I think the reasons someone reaches a conclusion are at least as important as the conclusion itself.
Recently someone I know changed their mind about a topic. Where they had previously disagreed with me on something, they now agree. Which was great, except, I found their reasons for the change problematic. It reminded me that I often have more affinity with those who reason carefully and come to a different conclusion, than with those who reach similar conclusion without that careful reasoning.
Not that I’m above accepting an ally in work or politics even when I disagree with their reasons. But for philosophical discussions bad reasons can make a conclusion look weaker than it is. An example might be someone who accepts compatibilist free will because they think something like the libertarian version emerges from the underlying physics. I’m a compatibilist, but not because I think anything resembling libertarian free will is true. My compatibilism comes from seeing free will as more about the capacity for forethought. So I’d have no interest in defending the emergent reasoning.
People take stances and believe things for all kinds of reasons. Often it can be because of who we are, our cultural background and biases, which can be very hard to recognize in ourselves. (It’s usually easy to see in others we disagree with.) It can be because of what we’d like to be true, also very hard to catch, particularly since these preferences are often unconscious. It can be because someone we admire and trust holds the position. It might be because we’re angry about something and it affects our judgment. Or it could be we’re concerned about our reputation, a danger anyone taking a stance relative to their profession has to consider.
In truth, avoiding all of these effects, all of the time, is unrealistic. The best we can do is expose our reasoning, the step by step logical decision tree we go through to reach it. And then put pressure on each of those steps and see if any of them are shaky. Doing this mentally is a good habit to develop. But as I’ve noted before, a stronger approach is to share those reasons with others, particularly with those who disagree, and see what objections they can offer, in other words, show our work.
That does put the conclusion at risk. Which if we arrived at it for the wrong reasons, we might be reluctant to do. In those cases, it helps to remember what the consequences could be if we’re wrong. (Admittedly for philosophical topics that may not be anything immediate.) But also how good it might feel if the reasoning survives the test. Of course this doesn’t guarantee that it’s right and won’t fail some future test, just that it’s less likely to be a figment of our own subjective biases. In many ways, this is similar to the stance in the previous post. In this case, that a logically complete stance is stronger than one with gaps.
A while back someone expressed dismay that I was taking a concept seriously, one that was far out and dubious from their perspective, when I skeptical of some of the concepts they championed. My response then is the same as it is here, the reasoning, the logical steps to a conclusion, matter. And when I stress tested the steps to the other concepts they favored, I hit obstacles, which I shared with them.
Actually, one of my favorite feelings is when a series of seemingly reasonable assumptions lead to something astounding, or at least counter-intuitive. It puts us in the position of either having to accept the conclusion or question the assumptions. I think it’s why I find science and philosophy discussions so interesting. You never know when the floor is about to be ripped out from under you, or when a single insight may make things cohere in a way they didn’t before.
But for me to have that feeling, the steps to get there have to be fairly solid. Someone merely speculating about an exotic concept seems, in comparison, like weak sauce.
What do you think? Is this putting too much emphasis on the journey rather than the destination? Are there issues with any of my reasoning here about reasoning?
SelfAwarePatterns 
“You never know when the floor is about to be ripped out from under you, or when a single insight may make things cohere in a way they didn’t before.” Dick Cheney was right about one thing – unknown unknowns are a thing. My favorite example concerns compatibilism: the main argument against compatibilism turns out to hinge on assumptions about the arrow of time which physics shows to be highly dubious. Specifically, relativity shows there is no universal “now” common to all observers, and thermodynamics explains the apparent arrow of time as an emergent phenomenon which does not go “all the way down” to fundamental fields. And these points do not require quantum mechanics, despite the popularity of trying to find free will in QM. Philosophers of action theory don’t much study philosophy of physics, but the latter turns out to be a left field that something very important is coming out of.
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The unknown unknowns guy was actually Donald Rumsfeld, but it’s easy to get those Bush era guys mixed up. Politics aside, it was a brilliant distillation of epistemic issues.
The free will example came to mind because I listened to an interview of Robert Sapolsky this week. He claims to be attacking compatibilism, but all his talking points seem more aimed at libertarian free will.
I still don’t see how time symmetry makes a difference. Although I generally see the determinism question as irrelevant for social responsibility anyway. Even if QM were a significant factor, how does randomness impart responsibility? The only difference I can see is that the outcome isn’t preset, which only seems relevant for people who want to think an ultimate judge didn’t preordain the outcome.
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Time symmetry: note that when Sapolsky says “turtles all the way down”, he means turtles all the way back — in time. Back, but not forward. Why do no philosophers argue that because your present situation (say, getting off an airplane) implies a particular past action (boarding in the departure city), that means you had no choice about your past action? For the obvious reason: your getting off at the destination depends on the action of boarding. But if laws are time-symmetric, your microscopically detailed past depends on what you do now, according to physical law. If you go back a few weeks, microscopic differences will correspond to the difference between you taking that flight, vs taking another, or none.
Intuitively, we think the (whole) past is fixed – but this is an overgeneralization, based on our experience as macroscopic systems.
Go back to the previous episode of Robinson’s Podcast with Jenann Ismael, to understand this better. Pay careful heed to her reasons why no agent can find that epistemic reasons compel a complete description of the world. Self-reference is the key here. You don’t really need to know about the time-symmetry of fundamental laws. But! It still helps, because otherwise, the intuitive picture of time will creep back in, and confuse you.
