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?

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.

[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.

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.

We found that participants in the folk ballad and hip hop conditions produced different patterns of response (chi-square = 4.393; p = 0.036). In the hip hop condition, a significantly greater percentage of participants judged that the immoral lyrics would make the song better.

We believe that our result adds new evidence to the ethical criticisms of art debate in philosophical aesthetics. This debate is concerned with the relationship between moral and aesthetic values of artworks. There are three prominent families of views in this debate. Autonomists think that moral defects are aesthetically irrelevant; moral value is not intrinsically related to aesthetic value. Moralists think that moral defects are aesthetic defects, at least in many cases. To be precise, they think that moral value monotonically relates to aesthetic value: as moral value decreases, aesthetic value decreases or stays the same. Immoralists agree with moralists—and disagree with autonomists—that moral value interacts with aesthetic value, but they think that some moral defects cause or constitute aesthetic virtues. To be precise, they think that moral value non-monotonically relates to aesthetic value.

Our result clearly shows that ordinary people do implicitly take moral evaluations to be relevant for aesthetic evaluations (contrary to what they may profess). The autonomists thus have the challenge of explaining away ordinary people’s moral and aesthetic evaluations; that is, they must explain why ordinary people take moral defects to be aesthetic defects. More broadly, they have the burden of explaining why ordinary people’s moral and aesthetic evaluations systematically fail to track the actual moral and aesthetic values. For the moralists, the challenge is to account for the different patterns of responses in the two conditions. They must explain why a significantly larger number of participants judged that the immoral lyrics to be aesthetically better in the hip hop condition, and why those participants are mistaken. Given these challenges for the autonomists and the moralists, we take our result to provide prima facie support for immoralism. As we see it, the folk are genre-sensitive immoralists when they evaluate artworks.

We would love to hear your thoughts on this study and suggestions for future studies!

[Cross-posted at The Experimental Philosophy Blog; please comment there]

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) 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.

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 9,300 times in 2010. That’s about 22 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 7 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 80 posts.

The busiest day of the year was August 28th with 113 views. The most popular post that day was Can an OUGHT follow from no ISs?.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, consc.net, www-personal.umich.edu, tar.weatherson.org, and crapulae.wordpress.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for carnival, grue, go grue, carnival pictures, and mental activities.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Can an OUGHT follow from no ISs? August 2010
26 comments and 2 Likes on WordPress.com

Philosophers’ Carnival #90 May 2009
4 comments

Peter van Inwagen on Clifford’s Principle May 2007
5 comments

Dawkins’ “ultimate Boeing 747″ argument March 2007
15 comments

Boo Surveys? August 2010
6 comments

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

–

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.

As far as I understand, the survey method — in the salient sense — simply involves collecting data by asking for people’s self-reports, rather than, say, by observing and coding their behavior or scanning their brains. (Another sense, in which surveying involves no experimental manipulation, clearly does not apply to many experimental philosophy studies.) This method is commonly employed in social and (some) cognitive psychology. For example, studies in the confabulation literature use the survey method. They ask people to report on their judgments and how they come to those judgments. Of course, the experimental manipulations of those studies are what allows the interpretations of the data that led to the conclusion that people are unreliable in their self-reports about some mental processes.

I take it the thrust of the anti-survey refrain is in fact not about the survey method at all, but about the manipulations and interpretations of some experimental philosophy studies. Fair enough. But not all experimental philosophy studies use the same experimental manipulations and the same approach to interpreting the data. So, it seems to me, specific criticisms of manipulations or approaches to interpretation would be much more helpful than broad ones. At the very least, broad criticisms should identify what the problematic manipulations or approaches to interpretation have in common, and which studies fall prey to these problems. It looks like the experimental philosophy community has done a decent job keeping itself in check on those counts (e.g., this and that) even though progress certainly comes incrementally and slowly.

Moreover, once clarified, the thrust of the anti-survey refrain impacts philosophy’s interactions with empirical disciplines generally, and not just experimental philosophy. Perhaps the stake-manipulation study-designs do not adequately address epistemologists’ concerns and the straightforward inference from folk responses to philosophical conclusion is overly hasty. Even so, these are simply the kind of problems that frequently arise with interactions between philosophy and psychology (and likely other empirical disciplines too). Psychologists designing the experiments could easily, and perhaps even more likely given their lack of conceptual familiarity, miss philosophers’ concerns too. They might not know what the appropriate questions to ask either. Similarly, philosophers could misinterpret psychological findings. Additionally, in my experience, psychologists not infrequently misinterpret their own findings by making stronger conclusions than the data warrants; it would be bad, too, if philosophers were to draw philosophical implications by simply taking psychologists’ words at face value. This is not to say that philosophy ought not interact with empirical disciplines, but just that it’s hard generally. Consequently, I find the singling-out of experimental philosophy in this line of attack puzzling.

There are a lot of good methodological criticisms of specific experimental philosophy studies or sets of studies, including criticisms from experimental philosophers themselves, as noted earlier. As such, let’s lay to rest the anti-survey criticism of experimental philosophy in general. Minimally, it’s bad sloganeering.

