Fictionalism
I am a supporter of the fictionalist position. This means I believe that other than possible physical laws found in the natural sciences that other laws, norms beliefs and social structures are fictions (possibly useful fictions)
So I think that things like legal laws, human rights claims, moral claims and general value claims, traditions and so on are just things we say and use to alter peoples behaviour under the guise that they are lawful.
This can be compared to people following the rules of a religion where believers believe they should observe certain behaviours but non believers see this behaviour unjustified (even crazy).
I think fictionalism seems to lead to nihilism where society seems absurd because peoples behaviour seems to be not being governed by reason or rationality but by an unwarranted faith or unthinking allegiance to unjustified ideologies.
So I think that things like legal laws, human rights claims, moral claims and general value claims, traditions and so on are just things we say and use to alter peoples behaviour under the guise that they are lawful.
This can be compared to people following the rules of a religion where believers believe they should observe certain behaviours but non believers see this behaviour unjustified (even crazy).
I think fictionalism seems to lead to nihilism where society seems absurd because peoples behaviour seems to be not being governed by reason or rationality but by an unwarranted faith or unthinking allegiance to unjustified ideologies.
Comments (43)
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Under the guise that they are lawful, or truthful?
While I agree that morality is constructed and historically has been sold as something that is objective and true, I wouldn't call myself a fictionalist, but rather a moral constructivist. The difference is that I don't think we should necessarily lie about their origin, or at least that's what I hope. Laws and morals need not be true and objective to be 'lawfull', their force can be derived from that fact that we agree on them.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
I think it leads to nihilism because people stop believing in the fiction (and it works if they believe in it). And then society becomes absurd because people feel like they have to continue to act like they believe in the fiction because they think other people do, while in reality nobody really does... or at least very few.
Anyway my question to you would be, do you think we should get rid of morality all together then, since it is a fiction? And rely on what then? On people just getting along and acting rationally out of their own volition?
That is a good point. Possibly both. But value statements have law like or "ought" like qualities.
People say things like "You ought to lose some weight". You can get the impression that there is an ideal weight that we ought to be aiming for.
If you believe this is true than you may treat it as lawful.
So I suppose people may have to treat a claim as true before treating it as a law or an "Ought".
But I think the person delivering the claims is acting like they are factual and that they should be obeyed.
I like the term "reifying" or "reification" that treat something conceptual or controversial as concrete.
It depends on why you are agreeing on something. Obviously consensus doesn't equal right. Would people agree to agree to rules that they accepted were completely made up and not metaphysically binding but only pragmatic and a tool for some kind of social cohesion?
For example I don't think an atheist would follow religious rules regardless of their pragmatic or utilitarian value.
I believe people think there is a deeper validity to concepts like human rights and prohibitions against stealing and killing than just being pragmatic tools.
I think we have to make weaker moral claims and these would lead to moderation in behaviour hopefully.
I don't know if a tyranny has existed based on agnosticism and a belief in the fallibility of values.
That is the question indeed. Historically it didn't seem enough, which is one of the reasons they felt the need to invent God I think, to infuse morality with objectivity. Ultimately this is a question of psychology it seems. I hope we can get to a place where we can just agree on things and have that pull enough weight, but I wouldn't know if we can.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
And is this something that is learned, i.e. because we were taught to think about them as objective, and so could possibly be changed? Or is it something that is more or less psychologically hard-wired?
Yes I agree people view morality that way, the question is if this is necessarily so, like I said in my comment above?
Also since some things rely on implicit values that almost everybody agrees to, these oughts might be very much equivalent to a factual claim. For instance, the claim you ought to lose weight might follow from the value 'health'.... if we agree on the value of health, then you ought to lose some weight. This just as an example to be clear, not that I think that losing weight is always good for your health.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Let's take homosexuality as in example. It seems to be a minority occurrence but that doesn't seem to entail it has less validity or value than the majority sexuality. It seems to be hardwired as well.
I don't think you can derive values from possibly hardwired behaviours and preferences and pit them against each other. Desirable and undesirable traits are probably somewhat hardwired.
