Dennett says philosophy today is self-indulgent and irrelevant
One of the most famous living philosophers says much of philosophy today is “self-indulgent”
Dennett is quoted as saying...
According to the article he particularly has in mind metaphysics in analytic philosophy, much of which is, he says, "willfully cut off from any serious issues".
For some background and clarification of his position, see the Daily Nous's reaction here:
http://dailynous.com/2016/08/29/philosophers-should-be-more-like-daniel-dennett-says-daniel-dennett/
Is he right, and does it matter?
Dennett is quoted as saying...
Philosophy in some quarters has become self-indulgent, clever play in a vacuum that’s not dealing of problems of any intrinsic interest.
It can take years of hard work to develop the combination of scholarly mastery and technical acumen to work on big, important issues with a long history of philosophical attention. In the meantime, young philosophers are under great pressure to publish, so they find toy topics that they can knock off a clever comment/rebuttal/revival of.
According to the article he particularly has in mind metaphysics in analytic philosophy, much of which is, he says, "willfully cut off from any serious issues".
For some background and clarification of his position, see the Daily Nous's reaction here:
http://dailynous.com/2016/08/29/philosophers-should-be-more-like-daniel-dennett-says-daniel-dennett/
Is he right, and does it matter?
Comments (82)
Nobody needs to read 100% of what's published, or even need to sample it evenhandedly. But there needs to a broad scope of interests being pursued, and a range of talents being allowed to thrive, in any intellectual or research community, so that promising lines of inquiries aren't foreclosed just because old beards like Dennett have convinced themselves that it's just more boring and pointless Schmess... even if 90% of the time he'd be right about it. Also, how can he judge that no variety of Schmess inquiry can be interesting or valuable just because it won't lead to a cure for cancer?
I personally am disappointed that certain philosophical threads have been abandoned. I would very much like for there to be active Husserlian cooperative schools going on, and ideally to participate in them. But they just don't exist; the field moved in another direction. I have a hard time engaging in analytic metaphysics as well, but I don't think I could bring myself to complain about it in a professional capacity if I had it like Dennett does. In other words, I don't confuse my personal disappointment with insight into questions of (in)significance.
That's quite right. The most valuable things are the least useful. Useful things possess mainly derivative value. So, when I am asked about the usefulness of philosophy, I usually respond that it's useless, which is why it's so valuable (as are much of theoretical science, literature, music, personal relationships, etc.)
Yes. This may also be related to what Wittgenstein has identified as the "loss of problems".
"Some philosophers (or whatever you like to call them) suffer from what may be called "loss of problems". Then everything seems quite simple to them, no deep problems seem to exist any more, the world becomes broad and flat and loses all depth, and what they write becomes immeasurably shallow and trivial." Zettel 456
The lesson, I guess, is don't get old, metaphorically or literally. The next generation is just going to trample your dead body though, so it doesn't matter. Dennett's opinions don't mater.
But even the sick pleasure of grading academics could no longer fulfill.
Sighing he looked above his mantle here the crown of philosophy sat, softly illuminated by a Fresnel placed carefully to highlight the fine etchings without drowning the crown out in contrast.
"Wherefore is thy next bearer, I ponder" sighed the old man. "Is no one serious anymore? Am I doomed to be alone in my wisdom, to take it to the grave as only fops and nincompoops take the reigns?"
:D
It strikes me as goofy. It honestly reminds me of my old "mentor" in the union world -- crusty old bitter bastards will continue to be crusty old bitter bastards, and the best contribution they give to the world is a warning to the rest of us to figure out how to avoid living like that.
Dennett's still a great philosopher and all. But he's also human, and I'd put this one in the 2nd camp at first blush. That scholars today should get off your la. . . I mean, find topics of "interest" just seems like an inane point to make.
However, I'm not familiar with the kind of academic philosophy that he's referring to, so I'd beseech anyone to give an example of something that Dennett would think is irrelevant and self-indulgent, but which you think isn't, and then to explain in plain english why it's not.
That said, I do find the lack of engagement with science exceedingly puzzling. With the exception of some of the philosophy of mind crowd, it seems to me that analytic metaphysics is almost entirely devoid of any real scientific reflection. I used to admire the analytics for their openness to the sciences, but that seems to have waned in favor of going crazy with formal logic instead. I also often wonder about whether there is any sustained reflection on the nature of logic itself - rather than taking it for granted, as it were. But these are considerations I pose from a position of ignorance, rather than meant as a critique.
That's a weird thing to wonder, since analytic philosophy is positively drenched in reflection on the nature of logic, and always has been.
No, you're right, I need to explain my reservations better. Basically I've always wondered this: how does formal logic deal with individuation? I would appreciate being stopped and corrected at any point here given my relative ignorance, but to the degree that logic deals with already-individualized terms and the relations between them, formal logic seems constitutively unable to deal with questions of how terms become what they are. If, for example, one holds that individuation is a matter of process and that discrete individuals the results of such processes, formal logic always comes 'too late', as it were, to deal with it.
Thus someone like Gilbert Simondon, for example, will write the from the perspective of individuation, "at the level of being prior to any individuation, the law of the excluded middle and the principle of identity do not apply; these principles are only applicable to the being that has already been individuated; they define an impoverished being, separated into environment and individual. … In this sense, classical logic cannot be used to think the individuation, because it requires that the operation of individuation be thought using concepts and relationships between concepts that only apply to the results of the operation of individuation, considered in a partial manner". I'm being somewhat brief here because going into it would require explicating a whole metaphysics, which I'm trying to avoid for brevity's sake!
Also at the back of my mind here is Bergson's critique of the modality of 'the possible' as anything more than a 'back-formation', as it were, where 'the possible' is simply thought of as the double of the actual that simply 'lacks reality' somehow - again the implicit critique is that thinking in terms of 'the possible' is to forego thinking in terms of individuation. Anyway, it's these things that I've had at the back of the mind when I referred to 'the nature of logic'. Basically, the suspicion is that formal logic operates at the level of identity, and can't think in terms of becoming. Again, my ignorance may well mean that logicians have taken these kinds of ideas into account, but I'm kind of going off intuition here - which may be wrong. *In mathematics, the kinds of operations involved in category theory seem promising as a kind of 'logic' that would address these concerns (to the degree that category theory deals solely with relations), but again, I'm not well versed enough to speak authoritatively on these matters.
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*As an aside, I've recently picked up an interest in the notion of analogy, which deals with the question of the 'more or less', a notion that operates 'below' the level of the 'already individuated'. The basic idea is that the nature of 'being' or whathave you is not 'logical' but analogical. As a further aside, my hunch is that 'continental philosophy' has long been averse to formal logic precisely because kinds of concerns above, but I don't want to dwell on that.
Isn't Dennett an eliminative materialist? He thinks the self is fiction. So what is self-indulgence?
[quote=Dennett]"Philosophy in some quarters has become self-indulgent, clever play in a vacuum that’s not dealing of problems of any intrinsic interest."[/quote]
Seems to me that the average person would say the same thing about philosophy in general. Who the hell cares whether or not God exist, so long as I get to go to heaven?! Who cares whether a world exists beyond our perceptions, let's go have ice cream! Who cares what the nitty-bitty details of ethics are, the important thing is to not be a dick! Who cares about the epistemology of belief, I already know what I believe! "Who cares?!" is the response I get from most people when I tell them the specifics of my interest in philosophy. They really couldn't give less of a shit.
The point is that the average non-philosophy-inclined person, just like Dennett, has an agenda, in which certain topics are more important than others thanks to a prioritization due to the agenda. To the average person, perhaps instead of philosophy, it's politics, or professional sports, or manufacturing the next salvation of humanity, or droning on video games all day, or whatever happens to fill the vacuum of boredom in your life.
Personally, I don't really care whether or not we find yet another exoplanet, or yet another species of irrelevant fish somewhere in the depths of the oceans, or who wins the Superbowl, or whether or not Trump or Clinton gets elected, or if Costco is having a sale on their nachos. They aren't relevant to me.
So in order for Dennett's claim, that much of philosophy is self-indulgent and irrelevant, to make sense, he needs to support the background view which prioritizes other self-indulgent and irrelevant disciplines and pursuits, and show why they are not self-indulgent and irrelevant and why they should be taken as of practically universal importance.
I suspect Dennett thinks much of analytic metaphysics to be like his analogy to chmess - chess but with slightly different rules as to make an entirely new game and entirely different strategies. If this is the case (which I don't think it is), what still is happening is that these professional philosophers are enjoying what they are doing. And, in fact, they are indeed discussing a portion of the world, even if this portion is not as relevant or catches the eye of Dennett.
What I think ought to change is the longevity of these pursuits. For as smart and capable as these professional philosophers are, many of them continue to focus on issues that are, in some sense, beneath them. Let the amateurs and aspiring philosophers work on these fun (legitimate) puzzles and focus on bigger, nobler and radical theories - otherwise it's like a PhD computer scientist working on a Raspberry Pi.
These analytical metaphysical questions: persistence, identity, object-hood, property theories, etc are likely never going to be solved in the way they are currently attempted to be, which is why I think they are better off being studied by undergrads and aspiring professionals as ways of honing their skills and preparing them for the bigger problems.
I think the reason this is not happening, and why professional philosophers continue to discuss these perennial and yet more amateur questions, is that it's easy. For as much as ontology and metaphysics in general has exploded after Quine (regardless of whether or not it is justified), current analytic metaphysics is rather sterile and shallow. There are much, much deeper questions to be tackled that don't require the abandonment of metaphysics entirely. Compare what is usually discussed in analytic metaphysics today with what was discussed in the past or is elsewhere, and you will see just how limited the scope of analytic metaphysics really is.
Additionally, in their attempt to be be independent of the natural sciences, analytic metaphysicians end up isolating themselves from any real contact with the natural sciences. In my opinion, analytic metaphysicians have done this not (just) because they believe metaphysics is indeed a separate branch of inquiry (the a priori study of the possible, pace E.J. Lowe), but because they are scared of what might happen if they put their theories to the test against the sophistication of those of natural science and what the public will think of their discipline. It's what Harman said - philosophy today has a severe inferiority complex. They are scared of questioning the social hegemony of science - something Meillassoux pointed out when he argued that the austere correlationist can and should inform the cosmologist and geologist that what they are studying, the ancestral, never actually happened. (Meillassoux does not actually support this view, though, as he is a realist).
Metaphysical theories rise and fall with the evidence just as natural scientific theories do, and I do believe that many of these analytic metaphysical theories can withstand the so-called threat of scientism and the hegemony of modern physics (but many will not and are only kept alive by this isolation) - however, this will require a bootstrapping relationship between the two, and more importantly will require metaphysicians to step up their game and tackle the bigger questions, the questions that contemporary philosophers of science are trying to do right now and could be helped by those with more sophisticated metaphysical background. Specifically, they should focus more on issues of grounding, perception, mathematical (anti-)realism, speculative cosmology and especially causality and the nature of Being itself (i.e. what does "physical" actually mean?) - many of these pop-scientists could learn a thing or two from what these metaphysicians have to say. Additionally, the divide between analytic and continental philosophy, although claimed to have been dissolved, continues to exist and you get a severe lack of communication between the two when much could be gained if there was.