–

Postscripts:

• In the interest of full disclosure, I used to adopt the unfortunate “survey” terminology for some experimental philosophy projects as well. So let this post serve as self-correction.
• There are some experimental philosophy projects, as well as projects in psychology, that do not involve manipulation. Instead, they might do correlational analyses on people’s self-reports; Chandra Sripada’s recent work using structural equation modeling is one example. Even with these projects, though, what experimental philosophers are doing is not merely polling and taking the majority view, as the survey terminology might suggest.

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)

Suppose you learn by conditionalization — the confidence that you would have in A were you to learn B is just c(A|B). Suppose also that dependency hypotheses are probabilistic full patterns. Some notes: a dependency hypothesis is a “maximally specific proposition about how the things [the agent] cares about do and do not depend causally on his present actions” (p.11). A probabilistic full pattern is a proposition of the form &&…, where  are your available actions and are propositions specifying the chances at , respectively, where  is the time of realization of  (cf. p. 26). Suppose also that you care exclusively about money.

MEMORY WIPES AND INFORMATION VALVES. There are two buttons in front of you, A and B. You know that pressing button A has the following chancy impact:

• ($100 DEPOSITED IN YOUR BANK)=1/2
• ($0 DEPOSITED IN YOUR BANK)=1/2.

Similarly, pressing button B has this chancy impact:

• ($90 DEPOSITED IN YOUR BANK)=1/2
• ($0 DEPOSITED IN YOUR BANK)=1/2.

Whatever you do, your button-pressing memory will be nixed immediately afterward. You’ll then be presented with an envelope. The envelope will either be empty or contain a note that informs you of which button you pressed. The process for determining the contents of the envelope is: a ball will be drawn randomly from an urn containing 100 numbered balls (numbered 1-100);

• If ball #77 is drawn and you pressed A, but nothing was deposited in your bank account, then the envelope will be left empty;
• If one of the other 99 balls is drawn and you pressed A, but nothing was deposited in your bank account, then the envelope will contain a note saying, “you pressed button A”;
• If ball #77 is drawn, and you pressed A, and $100 was deposited in your bank account, then the envelope will contain a note saying, “you pressed button A”;
• If one of the other 99 balls is drawn, and you pressed A, and $100 was deposited in your bank account, then the envelope will be left empty;
• If ball #77 is drawn and you pressed B, but nothing was deposited in your bank account, then the envelope will contain a note saying, “you pressed button B”;
• If one of the other 99 balls is drawn and you pressed B, but nothing was deposited in your bank account, then the envelope will be left empty;
• If ball #77 is drawn, and you pressed B, and $90 was deposited in your bank account, then the envelope will be left empty;
• If one of the other 99 balls is drawn, and you pressed B, and $90 was deposited in your bank account, then the envelope will contain a note saying, “you pressed button B”

You know all of this.

Question: what option should you choose, according to evidential decision theory? Evidential decision theory prescribes V-maximizing, where . Note: evidential decision theory is partition invariant; V(X) doesn’t depend on your choice of . We’re free to partition logical space as follows, then: , where is the proposition that i dollars are deposited in your bank account. Let’s do so. Also, note that, prior to pushing the button, you’re certain that either $0, $90, or $100 will be deposited in your account, so we can restrict our attention to . We have:

• ==.
• ==.

The important quantities, then, are and . So how confident would you be in  if you were to learn that you pressed button A? Well, given that you pressed A, it was equally likely that $0 would be deposited as it is that $100 would be. And if nothing was deposited, it was extremely likely — 99/100 -likely — that you would learn that you pressed A. If $100 was deposited, however, it was extremely unlikely — 1/100-likely — that you would learn that you pressed A. So it seems as though you ought to be extremely confident that nothing was deposited — 99/100-confident, to be precise — and have only the slightest shred of confidence (viz. 1/100) that $100 was deposited. Hence, =1/100.

The same goes for , mutatis mutandis. How confident would you be in  if you were to learn that you pressed button B? Well, given that you pressed B, it was equally likely that $0 would be deposited as it is that $90 would be. And if nothing was deposited, it was extremely unlikely — 1/100 -likely — that you would learn that you pressed B. If $90 was deposited, however, it was extremely likely — 99/100-likely — that you would learn that you pressed B. So it seems as though you ought to be extremely confident that $90 was deposited — 99/100-confident, to be precise — and have only the slightest shred of confidence (viz. 1/100) that nothing was deposited. Hence, =99/100.

But then

• 
• .

This is wrong, though. You ought to press button A. At least that’s what a causal decision theorist will say. Pressing A tends to produce better financial outcomes than pressing B.

Importantly, evidential decision theory goes wrong in MEMORY WIPES AND INFORMATION VALVES despite the fact that you’re certain of which dependency hypothesis obtains. You know exactly how the things you care about do and do not depend causally on your present actions; you know that pressing button A has the following chancy impact: