Evolutionary Psychology posits that appreciation of beauty is adaptive — it is an adaptive trait — that finding things x, y and z beautiful increases the likelihood of surviving and/or producing offspring and/or successfully raising them. This implies that what is considered beautiful is different for each species, and different for different individuals, depending on their life histories/abilities/current needs. As an example, a species or individual who was raised in a certain kind of ecology, has skills and adaptions that allow them to survive/thrive in that ecology, and they will find the landscapes of that type of ecology more attractive than that of ecologies which they are unfamiliar with, ie, that they have no particular survival skills in, etc. This implies that there is ONE aesthetic principal : each species has evolved to have their attention captured by, and to be attracted to certain objects/entities/landscapes that are evolutionarily adaptive for them to notice and respond to.
However, many stimuli that appear evolutionarily novel, originate from hostile environments, or are ultimately useless do sometimes give a powerful aesthetic response: rhythms beaten on a drum, tonal harmonies, polyhedral dice cast in neutral tones, a pentagram on white paper, scenes from beneath the ocean or deep space. At minimum this implies that there is another aesthetic principle besides the one.
But I don't think that means that you can't fool mother nature. People find pornography enjoyable even though watching it doubtless doesn't improve survival or procreation. That just means our environment has changed more rapidly than our ability to adapt. Presumably people who are most easily 'fooled' by pornography vs. 'the real thing' will gradually be eliminated from the gene pool. I've heard various suggestions as to why music, for example is, in a way, functionally equivalent to pornography — all of them are based on the idea that music is simulating something that it is adaptive to pay attention to, and to enjoy experiencing. One explanation I like is that music (or at least the kind of music I like) is harmonic (and thus simulates the sound of happy people's voices rather than angry people's voice). Some people do prefer discordant music, but perhaps they are responding to feelings of boredom, and desire for 'mixing things up'. You can make similar guesses about color schemes in the deep ocean photos that are soothing or exciting, or look (to our imperfectly adapted eyes as if they would be peaceful or fruitful places to live in. But it is easy to come up with 'just so' stories. The real clincher to me is that there may be multiple modules in our brains that respond to different kinds of beauty, but that all of them have to have evolved to exist. They may respond to a wider set of stimuli that just the adaptive ones, but, presumably, if our environment was stable for long enough, they would slowly get better at responding to the stimuli that really is adaptive.
First of all, what you have to say is interesting, and I want to thank you for sharing your ideas.
Yet, you are primarily continuing to discuss evolutionary adaptation, rather than effectively arguing that other phenomena are either not beautiful, or are beautiful but can be subsumed into an evolutionary explanation.
That pornography is exciting is unsurprising, but most people would argue pornography is *not* beautiful.
Happy people's voices do have a different pitch and tambre from angry people's voices, but a single voice doesn't harmonize with itself. The voice pitches of two people speaking naturally will not form thirds, fifths, or any other musically recognizable interval; nor will their syllables naturally form a recognizable rhythm.
And if people find scenes beneath the ocean or deep in space beautiful, they are definitely responding to something outside of their ancestral familiarity with environments promoting survival.
Well, substitute the picture of a beautiful woman for pornography in my example. Our brains are fooled into responding to it in many of the same ways that we would respond to a beautiful woman in person. We find it beautiful. That is adaptive, in the case of the woman, but not in the case of the photo. It is a mal-adaption that we respond to the photo in the same way. We are mal-adapted to our current environment because it has changed and is changing faster than we can evolve.
My claim is, or I guess, Evolutionary Psychology's claim is that everything we find beautiful is either something that it is adaptive for us to find beautiful, or a mal-adaption — the environment has changed too fast, or the other things what ever they are, aren't worth screening out, — greater specificity costs resources, and if it doesn't interfere with our fitness, nature won't take on the extra burden of screening it out.
It looks at the situation from the point of view of which landscapes we find aesthetically satisfying, and how that possibly evolved, and why it was adaptive. It is really interesting, in fact the entire book is very interesting. I'd highly recommend it. I have also seen other discussions of this in terms of why humans find some physical features attractive in potential mates : smooth skin, hip-waist ratio, etc: all are supposedly proxies for fertility or good genes, or good health or good nutrition — all of course, good things to select for in a mate.
Bottom line my point is, that there is no human mental capability that hasn't been acquired by evolutionary processes — the idea that the brain is a collection of modules— and that each one exists because, and only because it was highly valuable to have such a module in our brains performing that function. Thus the human brain is TUNED to notice and respond to certain cues. Obviously we notice and respond to cues that don't seem to have any relationship to survival or procreation or helping our young. My contention is that our brains aren't really finely tuned — either because it didn't provide any real advantage to have them more finely tuned (from the point of view of evolution) or because a beneficial mutation just doesn't happen that often, which means evolution takes a long time.
