Empiricism is dead! Long live Empiricism!
Is empiricism, [s]the crown jewel of English-language philosophy[/s] a thing that happened, dead?
How many schools of philosophy, how many individual philosophers have a colorable claim either to have killed empiricism or fixed it? Kant, classical pragmatism, logical positivism, Quine and logical empiricism, then Sellars the sellarsian, and all the other modern pragmatisms and pragmatism hybrids right through to Rorty, and even the unrepentant Chomsky.
How many times must empiricism be killed? Why won't it stay dead?
It's the Chuck Norris of philosophies! You can't kill that.
Must your slate be blank to be an empiricist? Can you darwin in a little, maybe some "pattern detecting" and still call yourself an empiricist? What about the representational realism so beloved today? Is that empiricism reborn or another attempted murder?
So come one! Come all! Attack empiricism or defend it! She either needs saving or needs killing again! Submit your entry to the Great Empiricism Bake-off!
EDIT: changed my perfectly charming intro so @Olivier5 will stop one-upping me in my own damn thread.
How many schools of philosophy, how many individual philosophers have a colorable claim either to have killed empiricism or fixed it? Kant, classical pragmatism, logical positivism, Quine and logical empiricism, then Sellars the sellarsian, and all the other modern pragmatisms and pragmatism hybrids right through to Rorty, and even the unrepentant Chomsky.
How many times must empiricism be killed? Why won't it stay dead?
It's the Chuck Norris of philosophies! You can't kill that.
Must your slate be blank to be an empiricist? Can you darwin in a little, maybe some "pattern detecting" and still call yourself an empiricist? What about the representational realism so beloved today? Is that empiricism reborn or another attempted murder?
So come one! Come all! Attack empiricism or defend it! She either needs saving or needs killing again! Submit your entry to the Great Empiricism Bake-off!
EDIT: changed my perfectly charming intro so @Olivier5 will stop one-upping me in my own damn thread.
Comments (67)
It thus follows from the skepticism of empiricism that one ought to proceed nevertheless under the assumption that empiricism is true, for to do otherwise is merely to give up on the pursuit of truth.
I find the idea of an ‘English language philosophy’ amusing, as if philosophical ideas were chauvinistic, or unfit for translation.
It's an inelegant phrase, guilty as charged.
Historically? I might stand by it.
And take a side! Empiricism: are you for it or agin it?
And yes, I am all for empiricism. When combined with rationalism, it makes for good science.
Lots of aspects of reality as we know it conform to empirical descriptions and respond to empirical methods. Which explains its persistence. So the ubiquity of the former, general sense possibly explains the persistence of the strict epistemological dogma.
Rejecting empiricism completely would do this (at least I think so) but if empiricism means, for example, one can only get knoweldge via experience, say, then one could reject that point without losing the ability to criticize. I think. Also we need to specify, I think, which empiricism.
Not at all. My intention was to conflate all senses of the word "empiricism".
Remember empiricism? That theory that had two remaining dogmas Quine took himself to have demolished? (And then Davidson found another worth demolishing.)
Empiricism? The theory Sellars took himself to have shown subscribed to the insidious Myth of the Given?
Verificationist theories of meaning? I recently spent an afternoon watching old Bryan Magee interviews, and there's a lovely one with Ayer where he explains what a bust that was.
What's left of empiricism? Just some vague notion that knowledge "comes from" experience? Is there any actual theory anyone's willing to defend here?
And I'm curious how people think cognitive science fits into this story. Quine was already happy to have lots of learning mechanisms wired in where classical empiricists only had "association" and that sort of thing. What does modern cognitive science say about concepts? Are any of them hard-wired? Are time and space? Is causality? Induction? Do we just point at Darwin and move on? Is there a concept-forming "organ" in the brain like Chomsky's language-learning thing?
(I'm deliberately making a hash of all this to take in as broad a swath as possible.)
I didn't define "empiricism" so everyone could put their own spin on it. I can't tell what your spin is.
Quoting Olivier5
That sounds to me like you have something to say that for reasons I can't fathom you've chosen not to say.
It's not the traditional philosophy of empiricism that prevails, it's more like the actual use of empiricism that survives. And good so. But of course, everything that has good effects has it's drawbacks too.