I think the problem is not with identifying aspects of life we can improve but having the the justification of compelling other people to follow our values.
But still I believe that people including those that claim to be relativists treat values and social ideologies as more compelling than they are and use them to justify their own beliefs and actions..
Reason appears to tell us that you can't get an "ought" from and "is".
I think reason sometimes amounts to a value system including the idea that we ought to be reasonable. Like the issue of weight loss I mentioned earlier. It may be good for your health to lose weight but should that compel you to lose weight.
I think one could join a religion because they like the music, architecture. poetry, the community and atmosphere. That may benefit their mental health but I couldn't do this and suspend my disbelief adequately.
Yes I didn't mean to imply that you can derive them from biology. There would just be agreement, convention as a basis for some values and consequent morality.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Aren't you having your cake and eating it too here? The idea that you need a justification to compel other people is a fictional ought too if you apply fictionalism consistently. So this seems like a problem to me, because if you believe that 1) no objective morality exists and 2) justification in objective morality is necessary to compel people to behave in a certain way, you are 3) effectively ruling out the possibly of morality from the start.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Yes I agree, I don't think anybody is really a relativist (or nihilist) when it comes down to it... when you look at their actions. And it is often used as a rhetorical tool yes.
I think science claims that its laws are descriptive rather than prescriptive. Do you think one could regard social rules in the same way? "This is how banks, courts, neighbourhoods function, and this is how those things fall apart..."
I thought that the point of a physical law was that you could not break it because no exceptions to the rule have been found so it is self enforcing.
It is a description but a description of something that is self enforcing and a supposed limitation.
I think there are many ways you could describe social institutions and how they work
For example you could claim tax laws are made to benefit the wealthy or that schools intend to indoctrinate children. In this sense there seems to be an intention or motive behind creating social structures and this can be and is challenged.
I don't think you can necessarily give an objective description of social structures and norms.
So someone may say tax laws are there for the equal redistribution of wealth and schools intend to enlighten people. Some people claim taxes are theft. In this sense it is a fluctuating, contested dynamic.
I have an intuition that some things are good and somethings are bad. I don't know where this comes from and I don't know how accurate it is.
I think if we concede that state of affairs "A" is better or preferable than state of affairs "B" we can aspire towards state "A". I don't think this is morality however in the sense that medicine is not usually coined in terms of morality but rather just an improvement in well being and medicine seems to rely on scientific discoveries about the best functioning of a body.
I think moral scepticism/nihilism is simply challenging the truth value of moral claims not claiming there is no preferable state of affairs.
But then we have the problem of teleology. The human body and its organs seem to have goals such as the heart pumping blood around the body. You could hypothetical have a healthy human body regardless of the preferences of the individual but social norms do not appear to have any kind of teleology like this to follow.
Another problem I have with morality and utopian or utilitarian attempts to improve society is that I think they are bound to fail. So I think it is impossible to not be morally contradictory/hypocritical and impossible to create a non exploitative society. If humans are just a another part of nature then we see that nature appears inherently flawed and not something we can transcend.
However I am interested in what society would look like if we looked at claims outside of the natural science as weak, contestable and pragmatic.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
If you mean that we can't find a teleology for them in nature and biology, then yes, I agree. I think we create them because we value some things over others, and so we want people to behave to attain those values. And personally I think this is only a problem if you expect to find objective morality in the first place.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
That would depend on how high you set the bar, right? If you expect a society of saints, then yes that won't work. But on smaller scales and for less utopian goals there does seem to be some utility. For instance, I think moms can be successful in teaching Johnny not to hit his little sister.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Yes by and large, although I'd probably say that they are no claims to truths at all, so neither weak or strong. And if we realise that we create them, it is already implied that they are up for revision if they don't serve our ends (anymore).
I can use the example of veganism here.
The impression vegans give is that humans are the main source of animal suffering. However in the wild animals are eaten alive. Most deer starve to death and there are no old persons homes for animals.
Nature has been presented like a kind of Disney story.
I don't think it is possible to take the death, predation and starvation out of nature and still have life. If no one died the world would soon become over populated. Dying organisms are part of the cycle of life.
