Philosophical Thought Experiment as a Genre?

A recent post by Brian Weatherson over at the Arche Methodology Project Weblog raises an interesting idea: can philosophical thought experiments be treated as a genre like, say, science fiction? This idea is also explored in Jonathan Weinberg’s article “Configuring the Cognitive Imagination” in New Waves in Aesthetics. Weinberg spells out the idea, without endorsing it, on page 214:

Yet, what if philosophical thought experiments were a genre—at least in the sense that engaging in them successfully requires mastery along the same lines as I have sketched for the mastery of literary genres? There are rules to engaging properly with a hypothetical scenario, after all. To make just some of the more obvious generalizations about our imaginative practices with thought experiments: one should embellish as little as possible; generally it is a practice conducted in an affectively `cool’ manner; and our inferential systems must often be brought to bear in this particular sort of imaginative project as well. And there are surely other, and more subtly articulable, rules for the proper performance of thought experiments still to be detailed.

While I was initially attracted to the idea—especially given my interest in imagination, fiction, and genre—I now think that it won’t do, on the more interesting interpretation. Roughly, the idea is to treat philosophical thought experiment as a genre relevantly similar to other genres of fiction. I have two worries with the idea, interpreted thus. In this post, I’ll press the first worry: we engage with philosophical thought experiments relevantly differently from the way we engage with fictions in other genres.

Philosophers’ Carnival #90

You are hiyo by the 90th installment of the Philosophers’ Carnival!  This edition of the Carnival is hosted here at the University of Michigan Graduate Student blog Go Grue!.

---

Since there’s no May JFP this year, you can spend your reading resources on these fine posts:

Booth 1: Wittgensteinian Investigations-Flavored Popcorn
In the first booth, we have a treat for the Wittgenstein lovers.  Adam See discusses Witty’s views on language in Wittgenstein on the Essence of Grammar (Adam See).

Booth 2: Lots of Talk about Universalism
The discussion at the next booth has been going for a while before we got there.  Fortunately, the wonders of the electronic carnival preserve the story.  To find out what all the fuss is about, check out A.P. Taylor’s A Quick Libertarian Argument for Universalism.  (Larry Navin responds to Taylor’s style here: Looking at syllogisms from both sides, now.)

(Projection) Booth 3: An X-Phi Video
Tired of reading? Well, experimental philosophy has a solution for you: watch this video blog post that illustrates a new experimental study based on an example from Aristotle at the Experimental Philosophy blog.  Unfortunately for your tired eyes, you’ll have to (and want to) read the comments.

Booth 4: A Throw Back to When Everything Made Sense
Next up, Kenny Pearce asks us to think about Locke’s and Berkeley’s account of common sense in Locke, Berkeley, and ‘Common Sense’.

Booth 5: Sing(er) Me a Song Mr. Ethicistman
The next booth contains another fine post by Terrance Tomkow entitled “The Good, The Bad and Peter Singer” where Tomkow discusses (i.e. rips into) Peter Singer’s new book and his long-standing views, all while being hovered over by a picture of Singer coddling some carrots.

Booth 6: Philosophy Short and Tweet
Over at TAR, Carrie Jenkins gives the results of the Philosophy Short and Tweet competition, where winners must argue their points in 140 characters or less.  Congrats to Go Grue!’s very own Dustin Locke for bringing home the prize for Cryptic Minimalism.

(Meta)Booth 7: The Booth of Many Other Booths
In the next booth, they’re selling group blogs.  Recently, these are in high supply!  In case you’ve missed them, here’s a few new group blogs:

It’s Only A Theory (General Philosophy of Science)
Choice & Inference (Formal Epistemology and Decision Theory)
Matters of Substance (Metaphysics)

Booth 8: Formally Speaking, These Posts are Great
Speaking of Choice & Inference, there are many great discussions of Formal Epistemology there.  Some of those include Rachael Briggs discussing Causal Modeling and Counterfactuals and Jonah Schupbach discussing A Connection between Bayesian and Mainstream Epistemology. If formal epistemology is up your alley, don’t forget to join us at the Second Formal Epistemology Festival aka “2FEF” at the end of May.

Booth 9: Intensionality with ADHD
In the last booth, to serve as an exceptionally exciting send-off, over at Matters of Substance, Dan Nolan has a very interesting discussion of hyperintensionality: The Age of Hyperintensionality

That’s all for this edition of the Philosophers’ Carnival!

---

There were many good and some merely interesting submissions to the Carnival this time.  Not all of them made it here, but don’t fear: the next Philosophers’ Carnival will be hosted by sevenlayercake: a sweet philosophy blog.  Don’t forget to submit your exciting philosophy (and some boring philosophy, to keep it fresh) by May 25.

Posted on May 4, 2009 by Daniel J. Singer

The Morality of Psychopaths?

