Tag: philosophy

Edward Feser addresses R. Scott Bakker’s proselytization for post-intentionality:

Bakker tells us that, though he once found the objections to eliminativism compelling, he now takes the post-intentional “worst case scenario” to be a “live possibility” worthy of exploration.  It seems to me, though, that he doesn’t really say anything new by way of making eliminativism plausible, at least not in the present article.  Here I want to comment on three issues raised in his essay.  The first is the reason he gives for thinking that the incoherence problem facing eliminativism isn’t serious.  The second is the question of why, as Bakker puts it, we are “so convinced that we are the sole exception, the one domain that can be theoretically cognized absent the prostheses of science.”  The third is the question of why more people haven’t considered “what… a post-intentional future [would] look like,” a fact that “amazes” Bakker.

Still incoherent after all these years

Let’s take these in order.  In footnote 3 of his article, Bakker writes:

Using intentional concepts does not entail commitment to intentionalism, any more than using capital entails a commitment to capitalism.  Tu quoque arguments simply beg the question, assume the truth of the very intentional assumptions under question to argue the incoherence of questioning them.  If you define your explanation into the phenomena we’re attempting to explain, then alternative explanations will appear to beg your explanation to the extent the phenomena play some functional role in the process of explanation more generally.  Despite the obvious circularity of this tactic, it remains the weapon of choice for great number of intentional philosophers.

There are a couple of urban legends about the incoherence objection that eliminativists like to peddle, and Bakker essentially repeats them here.  The first urban legend is the claim that to raise the incoherence objection is to accuse the eliminativist of an obvious self-contradiction, like saying “I believe that there are no beliefs.”  The eliminativist then responds that the objection is as puerile as accusing a heliocentrist of self-contradiction when he says “The sun rose today at 6:59 AM.”  Obviously the heliocentrist is just speaking loosely.  He isn’t really saying that the sun moves relative to the earth.  Similarly, when an eliminativist says at lunchtime “I believe I’ll have a ham sandwich,” he isn’t really committing himself to the existence of beliefs or the like.

But the eliminativist is attacking a straw man.  Proponents of the incoherence objection are well aware that eliminativists can easily avoid saying obviously self-contradictory things like “I believe that there are no beliefs,” and can also go a long way in avoiding certain specific intentional terms like “believe,” “think,” etc.  That is simply not what is at issue.  What is at issue is whether an across-the-board eliminativism is coherent, whether the eliminativist can in principle avoid all intentional notions.  The proponent of the incoherence objection says that this is not possible, and that analogies with heliocentrism and the like therefore fail.

After all, the heliocentrist can easily state his position without making any explicit or implicit reference to the sun moving relative to the earth.  If he needs to, he can say what he wants to say with sentences like “The sun rose today at 6:59 AM” in a more cumbersome way that makes no reference to the sun rising.  Similarly (and to take Bakker’s own example) an anti-capitalist can easily describe a society in which capital does not exist (e.g. a hunter-gatherer society).  But it is, to say the least, by no means clear how the eliminativist can state his position in a way that does not entail that at least some intentional notions track reality.  For the eliminativist claims that commonsense intentional psychology is false and illusory; he claims that eliminativism is evidentially supported by or even entailed by science; he proposes alternative theories and models of human nature; and so forth.  Even if the eliminativist can drop reference to “beliefs” and “thoughts,” he still typically makes use of “truth,” “falsehood,” “theory,” “model,” “implication,” “entailment,” “cognitive,” “assertion,” “evidence,” “observation,” etc.  Every one of these notions is also intentional.  Every one of them therefore has to be abandoned by a consistent eliminativist.  (As Hilary Putnam pointed out decades ago, a consistent eliminativist has to give up “folk logic” as well as “folk psychology.”)

To compare the eliminativist to the heliocentrist who talks about the sunrise or the anti-capitalist who uses capital is, if left at that, mere hand waving.  For whether these analogies are good ones is precisely what is at issue.

I am intrinsically dubious about Bakker’s ability to construct anything coherent on much simpler grounds. The fact that he could not, by his own admission, understand the metaphor when I pointed out how the rejection of traditional morality by modern SF/F writers significantly reduced their conceptual color palette and left them painting in shades of grey did not testify well concerning his intelligence.

John C. Wright had the likes of Bakker pegged when he wrote: “They think they are smarter than us. These undereducated boobs who cannot follow a syllogism of three steps, who do not speak a word of Greek or Latin, who do not know the difference between Arianism and Aryanism, who have never read ORIGIN OF SPECIES or DAS KAPITAL or THE REPUBLIC and who do not even know the intellectual parentage of all their ideas, these vaunting cretins whose arguments consist of nothing but tiresome talking points recited by rote and flaccid ad hominem, whose opinions are based on fashion, they, of all people, think they are smarter than the rest of the world.”