Some people would argue we should be just like nature (survival of the fittest?) and not try to transcend it. Are our attempts to control or thwart nature sustainable or psychologically healthy? I think our current era of prosperity (which is not available to many people) is ahistoric and we have to have faith that it is sustainable.
So if you advocate for fictionalism, then you're also advocating for nihilism?
Quoting Andrew4Handel
No, reason didn't tell us that. David Hume did.
It depends what nihilism means. Personally I have found no meaning out of life. But the nature of meaning is a huge topic. If people kill themselves does that mean they felt life was not meaningful?
Is genocide meaningful or nihilistic?
Do physical laws amount to meaning?
Is the meaning of words special? (I think the meaning of words is an indisputable case of meaning)(We convey information to one another) (Yet language is a mysterious area where these kinds of symbolic representations are not understood.)
Quoting Wayfarer
But he used reason. I think his formulation is logical and logic is a key postulate of reason.
Is there a difference? /s
Normative laws are not useful as descriptions of the world, but then, describing the world isn’t what they are trying to do in the first place. What are they trying to do? Might any of them be more or less useful than others towards that end? And wouldn’t that measure of usefulness be equally a basis to decide that some are better or worse than others, more right or wrong? In a different sense than is used of descriptive laws, but still a sense, which is all you need to salvage normativity from nihilism or other relativism.
It’s characteristic of Hume, ‘the godfather of positivism’. The ‘is/ought’ problem was very much a consequence of early modern philosophy and the Cartesian split between mind and body. What was measurable was subject to precise quantification - is/is not - whilst what was good, proper or true was not. Hence the fact/value dichotomy, hard problem of consciousness, and the rest.
Let’s not try to swallow the ocean. Nihilism is variously interpreted as nothing is real, nothing matters, or nothing has any real value. As is well-known, Nietzsche (and I don’t want to turn this into a thread about him, but anyway) predicted that nihilism was the fate of modernity. I think he was right in that. Nihilism doesn’t have to comprise enormous emotional upheaval; it can be a shrug, a ‘whatever’. ‘Nothing matters’. It’s easy to be in that space, almost commonplace. So I suppose the contrary to that is that it does matter - what you do, what you believe, how you live your life, matters. Quite why, of course, is the problem.
Regarding physical laws - the very notion of law is descended from the idea that there was a God who set these laws. It was merely assumed in the older days. But as God is now presumed dead, then who underwrites those laws? Are they really laws? You’ll notice they’re kind of shrugged off nowadays, hey, they’re useful, and all, but the nihilist view is that there’s nothing meaningful about them, it’s just the habits that stuff develops, given a few billion years. Whereas in classical philosophy, the same mind which authored those laws was reflected in miniature in the rational mind of man.
I think most physical laws are statistical based. Water is always liquid except when it it freezes or boils. Matter cannot be created or destroyed, except radioactivity.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Well I don't know what gravity is for either. Taxes are government collecting money from people. Schools are collective child-minding facilities. Gravity is stuff tending to fall down, law is societies regulate their relations.
It certainly is unprecedented and unique, but then again it's not like there's a script history has to follow. Is it psychologically healthy and sustainable? Maybe not, but that is a bit moot point if we don't really have all that much choice in the matter. We are here now with a couple of billion people on earth. The more interesting question to me is where do we go from here?
I'd say at this point there is no way back, and we will have to make it work somehow precisely because there are no guarantees that it will. And hearkening back to stories of old, like nature, nationalism or religions won't do the trick I think, because those were geared to a world that doesn't exist anymore. The world has changed fundamentally and we can take responsibility to make it work or not... a little bit of lucidity, creativity and trust in ourselves and we could be off.
The point is that gravity will it impose itself on you but social structures are imposed by other people based on what appears to be false beliefs and not by regularities and restrictions found in nature..
What motivates the creation of social structures is what is not objective.
It could be that there are no laws of physics and that is an illusion which would feed into a complete nihilism. What I want to stress is the non factual, unjustified nature of social claims that influence behaviour.