In recent work Joshua Greene argues that when we realize that many of our characteristically deontological moral judgments arise from emotional reactions rather than deontological reasoning, we will lose our confidence in these deontological judgments.  In contrast, when we learn that many utilitarian judgments arise from cognitive processes that engage in cost/benefit analysis, then this vindicates these judgments.  And (to simplify Greene’s reasoning) the conclusion of all this  is that we should become utilitarians.

For example, when people consider the trolley case they usually make utilitarian judgments, since this case is not so emotionally loaded.  But, when we consider the footbridge case, in which we have to physically push somebody in front of the runaway train, then we make a deontological judgment to the effect that the end does not justify the means.  This judgment, Greene argues, is caused by an emotional reaction rather than deontological cognitive processes.  

If we look at the empirical literature on moral judgment, we also learn that psychopaths and people with lesions in the emotional centers of their brains are more likely to make utilitarian moral judgments.  These people tend to directly conclude that we should push the fat man in front of the train.  And, if asked to evaluate a scenario in which we could say our own lives only by smothering some baby, then these people quickly judge that we should do it, whereas others with normal emotional capacities have to think carefully about this before reaching a conclusion.

I was just curious about what people think about the following observation. Utilitarianism, as this last observation helps us to see, is in one way the morality of psychopaths.  This observation may lead us to doubt whether empirical research on moral judgment really does debunk these deontological judgments in the way that Greene and others think it does.  I agree that the evidence he appeals to undermines the idea that what he calls characteristically deontological judgments usually derive from moral reasoning.  But, does it really give us reason to think that, because of this, we should not trust/rely on these intuitions in our moral thinking?

It might seem a little silly to say that utilitarianism is the morality of people with brain damage or of psychopaths, and since we don’t want to be like such people, we shouldn’t be utilitarians.  But, it is interesting, I think, to think about that piece of data when considering the kinds of arguments that people like Greene give.  Thoughts?

A Troublesome Quartet

Based on the following line of thought, it seems to me that if one is a buck-passing existence-internalist who accepts a certain thesis about motivational diversity, then she or he should give up on one of those commitments or give up thinking that anything has intrinsic value. (There are other ways to frame the matter, of course.) But I’m not yet sure that the following line of thought is unproblematic. Feedback is welcome!

P1: (Intrinsic Value) Something has intrinsic value. [In other words: Something is worthy of being valued (by anyone) for its own sake.]

P2: (Fitting Attitudes Reduction) Something’s being worthy of being valued (by anyone) for its own sake just is for it to be such that there is reason for anyone to value it for its own sake.

C1: So, there is something such that there is reason for anyone to value it for its own sake. (from P1 and P2)

P3: (Existence-Internalist Thesis) For any thing X and any agent A, there is reason for A to value X for its own sake only if a (specified) X-related motivational fact about A obtains.

P4: (Motivational Diversity) For any thing X, there is some possible agent A such that the (specified) X-related motivational fact about A does not obtain.

C2: So, for any thing X, there is some possible agent A for whom there is not reason for A to value X for its own sake. (from P3 and P4)

C3: So, it is not the case that there is something such that there is reason for anyone to value it for its own sake. (from C2)

C4: So, C1 & C3 (Contradiction)

Color-judgment expressivism?

Hey guys,  

I don’t know too much about the philosophy of color, except for what you learn from examples people use in discussions about other topics. I’ve noticed that some people, to take one example, think that we should be error theorists about color: we falsely believe that surfaces have these mind-independent color features that they don’t really have, and therefore our color-judgments attributing these properties to surfaces are all systematically erroneous.  This, if I am not mistaken, is Velleman’s view. He brings this up in a discussion about whether people’s belief in free will is some kind of systematic illusion of a similar sort.  Other people, like Gibbard, think that an error-theory about color-judgments is too extreme; we should not attribute systematic errors to the folk unless no other, friendlier theory is available.  One type of theory of a friendlier sort takes color-judgments to be judgments about dispositional properties: we judge things to be such that they tend to look a certain way to people.   But, what are some other possible views?

Here’s what I am specifically interested in knowing: do you guys know if any philosophers have given expressivist views about color judgments?  The idea would be something like this.  In saying, for example, “the sky is blue” what people are doing is expressing their mental state of seeing the sky as blue.  Now, what is their seeing it as blue supposed to mean here?  Well, perhaps I would have done better to say something like “they express their mental state of its looking a certain particular way to them”.  So, the state of judging something to have a certain color is closely tied, on this view, to the state of something looking/appearing a certain way to you.  And, if you say that the thing has the color in question, then you are expressing this state of mind, rather than reporting it.  (This, by the way, seems right: in calling something blue it seems better to say that I am expressing my state of mind of seeing it as blue than to say that I report its looking to blue to me.)

Zillions of Beliefs?