I understand. What I wonder is, can this framework successfully explain why the Pillairs of Creation, Dark Tranquility's Ex Nihilo, or a monochromatic septagram are beautiful?
Quantum physics predicts many features of chemistry, and would likely have led to a row or two of the Periodic Table without the work of Mendeleev. However, it would not likely explain properties like viscosity or equilibria of forward and reverse reactions without chemistry.
Similarly, evolutionary psychology successfully predicts why we are drawn towards images of food or prospective mates, but it's pretty clear from this discussion that neither one of us can see how our reactions to structures in deep space, or abstract noise and images, would be predictable from evolutionary psychology alone.
Unfortunately, while physicists have chemists to help them understand properties of matter at the large scale, when evolutionary psychologists turn to philosophers to help describe, delineate, or explain principles of aesthetics, there is no useful consensus available.
Yeah, you're right. Evolutionary Psychology is basically unfalsifiable. If you can think of a plausible way in which a trait is adaptive, it has evolved, one tiny step at a time, like vision; if you can't think of a plausible way in which a trait is adaptive, it is a spandrel, the by-product of the evolution of an adaptive trait— or the environment has changed, and the trait used to be adaptive. etc. Not that I doubt that Evolutionary Psychology's basic insight is true. But, unfalsifiable, and, so, of course, not a science at all; or hopefully, not yet a science.
But I've never thought that philosophy would be the field that would help turn psychology into a science. I think the fields that are going to turn psychology into a science are neuroscience, and genetics/molecular biology, and ethology: down there figuring out the nuts and bolts of how things really work.
Interesting how I normally hear that: nothing is objective, everything is subjective and we can only approach the "objective" by trying to be intersubjective to the maximum possible degree. Whereas here you are arguing from the reverse direction: "Beauty is subjective". Saying "beauty is subjective" sounds like you're trying to make an objective statement about beauty, which you just said is impossible. Therefore you can't say beauty is subjective.
But it's the same problem, which is that you can't be objective about anything. Deductive logic can lead to objective truths internal to the system, but the "truth" of the system as it applies to the world rests on the priors that deductive logic is taking to be true, which were proposed by empiricism and inductive logic. As we expand our radius of intersubjectivity to each other, inanimate matter, classical physics seemed to remain "objectively" true until we hit relativity/quantum, and we had to update our priors. With beauty we can't even expand our radius of objectivity to other cultures and individuals before finding differences, let alone trying to expand this to animals, plants (do they find water and sun to be beautiful?), etc. What would an attempt at an objective definition of beauty even look like? "that which triggers dopamine" or something equally materially reductive?
Not necessarily, although I appreciate the excuse to revisit Scott's writings from the days when he was young and cute!
I'm just thinking of an ideal philosophy as a discipline which has some sorts of methodologies that can reveal reality, even if only incrementally and in a way that inspires some vague confidence and agreement. Everyone knows science isn't perfect, but everyone still respects it because overall, it works. Potentially, a series of protocols, tools, or methodologies could also be worked out for philosophy.
This is such a weird piece. Do you really think philosophers haven’t been using the principle of non-contradiction in their arguments? It is everywhere, everywhere in philosophy. A lot of the emergence of philosophical empiricism (in the 17th century) comes from disillusionment with rational argumentation that relies on logical principles like non-contradiction to try and establish deductively certain systems.
Thanks for the subscription. 🙂 And for saving Western philosophy ... 😉🙂
But interesting article that I'm still chewing through -- lots of food for thought there, lots of avenues to pursue. Amused to see, in Wikipedia's article on induction, the quip, from C.D. Broad, that induction is "the glory of science and the scandal of philosophy". Seems about right -- too many philosophers, maybe more interested in job security than getting to "The Truth", have been starting off on the "rong" foot.
Offhand, it seems that "deductive and inductive logic" is something of a false dichotomy, induction being more of a hypothesis than an "inexorable" set of rules and laws of inference. Consistent with D.C. Williams' "notable idea" (according to Wikipedia) that "the reliability of statistical sampling solves the problem of induction". Though "correlation is not causation" and all that. But a substantial part of your point if I'm not terribly mistaken.