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Thanks Paul. Just queued up that episode. I’ll listen to it before replying any further.
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Ok, just finished it. I might need to listen again to fully understand her discussion of agents and “interference”. My overall impression is that our view of the future is unavoidably skewed by our own effects on it, which if so, makes sense. Although I didn’t catch anything about the past not being set.
I did agree with what she said toward the end when free will was explicitly discussed, that the key thing is to understand that we, the self, is composed of the things that Sapolsky sees as crowding out human agency. And I think I agree with what she said about everything in isolated systems not being deterministic due to outside factors. There were some last minute remarks about non-material unity I’m not sure about.
I’m surprised to discover that I own her “How Physics Makes Us Free” book (maybe on your recommendation), although I don’t think I’ve read it, or at least not much of it. I also see she has a Very Short Introduction book on time, which might be interesting.
Anyway, interesting episode. Thanks for recommending it!
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Glad you liked it. Part 2 of her book, I think it was Chapter 6, explains why the past is not fixed if determinism is true. Again, her focus is on self-reference.
Which is logically cogent, but I still think it’s worth going after the philosophy of time directly. Otherwise, a reader could be left in an apparent paradox. Due to self-reference, the past can’t be fixed if determinism is true. Due to the imaginary fact that Time Marches On, the past must be fixed.
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Thanks. Just quickly read a good part of the chapter. She writes the same way she talks, going over the details and waiting a long time before cashing out conclusions, a common academic tendency I find tedious. Anyway, this is the main takeaway I found.
My main nit here is it feels like talk of “influencing” the past is abusing the word “influence”. A better way to say it is that the fundamental relations between present and past are the same as the ones between present and future, but the emergent macroscopic asymmetries make them different for us macroscopic agents.
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“My compatibilism comes from seeing free will as more about the capacity for forethought.” In what way does that not employ the same concepts of time? The term “will” implies the intention to do something in the future.
My objection to compatibilism is asking of “free will”, what is the will ‘free’ of? The whole point of dualist ‘free will’ is that the will (of the mind or soul) is free from physical causes.
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Did I imply somewhere that the capacity for forethought isn’t related to time? My response to Paul was about time symmetry, the fact that the most fundamental laws don’t have an arrow of time associated with them.
I agree that asking what the will is free of is crucial in any discussion about this topic. Libertarians are arguing that it’s somehow free of the laws of physics, or at least of determinism. My version is a will free from being solely determined by immediate stimuli and impulses, that who we are and what we know, or should know, matters. To me, it’s enough for a reasonable form of social responsibility.
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I would rather ask what the will is free TO do – and my answer is, any of several plans it is capable of contemplating. However…
I think you nailed a point there, but let me add an emphasis. The dualist wants to be free from physics, because he thinks we are not physical. As a materialist myself, I think Thou Art Physics, so being “free from” physics would be a nonsensical freedom-from-oneself.
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I didn’t particularly want to go deep into free will, but it’s pertinent to this article …
“Compatibilism offers a solution to the free will problem” – Why does it need a solution? If there’s no free will, then there isn’t. We don’t need to invent solutions to solve some other difficulty, or to appease pleas from Dennett that without it our moral system comes unstuck. Should the lack of free will destroy our moral systems, then sort out the moral systems. The compatibalist perspective here looks very much like the bad arguments of theists.
“Compatibilism is the thesis that free will is compatible with determinism.” Again it hinges on what ‘free’ means, and free will is a dualist notion. What we take to be free will is not more than a measure of the proximity and timeliness of causes of the will, the intent. We are unable to account for a lifetime of physical influences (and mental influeneces are physical, even to compatibilists). But that will is not free from physical causes, and is entirely caused, … if determinism holds.
“Because free will is ***typically*** taken to be a necessary condition of moral responsibility…” – Typically, but incorrectly – another example of where bad arguments lead to incorrect conclusions and/or false allies.
A moral system can be constructed entirely from principles that are compatible with determinism, not with a bogus ‘free will’. Compatibilism is a false ally of determinism.
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Sorry, carelessly replied to the wrong comment.
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No worries. It looks like you’re replying to the SEP quote I provided below, which Paul may not have seen.
As you noted above, it always comes down to what kind of freedom we’re talking about. For any kind of freedom from physics, I think we’re all agreed that’s not really a coherent notion for a physical system. The only question is whether that specific type of freedom is necessary for responsibility, or if a more limited kind is sufficient.
It can also depend on what we mean by “responsible”. Do we mean it as a tool to judge when there could be bad results if we continue to trust someone as a member of society? Or in some absolutist salvation / damnation fashion that only makes sense in a religious context?
My view of compatibilism is reducing both sides of this to the more pragmatic versions.
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I don’t think you’re putting too much emphasis on the journey rather than the destination. What you’re talking—giving reasons—is what lies at the heart of doing philosophy. In other areas or situations, though? I’m finding it difficult to come up with an example where the reasoning behind the conclusion doesn’t matter. The best examples I can come up with pertain to politics, where people frequently seem to give stupid reasons for their decisions—and I suspect nearly everyone would agree with me on “people give stupid reasons” …and for very different reasons!