Bret Weinstein put it remarkably well: in science and STEM fields in general, empiricism has, perhaps unintentionally, acquired a dominant position because that's what is the easy thing to do: scientist do scientific tests. Theorizing, making theories, thinking of the bigger picture which is the more difficult thing to do has taken a sideline. Far more easy to do science with testing something and looking if anything interesting shows up. And this strategy leads, unintentionally perhaps, to empiricism being in the end the dominant philosophy of science left standing on the field.
There is some link between empiricism, a philosophical theory, and empirical science. What is that link?
Let's define an empiricism -- not the empiricism, but one of many: human beings use concepts, but they are born with no conceptual apparatus at all; therefore, a human being must be able to construct a conceptual apparatus out of the only material she has, her individual sense experience; some of this may occur naturally, through "association", say, and some of this construction is done by the use of reason, which may be inborn but only provides the tools to construct a conceptual framework, not the framework itself.
A conceptual framework is necessary to do science, but Weinstein suggests that many scientists don't do the work of building their own conceptual apparatus; instead they "borrow" an existing one. In some sense, then, they are in the position of the conceptual apparatus just being given, as if they were born with it; it is not something they have to construct. (In modern parlance, they are perhaps "externalists".)
So that's the opposite of my sample empiricism, isn't it?
But we're going to call it an "empiricism" because people working within an entirely given conceptual framework do something empirical in it.
Given the sorts of things people keep saying to me -- and what prompted this thread* -- maybe I should have just asked if
* in part
Possibly because my “spin” in much broader than any of the others you’ve mentioned, e.g. Quine pointing out that observations are theory-laden seemed kinda pointless to me, because of course they are, that doesn’t make empiricism false; etc.
I would define empiricism as the view that the correct way of adjudicating differences of opinion about what is or isn’t real is comparison to our empirical experiences.
That is equivalent to the rejection of both the view that our empirical experiences can’t tell us anything about reality because they’re all dubious, and the view that there are ways of learning about reality that do not depend at all on empirical experiences.
Excellent! Thanks for actually claiming a version of empiricism you would defend.
One question -- only disputes about what is real? Or do we look to experience to settle disputes in general?
(Or would you prefer to leave it as you wrote it but with a translation manual so that all disputes are about whether something is real?)
My reasons are that empirical observation springs from reason, is framed by reason, and comes back to reason when analysed. So when blended with a fair dose of rationalism, empiricism makes sense. When it doesn’t make sense is when it claims to be the sole fount of knowledge, as others have pointed at.
So do you see an individual, even if she's not aware of it, as essentially doing science all the time? That is, as having a working theory that produces predictions and directs the acquisition of new data via sense experience? Is that the force of "springs from"?
Makes sense, not a distinction I had in mind when I asked. So how do you see the theory-ladenness of observation playing out when settling an empirical dispute?
See anything so far that sounds right or wrong to you?
I’m basically a falsificationist, so if an observation implies one thing in the context of one theory, but is also consistent with some other theoretical framework entirely, then both of those theoretical options remain live possibilities.
We never ever pin down exactly one theory that is definitely the one truth according with observation, we only ever narrow down the range of remaining possibilities still consistent with observations thus far.
That implies that the competing theoretical frameworks overlap, right?
Indeed.
This seems awful close to a "blank slate" theory of mind which I think has been fatally wounded in the last few decades. If this is the empiricism that we are talking about, then I think I will have to throw in with the people who think it is on its way out.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes! As I interpret Kahneman and Haidt, most of our thinking is done subconsciously and we only roll out the rational part of our minds when we need to justify decisions that we make. The idea that we are doing science all the time, even if subconsciously, is very appealing.
Two for two!
Yes, the sample empiricism is deliberately old school.
And in the second quote I'm thinking of those types of models. But "System 1 is a machine for jumping to conclusions." That's a funny kind of science, isn't it?
But isn't that the way we often do science? First we jump to a conclusion (an intuitive leap). Then we start doing the analysis to see if the data will support or falsify it.
Plus, we don't really know what's going on in that subconscious mind. I suspect that what we perceive as an instantaneous jump to a conclusion may have extensive experience and analysis underlying it.
But that lack of transparency doesn't sound much like science either. Remember a couple years ago when Donald Hoffman was pushing that "desktop" metaphor? He was arguing that this subconscious is systematically lying, because evolution would have selected for rapid threat identification and against accurate perception. Whatever the merits of his position, people can tell different stories about what's going on in the black box, and different evolutionary psychology stories about why. Do we need a way to assess these stories? What would that be?