It is different also than fictionalism about maths and numbers because maths is not making value claims. To me maths is a set of axioms and the application of logic to discover patterns that does not need to rely on absolutism.
Societies have been structured around value claims which with the support of law are said to justify peoples and nations actions.
It depends what you mean by going back. Environmentalist would like to see a reduction in the human population and sustainable and more ecologically integrated ways of functioning.
I think where ever we should go should probably guided by reason and exposing and exploring fictions is part of that process.
It depends what you mean? Useful to whom. Why should usefulness to one set of desires take precedence over usefulness to another set of desires?
The impression I get from scientists is that they they have discovered laws that are a fundamental basis for reality and not just something pragmatic.
I think to make pragmatic laws they should be based on an acknowledgement that the rules are fictional and instrumental because I think following made up rules without acknowledging them as such is a kind of nihilism.
I always answer the OP. Not the issue of the side-track.
Calling physical laws and human-created laws (be they legal, traditional, spiritual) is an equivocation in the Aristotelian sense of the fallacy.
Physical laws don't exist purely in nature outside of the human sphere. They are human-created solidified opinions how the world works. The physical world does not operate on laws of the physical world. We don't know what the physical world operates on, most likely it's a deterministic effort.
So physical laws exist inasmuch as human opinions exist.
Other laws that made BY humans FOR humans, are guides. That's why it's no surprize they are basically crowd-control devices, set up by the ruling class to keep the non-ruling class in their control.
Human-created laws (not human-discovered laws) and their effected behaviour in humans only look stupid and crazy, and they do, because the practice was a solidly good idea at one point, which they therefore implemented, it became a tradition, and the tradition still lives, with or without conviction that it helps anyone in anything. They look ridiculous because knowledge proved they are futile. Some believe still that traditional rituals are not futile. But then why do they look ridiculous.
It's a weak point and a largely false belief. Firstly, other people are as real as gravity, and secondly, social structures are almost invariably based on necessities of interdependence. Which side of the road we drive on is arbitrary, but that we all drive on the same side is a physical necessity just as implacable as gravity, and the situation is akin to a boulder balanced on a hill top that is bound to roll down one way or another.
This forum has rules that are necessary to its being a place of discussion and not full of thoughtless rubbish. If you think they are based on false beliefs, try a site where they do not have them and compare.
This just gets at the issue with saying something like "you can't get an ought from an is". It stops you from evaluating whether things are working properly. Sure, you can say the economy is efficient, but then why investigate the efficiency? Why not waste all of our resources on bitcoin? You can say everyone might as well be selfish, but then why even pursue your own interest? Any question about what to do becomes undecidable.
The Greek answer to the question was to say that each thing has a function, and "good" merely means fulfilling this function.
That's fine for things that have one function. But a related question to "how ought I to behave?" is "what is the purpose of my existence?"
This is why, for me, morality is an existential matter. We are far from a situation in which we have well-defined functions, or where any given function "ought" to be adopted over another. We have a lot of freedom, which burdens us with a lot of decisions to make.
The difference between this forum and life or society is that we choose to come here and accept the rules. We are imposing the rules on ourselves to achieve the aims we want.
This forum could have a different set of rules and no moderation. There are a variety of forums that allow people to express themselves in different ways.
This reminds of the Trump Twitter ban. Banning him earlier would have probably been more beneficial to everyone but for reasons only they can know they allowed a lot of prior inflammatory behaviour.
I don't think anyone is entitled to go on twitter or on this forum it is a negotiation and a fluctuation of values and attitudes.
I think the apparent need for rules is an interesting point. Needing structure and rules does not mean these rules are not invented and without genuine force.
The fact that views on here can be and are challenged means the forum is already accepting that no persons opinions are absolute and unquestionable.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fictionalism/
I would class myself as a linguistic fictionalist. I would not make the ontological claim that all abstract claims, concepts and beliefs are fictional.
I am skeptical about the basis of certain claims but agnostic about how much of discourse reflects the nature of reality.
So for instance I think moral claims need a realm of authority beyond anything we have at the moment from religion or science. I suppose moral claims have to exist in a non natural realm because nature is brutal and amoral. So I think nature does not provide moral ought's.
