David Lewis + Kit Fine = Weirdness

David Lewis thinks that properties are just sets of possible individuals. SEP: “Lewis argues that for any set of actual and possible objects (fundamental or not), there is a property, namely the property an object has just in case it is a member of the given set.”

Kit Fine thinks that essence is an asymmetrical relationship. Specifically, it is an asymmetrical relationship between a set and its constituent(s). Although Socrates is essential to the singleton set {Socrates}, the set is not essential to Socrates. “It is no part of the essence of Socrates to belong to the singleton.” (“Essence and Modality“)

Suppose you accept both. Then no individual has any property essentially. After all, a property is a set, and it is not part of the essence of any individual to belong to any set. Moreover, every property has its bearers essentially. After all, constituents of a set are essential to that set. On the face of it, that is pretty weird.

Ways to get out: (1) Most obviously, don’t put Lewis and Fine together. (2) Clarify what Fine says, so that the essence relationships hold for some sets but not others. (3) Clarify what Lewis says, so properties aren’t just sets, but in some sense correspond to them. Both (2) and (3) look ad hoc to me, so perhaps the weirdness can count as an incompatibility result between Lewis and Fine?

Too Many Dans or Just One?

Though it wasn’t quite the University of Woolloomooloo, in July 2010 at the Australian National University, I, Dan Singer, was honored to join the company of Dan Greco, Dan Korman, Dan Marshall, Dan(iel) Nolan, and Dan Stoljar.

Courtesy of Thomas Whitney

There sure were a lot of people with the same name … or so you might think …

1. Dan Singer and Dan Nolan have the same name.
2. Names are rigid resignators, a la Kripke (1970/80).
3. So, Dan Singer’s name and Dan Nolan’s name pick out the same thing in all possible worlds.
4. So, Dan Singer’s name actually picks out the same thing that Dan Nolan’s name picks out.
5. So, Dan Singer is Dan Nolan.

Either 4 is wrong or I know a lot more about metaphysics than I thought I did.  It seems pretty obvious to me that there is an equivocation on “name” between 1 and the rest of the premises.  The issue is that I can’t figure out a sense of “name” that makes sense of 1.  Here’s why: The natural move is to say that the names of 1 are individuated by their syntactic properties (i.e. the letters and the sounds associated with them).  Then admit two senses of “name”.  But if this is right, we’d expect the analogous move to apply to words in general, i.e. that there’d be the two analogous senses of “word”.  But I’m inclined to deny that there is any sense of “word” such that financial institutions and sides of rivers can be picked out by the same word.  Am I just being stubborn on this point?  Are there other viable solutions here?

Experimental Metasurvey

[cross-posted at: http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/experimental_philosophy/2011/05/experimental-philosophy-metasurvey-results.html. This is a summary of the results of a meta-survey about experimental philosophy conducted by myself (Billy Dunaway), Anna Edmonds and David Manley.]

Some current experimental philosophy is devoted to conducting surveys among non-philosophers to gather information about their dispositions to apply philosophically relevant concepts. And those who report the results of these surveys sometimes make claims about how surprising these results are to philosophers. (Here is a representative quote: “[W]e think that a critical method for figuring out how human beings think is to go out and actually run systematic empirical studies… Again and again, these investigations have challenged familiar assumptions, showing that people do not actually think about these issues in anything like the way philosophers had assumed.” (Nichols and Knobe, “An Experimental Philosophy Manifesto” in Experimental Philosophy, ed. Knobe and Nichols, p. 3)) But whether an empirical result is surprising to a group of people is itself an empirical question, and so we designed a survey of our own to test this.

Our hypothesis was that that philosophers would, for the most part, correctly guess what kind of response non-philosophers would give. This was confirmed by our study. We selected several published surveys of folk subjects, each of which had been claimed in the literature to have surprising results. The surveys we chose cover a variety of philosophical topics: causation, intentionality, and moral responsibility. We asked philosophers to suppose that ordinary, non-philosophical folk are presented with the relevant cases, and to say how they thought the folk would respond. (Subjects were firmly instructed to opt out of a given question if they had prior familiarity with experimental research that might bias their answer.) For each question, at least 77% (and up to 95.8%) of philosophers correctly predicted how the non-philosophers would respond.