Now what about the part we're aware of? Is it conceivable there is something like an old school blank slate empiricist agent that we experience consciously as feeding us a complete conceptual framework, already assembled, such that we might as well have been born with it?
(Your first paragraph I want to hold off on.)
I'm not sure what you mean by that.
What I mean is that, assuming some common background theory, an observation might imply that such-and-such is the case. But of course we could always instead change the background theory so that the observation does not imply that such-and-such is the case. As Quine points out, we're always testing the combination of whatever thing we're explicitly trying to test with an observation, plus all of the background theory that's we're not explicitly trying to test. And that's a totally unsurprising thing to me; of course we're always testing the combination of all of our beliefs.
Like, a medieval astronomer noting the retrograde motion of planets could conclude from that observation that the true motion of planets cannot be simple circles, and that we must conclude that they follow epicycles around intermediary points that in turn circle the Earth as we previously supposed the planets to.
Or, Copernicus might point out to them, we could instead modify our background assumption that planets circle the Earth at all, and instead suppose they and the Earth circle the sun, and the relative motion of the Earth and (other) planets would account for the observation of retrograde motion in the sky.
Except, that still doesn't perfectly fit the observations, so the critics might retort that we do in fact need to conclude that epicycles are real anyway, whether or not the planets circle the sun.
Unless, Kepler might point out to them all, we instead modify out background assumption that everything in the sky moves in circles at all, and allow for the possibility that their motion is elliptical.
So the observation of retrograde motion either proves that epicycles are real, or else disproves the assumption that planets move in circles*. Either way, we're still adapting our theory to account for the observations, and so still doing empiricism.
*(Or... any of an infinite number of other possible explanations that would still fit that observation).
I was thinking we have competing theories. Turns out you're talking about one theory and competing hypotheses, and the whole Quine-Duhem holism underdetermination thing. All good.
I want to see what everyone else is up to, and then maybe we can talk about that some more. I also find a lot to like there.
Where are all the forum's Kantians, do you suppose?
OK. I will start off with the confession that my exposure to Hoffman's idea is a 20 minute TED talk. But from that talk, I think he has gone a bridge too far. I agree that our perception of reality seems to be warped by evolution. But maybe not always. Figuring the trajectory of a spear on a windy day might have less warping than deciding if the snap of a twig is a hungry lion hiding in the undergrowth. But, I agree that we can't depend on the output of the black box to be a reliable representation of reality. So, yes, we do need a way to assess these stories. For me, that would be science. Formulating models. Doing experiments. And then arguing about the results with lots of people with different black boxes. Hoping for transcendence.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
If a part of my mind is a blank slate, it would be the conscious part. But I don't know about an innate empiricist agent or an innate conceptual framework. How will we figure that out?
I didn't even watch the talk. I don't care about Hoffman -- just an example. I brought him up because there's a lot of "Bayesian brain" talk these days.-- in other words, don't worry about it, your brain is doing math for you that you wouldn't even understand, it's got this covered. Oh, and Darwin, QED.
Quoting flaco
Yeah that's not bad at all. And you and @Pfhorrest both end up talking about resolving disputes, though Quine's model on its own has that classic me-alone-figuring-out-the-world feel. Hence radical translation and all that.
The last part you quote -- I'm just trying to see if we can tie it back to old school empiricism. We've tabled, you'll recall, the issue of where concepts and theories come from. I was just wondering if we could imagine an arrangement that feels to us like we just have this conceptual framework, but underneath it is being generated along empiricist lines. We have these two levels; the classic empiricists didn't. We've also been considering the opposite arrangement!
On my model, the disputes can be internal to one person. There are multiple options and you're not sure which to believe: how do you choose? It's the same exact problem as different people with different opinions trying to decide which if either is correct.
You mention pragmatism. But maybe Peircean pragmatism leads somewhere truly radical because it says our "reality" lies all curled up inside its own "acts of measurement".
Our realism is so indirect that it involves ignoring the "physics" and learning it to replace it with a system of sign - a semiotic umwelt.
Empiricism is thus a way construct "ourselves" as observers making observations. We form conceptual theories, validate their predictions, and move on, in a way that completely removes us from the noumenal actuality.