Here’s a fun one:

1. Anyone who knows basic maths knows that 2+2=4.
2. If someone knows that 2+2=4, then that person believes that 2+2=4.
3. The known proposition in premises 1 and 2 (i.e. that 2+2=4) can be replaced by a very large number of other propositions (e.g. that 2+3=5 or that 5-1=4) while maintaining the truth of the premises.
4. Therefore, anyone who knows basic maths has a very large  number of beliefs (countably-many?).
5. Regular people do not have a large number of occurent beliefs.
6. Therefore, many of the beliefs of regular people are non-occurent.

I’ve heard a few people complain that this idea of a non-occurent or implicit belief is non-sensical or elusive.  If you’re one of those people, which premise do you reject?

Why I might have reason not to eat honey

I’m a vegan, and someone recently asked me whether I ate honey, and if not, why not.  I wasn’t sure what to say, because I don’t eat honey, but I’m not sure I have good reason not to.

I take myself to have good reason not to eat fish, mammals, and birds or related animal products on the following grounds:

(1) These animals are sentient, i.e., they can have positive or negative affective responses to stimuli.

(2) Ceteris paribus, I prefer states of affairs in which sentient creatures don’t suffer (that’s them negative affective responses I was talkin’ about).

(3) Animal agriculture, including the production of eggs and dairy products, causes a great deal of suffering.

(4) I don’t think that the fact that I used to enjoy eating animal products gets me past the ceteris paribus in (2).

Therefore, I eat other things now (plants and salt, mostly).

In the case of honey, I’m not sure I have the same kind of reason, because I don’t know whether bees and other insects are sentient.  They don’t have brains, but they have rudimentary nervous systems and seem to respond aversively to certain harmful stimuli, etc., but it’s tough to say.  I currently give them the benefit of the doubt, but if I liked honey more, I might not.

So there you have it; “Peter Singer for one,” you might say.  Unlike Singer, I don’t think that everyone has a duty or reason to maximize utility, so I don’t assume that everyone has the same reasons I have for eschewing animal products.

That said, I’m curious to know why others don’t take themselves to have similar reasons to mine.  It seems to me that most people would agree, on reflection, that they don’t like the idea of animal suffering and would prefer that it weren’t so prevalent.  I doubt most people think that their current gustatory practices provide them with irreplaceable benefits.   So what gives?

Counterfactual-possibility

So I’ve been thinking about this objection I made to the Possible Worlds account of counterfactuals as an undergraduate, and I’m curious whether anyone has read something which deals with this problem (or whether anyone has a rough-and-ready rejoinder).

The objection goes like this: Possible Worlds Semantics (PWS) claims to give an account both of our notion of counterfactual dependence and our notion of possibility.  These are, roughly, the notions we express with the English constructions “If…had been the case, then…would have been the case,” and “It might/could be/have been the case that…”  PWS explicates these notions by saying that the former is true iff the closest world (on some contextually-defined similarity metric) in which the antecedent is true is a world where the consequent is true also.  The later is true iff there is some world accessible to the world of evaluation at which ‘…’ is true.

However, things seem to go screwy when we stick these two notions together.  

Quick question

While reading an influential text on direct reference, I found the following claim:

In the framework I have just sketched, a proper name is a word which must be used in a certain way, even though it may happen to be used in other ways.

I don’t know how to interpret this in a non-inconsistent, or non-contradictory, way.  I wonder, more specifically, how the quoted text differs from the following:

According to the rules we have just stipulated, you must come home every night at 8, even though you may come at other times.

Any proposals?

Tooley on Laws of Nature and Counterfactual Support

So I was looking over Dan’s reconstruction of Tooley’s argument below, and I’m still somewhat worried about its validity.

Dan mentioned that I thought there might be some funny business with premises (3) and (10) (on his first reconstruction):

(3) It is a nomological truth that all salt, when in water, dissolves.

(10) It is true that if this piece of salt were in water and were not dissolving, it would not be in the vicinity of a piece of gold.

Dan’s certainly right that there’s no straight-up contradiction here (like there would be if (10) was stating a material conditional).  However, something still feels very odd about the line of argumentation being taken.  What originally bothered me was the fact that, in (10), we are using a putative law to support a counterfactual about what would happen in a situation in which that law (or, rather, the law from which it is derived) is violated.  And I’m not convinced that any law can support a counterfactual like this.

This is a problem because Tooley is trying to draw a distinction between two classes of nomological truths (the laws proper and the logical consequences of laws).  He is arguing that the second class cannot support certain counterfactuals which the first class can – and that, therefore, they must be treated differently.  However, if he demonstrates this by pointing to a certain class of counterfactuals which are not only problematic for the second class, but for the first class as well, then he’s failed to draw the distinction.

So, I’ve been convinced by Dan that Tooley’s argument demonstrates that nomological truths like (L) all salt, when in water and near gold, dissolves in water. have difficulty supporting certain counterfactuals.  However, I haven’t been convinced that laws proper don’t face the very same difficulty.  On my understanding of things, if I can show that a plain jane law faces similar difficulties with the same kind of counterfactual, then I will have undermined Tooley’s distinction.