In any case, somewhat more broadly, and since you're a philosopher of science, I wonder if you've run across Paul Griffiths -- lately at the University of Sydney, now retired, philosopher of science, and co-author of "Genetics and Philosophy" -- and, in particular, his "What are biological sexes?":
I'd sent him a couple of emails which he had kindly responded to with a link to another related paper by Muhammad Ali Khalidi on "Are sexes natural kinds?" I've only more or less skimmed it, enough I think to get the gist of it, and I kinda think Khalidi "snatches defeat from the jaws of victory" at the last moment, but still a useful question to pursue:
Seems to me that much of the transgender clusterfuck -- excuse my French ... -- turns on two profoundly different ways of looking at the sexes. Most people, including too many ostensible biologists and philosophers, see "male" and "female" as, more or less, "immutable identities" based on some "mythic essences" -- as Jane Clare Jones, a UK feminist "philosopher" (the jury is still out ...), once put it. But more rational and credible biologists and philosophers -- Griffiths & Khalidi in particular -- see "male" and "female" as denoting transitory reproductive abilities based on "accidental" properties. As Griffiths puts it in the Abstract to that paper of his:
PG: "Finally, the fact that a species has only two biological sexes does not imply that every member of the species is either male, female or hermaphroditic, or that the sex of every individual organism is clear and determinate. The idea of biological sex is critical for understanding the diversity of life, but ill-suited to the job of determining the social or legal status of human beings as men or women."
The problem in a nutshell.
Which is largely why I have tried to write something of a "Guide for the Perplexed"-- in my most recent post (Rerum cognoscere causas) -- that would provide a broader and deeper justification for the standard biological definitions for the sexes, i.e., to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexless. But of maybe some particular interest to you, my argument is largely based on an article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP, quite a useful resource) on "Mechanisms in Science":
Hard to imagine a more fundamental "natural kind", at least as far as biology is concerned, than the mechanism of "produces large or small gametes", one that characterizes and defines literally millions of species.
> Offhand, it seems that "deductive and inductive logic" is something of a false dichotomy
I do rather agree, although I think his argument is still good overall.
The real trouble of course is how effortlessly this kind of philosophical argumentation can produce monsters like Hume's fork. It would be nice to say "Philosophy makes messes and then philosophy cleans them up," but, would it really be obvious that Eugene's argument was good if we couldn't see that induction obviously worked perfectly well? Without knowing the answer in advance, I don't think philosophy can reliably clean things up. Obviously Eugene thinks it can, but I don't have the heart to test him directly with a simple question like "Does morality exist, and why or why not?" knowing that philosophers still have made minimal progress towards answering it after thousands of years.
Mostly though Steesman, I just wish you could be convinced not to constantly write about sex and gender.
> "I do rather agree, although I think his argument is still good overall."
Hume's? Not quite sure of the nitty-gritties of it myself, but Wikipedia informs me that his original formulation was more to do with the dichotomy between analytic and synthetic statements:
"An analytic [necessary] statement is true via its terms' meanings alone, hence true by definition, like 'Bachelors are unmarried', whereas a synthetic [contingent] statement, concerning external states of affairs, MAY be false, like 'Bachelors age badly'."
Maybe there's something intrinsic to "bachelor" or to swans that make it necessarily true that all of the former "age badly", and that all of the latter are white. But absent a universal cause, an underlying and essential MECHANISM, the conclusions -- "bachelors age badly", "swans are white" -- are only contingent, are only suppositions, and not brute facts.
> " Philosophy makes messes and then philosophy cleans them up,' ..."
Haven't really read all of your essay yet, but kinda think you have your thumbs on the scales, that you're not judging science and philosophy by the same "metrics". One might say the same about science since it hasn't yet resolved the "conflict" between relativity and quantum mechanics. Reminds me of Lee Smolin's "The Trouble with Physics" -- highly recommended, not least because he was highly critical of the lack of progress on that dream of a "Grand Unification". Some have suggested it is something of a chimera if not a wan hope:
But maybe when physicists have "cleaned up" that "mess" then they'll be in a position to throw stones at the philosophers for not having done so in their own bailiwicks? ... 😉🙂
Seems there are inherent limitations in any system of logic -- mathematical, physical, or philosophical. Kind of the nature of the beast. Largely a matter of assumptions, of axioms, of articles of faith that we don't know, can't know, the "truth" of until we get to the end of some chain of "reasoning". NP-Complete? 😉🙂
> " I just wish you could be convinced not to constantly write about sex and gender. ..."
One-trick pony? When the only thing you have in your tool box is a hammer ... 😉🙂
Though "constantly" seems a stretch since it seems the last time I commented on the topic here was last April:
But some reason -- many reasons, in fact -- to argue that the fate of western civilization hangs in the balance on how we resolve that issue, and that you're more a part of the problem than of the solution. Not sure yet whether the latter is because you're "unclear" on some important philosophical principles, or because you're careless, or because you're engaged in some serious, and seriously problematic "motivated reasoning". Lot of that -- all three "modes" of "thinking" -- goin' round these days.
But relative to the former, you at least might appreciate, or you should appreciate, a post at "The TransAtlantic" on the Royal Society -- founded 1660 -- and its motto, on what it has nailed to its masthead: "Nullius in Verba, On No One’s Word". But what is particularly apropos of that "sex and gender issue" is this statement by its author which I think nails the whole problem:
TA: "The dislocations experienced around gender identity ideology have revealed the great threat couched in abnegation of the scientific disposition."
The biological definitions -- analytic statements that are true "by definition" -- stipulate that to be a member of the sex categories is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexless. You may reasonably suggest that there are other definitions, other "analytic statements" that get closer to the bedrock of that "natural kind". Or you can come up with your own idiosyncratic, highly subjective, and quite unscientific definitions for the sexes -- as too many transloonie nutcases insist on doing. But then it ain't biology.
You may wish to consider reading my open letter to the erstwhile reputable biology journal Cell which had asked, apparently in all seriousness, "Is 'sex' a useful category?" to see how far the rot from that "abnegation of the scientific disposition" has progressed -- the prognosis is not encouraging:
Your pronoun was rather "obscure" at best -- there was nothing that gave any indication at all who you were referring to, and quoting "deductive and inductive logic" is most consistent with Hume.
In addition to which, your "induction obviously worked perfectly well" seems to miss the point -- which I expended some effort to try to clarify. It really doesn't work well at all, unless it is clearly understood as a hypothesis -- maybe all swans ARE white?
> "*Rubs temples*"
Like I said, much of your post is something of a clear case of having your thumbs on the scales when it comes to criticizing philosophy. Which Eugene seems to agree with. Which I also expended some effort to show why I thought that way. Not that you seem much willing to consider that argument so it's moot why I should expend any more effort elaborating on its other deficiencies.
> "constantly write about sex and gender."
Fighting words my man ... 😉🙂 Particularly given they didn't hold much water at all, at least here on your Substack. Your gender article in particular is, sorry to say it, riven with no end of contradictions and sloppy reasoning. For one example, you say:
Jack: "what’s your gender? Are you a male or female?
Snail: ... Snails are hermaphrodites [sex, producing both gametes].”
You ask about "gender" then say "there’s something significant about two biological sexes—it’s just that not everyone fits within them." You're conflating sex and gender, changing horses in midstream, despite acknowledging they're different kettles of fish.
You might consider using "male" and "female" for the sexes and "masculine" and "feminine" for the genders, the two halves of a multidimensional gender spectrum. Particularly since you said, "Gender and biological sex are not really the same thing. One is cultural, the other biological; but clearly the two are related."
Make up your mind -- are they the same or different? Conventional wisdom more or less endorses "different", and recognizes that in the general use of "masculine" and "feminine".
For another example, of many, you say: "To say you are an atheist is a good answer to the question 'What religion are you?' "
No it's not. Atheism is the absence of a religion -- "I don't have one" is a better answer. But you and too many others seem to balk at the idea that many people can be of neither sex -- and by standard biological definitions, "sexless" includes about a third of us. But consider an analogy: IF religion was a binary -- say Christianity and Islam -- then atheists are "religion-less", neither Christian nor Muslim. Neither religion nor the sexes are "exhaustive" -- there can be many entities outside those binaries.
> Like I said, much of your post is something of a clear case
Steersman, you clicked the Like button on a post you didn't even read. You also have trouble reading the mood of the person you're having a conversation with.
I've known you for more than a year now, man. You've been banned from another Substack for going on and on about sex and gender, and you're still doing it to me after I asked you not to. I think you have a problem. I think you don't spend enough time really looking at what other people are saying or feeling, most likely because you don't really respect them. You might think about this, or you might just scatter a few more random smilies and return to your own blog, but either way, I'm done with this conversation.
Yes, yes exactly, and then where did philosophy go after this? What did it achieve?
To be clear, I don't think that philosophers haven't been using the principle of non-contradiction in their arguments, but rather I think that philosophers were doing too many things besides using non-contradiction that don't work. If you're genuinely interested in where I'm coming from, you should probably not be starting with this post; you might take a look at earlier posts like this: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/art-can-be-objectively-better-or
For some reason, when physicists and mathematicians follow their usual methods, and even when they reason by the seat of their pants and ignore likely difficulties, everything still comes out easily and well, whereas when you try this in philosophy you sink immediately into the swamp. Do you have any advice for a person who is trying to build a raft for making tentative forays into this swamp?
I think a starting point is to come in with a little more humility. I'm not saying that as a put down. You seem to have constructed 'philosophy' as this monolith of useless nothingness. I read that other piece you wrote, and I think that overall you are coming at this with a deep misunderstanding of what philosophy has done over the course of time.