This would be the modelling relation approach - an enactive model of neuropsychology. We see the world as coloured as a way to shortcut the process of pattern recognition.
The fact that light has no colour is not then a problem for our "empirical realism". The whole point of a neurological level empiricism is to be able to replace a brute physical response - like the excitation of some random protein by a photon - with the "reality" of a personally meaningful signal.
Our photopigments are there in our retinas, set up as switches to be tripped. Physics can get left the other side of this barrier, this "epistemic cut". Acts of measurement start the business that counts, which is updating a neural control model doing informational pattern processing.
So empiricism sells itself as a realist exercise. It is revealing the actual world. Yet acts of measurement are a way to block out that reality, or at least reduce it to a tidy triggering of conceptual switches.
That is true of life and mind from the ground up. It starts with the encoding machinery of genes and neurons. Then it becomes what humans do through the codes of words and numbers.
Empirical acts of measurement speak to the fact that there is conceptual modelling in place. And so idealism kinds of wins if empiricism is followed through to its proper conclusion.
But of course, an idealism that is rooted in the world it models, not some free-floating idealism that could be its own separate thing.
OK. Let's look at evolution. Let's say that we get an evolutionary advantage from creating models in our brain and monitoring the effectiveness of the models for obtaining food and avoiding close calls of becoming food. We modify those models and check to see if they become more or less effective for achieving our survival goals. Maybe creating those models is an innate feature of our brains. Maybe creating the models is subconscious. Would that fit your idea of a conceptual framework generated along empiricist lines? It seems like this formulation requires an innate capability rather than a blank slate. Can you lay out a scenario that is illustrative of your concept of a conceptual framework that is generated along empiricist lines?
That's a misrepresentation. The brain is not doing maths at all. It is trying to predict its "sensory inputs".
It is saying things like that flower should smell like a rose, that fuzzy patch of grey is probably the cat. And so when you stick your nose to sniff the plastic flower, or stick out a toe to prod the snoozing ferret, you can have the surprised feeling of your "reality" being meaningfully contradicted.
A theory about the state of the world just got disproven and so your running state of conception has to be updated to fit the new evidence.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
That sounds more like the modelling relations approach.
There has to be some interface between our neurobiological modelling and the physical reality it is meant to regulate. The conceptual part is that we do operate with some world theory. The empirical part is we do put out some set of logical switches that are designed to be physically triggered.
But my argument is that the empirical is a product of our conceptual needs. We arrange our measuring so that it speaks to some state of prediction that was in play - the guts of the Bayesian Brain approach.
Oddly enough I think I can! Maybe. (And I do think empiricism is fine with there being some inborn capacities, often reason, psychological mechanisms like "association" and memory, all that. Just no knowledge, no conceptual framework. So I think a modeling capacity in the brain is fine, so long as you're not born with a model that exceeds your experience in utero.)
This is more or less the territory I expected us to end up in, and part of what I wanted to explore was whether this sort of view is a sort of empiricism (most empiricisms also feature some sort of representational realism, for example) or if it's hostile to empiricism somehow.
I'd really like to see us begin, a little, to approach the big stuff: space, time, causality, induction, persons and objects. One of those has a particularly memorable role in the history of empiricism.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Hume takes himself to have shown that there is, and can be, no rational justification for our reliance on induction. And then he offers his "sceptical solution": habit.
Now here we are, talking in part about stuff that System 1 gets up to that's below our level of awareness -- certainly not the result of any conscious reasoning, and we know not always conforming to our standards of rationality -- and what in particular is System 1 the home of? Habit.
So we could, without too much special pleading, look at Hume's empiricism as recognizing how System 1 grounds the conscious rational work we do in System 2. [hide="Reveal"](@flaco, you'll have to keep an eye on my use of Kahneman -- the material is fascinating but I found the writing in TF&S almost unbearable, so I only ever got halfway through it! I feel bad.)[/hide] And if that's reasonable, then maybe the modern view is exactly the sort of empiricism Hume had in mind.
But is it? System 1 chugging along -- it's responsible for our model of reality right? We might be able to see how habit underwrites induction -- there would be mechanisms there honestly below my level of interest -- and maybe, maybe, maybe that gets us somewhere near causality, maybe even persons and objects, but space and time? There I hit a wall. It's not hard to see how these would be part of the model -- it's hard to see how they could not be! Or, rather, it's hard to imagine what a model even is if it doesn't just assume these. But does the model "come up" with them? I can barely make sense of the question. (And I don't remember offhand how Hume dealt with space and time!)