Instead of removing/rejecting metaphysics, metaphysics needs to be improved and established as an important and relevant discipline to anyone who has an interest in understanding how the world works.
If you're saying what I think you're saying, I agree with this observation of Dennett but would say it comes out in a different way. Take his free will debate with Sam Harris. Dennett has maintained that he is arguing for a "free will worth wanting", which, if you are psychologising (a practice not always wrong), is quite revealing. What I got from this debate was that Dennetts motivation for arguing for free will is that he doesn't want the argument against it to win, so we don't lose a 'useful fiction' - remember his Big Think video "stop telling people they don't have free will" (because they act more irresponsibly when they believe it). He also maintains how the free will problem is not actually about whether we have free will at all (silly!), but, he insists, it is, or should be, in his mind, about whether we have moral responsibility. He seems to want to convince people, and himself, that free will exists only so we can sustain certain 'truths' necessary to prevent people from acting irresponsibly, or to put it philosophically, to prevent them from acting on what he perceives to be the truth of a kind of nihilism (hard determinism). He wants free will because a truth otherwise will simply not do.
[edit] changed free will worth having to wanting, which makes my case even clearer.
Perfect.
What do you mean by a term? I ask because the word has a technical meaning in logic, a well-formed string with a denotation (usually of an individual, but it could also be of something else, like a property). If this is what you mean, then terms in logic don't have to be already individuated: they can be compositionally built up from parts, and certainly can come to be organically from how the language's syntax is structured.
So for example if you have a language with a iota operator, this is going to result in an individual when combined with an open formula, to pick out the individual that satisfies that formula. This can have lots of complicated interactions with your logic: you pick out an individual, and not a priori, but rather based on a property it has, and this property might additionally then be sensitive to all sorts of things, like the world parameter in modal logic, which would result in the individual changing depending on the modal context in which it occurs. So there is a lot of room for play in how individuals get picked out of a domain.
Or, if you mean not the terms themselves but the individuals they denote, there's all sorts of apparatuses that do interesting things with individuals rather than just taking them for granted. For example, you have traditional modal logic which separates the domain from possible worlds, capturing the notion that individuals persist across possibilities and that we can talk about the 'same' thing in different situations: but Lewisian counterpart theory will instead say that individuals don't persist in this way, but are rather tied to some single logical possibility or world, and that modal claims about individuals hold in virtue of one possible individual relating to another via a counterpart relation. And more generally the notion of variable domains plays with the idea that what a thing is depends on which possibility is manifested, with individuals being tied more tightly to possible worlds.
There's also apparatuses for trying to capture the way in which the actually existent and the non-existent differ by separating differing levels of the domain, as in free logic, and creating different rules of inference for how individuals behave in the truth conditions of formulas based on which domain they belong to.
There's also tools for dealing with mereology and subpart relations, and for dealing with the complexity of individuals combined from atomic parts (like 'Mary and John'), collective individuals like teams, the way properties either distribute over them atomically, or can apply collectively (as in, 'the crowd split', twhich doesn't mean each individual in the crowd split). There is logic for temporal stages of single individuals and how they persist over time, to model different ways of viewing ordinary individuals, as four-dimensional time worms, or single time-slices, or themselves stages of larger individuals, etc.
But the fundamental problem I think is that you are treating logic as if it were metaphysics. Whether or not logic is metaphysically insightful, and I think it almost always is, it is first and foremost a formal system that combines a syntax with an interpretation procedure. Logics in of themselves are just mathematical objects of a certain sort -- it's a separate question whether they apply to certain metaphysical issues or not. Analytic philosophers I think build logics as the result of certain expressive needs, and these logics can in turn tell us a lot about metaphysical intuitions, including ones about individuation, by formally representing certain relations about statements involving individuals in their truth conditions. This can be very valuable, as philosophizing in the absence of formality gives discussion on complex matters a fuzzy sort of air that becomes difficult to resolve or sometimes even think about in any interesting way.
Quoting StreetlightX
Modal logic arose out of a desire to capture entailment relations to claims about possibility and necessity, such as the old medieval dictum that must implies can, the Kantian dictum that ought implies can, and so on. In that respect it's remarkably revealing, and different modal systems can be constructed to talk about different sorts of modality. The tack seems to be to develop actual tools for talking in modal terms, rather than to abstractly speculate on notions of the possible, and this is very fruitful. Many discussions about modality are confused because they don't differentiate between modal systems, don't understand the difference between epistemic and deontic modality, and so on. Modal logic itself cannot tell us about the nature of possibility, but again, a logic is a mathematical object, not a metaphysical thesis.
Quoting StreetlightX
I think historically speaking this has certainly been a reason given by continental philosophers themselves. But I think a lot of the aversion comes from a more mundane source, which is that continental philosophers just don't get taught it. That is a situation that I think at least Husserl would not be happy about.
Ever since the legendary epic smack-down between Quine and Carnap, in which Quine objectively won and thus rescued metaphysics by placing it on the same level of meaningful-ness as the natural sciences, realist metaphysicians have taken to rehabilitating the Aristotelian being qua being metaphysics as first philosophy.