Of course, politicians don’t seem to care one way or another why you chose to vote for them so long as they have your vote. Even so, I can’t imagine there’s no difference at all between voting for someone or something for good reasons vs. superficial reasons. At least, if I were a politician, I would care about the reasons why people are voting or not voting for me, since getting people to vote for me again would seem to require knowing why they voted for me in the first place. (Then again, I would make an awful politician, so there’s that.)
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I’m with you on being someone who would be awful politician. Although I’ve been in management now for a couple of decades. Often getting things done means making partnerships with other people and organizations. Sometimes the reasons those partners have for being in the partnership are questionable. As long as it doesn’t cause any foreseeable problems, I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut and just accept the alliance.
I think you’re right that a politician should care why people vote for them. But just as in my work alliances, it often not in their interest to address people’s questionable motives, again, unless it will lead to problems. (Even then, if the problems are on the other side of the election, their incentive is to focus on winning first, and dealing with complications later.)
Even in science and philosophy, people will often accept an alliance based on common interests, such as the allies all being opposed to a reigning theory, even if they disagree on what the alternative should be. But usually in those cases, everyone understands the transactional nature of the alliance.
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I didn’t know you were in management, though, actually, I can see how you’d be good at it, despite not being a natural politician. Sometimes it’s those who know how and when to keep their mouths shut who can handle those who can’t.
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I did cross to the dark side long ago. And definitely, knowing when to shut up is a crucial skill. Although developing that judgment seems like a lifelong effort, at least for me.
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Nicely done Mike! As you say many times we are persuaded of a point of view because it is held by someone we admire and trust. I thought of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. In my opinion a work that should be on the reading list of every philosopher along with the Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle practically laid down an iron-clad rule that persuasion follows a specific pattern from ethos, to pathos, to logos with ethos (the trustworthiness of the speaker) first and then logos (the logic of the argument) last.
Many thinkers adopt an ideological attachment about some judgment assuming it is a necessary component of a broader and comprehensive philosophical structure. This is a problem. Many times it’s difficult for the thinker himself or herself to discern this tendency. Moreover, when one is under the influence of ideological thinking the truth of a proposition is quite often sustained quite separate and independent from the arguments supporting that proposition. An example is when the working class never rose up to overthrow capitalism as predicted. The Marxists were totally undeterred. Even though it was fundamental, they failed to see it as any problem with Marx’s theory. That is, an ideological point of view tends to acquire a life of its own. I submit that ideological thinking is more prevalent than many suppose. It takes many forms—political, of course, but also very often in economics and philosophy as well. One of the toughest problem debunking ideological thinking is arguing against it from the ideologue’s own conceptual framework—which is extremely hard not to do. For example, those who wish to question Hume’s famous categorical fact/value dichotomy run smack into that conundrum.
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Thanks Matti!
I’ve actually never read those Aristotle works. That persuasion pattern sounds interesting, and matches my experience. I often think of it is you have to tell people why they want, at a visceral level, whatever it is you’re selling. But it usually has to be coupled with a rationale for why they’d be a good person for wanting it.
The Marxist point reminds me of those apocalyptic religious cults, where a particular date gets predicted for the end time. After the date passes with life carrying on, you’d think they’d question their outlook, but instead they usually just rationalize why it’s still coming and preparation is still required.
On ideologies, have you ever read Sapiens by Yuval Harari? He largely equates religion and ideology, then goes on to show how our cultures are suffused with them, although we don’t name or explicitly recognize most of them. It’s a category that he lumps traditional religions into, but also many philosophical schools (Stoicism, Epicureanism, etc) and political ideologies (communism, capitalism) as well as different varieties of Humanism. I’m sure he got the idea from somewhere else, but still interesting.
Overall, ideologies are tough to avoid, since we hold many without even thinking of them as ideologies.
I do think Hume had a point, although I’m a moral antirealist, so I would. But I’m always open to learning why I might be wrong.
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I am not a fan of Yuval Harari. There are many dangers involved in those who think they can do “Big History”—falling into ideological bias (ironically) is one. Ever look at Gibbon’s Decline and Fall Of The Roman Empire or Spengler’s Decline of the West? Does anyone study them nowadays? Years later we see huge blind spots in such works. I feel more confident in the conclusions of a well-researched history say of the French Revolution or the causes and consequences of the Peloponnesian War where the historian’s analysis is more close to historical fact and rigorous.
As to my reference to Hume, I can only refer you (again!) to Hilary Putnam’s work, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy. In my opinion it is a helpful—almost a baby step—to seeing from a different perspective. Putnam is very careful. He only tackles the issue as a philosopher of science. If that doesn’t whet your appetite to a different way of thinking about value then a more aggressive and comprehensive argument from some other ethicists would be useless.
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I definitely wouldn’t argue that Harari gets everything right, and made that clear when I reviewed his book a while back. But I do think he makes interesting points.
I have to admit I haven’t read Gibbon. The sheer size of his work has always intimidated me. Plus I’ve read enough about it to know he had his own blind spots (common to his time, but still there). I don’t think any historian ever completely escapes their own cultural milieu. Nor do the rest of us for that matter. It’s something we all have to keep cognizant of, even if we can’t eliminate it entirely.
Sorry if I’ve asked this before, but what would you say Putnam’s main points are? His Wikipedia article has this snippet: “that is, normative (e.g., ethical and aesthetic) judgments often have a factual basis, while scientific judgments have a normative element.” I think you (or maybe someone else) said something similar in a conversation a while back. I agree with these points, except that I think they can be true while the fact / value distinction remains.
Put another way, it seems like our values can be informed by facts while not being set by them, and we choose which facts to investigate based on our values even though they (hopefully) don’t determine the results. I realize these points are pretty nuanced, but they seem crucial.
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Mike, as you say, “I don’t think any historian ever completely escapes their own cultural milieu. Nor do the rest of us for that matter. It’s something we all have to keep cognizant of, even if we can’t eliminate it entirely.” No truer words by friend—that’s the knotty and persistent problem of objectivity. My limited point is that historical analysis has a better chance at historical accuracy and useful insights in smaller bites. I don’t completely dismiss the potential value in the multidisciplinary approach to history taken by so-called Big History. I just think its sweeping approach is more prone to blind spots.
A long time ago I tried to simplify Putnam’s argument in this blog. If memory serves I made a complete hash of it. I do think Putnam, a mathematician and scientist as well as a philosopher, provides a persuasive perspective for some of the more science-oriented thinkers regarding the tenacious Humean dispute. One simple point, Putnam argues that value judgments are not outside the domain of rational discourse as purely subjective or emotive claims in part because we know and it’s an indisputable truth that scientific conclusions themselves are justified using a variety of epistemic values. It seems there is a porous boundary within Hume’s dichotomy. That is, in our “cultural milieu” science is regarded as a high if not the highest standard of truth. However, scientific inquiries as Putnam points out cannot express reliable certainty about truth unless justified through a variety of epistemic values. This is what I meant by saying Putnam begins with baby steps pointing toward a more comprehensive view of value. With that snippet I will reserve a larger summary for a time after I have freshly reviewed his book.
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Thanks Matti. I found your earlier summary (or one of them) and thought it was pretty good: https://selfawarepatterns.com/2021/04/17/the-relativity-of-scientism/comment-page-1/#comment-138414
For my part, I’ll keep Putnam’s book in mind. My current reading list remains out of control, and I buy too many ebooks I never read. But maybe the next time ethics becomes a strong interest I can move it to the top of the queue.
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Thanks Mike. I dare not read what I wrote. I remember it as hash. I really did not want to venture down this side issue. I was more interested in discussing the pernicious problem of ideological thinking to your interesting essay on reasons and conclusions.
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Ah, sorry for steering things in that direction.
The ideology issue is something I am interested in. It’s interesting to read academics from previous centuries, because the ideology of the time is often very evident, even in the most progressive thinkers for those times. Even material from a few decades ago reveals interesting aspects of the zeitgeist back then. To me, that means we have to be very careful about what we accept as objective.
Not that I buy into the typical postmodernist stance that trying to find objective reality is misguided. But it’s one of the reasons I’m a structural realist rather than a full realist in the traditional sense. It’s too easy for the stories we tell ourselves to change.
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Mike,I feel I must circle round to try to make my original point a bit clearer. In brief, I believe one of the most difficult problems in critical thinking/discussion is the pernicious influence of ideology. We all have a propensity to fall into ideological thinking because we tend to view certain cherished philosophical propositions as necessary bricks in the wall of our overall weltanshauung. Pull that one brick out and one risks the collapse of the whole wall. That cherished proposition then becomes a viewpoint sustained quite independent from the arguments that originally supported it and quite oblivious of excellent arguments that question it. It’s pernicious because it’s a form of lazy thinking that can become habitual. Have you ever run into a Marxist lately?
I did have a long rambling argument on how one might deal with the problem of ideological thinking in ourselves and others. But I cut it to make sure my original point was clearly made. I hope I accomplished that.
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Matti, I agree with just about everything you say here, but with one caution. Another word for “ideology” is “worldview”, which we all have. And it’s not realistic or productive for us to question everything about it all the time, or to avoid assessing propositions within its framework.
I do think we have to be alert to when aspects of that worldview aren’t working well. But as you noted, its all part of a complex web of stances. Shifting important paradigms in that view takes time. It’s why I see persuasion as a long game, and never expect too much from any one conversation. And of course try to stay open to the possibility that I might be the one who’ll be persuaded.
Marxists are rare where I live. (Ideological conservatism is much more common.) But I do encounter them online. A couple even comment here occasionally. I think most would say their philosophy has never been implemented right. Of course, that assumes it can be so implemented.
On your meaning being clear, maybe you can use this reply to gauge whether I caught it?
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Mike, you are absolutely correct. I should have defined my use of “ideology.” It, of course, can be used neutrally as merely a system of ideas or, as you say, a worldview. I tend to use the term in the pejorative sense as a tight interlocking set of principles that in many cases purports to provide an explaination of all reality. Marxism is my favorite example. Ironically I think it was Karl Marx who was one of the first to use the term pejoratively by labeling the then ruling class as under the spell of a “false ideology” intended to justify their economic system. Marx claimed that ideologies profess to describe and explain reality when in fact they’re really elaborate apologetics for a ruling elite. Because I use the term pejoratively (like Karl) I wrongly supposed others did as well. But you are right to note that distinction.
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There’s a definite danger with any ideology of it being little more than propaganda for certain interests. That’s my attitude with most political ideologies. I read a book some years ago by a couple of psychologists who presented a lot of evidence that most people are attracted to the political philosophy that benefits them, or people like them. It changed my view of politics, and cut out most of the political posts I used to do, except occasionally within a historical or theoretical context.