A brief overview of the questions from the experimental philosophy literature we asked about and the results from our study are printed below. For a more detailed presentation of the questions we asked (which include verbaitim descriptions of the vignettes from the original studies conducted by experimental philosophers) and the results, go here:

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~dunaway/MetaSurvey.html

Genre and Folk Evaluations of Art

How do our moral evaluations of artworks relate to our aesthetic evaluations? Put it another way: do moral defects cause or constitute aesthetic defects, cause or constitute aesthetic virtues, or are they aesthetically irrelevant? This is the question that we (Shen-yi Liao and Jonathan Phillips) attempted to answer in recent studies. Our findings suggest that there is no univocal answer to the question. Instead, the influence that moral evaluations have on aesthetic evaluations of artworks partly depends on genre.

Let’s run through one study (N = 50; between-participants). In one condition, participants listened to a 30-second clip of a Taiwanese folk ballad song.

Then they were shown two sets of “translated lyrics”, and asked which set of lyrics would make the song more appealing.

“Show You the Facts” (Moral)
Men say stupid things like
“Women are not worth anything
I use them and then I toss them”
They don’t treat women like they should
Let me show you the facts, get it right:
Women are equals in every respect

“Game Over” (Immoral)
Another woman dropped down
I wanted it, I got it, and I’m gone
There’s another one around the corner
I’ll do the same thing with her
You know they want more from me
But the game’s over when I score

In the other condition, participants listened to a 30-second clip of a Taiwanese hip hop song.

Then they were shown the same two sets of “translated lyrics” as before, and asked which set of lyrics would make the song more appealing.

Most Expensive Parking Ever

Ann Arbor, like most cities, is currently struggling to pay the bills. It’s rare that metaphysics can help with these problems, but this case is different.

The city has recently raised the parking rates: It used to cost $1 per hour to park next to the city library. Now the rate is published like this:

60 cents per half hour for the first three hours, and 70 cents per half hour and part thereof after the first three hours.

Given the number of parts of half hours, it seems pretty steep to me.

A Puzzle about Objective Chance and Causation

Suppose that this is how a given casino’s 10-cent slot machine works: it has a random number generator which produces a  string of numbers between 1 and 1000, given a seed value.  Pulls of the lever are put into correspondence, chronologically, with this randomly-generated string.  If a lever pull matches a certain designated number, say, 222, then that lever pull gets a payout of $90.  Here’s a proposition about these slot machines:

A) The objective chance that the slot machine pays out, on any given pull, is 1/1000.

It’s true that, if we were to know the value of the seed and the nature of the random number generator, then we could figure out precisely when the machine will pay out.  But, given determinism, precisely the same thing is true of any coin flip or die roll.  Were we to know the precise microphysical initial conditions of the coin flip and the laws of nature, we could figure out whether the coin will land heads or tails.  This is no obstacle to there being an objective chance associated with an event – it only tells us that a precise specification of the microphysical initial conditions is inadmissible information.  Similarly, the seed-value and the method of random number generation is inadmissible information when it comes to the slot machine.  But this doesn’t mean that there isn’t an objective chance that the slot machine pays out, on any given pull.

Here’s another proposition:

B) The objective chance that any given roll of a fair, six-faced die lands 1-up is 1/6.

This should be beyond reproach.

Finally, consider this proposition:

C)  If there is a robust causal law to the effect that events of type A cause all and only events of type B — so that every A event leads to a B event, and no B event is caused by anything other than an A event — then the objective chance of an A event occurring is equal to the objective chance of a B event occurring.