The above story is a silly oversimplification that is actually more incorrect than correct, but it continues to be used as a justification for this kind of metaphysics. Additionally, the realists are those who are most active in metaphysics and are thus the most vocal, and yet they are also the minority, as Chalmers argues that there is a silent majority looking on skeptically as the realists have their fun.
This is important. Imagine how actually useful modern metaphysics would be if it were generally focused on the central question of individuation rather than being - dynamical development rather than static existence.
Sorry but modal logic bypasses the essential issue of individuation. It treats possibility as countable variety and not indeterminate potential, from the get-go.
This is largely due to the very nature of maths of course - being the science of the already countable. Give a man a hammer, etc.
My guess is that the field is producing very capable philosophers. It's hyper competitive and I'd expect that there are extremely good philosophers who can't find work so they move on to something else, not that there are a bunch of hacks finding work because of too little talent.
I agree; modal logic is a narrow formalized conception of logic. All disciplines, even poetry, have their own logics, and there is a logic of individuation too, of course.
Regarding Dennett's remarks; the question they seem to beg are:
What does it mean to be philosophically significant?. Does the importance of philosophy consist in showing how to live well or how to think well, and if the latter, then how to think well in what modality? Science, logic, sociology, psychology, the arts; which disciplines would help us best to live well, or doesn't it matter, because philosophical significance is simply a function of what is interesting? If so, interesting to who? Is any system of thought interesting in itself or only insofar as it contributes to some practical purpose?
Yes, I certainly agree with all of that. That said, I think even formal logic has its place if it helps people to be able to think better; kind of a form of mental calisthenics. But then there is also the further question of what content, in terms of the kinds of enrichment I don't believe formal logic can itself provide, that the formally improved thinking should apply itself to. Is that just a matter for each individual, or should one guide one's thinking into certain avenues as opposed to others (science as opposed to mysticism, for example, but there are others of course), to develop a body of inter-subjectively justifiable content against which to measure the value of one's own thoughts? I think we agree on many points, but I suspect that this one point may be precisely what differentiates our two ways of thinking.
Basically anything that abides by the law of identity ("a thing is equal to itself"). To be absolutely clear, to deny the law of identity isn't - for me anyway - to say that 'things aren't equal to themselves', but to deny that the very category of equality is properly applicable to 'things' at all; that is, it is a category error as such to invoke equality (whether it be to affirm or deny it) when speaking ontologically, other than as a heuristic of everyday speech. Or differently again: there is nothing 'equal' or 'unequal' in nature, no identities. And even in everyday speech, equality is always invoked respect to some quality or another, rather than as a 'brute fact' of identity, as it were.
The closest thing - that I know of - in formal logic that thinks along these lines in dialetheic logic, but even dialetheic logic seems inadequate to me to the extent that it simply denies the law of identity, rather than putting the very idea of equality into question (hence it's admission of contradictions, which are only ever contradictions from the perspective of identity). Thus for example, Deleuze's metaphysical project takes as it's starting point the attempt to think a concept of difference which is not parasitic or derivative of identity and equality, and hence contradiction. So in a critique of Hegel that might well be word for word written about dialetheism, he writes: "Hegelian contradiction appears to push difference to the limit, but this path is a dead end which brings it back to identity, making identity the sufficient condition for difference to exist and be thought. It is only in relation to the identical, as a function of the identical, that contradiction is the greatest difference." By contrast, Deleuze will look to explicate what he will refer to as 'difference-in-itself'. The exact details aren't important, but I just want to impart a flavour of where I'm coming from when I asked if analytic philosophy has the resources to question the nature of logic - I really mean this kind of absolutely 'foundational' stuff, as basic as the law of identity.
You can at least see, I hope, how a position like Deleuze's is even 'more radical' than dialetheism, and given the suspicion with which paraconsistency alone is viewed among the analytic community, I this sort of stuff is mostly viewed as beyond consideration. But for me, this is more or less the most important stuff, and most of the philosophical atmosphere in which I saunter in deals with things at this level, and at length. When I ask if AP asks after the nature of logic, it's at this level of generality that I'm referring to.
*I don't mean to ignore what you've said about the strategies employed in logic to deal with all the things you mentioned, but I'm simply too out of my depth there to have anything worth saying.
In speaking of Heidegger, it's of course entirely appropriate to refer to those initiated and those uninitiated. The same was the case with the ancient mystery religions; only those who had been initiated could claim to understand their rites and rituals, as they couldn't be disclosed to the uninitiated.
But Heidegger could write clearly enough when he wanted to--for example in his essay The Question Concerning Technology, and of course in his extravagant praise of Adolf Hitler.
Ah, it's been some time since I could indulge myself in that fashion. I confess I didn't have the strength to resist the opportunity.
Heidegger notwithstanding, though, I suspect that what Dennett says regarding academic philosophy might also apply, accurately enough, to other academic disciplines.
I am not too familiar with dialetheic logic, but my understanding is that dialetheism doesn't have to do with identity, which is a relation, but with the existence of truth value gluts (a single proposition having more than one truth value simultaneously), where these truth values are related by negation. That gives you the possibility of true contradictions. That does not, so far as I know, require changing the law of identity.
I think it's also worth noting that the law of identity itself is not really part of the apparatus of classical logic – propositional logic doesn't even deal with identity of individuals, and first-order logic only introduces the identity relation '=' as a special subcase of a regular relation, which you have to define in giving your interpretation. So you might say, for example, that the '=' relation is the maximal exclusively reflexive relation: it holds between any individual x and itself, and to no others. But that seems to me to be a theory about how identity should be interpreted. Nothing stops you, even in classical logic, from defining the identity relation differently.