But any ideology held to dogmatically becomes a religion rather than a tool.
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The problem with not having a reliable path to the same conclusion as the reliable path is that the same faulty path can just as easily lead to a different conclusion, and does, often. The ally that uses bad reasoning might at a later time be just as easily persuaded to oppose you.
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It’s definitely possible, although in my experience it doesn’t happen enough to warrant never accepting an ally just because we don’t see eye to eye on everything. Sometimes we just need to help each other get past the next obstacle, even if we’ll be in opposition later.
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WTH is “compatibalism”? Did you make that up?
Dark screen or light one? My reasons come from biology, evolution and the phenomenon of rod and cones in the eye (light for me). Others cite dubious white light eye strain or radiation effects (dark for them). Ultimately, most of these esoteric preferences and philosophical tendencies, regardless of the evidential path taken, end up being personal choices.
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Not this time (on making it up).
(Admission: I haven’t read the linked article. For all I know it says, “Mike is wrong,” in section 7.5.4 or something.)
I often (but not always) favor dark screens. All my social media sites are dark. But it depends on the UI. Some can be hard to read unless they’re designed with dark mode in mind. I think I’m mostly just not a fan of UIs that are too white. In my case, it probably has something to do with the typical computer screen when I first started. And dark has that old planetarium feel about it.
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I didn’t particularly want to go deep into free will, but it’s pertinent to this article …
“Compatibilism offers a solution to the free will problem” – Why does it need a solution? If there’s no free will, then there isn’t. We don’t need to invent solutions to solve some other difficulty, or to appease pleas from Dennett that without it our moral system comes unstuck. Should the lack of free will destroy our moral systems, then sort out the moral systems. The compatibalist perspective here looks very much like the bad arguments of theists.
“Compatibilism is the thesis that free will is compatible with determinism.” Again it hinges on what ‘free’ means, and free will is a dualist notion. What we take to be free will is not more than a measure of the proximity and timeliness of causes of the will, the intent. We are unable to account for a lifetime of physical influences (and mental influeneces are physical, even to compatibilists). But that will is not free from physical causes, and is entirely caused, … if determinism holds.
“Because free will is ***typically*** taken to be a necessary condition of moral responsibility…” – Typically, but incorrectly – another example of where bad arguments lead to incorrect conclusions and/or false allies.
A moral system can be constructed entirely from principles that are compatible with determinism, not with a bogus ‘free will’. Compatibilism is a false ally of determinism.
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Sorry, this version got snagged by the spam folder. I’ll just link here to my reply above: https://selfawarepatterns.com/2024/02/10/reasons-and-conclusions/comment-page-1/#comment-173685
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Interesting discussion but kind of confusing to me. Sorry to jump in late.
People are questioning the fact/value distinction, talking about Putnam pointing out that value judgements are involved in a scientists conclusions, that “subjectivity” often interferes with the “objectivity” of conclusions (and so sound argument is so important), and how bad “ideology” is, so my conclusion is I don’t think any of these basic distinctions have really been questioned or shaken off by anyone in this discussion so far.
If there really is no “fact” pure and simple; no fact alone and undiluted by our humanity, then there really is no Ideology because all views would be equally ideological, and that would make All Views equally Influenced/ “infected” by human values.
And that is the best way to see it, “the truth” so far for us now.
Not even Science (all bow our heads—to the current ideology) gets to Nature or Reality or Truth, As It Is In Itself. And that is not a bad thing, because if you really shake these distinctions, you will find that The Gap that was supposedly between values and facts, subjects and objects, ideologies and what history really is beyond our opinions, That Gap, should now be given up as having served it purposes and use to us and now can be left behind for a better, more useful way of living.
Shocking to say, but Art can be as objective as science; Ethics too, and even a new and more useful kind of religion could have “warranted assertibility” (i.e. “truth” understood in a more useful way) as argued by John Dewey and other past and current philosophical Pragmatists, like Putnam (often), Dennett, Rorty. and others.
Values are a part of all “the facts” we see and use. And that is good too, because that means our “views” are just a natural part of life (biology) and even that great universe beyond. All the Gaps in all those distinctions can be softened and made relative to our various purposes.
I have said more than I intended, so I will stop. Surely you will think I am a Relativist, and there is a good deal of truth in that. It is a Relativism Under Significant Restraints, as Harvard’s Nelson Goodman (a Pragmatist) called it in his “Ways of Worldmaking.”
“Or have I missed something?” No, really, thanks for all your good writings and discussions!
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You’re not late! This post is only a day old. I periodically have comments on posts from months are years ago. So you’re totally good.
I’m not sure I catch all your points, but I do understand relativism. I’m a relativist myself, but like you, not in any pure sense. The environment, our evolution, and overlapping agendas do put constraints on social mores in a game theory fashion, although those constraints allow more than just about anyone is comfortable with.
Thanks Greg! Your thoughts are welcome in any discussion.
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More clearly, here is what is bothering me about your post and the thread that followed.
In many situations, you are wrong: the journey is Not more important than the destination. The reasoning is Not more important than the conclusion. Often, the outcome, the conclusion, is the prize and who the hell cares what it took/takes to attain it. (really?)
Now, to your credit, you did say “too much emphasis on” the reasoning, the journey. You acknowledge The Essential Tie between reasoning and conclusion, journey and destination. But often we do stretch that tie to the limit–or break it– and “see” or “think” the two as completely separate.