I'm a philosopher of science by training. One pretty widely agreed on idea in the philosophy of science is this: philosophy is the starting point of all the sciences. That is, if you look at where and how different scientific disciplines begin, they start out with philosophers getting interested enough in a topic to start to develop methods, foundational ideas, etc.
So, for example, although Aristotle was wrong about almost everything as a natural scientist, Galileo was educated in a natural philosophy tradition that existed because of him. Galileo's specific brand of thought experiment that you like was not unique to him. Check out Jean Buridan and Nicole Oresme for example. These guys were monks: scholastic philosophers. But because one part of scholastic philosophy was the natural philosophy of Aristotle, they critiqued Aristotle's physics using thought experiments and came up with ideas such as the concept of impetus, which contributed to the development of inertia, one of the key aspects of the scientific revolution. There is no boundary between natural philosophy and physics, historically. The natural philosophers doing physics just get more specialized and better at math and develop more specific methods and eventually you have a new discipline.
Economics is another good example. Adam Smith is a totally standard enlightenment philosopher who happened to be interested in markets. He is a lot like John Locke and David Hume, in his assumptions, his methods, his topics. His thoughts on how society works (standard thing for philosophers to talk about going back to Plato) were just very very fruitful and people ran with it, developing and mathematising concepts from him and other philosophers of political economy until you have economics.
Machiavelli was a Renaissance humanist who wrote political philosophy. His stuff is still incredibly, incredibly relevant and good. He is in a direct tradition of political philosophy that includes Cicero, Aristotle and Plato. He just has a different take on how to think about politics: don't start with what makes a ruler good or what justice is or what kinds of state there are: start with how you get and keep power (I'm oversimplifying a little, but you get the idea). He's a philosopher. He is also usually considered the first political scientist.
I could go on, but let me direct you to something I wrote that addresses the question of 'does philosophy progress, and if not why not'. The first half is about Hume's problem, and the second half talks about why people won't believe Hume's problem is solved.
Eugene, I want to thank you very much for such a thoughtful response! I feel especially lucky to have attracted your attention, as I've read your essay from Philosophy Now some years ago, and it actually informed some of my more recent attitudes towards the discipline. On reading it again I notice you even cited David Stove, whose essay on What is Wrong With Our Thoughts (Chapter 7 of his Plato Cult) is probably my favorite work by any philosopher of the 20th century.
I am well aware of the way the easier problems in philosophy boiled away from the discipline, leaving a much less tractable residuum. I do note that in your essay you specifically bring up the idea that that these intractable problems swirling around philosophy may only be difficult to *convince* anyone about, rather than being genuinely difficult to solve, but the problem remains essentially the same. Or rather, I suspect that the problem is even worse than you argue there, since I do think you gloss over some problems in your essay, e.g. "We can’t even imagine how a logical contradiction could be true" doesn't take dialetheisms into account.
My main disappointment is that your remarks here at my own blog imply that, ultimately, you haven't come upon any ideas regarding how to move forward. Is that really the case, or, were you simply trying to put a more positive light on what philosophy has been able to accomplish?
That’s cool you read the Hume piece previously! Glad it was useful.
I would say my own skepticism about progress in philosophy is ultimately not that deeply rooted: it’s more based on the idea that it’s hard to build a consensus than that the problems are unamenable to solution. I think even in the difficult residuum of problems left to philosophy departments, questions get answered all the time. But many of those answers will not catch on despite being correct, and many of the answers are also to problems that philosophers raised themselves, and so don’t really accomplish much (consider the refutation of Hume’s problem: if we accept it’s right, we just learned something everyone already knew).
With philosophy specifically I think the main value is that it teaches people to think better. This more often than not has the most benefits when people take that to practical problems outside philosophy, but despite the massive amount of wasted effort philosophers do on occasion do useful work. To take a salient example, pretty much all the thinking on AI risk and superintelligence is philosophical: some of it by actual academic philosophers like Bostrom; some by computer scientists, or mathematicians or politicians, but all of it essentially applied philosophy.
Or to take another example, anything intelligent anyone has said about cultural evolution involves a lot of philosophical work, whether or not the people were philosophers— most aren’t.
Philosophy in the academy has some awful aspects to it but there is still cool stuff that comes out of it, even if most of it is useless.
So I don’t really think there’s a huge problem of how to move forward: it’s happening, especially in the areas that are connected to empirical problems or math and logic. It’s just kind of slow and inefficient and there’s a lot of very redundant back and forth and missing the point and bad work generally. But in some areas genuine progress is made and knowledge expands.
I think non-contradiction is a terrible foundation of philosophy, since it leads to ideas like "free will is an illusion". Since the notion of free will contradicts the mechanistic nature of science, people will try to eliminate it philosophically in the name of non-contradiction.
That will not make us stop talking and reasoning as if free will existed for real. So the entire exercise just makes philosophy as a whole seem ridiculous.
I agree somewhat but from the other end, 'sorta'’ kinda’ with both of you.
A lot of philosophical thickets arise because of quite logical extrapolations, in a very large 'solution' space. (Or art space to quote Hofstadter.) I call them thickets because the amount of time it would take to get to know them, or just learn about them is enormous. Let alone work through them, sift them …. This is why I am a fan of J. N. Nielsen’s substack. I read everything he is cross-posting from a big back catalogue on substack. And his work is just reviewing on philosophy/history|history/philosophy.
If non-contradiction or the excluded middle raises is ugly head it probably means one is using the wrong framework. The tetralemma is a method to be aware of this 'framing' issue to avoid being stuck in a neural-net learning pot-hole. It is not a counter-argument on the same level. It is not a rook taking a bishop, it asks, why are you playing chess here?
Gödelian theorems on incompleteness is another frame raising question at a more meta-level remove, using recursive mapping, and indicates, or intimates, that the ugly-head is a deep part of any logical system. But if so, or if not, we may never know. It may be rash to assume anything. The gap may always remain, even if littler gaps disappear. (This is despite Gödel's intuitions about Plato's intuitions.)
We all love to through stuff into the gap.
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In Pyrrhonist terms (Sextus Empirius was the most notable follower) one does not clunk-on down into contradiction, but where it arises as a gap of understanding (among other occasions) then it is wise to suspend judgement until the numbers or evidence is in. And suspend even unto forever (this is different from the Academic Skeptics who dogmatically say you cannot know), And one does not rashly choose dogma to die by, or shibboleth together with. Ratcheting the whole thing into a logical mechanical boxed set is a rash thing to do they say.
Lots of philosophies/people/cultures do this, even if they are avowedly anti-mechanistic, because they rashly throw stuff into the gap/s. Sometimes they call it the name of god, sometimes they call these axioms, but ya-gotta-start-somewhere. [priors in Bayesian speak]
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This is why I say logic, successful logicks, is a hindsight. It is not a starting place. A gathering of wisdom perhaps.
The logic might be perfect and the gods themselves cannot make 2+2=5 but maths describes all kinds of crazy stuff, but it is in hindsight that we choose the best fit, the best mapping, for now. The best scrapping of axioms, starts, priors.
This wisdom applies to non-contradiction too, and the law of the excluded middle. Some peeps want to wield these laws as if they were some sort of mental hygiene, but this might be rash. (Even if those wielding them like mantras are doctrinal narcissists. This is bad worlding. Rationalists are in danger of this path.)
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"Prediction is hard especially about the future."
Consciousness is a Janus-faced bet-placing effort, as is life, looking back, guessing forward.
But survival often mistakes its success for future-proofing, as if learning finished once we work it out (like say, a law of non-contradiction) (metaphor doesn't give a flying about that mapping, and being alive is more like metaphor than logic.) The non-contradiction and excluded middles are abstract mantras in a hindsight game and are as good as far as they go. But no mantra will stop your children from being eaten by a shark. We don't see the toad of perfection excluding middles successfully on a day to day basis, even if the frog of understanding can see how the toad’s stomach works quite logically.
Even the basic mathematics of counting requires a point-of-view (POV), and logic is an extrapolation of that effort to align marks with consistent mapping across domains. Consistency and coherence require memory. Abstract laws seek power beyond that memory, beyond any POV towards some objective stance, which is thus a derivative of POVs (who may negotiate with each other.)
We must judge where we cut, score, judge, count and can we call the derivative of that a truly objective science? Why is there this bias everywhere we look? Ya-gotta-start-somewhere.
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And this is also why the worries about mechanistic whatevers.... in philosophical thickets... are easily over-emphasized. Non-mechanistic philosophies make the same rash mistakes. (Not all philosophies are analytic).
Note that 'metaphysics' ares often just other peoples' ‘philosophies’. It depends where you start. Where you start depends on fashion.
but mind Keynes' nostrum that any economists who says they do not use theory is simply in the grip of an older theory (I tend to agree more with the less annoying of these two critics in the video discussing the very annoying Sam Harris).
I can't see how science would destroy free will because it is mechanistic. I *can* see how science might possibly do away with free will because it finds the universe is too *unpredictable.*
At the large scale many deterministic systems are chaotic - even very simple systems like a double pendulum behave chaotically: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwT0k09w-jw Most systems show more chaos than this, which is why (for instance) it's impossible to accurately predict the weather indefinitely far into the future.