What classical logic does so is force you to specify a domain. But a domain is filled with actual things, after all, and if their identity is somehow not determinate, then the choice of the domain sill simply reflect that. I don't think the logic forces you to make this decision. The issues about identity seem to be just to have to do with simple rules of language, such as coreferential expressions preserving truth when swapped out for each other, or the intuitive 'logical truth' of all appropriate statements of the form 'I'm myself.' So to say something like this:
Quoting StreetlightX
I'm not sure what to make of it. Taken seriously at face value, it's clearly false: people do in everyday speech treat things as if they are themselves, and it's not clear behaviorally what the opposite would look like. One option might to invoke cases where people treat the same thing in contradictory manners, but in such cases, we often say of people either that they're making some kind of error, because they're misinformed (like when they don't recognize someone they've met before) or irrational.
If you then want to push back a stage by saying that you deny some set of 'things' to begin with that we can then call equal to themselves, okay, but natural language doesn't seem to disavow this commitment, since it has individual-denoting expressions, so your claim would have to be weakened severely, to be a claim about special modes of philosophical discourse that are at odds with ordinary speech (as Hegel's writing, by his own admission, purposefully is).
As far as equality being invoked with respect to some quality, do you mean things like 'the same statue' versus 'the same lump of clay'? If so, you might be interested in Gupta relative identity.
To me it seems like individual denoting expressions are considered the problem. When we make a statement denoting an individual, we draw them up in reference to our own statememt. I say, "by identity, you are The Great Whatever who posts on The Philosophy Forum, " as if my statement of identity gave you as a brute fact.
But do you need my statement to be? What is no-one claimed that "by identity" you were The Great Whatever, would you somehow cease to exist?
"By identity" is more or less rhetorical. We appeal to it to defend a particular way of thinking or speaking, as if your very existence depended upon us saying: "You are the Great Whatever who posts on The Philosophy Forum." It's a postering for asserting a particular understanding of you, not a respect or description of you as an individual.
I'll have to do some extended reading on this to give a proper reply; what I'm getting from this is that I need to focus on the notion of truth at play here, and while I've the germ of how to go about it, it's not enough for a decent discussion. I think I'm going to start a thread on the question of negation to try and discuss some of these topics in another capacity.
Quoting The Great Whatever
On this though, I'd have to disagree. I don't think that at any point during our usual day to day activity, we go around thinking 'that thing there is what it is!'. A bit like Heidegger's broken hammer, these sorts of thoughts only occur in a highly abstract environment disconnected from lived experience; as far as identity goes, for the most part we think things like 'these things are identical - with respect to their color', or 'those two things are identical with respect to their function (for my needs)'; in any case identity and equality are defined with respect to some external parameter or another. To say that a thing is identical to itself, when you think about it, is an exceedingly strange formulation. Wittgenstein had something of this intuition when he declared quite flatly in the Tractatus that "roughly speaking: to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing."
Peter Geach's thesis of relative identity makes trouble for Leibniz's law of indiscernibility of identicals. Wiggins's thesis of the sortal dependency of identity -- expounded in his Sameness of Substance Renewed -- seems to me to incorporate the main insights of relative identity while saving Leibniz's law. (I wasn't aware that Gupta also had defended a thesis of relative identity so I am unsure how Wiggins' arguments against Geach apply to Gupta.)
No, but people say things like, Mr. Jones is Adam. They're the same person. And so if Mr. Jones went to the bathroom, Adam went to the bathroom. There are equative constructions (with 'be' in English) that predicate identity with something of a subject, and they turn up intuitively true when coreferential expressions are used (the same way these expressions seem to result in truth when you swap out one for the other in true sentences).
And the fact that people don't often say these things doesn't necessarily mean they aren't so – after all, we often avoid saying things that are incredibly obvious, or guaranteed to be true by rules of linguistic usage. But if you were to ask someone, 'Are you yourself?' they would probably, after asking 'why the hell would you ask that?' admit that yes, of course they're themselves, how could they not be?
Quoting StreetlightX
But this is just false: after all, Mr. Jones and Adam are identical (or more colloquially, Mr. Jones is Adam), so the first part is wrong [unless by 'two things' you mean two non-identical things, in which case the question is begged anyway, and no one would want to say that saying two non-identical things are identical is sensical], and 'Mr. Jones is himself (and not someone else)' is true, so the second part's wrong.
Clearly qualitative identity exists as well, but to deny that people are sensitive to numerical identity seems absurd to me. We are interested, e.g. whether the thing we saw in the sky today is identical to that which we saw yesterday, not in virtue of having the same quality, but in virtue of being the very same thing. And lo and behold it is, the sun. The question of whether the first sun-appearance is qualitatively identical to the second doesn't need to arise, since clearly it is in all relevant respects, but the numerical identity question is substantive.
All this shows is the very pedestrian fact that two different names can refer to one thing.
We might learn something as the result of discovering that the sentence expressing this identity is true, of course, viz. that the two names belong to one man. But at base it asserts the very sort of identity you're saying people don't assert.
Quoting StreetlightX
But relative to a variable assignment, it's perfectly possible for x=x and x=y to have the same exact value, viz. if x maps to Mr. Jones, and so does y. The fact that you used different variables doesn't mean different individuals are involved. Quite the contrary, the truth of the statement lets us know that just one individual is involved, and that's why it's true.