Hold that thought, if you would. -- I don't think we've at all given intersubjectivity its due and it's not immediately in the offing. I will say your claim that it's the "same exact problem" has not been considered very convincing over the years. Point being: doesn't matter unless we do spend some time on intersubjectivity.
You can’t make sense of anything without a little priming of the conceptual pump. We are born with an innate natural logic that allows us to think about our observations and draw lessons from them, as well as with a capacity to model a Euclidian space (which is why non-Euclidian geometries are counter-intuitive). We are also born with hard-wired instincts and tropisms, just like any other animal species: we like certain things (eg the taste of honey) and dislike others (the sight of blood) innately.
Think of it as our operating system. Computers are not blank slates; a computer without any code in it wouldn’t be able to ‘start’, let alone ‘learn’ anything new. Same for us.
I would agree, and would add that we are born with emotion - the essential ingredient of experience!
It seems DNA information contributes substantially to our knowledge.
Zeno's Achilles and the tortoise paradox is a clear-cut case of our senses contradicting our reason. Our senses are 100% sure that not only did Achilles catch up to the tortoise but that Achilles left the tortoise in the dust. Our reason, however, says otherwise; not only will Achilles not overtake the humble tortoise but Achilles won't even catch up with it.
The resolution of this paradox has usually been in favor of empiricism with the attempts to find solutions all accepting Achilles to have won the race hands down. The problem, everyone assumed, is with reason but not in its rules but in the assumptions or theoretical context in which the paradox lives.
One common method to solve the paradox is to use the mathematical concept of the limit of infinite fractional sums. In essence, if one accepts this solution, it amounts to admitting that if ever the empirical doesn't agree with the rational, the fault lies with the latter.
This same pattern of thinking, blaming rationalism instead of empiricism, is seen again in quantum physics. The result of the famous double-slit experiment is that light is both a particle and a wave, two mutually contradictory ideas. As far as I know, scientists don't question the validity of the experimental results; instead they cast doubt on the credibility of reason, rationality and it's likely that, if given a modicum of encouragement, they will demand a complete overhaul of logic/reason itself to accommodate their findings.
On the flip side, there are some occasions during which rationalism carries the day and empiricism has to play second fiddle or even go offstage. Suppose you see an elephant sitting on your work desk through the window of your office. You know your desk won't hold the weight of your overweight secretary let alone that of an elephant. You conclude that the elephant is a hallucination i.e. rationalism has invalidated empiricism.
To make the long story short, it's complicated!
What you described through your examples is a dialogue, a collaboration between reason and observations to arrive at some (temporary) conclusion. And this interaction is indeed complex. Obviously our observations can be directed by our reason, for instance. In the case of the elephant on your desk, your reason tells you it’s impossible and therefore you shouldn’t trust what your eyes tell you. You could opt to do a number of additional observations to decide whether it’s real or not: assuming that your eyesight is problematic, you might want to touch the elephant (ie use another sense than vision), or you could ask colleagues if they can see the elephant too (use another observer). Based on this additional empirical data, you might be able to conclude (reason) one way or another.
So it’s the combination of reason and observation that is powerful. Reason alone is blind, and observation alone is meaningless.
[quote=Juvenal]Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?[/quote]
A model that only accepts concurrence between reason and observation should work well enough to save the day.
Quoting TheMadFool
This would be ok for a description of a philosophical zombie, but real people have emotions.
Wouldn't surprise be your immediate reaction? The Bayesian Brain theory predicts that it would.
If the notion of human experience is justifiable, then empiricism must be valid, in order to serve as the ground for knowledge of real, physical things, which is exactly what experience is. But knowledge of physical things is not the only human knowledge there is, so while empiricism remains valid, it is nonetheless limited by itself.
I have no idea what you're talking about. I'll look it up when I get the chance. If you have the time, I don't mind a few pointers.
It can also be a fight, a competition between them. E.g. in the case of a hyper-skeptic, aka a denialist, whose own reason finds ways to stubbornly reject any evidence contrary to her theory as ‘not good enough’, ‘inconclusive’, ‘fake’, etc. Or vice-versa sometimes our senses are being treacherous, e.g. in optical illusions. So those two don’t always cooperate.
That’s correct.