Now, Bakker is far from the worst of the sort; he is at least somewhat conversant with some of the books written on the subject. However, as Feser points out, he’s obviously not sufficiently conversant with the relevant material to understand that he is treading ground that has been trod before.


This exchange in the comments was particularly amusing:


Bakker: “How does asserting that I’m presupposing one of the thousands of
intentionalist interpretations out there do anything more than beg this
question?”

Brandon: “This doesn’t seem to be a correct use of ‘begging the question’; it’s
not presupposing a conclusion to point out that you yourself are
presupposing the conclusion and don’t seem to have any rational way of
not presupposing it.”

Scott: “Are you really entitled, on an eliminativist view, to talk about
“begging the question”? How might you give an account of that logical
fallacy with no reference to intentionality? I don’t think it’s
possible, but the point is that even eliminativists acknowledge that it
hasn’t been done.”

Feser: “I don’t know why you keep saying that the incoherence objection begs the
question. It does not beg the question. Here’s one way to summarize
the objection:

1. Eliminativists state their position using expressions like “truth,” “falsehood,” “theory,” “illusion,” etc.

2.
They can do so coherently only if either (a) they accept that
intentionality is real, or (b) they provide some alternative, thoroughly
non-intentional way of construing such expressions.

3. But eliminativists reject the claim that intentionality is real, so option (a) is out.

4.
And they have not provided any alternative, thoroughly non-intentional
way of construing such expressions, so they have not (successfully)
taken option (b).

5. So eliminativists have not shown how their position is coherent.”

If you find the whole thing difficult to follow, Anonymous provides a helpful summary:

What, precisely, do eliminative materialists think they’ve discovered in science that shows that intentionality doesn’t exist?

They
failed to discover something that’s been intentionally excluded
from science to begin with. This, they believe, is great evidence that
the thing they’ve excluded doesn’t exist.

And thus we see, yet again, that it is his lack of historical knowledge that bites the atheist in the ass. They are, as Wright observes, boobs who cannot follow, or find the error, in a syllogism of three steps.

1. If evidence for X cannot be seen or otherwise observed, X does not exist.
2. I looked in my closet and did not see or observe any evidence of zebras.
3. Therefore, zebras do not exist. 

I find it both amazing and amusing how so many atheist philosophies, no matter their starting points or authors, wind up chasing their own tails in precisely the same manner. They always wind up concluding that neither the individual nor his actions matter in the slightest. Taken as a whole, they point to a particular conclusion: without God, there is no Man.

I’m no devotee of the cult of reason, and one could easily blow a hole through the philosophical underpinnings for these “virtues”, but they are genuinely good advice if you’re willing to turn a blind eye to the base assumptions involved.

The first virtue is curiosity. A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. To feel the burning itch of curiosity requires both that you be ignorant, and that you desire to relinquish your ignorance. If in your heart you believe you already know, or if in your heart you do not wish to know, then your questioning will be purposeless and your skills without direction. Curiosity seeks to annihilate itself; there is no curiosity that does not want an answer. The glory of glorious mystery is to be solved, after which it ceases to be mystery. Be wary of those who speak of being open-minded and modestly confess their ignorance. There is a time to confess your ignorance and a time to relinquish your ignorance.

The second virtue is relinquishment. P. C. Hodgell said: “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.” Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs. The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud. Submit yourself to ordeals and test yourself in fire. Relinquish the emotion which rests upon a mistaken belief, and seek to feel fully that emotion which fits the facts. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm. Evaluate your beliefs first and then arrive at your emotions. Let yourself say: “If the iron is hot, I desire to believe it is hot, and if it is cool, I desire to believe it is cool.” Beware lest you become attached to beliefs you may not want.

The third virtue is lightness. Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own. Beware lest you fight a rearguard retreat against the evidence, grudgingly conceding each foot of ground only when forced, feeling cheated. Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can. Do this the instant you realize what you are resisting; the instant you can see from which quarter the winds of evidence are blowing against you. Be faithless to your cause and betray it to a stronger enemy. If you regard evidence as a constraint and seek to free yourself, you sell yourself into the chains of your whims. For you cannot make a true map of a city by sitting in your bedroom with your eyes shut and drawing lines upon paper according to impulse. You must walk through the city and draw lines on paper that correspond to what you see. If, seeing the city unclearly, you think that you can shift a line just a little to the right, just a little to the left, according to your caprice, this is just the same mistake.