But I don't agree that is what people commonly have in mind in their acknowledgment that a thing may have two or more names. As I see it the notion of a thing having a relation (of identity or otherwise) to itself is incoherent. This is not to say that a thing cannot have a relation between one part of itself and another part, but that is something else.
For me what really determines identity is difference, because a thing can have a relation with everything else; the relation that consists in it not being those other things. I think, for this reason, it makes sense to say that difference comes before identity; both temporally and logically.
The sentence doesn't say that the man has two names. That may be a requirement for its being true, and it may even be what we intend to convey by using such a construction, but what it says is that a certain individual is identical to a certain individual. Since as you note these are two names of the same man, viz. Adam, what the sentence says is that Adam is himself.
We can change the example to remove the reference to names if that makes it easier. We can say instead:
He is Adam.
'He' is a referential expression that is referring to some guy. 'Adam' also refers to that same guy. We are predicating identity with Adam of Adam himself. To make it even more explicit, we can say:
I'm myself (and no one else).
Is such a sentence not true? Is it nonsensical? That seems to me an incredible claim.
Also, just to note, even if none of this goes through, 'Adam is Adam' is still a true sentence, and one that makes sense. The fact that one isn't going to learn anything from it only goes to show that you already know that a thing is itself (duh).
In any case, the idea is that there is no 'identity as such', identity considered in abstraction from any kind of external parameter, not that 'identity doesn't exist' or whatever. This is made clearer in Wittgenstein's elaborations in the Investigations: "'A thing is identical with itself" - there is no finer example of a useless proposition, which yet is connected with a certain play of the imagination. It is as if in imagination we put a thing into its own shape and saw that it fitted. We might also say: 'every thing fits into itself.' Or again: 'Every thing fits into its own shape.' At the same time we look at a thing and imagine that there was a blank left for it, and that now it fits into it exactly."
See, I don't think this is right at all. He is not Adam; he is called 'Adam'. This goes back to an argument on another thread about the difference between identification and identity. He is identified as Adam, but Adam cannot be his identity (in any non-trivial sense). His identity cannot be given by any name or description, but only consists in his being a unique entity.
So what is it with respect to, in this case?
And what about the 'Adam is Adam' sentence? Surely this is true? There is not going to be any parameter of interest there, is there? Sure, it's trivial, but thats just because numerical identity is trivial, which is the point.
Also note that the fact that we can learn something about language use by uttering or assenting to these sentences doesn't detract from the fact that we are asserting the identity of a thing with itself. In fact, it's precisely because this is what we're doing that it can have these effects. I know how to address Adam because of the equation of him with himself using two distinct names.
Quoting John
Yeah he is. I'm TGW. I'm called 'TGW,' and I'm TGW as well.
I think that is redundant; to say that you are no one else is already to have said that you are. To say that your are yourself is a an empty elaboration of saying that you are. It really adds and clarifies nothing (except maybe for the woefully confused).
And yet, I'm predicating identity with myself of myself. And you understand it and recognize it as true. So contra your previous claim, there is nothing nonsensical at all about it.
But TGW cannot be a unique identity, because someone else, a million others, could also be TGW. Only 'I' as said by each person expresses the uniqueness of identity, because I can say that of one, and only one, person.
I'm saying it is an empty tautology. It's truth is utterly lacking in real sense, it is just an expression of a trivial definition.
Not so, after all I'm TGW, and no one else can be me.
Of course, other people could have the name 'TGW.' But that is not the same thing as being me (TGW).
Besides, you can replicate this with 'I,' as I just did, by saying 'I'm myself,' which is going to be true whenever someone says it (except for the old 'I'm not myself today,' which is interesting).
I don't know, give me a context of use. These things can't be talked about in abstraction - which is the point.
Quoting The Great Whatever
This simply strikes me as a kind of transcendental illusion, in the Kantian sense. We can say, in a kind of derivative manner, that to assert that Alan = Mr. Jones is to assert the identity of a thing with itself, but the very notion of identity is still a logical category imposed upon an 'existential situation' in which questions of identity or lackthereof are simply absent to begin with. In fact, speaking of Kant, 'A critique of pure formal logic' might adequately title the kind of position that I'm coming from here.
If being TGW has any uniqueness it is parasitic upon being a unique entity that is called 'TGW". Someone else can say that being TGW is unique; which seems odd. Would you not still be a unique entity and identity if you were stranded on an island and had amnesia? If you have thirty names are they all exactly equivalent insofar as they express your whole identity even if you are called these different names by different sets of people? Is your whole identity expressed by your online name TGW or by your everyday name?
But what does it matter whether identity is an imposed category? Have I argued for any specific construal of what numerical identity is? I've only tried to show that your Wittgenstein-inspired comment that to say a thing is identical to itself is nonsensical, is wrong, as is the claim that in ordinary situations we don't do this.
Quoting John
Not at all. I didn't have this name until I made it up for online fora, but I was still myself.
Quoting John
Yes, since you just admitted I was the same person in this hypothetical situation, ex hypothesi.
Quoting John
No name is equivalent to me -- I am a person, a human being, not a name. I might have names, even thirty of them.
Quoting John
A name refers to me, and any name I might have does the same, and so means the same thing. I might use different names in different contexts, and so they might be imbued with different shades of significance, but they all refer to the same person (me).
(I take) Wittgenstein's comment to apply to statements of identity that do not refer to an identity parameter. And it is the case the those sorts of comments are 'useless propositions'.