In a way, we behave as philosophical zombies when we are not in touch with our own emotions.
I suppose emotions add another layer to experience, over and above basic comprehension. I don't see how it's related to empiricism though? By the way, what's materially undoable about emotions? I remember someone posting a thread that had to with how mental states are reproducible with the right chemicals.
Quoting Olivier5
Isn't that exactly why need both, like you suggested? Each, by itself, can't be trusted. They can be trusted only when together. Sound reasonable? A compromise of sorts. Also, methinks, a good plot for a comedy/adventure/fantasy book/play/flick.
Empiricism dose not acknowledge emotions role in experience whatsoever.
In light of the philosophical zombie argument, where emotion is essential to consciousness and experience, this seems incoherent.
Edit:
Empiricism posits that all knowledge is derived from experience, but it dose not understand experience. It fails to take into account the role of emotion in experience.
:up:
We've all been saying things at least a little like this in this thread. I'm not sure there's much alternative, but it also makes me a little uncomfortable.
Suppose I ask, how can a child learn to speak her native language? One answer is: the ability to learn a language is a gift from God. Maybe I find this unsatisfactory, so I keep asking. Another answer is: it is a gift from Darwin, i.e., it's how our species has evolved. But that says nothing at all: however we are is however our species evolved. Since we can demonstrably learn languages, we must have so evolved.
In the period of classic British Empiricism, the options were: (a) it's a gift from God; (b) I made it myself. We didn't have a natural process that could fill the role of the Great Bestower, though of course Hume, he of the preternatural insight, would drop a remark here and there that seems eerily to anticipate the theory of evolution by natural selection. If there is a spirit of empiricism, it's related to this:
The honest toil of empiricism is to explain how we could have the conceptual apparatus we have -- objects and causes and all the rest -- without just stealing it from the gods like Prometheus. The updated version of rationalism (if we may speak this way) is just to get whatever you need from Darwin's Emporium.
Unfortunately, the middle ground is somewhat unsatisfactory: to justify, in the sense of "rationalize", reliance on evolution, we tell just-so stories of the fitness value of this and that, to make it plausible that the invisible hand would have selected for the traits we need to postulate. We can be sophisticated about this too: we can argue that what we think of as an innate ability to do such-and-such, where this seems an unlikely candidate for providing a survival benefit, is actually the repurposing of an ability originally "selected for" for quite different reasons. I like those stories, but if they're not testable, they're not hypotheses they're just stories.
Honest toil then, under this paradigm, would be restricting yourself to claims you can test. We're scientists after all. Thus if you want to claim, we can do A because there's a clearish survival value to being able to do B (which we can't test, that part remains a story), and A can borrow the mechanism that Bs, you want to test whether people who can't do A also can't do B. Neurobiologists can do some stuff like that with lesion studies, for instance: see whether people known to be unable to A turn out to be unable to B. Psychologists can also try to design experiments to test whether performing A-like tasks is related to performing B-like tasks. There's at least something like honest toil going on here.
What are the philosophers doing while all this is going on? There are always chunks of early modern philosophy, Hume being a pretty good example, that I find a bit tedious because they look a lot like armchair psychology, and we have the real thing now. I don't need Hume to figure out how memory works, say; my tax dollars are doing that, right? If we decide our role as philosophers is to "check up on" scientists, keep them honest, make sure their theories are conceptually up to snuff, we often look a bit ridiculous, like Jerry Fodor insisting that the way far too many biologists talk about evolution is insidiously circular. Mostly, they don't need us for that.
It's tempting to think the role of philosophy is to provide some goals, figure out what needs explaining. I've been tempted now and then to think of philosophy as in fact a sort of (armchair, but maybe it needn't be so) social science, a social science of reasoning. But that turns out to be economics. Kahneman and Tversky, for instance, show pretty definitively, it seems to me, that you needn't waste my tax dollars looking for the brain mechanisms that allow us innately to understand probabilities, because we don't. We suck big time at probabilistic reasoning.
What then is the role of philosophy? We can restrict ourselves to understanding the workings of System 2 -- finding our way around the conceptual apparatus we are just presented with by System 1, we know not how nor for what reasons. I like that well enough; that might be a descriptive metaphysics of the sort Strawson (and, I understand, Collingwood, and kind of everybody) advocated. But it's not clear to me, if we're going to let evolutionary psychology and cognitive science have their say, what a doctrine like empiricism has to offer. What's the point?
Yes, that was the project of old style empiricism. Get rid of the need for innate ideas, so as to avoid having to explain them. A shame it didn’t work. Now we’re back to Prometheus, or Euclidian geometry encoded (how?) in our DNA... I vote for the latter.
Here's still more stuff for your armchair time, and this brings us back to the sorts of stuff @Pfhorrest was talking about: from our point of view as conscious agents, and to the psychologist that will mean up here in System 2, how do we manage the relations between System 1 and System 2? We now have experiments revealing all sorts of cognitive biases. I don't even know what the state of play is for theories explaining why we have these biases, but the facts alone are both fascinating and knowledge of them useful. [hide="note"](It's entirely possible that I first learned about cognitive biases -- that is, as theory-backed thing -- back when I used to play fantasy baseball: some of those people can teach you a lot about statistics and probabilistic reasoning, and I remember seeing mention of "recency bias".)[/hide] So "now we know": beware of System 1! It's awesome, it keeps you alive, but it's not really designed (heh) to tell you the truth. Beware!
But -- not everything that goes wrong is System 1's fault, now is it? Up here in our System 2 paradise we're theorizing away about this and that, but System 2 being where reason hangs its hat doesn't mean everything that goes on in System 2 is reasonable. What we do consciously, reflectively, may in every case be an attempt at reasoning -- otherwise no one would have rung up System 2 for help -- but there can clearly be errors in reasoning that are not System 1's fault, not cases where we think we're reasoning but are really listening to the slightly paranoid but canny fellow in the basement. Or maybe we don't make a mistake but just hit an impasse, can't reach a decision. What do we do on reaching an impasse, and how could we have avoided some of our mistakes?
We send it back down to the lower court, and ask for more data. So "empiricism" could be a name for that: the System-2-level recognition that it is dependent on System 1 not just for the conceptual apparatus but also for the data we will slot into that apparatus when attempting to reason. But that description is way wrong.
And here is exactly why we need philosophy. (1) The data always comes packaged. System 1 won't give you the raw data, you couldn't use it even it did; it packages it up using whatever concepts it has. This is the major blow struck repeatedly against classic empiricism, the assumption that reason works with the raw data, the Myth of the Given. But that means there is a role for philosophy in understanding how the data is packaged: you may never be able to say "this wrapper is the concept" and "this part left over after I remove the wrapper is the data" -- that's very nearly Quine's first dogma, the futile attempt to distinguish analytic and synthetic; but you may at least be able to recognize the wrapper and know why it's there and how it relates to other elements of the conceptual apparatus, get a sense of the effect of how it was packaged. I also think we can send back what we get and ask for it to be repackaged in a different way. [hide="note added"](Actually this looks different, almost a "System 3": a specialized subsystem for reconceptualizing, repackaging. Interesting.)[/hide] (2) Even though in some sense System 2 is the big leagues, where the stuff we find interesting happens, it's also the feeder system, the minor leagues, for System 1, right? Play enough chess and a lot of the stuff you had to agonizingly work out with step-by-step analysis when you started becomes habit, pushed down to System 1 and handled now in a flash. Stuff you know you know how to do, and could have explained back when you learned it, can become an ability you have trouble articulating. So there is a role for philosophy in making sure that what we do in System 2 is done well, since it's going to end up a habit. And that includes the conceptual apparatus itself; if you get in the habit -- I just mean "habit", still System 2 -- of sending back data packaged in a certain way, because it's not appropriate for your reasoning, System 1 will get the message, move that packaging to a less accessible part of the warehouse, and maybe eventually quit using it at all.
I don't see a plausible alternative either.
Sorry to bring this up. If you're not interested, kindly ignore this post. If you are then, I'd like to ask you why you think emotions are, well, non-physical in nature? Love chemical = Oxytocin, Anger/Fear = Epinephrine, Happiness = Endorphins/Dopamine, and the list probably goes one. It seems, given adequate time, neuroscientists will eventually identify for every emotion, a specific brain chemical.
The neurotransmitters you mention are not in themselves an emotion, but rather signalers of emotion, in my opinion.
As I sit here in my armchair, I find that I am just not understanding this passage. I think I can accept the idea of packaging: stripping away extraneous information, abstracting. So for the purpose of this passage, do you have an example of the packaging that you have in mind.