Virtue isn’t really the correct term here, but that’s merely a rhetorical flourish for improving one’s rational performance. As with historical pagan sentiments, the higher paganism is often more admirable than the corrupt and imperfect realization of Christian ideals. But while those sentiments are worthy of respect and even implementation, they should never be mistaken for the genuine article of true godly virtue.

The smart guy from Khan Academy appears to be taking some unnecessary precautions:

The Learning Myth: Why I’m Cautious About Telling My Son He’s Smart

My 5-year-­old son has just started reading. Every night, we lie on his bed and he reads a short book to me. Inevitably, he’ll hit a word that he has trouble with: last night the word was “gratefully.” He eventually got it after a fairly painful minute. He then said, “Dad, aren’t you glad how I struggled with that word? I think I could feel my brain growing.” I smiled: my son was now verbalizing the tell­-tale signs of a “growth­ mindset.” But this wasn’t by accident. Recently, I put into practice research I had been reading about for the past few years: I decided to praise my son not when he succeeded at things he was already good at, but when he persevered with things that he found difficult. I stressed to him that by struggling, your brain grows. Between the deep body of research on the field of learning mindsets and this personal experience with my son, I am more convinced than ever that mindsets toward learning could matter more than anything else we teach.

Considering that his son started reading two years later than me, most of my high-IQ friends, and most of our children, I suspect Salman Khan can relax a bit. Anyhow, I always find this issue of “telling kids they’re smart or not” to be amusing. It’s exactly like debating whether to tell a kid he’s tall or not.

I mean, do you seriously think the kid is not going to notice? Especially if he is, in fact, actually smart? My parents never told me I was smart. It was just kind of hard not to notice when I was sitting there in kindergarten reading the Encyclopedia Britannica while the other kids were eating paste, licking the doorknobs, and urinating on themselves.

If Khan wants to make sure his son struggles, that’s easy enough. Throw some long division at him. Make him read in another language. Give him Cicero and Plato to read. In fairness, I don’t tell my son he’s smart, I just tell him to keep a straight face when his teammates lament the long division problems they’re struggling with, to help them out if they ask for it, and avoid ever letting them see the collection of alien hieroglyphics that pass for his math problems. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sight of his face when I introduced him to the “silent gh”.  He loved the “silent e”, but I’m 100 percent certain he thought I was screwing with him until I showed him a list of numbers that included a spelled-out “eight”.

The important thing is to teach the highly intelligent not to coast on their capabilities, not to mistake potential for achievement, and to show them how to respect the less-intelligent. Intellectual arrogance in a child is as natural and as innocent as athletic arrogance. It must be kept in check, but one can’t do that by pretending there is no reason for it to exist in the first place.

We don’t pretend that children don’t come in different shapes and sizes, and we shouldn’t pretend that they don’t come with different cognitive capabilities as well. I also find it rather amusing that a guy with a five year-old thinks he has discovered secret of raising smart kids. Come back in thirteen years, sport, and we’ll see what you think you know.

Over the years, I’ve had thousands of requests for advice. Some of it I’ve given publicly, some of it has remained private. Some people have taken it, more often they haven’t. Sometimes it has worked out, most of the time I have no idea what they did with it.

Now, I’m certainly not saying my life is perfect. Far from it. I’ve made sub-optimal decisions, I’ve made mind-boggling mistakes, and if I had known at 19 what I know now, I might well own part of two billion-dollar corporations. But, as a general rule, I am able to accomplish what I set my mind to doing so long as I don’t get too bored.

What most of you don’t know is that I’ve been lecturing this year at a technical institute, nominally teaching game development. But what I learned over the course of the spring semester was that while the information I was providing them was useful and valuable, the lessons they found most important had nothing directly to do with games or game development.

General concepts that I’ve learned and put into practice, such as failing faster, seeking external sources of motivation, incorporating objective metrics, demanding high performance, and leveraging personal connections to mutual benefit actually turned out to be much more valuable to them than the industry-specific ones. So much so, in fact, that several of the best students in the class asked permission to be able to attend it again in the fall.

(I said yes and even gave the institute instructions to let them do so for a nominal fee instead of the usual cost, although this didn’t quite make sense to me in rational terms; I’d already taught them what I intend to teach in the fall. But now, thanks to the Murakami novel I’ve been reading, I think I understand what they’re seeking by repeating the course.)