I'm not sure what you mean by an identity parameter. Do you mean some quality with respect to which things are identical, like color? If so, there seems to be no such relevant quality for things like 'I'm myself,' which are nonetheless trivially true. I'm the same as myself, in what respect? Well, in no respect, that's not the point of what it says, I just am myself, period.
Maybe some identity statements are useless, or convey useless propositions, but it seems this is so only because they're so trivially true, which only goes to show that numerical identity of a thing with itself is something we're trivially acquainted with. As for the cases with multiple names, etc., these are clearly not useless at all, but it's not clear to me in these cases what sort of identity parameter' you would have in mind. After all, when I say that Adam is Mr. Smith, I don't mean that Adam has identical height to Mr. Smith, or something like that -- no, I mean numerically they are the very same guy.
The conclusion is simply that no name can express your identity. The fact that your different names refer to different aspects of you, and that no name refers to the whole of you, and that any name may refer to innumerable others, all show that. Sure, you can come back and disagree, but it is all just empty playing with words in any case, and none of the stuff about identity has implications for anything ontologically substantive. It is difference, not identity, which is substantive, because it speaks to genuine relationship.
When the same individual is denoted by two names that have two distinct Fregean senses, then, upon learning that they are identical, what is learned by a language user who was acquainted with this individual under those two distinct modes of presentation isn't merely a fact about language. As Kripke has shown, in a clear sense, the fact about language is contingent but the identity statement that has been learned about is necessary. (Kripke, though, thought that he was arguing against a Fregean conception of proper names. Gareth Evans has shown that Kripke's observations are consistent with a Fregean account of singular senses, understood non-descriptively.)
For instance Lois Lane may be acquainted both with Superman and with Clark Kent, and know them respectively as "Superman" and as "Clark Kent". When she eventually learns that Clark Kent is Superman she doesn't merely learn a fact about linguistic use -- (although, as TGW hinted, she could learn this fact inferentially through learning another fact about linguistic use). She rather learns the fact that Superman and Clark Kent are the same individual, a fact that no alternative (i.e. counterfactual) conventions of linguistic use could have negated.
This is one issue. Another issue that has been raised in the recent exchanges in this thread is the identity that a material object (i.e. a "substance", or "spatiotemporal continuant") retains with itself through material and/or qualitative change, through time. This issue is related to the first since an object can be encountered at two different times under two different modes of presentation (i.e. while being thought about under the two different Fregean senses of "A" and "B" successively, such that the numerical identity of their denotata may come under question). What settles the question of the identity of A with B are the criteria of persistance and individuation for object of this sort, and the spatiotemporal carrer(s) of the relevant object(s): both things that may be matters of empirical investigation. This also goes beyond the mere discovery of contingent linguistic conventions.
But you don't 'just' mean that 'they are the same guy'; you 'also mean' that they will respond to the same name, that Mr. Jones is responsible for the Bad Thing you thought someone else was responsible for, etc, etc. The phrase 'they are the same guy' is a kind of nominal 'condensation' or short hand of these 'existential ramifications' as it were. What I'm trying to do is reverse the order by which we understand what it means to 'be the same guy'. Mr. Jones is Alan not because he is 'the same guy'; he is 'the same guy' because Alan has done everything Mr. Jones has, because he will (probably) respond the same whether he is called Mr. Alan or Jones, etc. That Mr. Jones and Alan 'are the same guy' (=identical) is just a way of saying that. Identity is parasitic, derivative, of these things which have nothing to do with identity 'in themselves'.
I don't think I mean any of those things. That might be implied depending on the situation, sure. But that's not what the sentence means. For example, it's possible for Adam to be Mr. Smith, but not respond to both those names.
Just goes to show that TGW is merely a part of you, the online you, TGW is you in a similar sense that the spout of the kettle is the kettle.
Fair point. I should have said something to learn identity is to at least learn a fact about linguistic use, etc. In any case, the point is to resolve identity into a context, to show that identity is never brute, but always relational. To learn that Superman and CK are the same is to learn they both saved that cat from the tree, that they both are excellent at changing clothes very quickly, etc.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
But to say all of this is already to subscribe to a very specific kind of metaphysics which is everywhere fraught with problems I think. Part of my line of questioning here is to call into question exactly these sorts of pressuppositions that thinking in terms of formal logic encourage, I think.
I don't think there is an online me. Yes, I go online, but that doesn't mean there are multiples of me, or something like that, just that sometimes the same person -- me -- is online, sometimes not. Someone could use the name TGW to refer to me offline, and not in respect to any online capacity. It just so happens that one of my names is used more often in an online capacity because that's where it was introduced and circulated.
Ugh, I missed the qualification of 'probably' that I had meant to attach to that (I did the second time I mentioned in it my post!). Not that it matters though: the point remains the same. To assert that Alan is Mr. Smith only makes sense if there is some kind of significance attached to that designation. It may not be that they will respond to the same name, but it will be - of necessity - some (contingent?) fact.
Surely this is compatible with the more basic point I'm trying to make, which is that your two earlier assertions:
(1) that people don't say a thing is identical to itself in ordinary speech, and
(2) to say that a thing is identical to itself is nonsensical
are wrong?
Indeed it seems to admit that when doing such an identification, some other fact is motivating it, is to presuppose that such identifications take place, make sense, and are an ordinary part of linguistic usage.