While my personal opinion is that system 1 is the "big leagues", we should probably discuss that some other time. I would like to understand your concept of system 2 sending data back to system 1 for repackaging. I get that system 2 can train system 1 for expertise like chess, but this idea about system 2 deciding that it wants data packaged in a certain way and training system 1 to do it just isn't resonating. Can you give an example to help me understand? Thanks.
For repackaging I have in mind very familiar things we do in deciding how to carve up what we observe. If I show you a picture of a bunch of people and ask you what you see, there are a lot of right answers available! All of those answers are going to package the people in the picture (assuming that's even what you think about -- maybe you notice their clothes) in a certain way: a bunch of old folks, a bunch of white folks, a bunch of people. But suppose I then ask you how many women are in the picture? You might not have thought about this -- which may or may not mean you analysed the question and tried to guess what I was asking, depends on the circumstances. So now you need the "data" to be repackaged into [ the men in the picture ] and [ the women in the picture ]. Mostly you'll do that quite readily. But the categories used in the second version are still the province of System 1, your habits of identifying and classifying and conceptualizing, habits acquired largely through training to speak your native language; only if things get tricky will you settle down to analysing the data piece by piece, seeking justification for how you classify, etc.
I'm also thinking of slightly more specialized pursuits like painting. As I understand it, in introductory painting classes some considerable pains must be taken to get students to see the patches of color in their visual field: they tend to think apples are a uniform red all over because the object they know is kinda like that. With enough practice they can learn to overcome color constancy and actually see the effects of light and shadow and reflectivity that present the apple not just in shades of red but with blues and purples and whatnot. Again, even that repackaging is not the raw data, but matches up with the names printed on the tubes of paint!
Does that make sense?
Yeah, I think there is overwhelming evidence that something like this must happen. I see what's on a chessboard dramatically differently from the way my kids do, and I know people who play a hell of a lot better than I do (or used to) see it differently still. System 2 as the minor leagues for System 1's habits is clear enough. [hide="anecdote"](I think it's Feynman who tells a story about the first paper he presented, and some great physicist -- I forget who -- gets up at the end to ask a question which Feynman later realizes completely demolished what he was saying. He couldn't get over this man in real time putting his finger exactly on the weak spot in his paper.)[/hide]
And I have a sense -- I think! -- of how kids can be trained to conceptualize as we do but it still feels like System 1's pump needs to be primed somehow, if not so much our individual System 1s, since we have adults to pour a cup of water in, then the "original", the core conceptual apparatus we've been passing down to our progeny for millennia -- and I don't see much alternative there besides "thank you, Darwin", which is not overly satisfying.
Yeah. Many years ago I more or less gave up philosophy because of the rise of cognitive science -- I just didn't see anything much left for us to do. (I was young.)
My evolving view -- which one can see evolving in this very thread! -- actually reinforces my desire to mostly ignore brain science but keep doing philosophy, because brain science is not in my purview but there's still a ton to say about whatever System 1 dumps into our awareness and what we do with it.
And this still leaves two ways of reading Kant (should I ever get around to this), either as describing what System 1 throws our way or as the transcendental analysis of the conditions of possibility of experience -- in which case it can also be kind of a guide to what System 1 is constrained into coming up with.
OK. I'm going to take a giant leap to crazy-land here. One distinctive characteristic of humans is our use of language. So, thanks to language, we are no longer confined to knowledge that is inherent or that we figure out on our own. With the use of language we can pass knowledge from generation to generation and we can learn from the experience of others.
The development of this sophisticated communication system requires system 2. What we call consciousness is really just an artifact of our communication system. So we got everything backwards. We think of the thing that we call consciousness as our essence. But instead our essence is contained in that invisible fellow buried in system 1. Can system 2 influence system 1 to make different choices? Yes it can. But only if it is inclined to do so by system 1.
So is there evidence that system 2 is just an outgrowth of our communications ability? Certainly I spend a good deal of conscious time having conversations with others, conversations with myself, reading, watching videos. All forms of communication. What about math and logic? That would be manipulation of human created ideas and symbols. Long term planning? That looks like an exception. But maybe I can argue that once we developed the capability to remember ideas and plan communications, it was just a minor adaptation to use that same capability for other purposes.
OK. That's my thought. We are not our consciousness. We are our prejudices and emotions.