Besides being intuitively plausible, I take (C) to be one of the central claims underlying the Bayes-Net approach to testing causal hypotheses.  When we model causation and objective chance in the way specified by Pearl’s and Spirtes et. al.’s causal models, we allow the causal laws codified in the structural equations to induce a probability function over the endogenous variables.  If (C) were false, then this would be illegitimate.

The Puzzle is that (A), (B), and (C) are inconsistent, as the following story demonstrates.

Suppose that the casino owners want to know the seed value for their slot machine.  They want, that is, inadmissible information that will let them calculate, ahead of time, what their bottom line will look like after a certain number of pulls of the slot machine.  However, while protective of their bottom line, they aren’t unscrupulous.  They don’t want to plant the seed, they just want to know what it is.  So, here’s what they do:  they produce 6 randomly-selected seed values, using standard techniques (clipping three numbers from the end of a 10-digit decimal expansion of an arbitrarily selected time, e.g.).  Then, they roll a die to determine which of these seed values will go into the slot machine.

Suppose that it’s true that, if the first seed is selected, then the slot machine will pay out on the 1001st pull of the lever.  If any of the other seeds are selected, then the slot machine will not pay out on the 1001st pull.  Then, there is a robust causal law asserting the following:  The slot machine will pay out on the 1001st pull if and only if the die landed 1-up.

If (B) is true, then the objective chance of the die landing 1-up is 1/6.  But then, if (C) is true, then the objective chance of the machine paying out on the 1001st pull is 1/6 — since there is a robust causal law saying that the die lands 1-up if and only if the 1001st pull pays out.  By (C), the objective chance of the cause must be equal to the objective chance of the effect.  So the objective chance of the machine paying out on the 1001st pull must be 1/6.  But this contradicts (A), which says that the objective chance of the machine paying out on any given pull is 1/1000, not 1/6.

It’s true, of course, that both the die roll and the causal law involves all sorts of inadmissible information.  But inadmissible information is only relevant to the question of what our credence should be.  The puzzle, as I’ve formulated it, has absolutely nothing to do with credence.  It has to do only with the objective chance function, and the connection between the objective chances of various events which are related by robust causal laws.

2010 In Review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Can an OUGHT follow from no ISs?

Suppose murder just is wrongful killing. Then it seems that Sally ought not murder Bob follows from no premises, the empty set of premises. Trivially, the empty set of premises is a set containing only descriptive premises, in Hume’s sense. But then, Sally ought not murder Bob, a substantive normative claim, follows from a set of purely descriptive sentences. So, you can derive an ought from iss. Take that, is-ought gap.

I have some half-baked potential responses in mind, but let’s see what you think.

Boo Surveys?

Brian Weatherson has written a post prompted by the New York Times symposium on experimental philosophy. The post makes a lot of valuable points (the Austin bit is particularly interesting, and not something I’ve thought of), but there’s also a line that touched a pet peeve of mine. So I wrote a comment. Since the line is something I’ve heard around these parts, I decided to reproduce the comment here. Let me know what you think!

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It seems that “I like the idea of experimental philosophy, but it just relies too much on the survey method” has become a common refrain in criticisms of experimental philosophy. I’ve always found this line of attack a bit puzzling, or at the very least, imprecise.

Evidential Decision Theory’s Misstep

Lewis 1981 writes:

Within a single dependency hypothesis, so to speak, V-maximising is right. It is rational to seek good news by doing that which, according to the dependency hypothesis you believe, most tends to produce good results. That is the same as seeking good results. Failures of V-maximising appear only if, first, you are sensible enough to spread your credence over several dependency hypotheses, and second, your actions might be evidence for some dependency hypotheses and against others. That is what may enable the agent to seek good news not in the proper way, by seeking good results, but rather by doing what would be evidence for a good dependency hypothesis. That is the recipe for Newcomb problems. (p. 11)

This, I think, is not right. It misdiagnoses evidential decision theory’s mistake. I’ll save what I take to be a better diagnosis for another post. For now, I’ll try to outline a counterexample that shows Lewis to be on the wrong track.