I am not entirely sure about that last point. Regarding the first, linguistic use need not be at issue. Lois Lane may have seen a man flying in the sky, later seen a man in her office, not know their names at all, and yet wondered whether she saw the same man twice. In that case, even though her two episodes of demonstrative reference (in thought) could have been (unbeknownst to her) correlated with the extent linguistic uses of "Superman" and "Clark Kent", or could have served to anchor new linguistic uses -- if, e.g. she would report upon her encounters using made up pseudonyms -- what she wonders about is if the man whom she encountered on one occasion is the man whom she encountered on another occasion.
Regarding the metaphysical issues that you believe to be contentious (regarding substances), I don't think we can make the economy of them since there can't be so much as a thinkable singular Fregean sense (i.e. demonstrative reference to an empirical particular) *or* a well defined naming practice if one is agnostic regarding the persistence through qualitative/material change of individuals encountered in experience at different occasions. (This is, incidentally, the topic of Kant's Analogies of Experience, brilliantly discussed by Sebastian Rödl, in connection with the metaphysics of substance, in his Categories of the Temporal: An Inquiry into the Forms of the Finite Intellect, HUP, 2012)
Hence the proposition expressed by "Hesperus is Phosphorus", say, where the two names have different Fregean senses, does *not* express the same proposition (and hence doesn't make the same empirical claim) as does the sentence "Hesperus is Hesperus", even though both sentences express the same Russellian proposition.
It is, however, a somewhat contentious Wittgensteinian point that the latter assertion is nonsense. For sure, it doesn't have much of a use in ordinary language; and likewise for the utterances of Moore-paradoxical statements, which can nevertheless express meaningful and true propositions, and likewise for a variety of truisms that Wittgenstein notoriously thought nonsensical for one to assert or claim knowledge of.
(1) People don't say a thing is identical to itself in ordinary speech [in isolation from some sort of parameter which would make sense of such an identity claim].
(2) To say that a thing is identical to itself [in the absence of some sort of context] is nonsensical.
Why not simply say that it is known a priori to be necessarily true and hence uninformative? What makes it known to be necessarily true, though, is a function of the meanings (Fregean references) of the words used to make the claim. Hence, even if it is "nonsensical", it is not thereby meaningless; it is, after all, truth-evaluable.
Okay, even accepting these are true, this just seems like goalpost-shifting. I never said that to say something is identical to itself is nonsensical in the absence of some sort of context. That's true about pretty much anything (though I'd prefer to say it might serve no communicativ function outside of a context, not that it's 'nonsensical'). As for 'parameters,' you still haven't clarified what those are, and Wittgenstein's claim seems not to make that proviso.
Well, the thing is really a matter of interpretation; there simply is no determinate truth about whether TGW is your whole identity or merely your online identity. And that's the issue I have with AP in general. It may be valuable as a practice if it reveals and clarifies some unnoticed conceptual confusions in our thinking, but it fails to deliver any startling new insights.
None of your arguments have convinced me that "X is identical to X" tells us anything more than "X is X" or even simply "X is".
As I indicated in the other thread, there are two distinct forms of identity. Wittgenstein (intentionally I believe) creates ambiguity with his use of "identity" and "same", inviting the reader to make an equivocal interpretation.
The reason for Aristotle's principle of identity, that a thing is identical to itself, is to place the identity of the thing within the thing itself, rather than the identity which is given to it by human beings who say what the thing is. This move allows for the mistaken identity which arises from human mistakes. Without allowing that there is an identity within the thing itself, independent of what human beings might say about that thing, then there is no possibility that when all living human beings agree, that such is what X is, this could be wrong. So for instance, if in Aristotle's time, human beings agreed that the sun is a body which circles around the earth, this is the identity which the sun has. Without allowing that there is an identity within the thing itself, independent from how it is identified by humans, how could this be wrong?
I read 'nonsensical' as 'lacking in sense' in this kind of context. It consists in lacking in any reference to anything that may be perceived. Relations to others have sense, relation to self has no sense; it is not metaphysically robust; and is thus 'lacking in sense' or 'non-sense'. Such things are not meaningless; they find their meaning in formal elaborations of rules. If I am, then it follows that I am myself, and it follows that I am identical to myself, and so on; everyone knows what it means ,but all this kind of elaboration really seems to tell us nothing beyond how rules may be tautologically elaborated.
Surely there is sense in a relation of self to self. I can relate myself of today to myself of yesterday, and my potential self of tomorrow. By establishing these relationships we learn how to better ourselves. And this is very important.
Sure, but I would count that kind of relation, whether logical or material, as being between a part of yourself and another part. There is also, for example, a relation between the whole of yourself and what you are right now, insofar as the former has given rise to the latter.
And that denies material identity. There is no longer the temporal continuity of a thing extended in time. There is one part at one moment, another part at the next moment, etc.. We no longer have the identity of the thing itself, with a temporal extension, only different parts related to each other .
Yes, but the whole of yourself is greater, more comprehensive, than it was yesterday (hopefully). It depends on what you mean by 'whole' though; on one interpretation the self at any moment is not the whole self, because some of what has been that self may no longer be present. Memories can be forgotten, senses and limbs may be lost. And it is not as if the totality of your experience, which constitutes the totality of what you have been, is present all at once in any moment. What you are now is the whole of yourself in the sense that it is the culmination of everything you have ever experienced and thought, not in the sense that it is the living presence of everything you have ever experienced and thought.
In another sense, consistent with what you said earlier about material identities having temporal duration. the totality of yourself, your total identity, is spread across time. Looked at that way, no momentary instantiation of your self is your whole self at all. What happened to you today is not part of the total self that you were yesterday, for example; so logically the two total selfs cannot be identical.
That was my first thought as well.