After all, is not the Object we see (“that chair” for example) independently existing from our Process of seeing it? Is not The Universe as the Big Bang and Its Evolving Particles independent of our knowing about them?
(Or as one contributor contended (more or less), can’t we have a Social Moral System independent of the idea of Free Will, human dignity, and personal responsibility? Now clearly to me, that is pushing the concept of “moral” into very extreme territory. Has he broken the essential tie? Would such a moral system be moral at all?)
A Scientific Realist (physics as the ult reality) should be able to do away with the entire process of human reasoning and just be happy with matter in motion. The conclusion–reality is totally about physics–has got nothing to do with the value-laden scientific decisions and the extremely attenuated human approach to reality that is physics. I think it was one of the Logical Positivists that concluded that The Doing of Science was like a Ladder that once we climb it, and attain that new view, we can Kick It Away.
From that point of view, you are mistaken: The journey is not as important as the destination; conclusions are way more real than the processes of getting to them.
Surely I am really confused, Please help. Thanks.
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I’d say the conclusion is more important, if it’s the right one. But how do we assess that if not by looking at the evidence and reasoning used to reach it? Of course, sometimes we’re just lucky and hit the right answer by chance. But luck is luck because it’s a low probability event and not anything we can count on.
I think the object that we see, like a chair, is intimately tangled up with the process we use to see it, as well as our background and understanding of the chair concept. Consider if it’s a red chair next to a green one. That’s a distinction we perceive due to our evolutionary background. Most mammals wouldn’t notice much of a difference in color, although they might notices how they smell far more than we would.
For most day to day activities, this isn’t a big deal. It’s only when we try to generalize these things and use such generalizations to assess scientific and philosophical models, that we start to turn into trouble.
So I don’t think we can ever not consider our own reasoning, and how it may be affecting our understanding of reality. If we know humans have certain tendencies or biases, or even just humans in our culture, we can then try to compensate for those tendencies, and to be leery of conclusions reached without those considerations.
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Thank you! I’m glad I’m making some sense to you. But I still have an issue with your response.
You are saying two different things at once, that don’t fit together; then you try to waffle back and forth between them to make it work. (and I don’t mean to be rude!)
First, “the conclusion is more important, if it’s the right one'” you say.
Second, “But how do you assess it if not by looking at the evidence and the reasoning?” The Process, the journey, is more important because that is how you assess conclusions, you are saying.
So you have got them both as more important, it seems.
Well, consider this argument for its all process, “All Journey,” and no Conclusions or Reality, or Nature that lies outside of those human processes and “the journey” of Human History! That is a true Relativism, the kind I believe (and others). And, it is still not “Just anything goes,” not any belief can/should be “true.”
The way you think “the Conclusion would be right without good reasoning is by luck.” You are using a Correspondence Theory of Truth here. It is right because our conclusion just happens to match up to The Way Reality (nature, things) Is. “Is” independently of us and any of our thinking, processing, journeying.
A belief can be right by just comparing it to, holding it up against, seeing if it is the same as, The Way Things Are—“Objectively.” This last part (“Objectively”) is usually thrown in as if it makes some big difference over the first part (“the way things are”).
Now, you are going to say (I guess), that comparing ideas to what exists in the world IS part of the Reasoning, the process of good thinking, “the Journey.” It falls under the idea of “Evidence,” it is usually thought and kind of what you suggested.
Theists, for example, are supposedly wrong because “God” (he, she, it) just really (“objectively”) can’t be found to exist anywhere (in space or time) that we have looked. Theists cannot just show us God; they can’t Point and say “There” to our satisfaction. (And I am an atheist—basically—but no longer ultimately by that argument),
The problem with considering “just looking” as part of The Evidence (the Correspondence Th of Truth), and often the Decisive evidence, is Our Beliefs, Ideas, Feelings, Experience, “our paradigms” (as Kuhn said) go all the way down. There is no “innocent eye,” no way of looking that escapes who we are and what we presume—escaping and getting to the way things really are in complete abstraction from what we are. (No “god’s-eye view” is what some philosophers mockingly call this position, “the Absolute View of how things are” is a chimera.)
Not even Science attains it. Your comment about the mammals not seeing color like we do is a good one, just take it further and further. “Reality” is from our perspective (human, mammalian. living, 21st century earthling) all the way down.
Instead of comparing beliefs to “Reality,” what we actually do is compare them to Prior Beliefs (and the objects those beliefs (largely) created) and in an often sloppy process come to decide which is A More Useful way of thinking and believing.
So your comment about some beliefs Cohere better to our other beliefs, is right on point here. This is a Coherence Theory of Truth, not a Correspondence Theory. It is also a view that has a place for Valuing the Beauty of a theory or its Brevity (Conciseness) as part of our belief in its truth.
In the end, it is argued (I’m arguing) that this is what we should think if we really do seriously and drastically revise The Fact/Value Distinction and The Subjective/Objective Split. This new way of thinking opens up some amazing possibilities.
I hope I am making some sense to you! Sorry I went so long. I am just getting this argument straight (straighter) in my own head, so I took this opportunity to rehearse it. I anxiously wait for your reactions! Thanks!
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I wouldn’t say either the process or the conclusion are important to the exclusion of the other. My point is that they’re both important. Maybe another way of looking at this is that one conclusion in isolation is less important than the galaxy of conclusions that should be associated with it. The right train of reasoning would lead to that. A lucky guess typically wouldn’t.
To your point about theories of truth, my attitude is that we never know truth in any platonic sense. We only have more reliable and less reliable beliefs. When I say “true”, I’m basically using it as a label for the most reliable belief we currently have for a particular area. We might eventually discover the limits of usefulness for the belief, but its usefulness within the domains we’ve tested it should remain. This is why Newton’s theories remain useful despite not being as universally reliable as new theories.
Hope that’s addressing your concerns.
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I’m going to tale one more shot at this issue, if for no other sake than my own.
You are taking a very practical approach to it. Yes, reasons should (totally) support conclusions, and conclusions (totally) derive from (good) reasons. But now I am already becoming impractical, with all that “totally” and “good” stuff, because all reasoning is not deductive reasoning.
The issue is inductive reasoning. How to get good conclusions from limited reasons and evidence. And then the issue becomes further complicated by our use of induction to understand “the world” and our use of deduction more abstractly–like in math proofs, or as the example for consistent reasoning.
When we approach the world (practically) with induction we want our beliefs (conclusions) to be “reliable” and “useful in their area” and not just “lucky,” as you say.
The trouble is, we do have a very Platonic idea of Truth in important ways, even if you don’t like it. Most of us use it to think that our best beliefs in science are approaching Truth (the way the world really is). Many of us think that is why science works, because it really gears into what exists independently of us. So we say, science is “objective” and art and ethics and religion is “subjective” and therefore not as True as sci.
So this is my awkward attempt to get to the issue of these big distinctions that some philosophers think so baffle our current modern culture—-subj-object, fact-value, reality-appearance.
Your reaction, please. Does this apply to your Reasons and Conclusions post, and your thinking overall? Thanks
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My reaction is to acknowledge that the problem of induction is real, but only if we’re holding out for absolute certainty about what we know. I don’t think we ever get that level of certitude. Even deductive conclusions are only certain relative to the premises or axioms they’re based on, premises which themselves are often arrived at inductively.
So yes, it does apply to the post. I should note that I’d be uncomfortable with anyone who agreed with one of my conclusions, but with 100% certitude. I don’t have that level of certitude for anything. Even Descartes’ famous “I think therefore I am” depends on what we mean by “I” and “think”. ”I” might be a fragment of what I think I am, with false models of an overall self and of thinking.
In the end, the only thing that keeps us from wallowing in this uncertainty is the pragmatic issue that reality extracts (or at least seems to extract) painful consequences if we don’t take it seriously. More reliable beliefs usually help better than less reliable ones at avoiding those consequences.
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Thanks for your time and response! I woke up this morning and realized better what I’m trying to say. Here it is.
Does “reality exact painful consequences on us”? I don’t think so (what a crazy thing for me to say!) “Reality” is not a thing! It is not some single thing, as if ‘out there’, and looming over against us. ‘It’ is not independent of us. “Reality” cannot check our beliefs and punish us for getting ‘It’ wrong.
“Reality” is us. But then ‘It’ is also not us when our expectations fall short. Sartre would say that you are using the word “reality” like a lot of people use the word “God’. And both of those are about as real as each other is the conclusion we should come to.
So, what is “exacting consequences upon us” is OurSelves! Our own uncoordinated, fragmented, self-antagonistic approach to life is what makes “reality” seem so alien and hostile so often to us. If we could coordinate our scientific, religious, ethical, and artistic efforts and all work together we would fit better into “the reality” that we are so much a part. Now surely that would take a lot of messing with premises and altering of ontologies to more align our basic practices..
(A lot more crazy ideas! But I think that is a consistent Coherence Theory of Truth and not a Correspondence Th. of Truth)
So back to the original topic of Reasons and Conclusions. When we do Induction we generally get the most basic conclusions that we had built into our premise from the start. it is like you said a while ago about Newton, his physics is still true within his limited perspective. Now just blow that large and apply it it to everything.
For example, Science is a very particular way of looking at the world and it gives us “good” “reliable” even “beautiful” results. But so does Art—good, reliable, beautiful and even true results. Science is no more about basic “Reality” than is art! Science no more ‘gears into reality’ than Ethics could if our modern culture ever got its head straight.
Crazy ideas. Thanks for your patience and responses.
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This gets into distinctions between idealism and realism. Idealism holds that it’s all minds. Metaphysical realism holds that there is an external world. And then there’s epistemic idealism, which holds that there is an objective reality, but we can never know it.
Along with that in the philosophy of science we have scientific realism vs instrumentalism. Scientific realism holds that our best scientific theories are descriptions of reality, at least to some level of approximation. Instrumentalism holds that all we can be sure of is that they’re prediction mechanisms, with no guarantee that they represent reality. And then there’s antirealism, which is a stronger stance that there is no objective reality, at least for the theory in question.
I’m a realist in both cases. In the metaphysical one, I think an objective reality is a simpler theory than one that requires that some mind be thinking of whatever we’re encountering in the world. And in terms of science, I’m a structural realist, a sort of cautious minimal realism, that holds that the structures and relations of our best scientific theories are what is real, even if the story we tell along with it might not be.
On “reality”, right, it’s just a word to quickly label the whole of whatever exists outside of us. For a pantheist, it is equivalent to God, Nature, etc, the god of Spinoza and Einstein. But without additional assumptions, it’s an impersonal and non-conscious one.
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Thanks for all your responses. I’m kind of surprised you followed up on the last comment, it was kind of down the rabbit hole of some very basic positions. Your ‘in a snap’ overview of philosophy was impressive, but misguided in important ways, it seems to me. I’ll try to be brief.
Our topic was “Reasons and Conclusions” and then induction and deduction, and your review of the basic positions/premises defined them in such a way as to insure the outcomes you want, or true conclusions that must be realized from them. Of course I cannot accept your framing of the argument in these ways.
Your “Metaphysical Realism” to me is just as deservedly called, “Naive Realism.” You say you have a “cautious minimal realism” but no one has ever been able very successfully clarify what minimal things are ‘the most real.’ You say it is “our best scientific theories” but what are those and even then our many good sci theories do not all fit together well at all! “Science” does not give us a unified world view.
I think the Theory of Evolution is an excellent theory and it can fit in with a lot of other good ways to think about the world. But then surely the idea of the universe as a single quantum wave is also a beautiful idea and predicts much. Like the idea that all that exists are atoms and there basic character and lawful interaction, each of these is very useful and surely “true” in some ways and in terms of some of our current best ideas and approaches.
Yet the premises of what is a “living thing” have no place in the view of the universe as a single q-wave or the world as only the basic elements of chemistry in interaction. Neuro science is obviously informative of our mental events, but what are those events? How do neural firings and patterns fully (?) explain “rationality” or the drawing of good conclusions from good reasons? To poke fun at your “Realism,” I think that the Quantum Wave of the Universe is doing a great job of eventually coming to a full understanding of itself! It sure knows how to DO good reasonable physics as it embodies itself in our current physicists.
And your characterization of Idealism was not the best view of it. Traditional Idealism was never “it’s all minds.” It was it’s all “Mind”, singular. All minds were always thought of as essentially connected as one mind, one overall “thing.” All is one. Idealism is Holism, and contrasted this to the pieces of the world (Empiricism) that Idealism always tried to bring together into a coherent whole. It was a Coherence Theory of Truth and Reality, not a Correspondence Th.
Modern-day “Idealism” has evolved into the idea that humans are an animal that got complex enough to discover/create Language, Culture, and even Science itself. Each of these–languages/vocabularies, cultures, societies, basic “practices”—like art, ethics, politics, economics—is a rule bound activity that we all tend to do together (Consensus is very important to them) and each has “Emerged” as its own autonomous whole. None are thoroughly reducible to physics or chemistry or neurology, but each offers a “useful” approach for us to that very vague and indistinct ‘thing’ we have tended to call “reality in itself.”
This Idealism is modern day Pragmatism as started by John Dewey, William James…continued by W. Quine, W. Sellars and on into today–more or less—by Kuhn, Rorty, Dennett, Davidson and Putnam. The up shot of it is No Fact exists on its own, All Fact is a part of Some Particular Perspective of human activity.
So, there are many ways humans ‘minimally and maximally connect to the world’ so to speak. “Objectivity” is about being a part of these very real human and natural activities, the many ways we participate with “reality.”
Final thought: your “antirealism’ as “no objective reality” is a bad way to describe thinkers who are trying to get out of the old dualistic framework of facts vs values, mind vs matter, subjects vs objects, out there vs in here, found vs made. The old dualisms that you think Science solves and the rest of our human activities are just not as “rational” or not as capable of “truth.”
Thanks, it helped me to write that out. Hope it is worthy of your time and consideration. I’m sure you have much to disagree with.
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This discussion has gone on for a while, and I haven’t reread the whole thread, so hopefully I’m not repeating myself or straying too far. Sorry if I am.
As you noted, my descriptions were “snap” ones, so I fully admit a lot of nuances were glossed over. For example, I didn’t get into the fact that there are many variants of each of these views. It was really just to make clear broadly where my own views fell.
There’s a view in philosophy called “naive realism”, but it isn’t mine. I don’t think reality is exactly as our perceptions imply. In Sellars’ language, the scientific image is very different from the manifest one. We have to use both observations and logic to derive the scientific version. Our perceptions are the reality test of any theory, but there’s always an element of interpretation involved. Of course, we also don’t get absolute certitude. As far as I can see, all knowledge is probabilistic.
The universal wave function, if it is reality, is a pretty low level description of it. Most everything else would be emergent from it (at least in a weak sense). Trying to find high level concepts in it, like biology, neuroscience, etc, would be, I think, an unproductive mixing of explanatory levels.
I was recently reminded that there is epistemic and ontological idealism. Many of the people you cite seem to hold a more epistemic view. Although philosophers are often maddeningly unclear on this, a practice I’m not a fan of.
A lot of epistemic idealists are also epistemic structural realists, equating understanding of structures and relations to science, but not of “things in themselves”, quiddities, intrinsic properties, or whatever we want to call them. I’m more in the ontic structural realist camp. I can’t see that it’s productive to say things in themselves exist but are unknowable, yet that we can still say things about them.
On antirealism, again, my description was a snap one. I’m open to hearing a more nuanced description. I do think my description is accurate for antirealist views of quantum states.
Writing things out does help in clarifying thoughts. It’s one of the reasons I blog. You’re totally welcome to do it here.
I don’t think we’re going to agree here, which is fine. All we can do is describe our conclusions and the reasons we reach them, and/or the blockers we have for those we disagree with.
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