I think a lot of claims have been propped up by God in the past (Children obey your parents). That is mentioned in the Stanford article in reference to Voltaire saying “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”
Apparently evolution has undermined function talk and teleology.
In evolutionary theory it is easy to explain behaviour as simply roundabout ways to encourage people to be fit and spread their genes.
If this evolutionary model is correct it would probably entail that whatever justification we give for our actions they are just serving the mindless survival of genes.
Well I've been working on an essay about this, but generally the answer to the question is "Ethics".
Try driving on the wrong side of the road and feel the genuine force.The idea that social pressure is unreal is as ridiculous as that it is unnecessary. A path is made by walking on it, something that sheep manage with no detectable entitlement. Habit and custom arise and establish themselves naturally, and entitlement is established in this way too; it is not a precondition of social organisation, nor is it anyone's invention. So far, I can see no radical distinction between the way a river course is established by a process of erosion, and the way a society is established and becomes regulated. Sometimes rivers flood and change course, and sometimes societies suffer revolutions. River courses are not fictional.
Good analogy!
It's interesting that a good analogy or metaphor can be more insightful, than trying to capture it in abstract categories like subjective/objective, absolute/relative, real/fictional etc etc... Good stuff.
I think you are conflating rules that people chose to obey as opposed to rules people feel obliged to obey.
I don't agree that rule like road laws are inevitable especially since cars are very modern historical development.
The invention of the motorcar made some kind of pragmatic road regulations inevitable. In this sense social structures are going to emerge once people develop a society but not because they are justified.
To make a crude analogy say someone invented a robot that came out at 7 at night and started killing people. In this scenario it would be advisable not to leave your house at 7 pm. That rule has only come about by an absurd decision to make a killer robot.
But anyhow I am not referring to pragmatic rules we chose to follow out of self interest but linguistic statements such as "You ought pay taxes" "Theft is wrong" "I own this house" "This is my country".
This is about foundational premises before your start creating your society.
When a country or area like that region has not had autonomy(The crusades/Ottoman empire etc) and been the centre of disputes it has not inherited a stable identity.
Other countries have had wars over the centuries to establish their boundaries and now we take those boundaries for granted. Now major countries have large armies and even nuclear weapons to enforce boundary and nation status claims.
The whole panalopy of laws and military assets is the elaborate machinery of enforcement of social/national claims to force compliance to the tests doctrines or beliefs.
I really don't understand how these are foundational or prior to a society? The notion of property and hence theft and tax developed out of agrarian societies. They make little sense to hunter/gatherer societies.
But let me make another suggestion; that morality is founded on biology and environment. Large brain mandates early birth and under developed helpless neonates. The complex social relations of a tribe require that large brain to learn the particular adaptations of behaviour and social structure developed historically to exploit the local environment. This automatically produces a web of dependencies such that children need to learn food sources and environmental challenges, as well as the social expectations that will allow them to survive. Hunters need to cooperate, shelters need to be built cooperatively, and so on.
The morality of intelligent turtles, that lay eggs on the beach and leave them to hatch and survive or not on their own, would be very different. Welfare services would not include child welfare.
Agreed.
Those two statements weren't supposed to be paired.
The first point I was making that statements like "I own this house" are fictional or "Child abuse is wrong" are fictional. There is not a metaphysical or ontological reality behind these claims. But they may be pragmatically useful.
The other point of about" foundations" I referenced in relation to the Israel/Arab conflict. There is not an agreement about who deserves to live on the land. They haven't developed a legitimacy basis to found a stable society on so they are in perpetual conflict.
It is not a smooth transition to adapt to new circumstances but an ongoing conflict. If there were objective facts about what made a just/valid society there would have been no need for these conflicts.
However the fictionalist claim is that certain things we talk about are fictions not about whether they can be effective or pragmatically useful or not. Religion has been an effective social force despite that I think it is none of it true.
That is a classic example of how the laws don't enforce themselves and can have no consequences as opposed to the example of driving on the wrong side of the road.