What hit the lightswitch was a passage in Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. Tazaki-san is speaking with his old friend Aka, from whom he has been estranged for more than twenty years. Aka runs a very successful creative business seminar company called BEYOND, which is one part corporate self-improvement, one part psychology, and one part bullshit. In explaining his success, Aka says:

One other thing I learned from working in a company was that the majority of people in the world have no problem following orders. They’re actually happy to be told what to do. They might complain, but that’s not how they really feel. They just grumble out of habit. If you told them to think for themselves, and make their own decisions and take responsibility for them, they’d be clueless. So I decided I could turn that into a business. It’s simple….

There are quite a few people who reject the program. You can divide them into two groups. The first is antisocial. In English you’d call them ‘outcasts.’ They just can’t accept any form of constructive criticism, no matter what it is. They reject any kind of group discipline. It’s a waste of time to deal with people like that, so we ask them to withdraw. The other group is comprised of people who actually think on their own. Those it’s best to leave alone. Don’t fool with them. Every system needs elite people like them. If things go well, they’ll eventually be in leadership positions. In the middle, between those two groups, are those who take orders from above and just do what they’re told. That’s the vast majority of people. By my rough estimate, 85 percent of the total. I developed this business to target the 85 percent.

In combination with a new writing program I’ve been using, that gave me an idea. Now, I’ve been trying to figure out how to start a business that is actually necessary for ten years. The fields in which I’ve been involved for years are pretty far down the priority list; no one really needs techno music, faster graphics, video games, or science fiction novels. They’ve mostly been offshoots of my personal interests. On the other hand, I have neither the skill nor the inclination to get involved in providing food, water, sex, or waste disposal, and as for shelter, well, I’m not exactly optimistic about the credit-stretched housing market.

Aka’s fictional company teaches corporate drones how to let the corporation think for them. That sort of thing is of no interest to me; I want to encourage people to think for themselves, not rely upon me, or anyone else, to do so, insofar as they are capable of it. But then it occurred to me that the two primary things I provided to the kids I have successfully coached are clarity and discipline. I didn’t teach them how to dribble, I taught them when to dribble and when to pass. I didn’t teach them how to shoot, I taught them when to look for the shot and when to look for the pass. I didn’t teach them how to tackle the guy with the ball, I taught them when to attack the ball and when to cut off the passing lanes.

On the soccer field, there are always a plethora of available options and decisions concerning which one to take need to be made so quickly that they are best made without thinking at all. In helping Ender make the transition from keeper to defender, I had to start with the very basics, and gradually bring him along a series of decision trees until he reached the point that he had internalized them and was reacting faster than I could call out directions from the sidelines.

About six months ago, I looked at what Athol Kay has been doing with his relationship counseling and concluded that I had no desire whatsoever to get involved with that can of worms. I have no interest in providing investment advice. And while it would be easy to start some sort of European men’s conference akin to Paul Elam’s recent one in Detroit, that doesn’t interest me either. I’m a game designer. I like to create systems that are both efficient and functional, and none of those things fit the bill.

But to design a system that permits an individual to life his life more effectively and efficiently, that is a fascinating challenge, indeed, in some respects, it is one I have been addressing in some fashion my entire life. I’m not saying that I’ve figured it out, but on the sheer basis of my literary output and my moderate success in various unrelated fields, I would estimate that I’m operating at about 50 percent more efficiency than the average. Now, one could put that down to my having about 50 percent more intelligence than the norm, but I know too many people who are smarter than I am who do less with more, and too many who do more with less, to accept that explanation.

So, I’m thinking about running a development experiment for what might be described as a technology-based life-design system, or semi-mechanical life-coaching. The aim would be for the system to be successful in objective terms for most people, low-cost or effectively no net cost to the user through the performance efficiencies gained, and zero bullshit. I’m not a guru or a spiritualist or a yogi, I’m a technologist and I believe in material metrics. None of that nebulous “he found his balance” or “she rediscovered her confidence” fraud. If it is effective across the board in material terms, there might be a business there. If it isn’t, then I’ll have failed quickly, without taking advantage of anyone, and I’ll move on to the next idea.

(This doesn’t have anything to do with dissatisfaction with either Castalia or Alpenwolf. Far from it. It is, rather an opportunity to test some of the ideas I’ve developed on myself as well as others. To a certain extent, it almost feels as if I somehow managed to kick my brain into a higher gear. Or perhaps I’m merely delusional with all the excitement surrounding the Hugo Awards.)

UPDATE: I have more than enough volunteers, thank you. I’ll be sending out some questionnaires within a week and will select the five test cases after that.