But science is even less mechanistic at the small scale where human thought seems to be processed, since quantum mechanics holds that the behavior of subatomic particles like electrons is not even deterministic. As in, "What thought was I having? Wait, an electron tunneled and now my neurons are firing in the part of my brain dealing with pies again." And let's face it, apple pies are really, really yummy.
Ah, I interpreted "non-contradiction" in a too strict sense. Science and free will are incompatible or at least difficult to combine, but as you say, they do not contradict each other in the strictest sense of the word.
Evolutionary Psychology posits that appreciation of beauty is adaptive — it is an adaptive trait — that finding things x, y and z beautiful increases the likelihood of surviving and/or producing offspring and/or successfully raising them. This implies that what is considered beautiful is different for each species, and different for different individuals, depending on their life histories/abilities/current needs. As an example, a species or individual who was raised in a certain kind of ecology, has skills and adaptions that allow them to survive/thrive in that ecology, and they will find the landscapes of that type of ecology more attractive than that of ecologies which they are unfamiliar with, ie, that they have no particular survival skills in, etc. This implies that there is ONE aesthetic principal : each species has evolved to have their attention captured by, and to be attracted to certain objects/entities/landscapes that are evolutionarily adaptive for them to notice and respond to.
However, many stimuli that appear evolutionarily novel, originate from hostile environments, or are ultimately useless do sometimes give a powerful aesthetic response: rhythms beaten on a drum, tonal harmonies, polyhedral dice cast in neutral tones, a pentagram on white paper, scenes from beneath the ocean or deep space. At minimum this implies that there is another aesthetic principle besides the one.
But I don't think that means that you can't fool mother nature. People find pornography enjoyable even though watching it doubtless doesn't improve survival or procreation. That just means our environment has changed more rapidly than our ability to adapt. Presumably people who are most easily 'fooled' by pornography vs. 'the real thing' will gradually be eliminated from the gene pool. I've heard various suggestions as to why music, for example is, in a way, functionally equivalent to pornography — all of them are based on the idea that music is simulating something that it is adaptive to pay attention to, and to enjoy experiencing. One explanation I like is that music (or at least the kind of music I like) is harmonic (and thus simulates the sound of happy people's voices rather than angry people's voice). Some people do prefer discordant music, but perhaps they are responding to feelings of boredom, and desire for 'mixing things up'. You can make similar guesses about color schemes in the deep ocean photos that are soothing or exciting, or look (to our imperfectly adapted eyes as if they would be peaceful or fruitful places to live in. But it is easy to come up with 'just so' stories. The real clincher to me is that there may be multiple modules in our brains that respond to different kinds of beauty, but that all of them have to have evolved to exist. They may respond to a wider set of stimuli that just the adaptive ones, but, presumably, if our environment was stable for long enough, they would slowly get better at responding to the stimuli that really is adaptive.
First of all, what you have to say is interesting, and I want to thank you for sharing your ideas.
Yet, you are primarily continuing to discuss evolutionary adaptation, rather than effectively arguing that other phenomena are either not beautiful, or are beautiful but can be subsumed into an evolutionary explanation.
That pornography is exciting is unsurprising, but most people would argue pornography is *not* beautiful.
Happy people's voices do have a different pitch and tambre from angry people's voices, but a single voice doesn't harmonize with itself. The voice pitches of two people speaking naturally will not form thirds, fifths, or any other musically recognizable interval; nor will their syllables naturally form a recognizable rhythm.
And if people find scenes beneath the ocean or deep in space beautiful, they are definitely responding to something outside of their ancestral familiarity with environments promoting survival.
What does the argument from evolutionary adaptiveness have to say regarding why people regard images like this to be beautiful? http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3YwmGwy7t2Q/U0Gpd-qwP4I/AAAAAAAAAVI/gdAlutPLrNY/s1600/ser.jpg
Well, substitute the picture of a beautiful woman for pornography in my example. Our brains are fooled into responding to it in many of the same ways that we would respond to a beautiful woman in person. We find it beautiful. That is adaptive, in the case of the woman, but not in the case of the photo. It is a mal-adaption that we respond to the photo in the same way. We are mal-adapted to our current environment because it has changed and is changing faster than we can evolve.
My claim is, or I guess, Evolutionary Psychology's claim is that everything we find beautiful is either something that it is adaptive for us to find beautiful, or a mal-adaption — the environment has changed too fast, or the other things what ever they are, aren't worth screening out, — greater specificity costs resources, and if it doesn't interfere with our fitness, nature won't take on the extra burden of screening it out.
Here's a really good chapter in a classic book on Evolutionary Psychology: https://archive.org/details/adaptedmindevolu0000unse_p0h5/page/555/mode/1up?view=theater
It looks at the situation from the point of view of which landscapes we find aesthetically satisfying, and how that possibly evolved, and why it was adaptive. It is really interesting, in fact the entire book is very interesting. I'd highly recommend it. I have also seen other discussions of this in terms of why humans find some physical features attractive in potential mates : smooth skin, hip-waist ratio, etc: all are supposedly proxies for fertility or good genes, or good health or good nutrition — all of course, good things to select for in a mate.
Bottom line my point is, that there is no human mental capability that hasn't been acquired by evolutionary processes — the idea that the brain is a collection of modules— and that each one exists because, and only because it was highly valuable to have such a module in our brains performing that function. Thus the human brain is TUNED to notice and respond to certain cues. Obviously we notice and respond to cues that don't seem to have any relationship to survival or procreation or helping our young. My contention is that our brains aren't really finely tuned — either because it didn't provide any real advantage to have them more finely tuned (from the point of view of evolution) or because a beneficial mutation just doesn't happen that often, which means evolution takes a long time.
I understand. What I wonder is, can this framework successfully explain why the Pillairs of Creation, Dark Tranquility's Ex Nihilo, or a monochromatic septagram are beautiful?
Quantum physics predicts many features of chemistry, and would likely have led to a row or two of the Periodic Table without the work of Mendeleev. However, it would not likely explain properties like viscosity or equilibria of forward and reverse reactions without chemistry.
Similarly, evolutionary psychology successfully predicts why we are drawn towards images of food or prospective mates, but it's pretty clear from this discussion that neither one of us can see how our reactions to structures in deep space, or abstract noise and images, would be predictable from evolutionary psychology alone.
Unfortunately, while physicists have chemists to help them understand properties of matter at the large scale, when evolutionary psychologists turn to philosophers to help describe, delineate, or explain principles of aesthetics, there is no useful consensus available.
Yeah, you're right. Evolutionary Psychology is basically unfalsifiable. If you can think of a plausible way in which a trait is adaptive, it has evolved, one tiny step at a time, like vision; if you can't think of a plausible way in which a trait is adaptive, it is a spandrel, the by-product of the evolution of an adaptive trait— or the environment has changed, and the trait used to be adaptive. etc. Not that I doubt that Evolutionary Psychology's basic insight is true. But, unfalsifiable, and, so, of course, not a science at all; or hopefully, not yet a science.
But I've never thought that philosophy would be the field that would help turn psychology into a science. I think the fields that are going to turn psychology into a science are neuroscience, and genetics/molecular biology, and ethology: down there figuring out the nuts and bolts of how things really work.
Interesting how I normally hear that: nothing is objective, everything is subjective and we can only approach the "objective" by trying to be intersubjective to the maximum possible degree. Whereas here you are arguing from the reverse direction: "Beauty is subjective". Saying "beauty is subjective" sounds like you're trying to make an objective statement about beauty, which you just said is impossible. Therefore you can't say beauty is subjective.
But it's the same problem, which is that you can't be objective about anything. Deductive logic can lead to objective truths internal to the system, but the "truth" of the system as it applies to the world rests on the priors that deductive logic is taking to be true, which were proposed by empiricism and inductive logic. As we expand our radius of intersubjectivity to each other, inanimate matter, classical physics seemed to remain "objectively" true until we hit relativity/quantum, and we had to update our priors. With beauty we can't even expand our radius of objectivity to other cultures and individuals before finding differences, let alone trying to expand this to animals, plants (do they find water and sun to be beautiful?), etc. What would an attempt at an objective definition of beauty even look like? "that which triggers dopamine" or something equally materially reductive?
Are you thinking of philosophy as something like this:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/06/raikoth-laws-language-and-society/
A language in which it is only possible to be logical and transparent?
Not necessarily, although I appreciate the excuse to revisit Scott's writings from the days when he was young and cute!
I'm just thinking of an ideal philosophy as a discipline which has some sorts of methodologies that can reveal reality, even if only incrementally and in a way that inspires some vague confidence and agreement. Everyone knows science isn't perfect, but everyone still respects it because overall, it works. Potentially, a series of protocols, tools, or methodologies could also be worked out for philosophy.
This is such a weird piece. Do you really think philosophers haven’t been using the principle of non-contradiction in their arguments? It is everywhere, everywhere in philosophy. A lot of the emergence of philosophical empiricism (in the 17th century) comes from disillusionment with rational argumentation that relies on logical principles like non-contradiction to try and establish deductively certain systems.
Thanks for the subscription. 🙂 And for saving Western philosophy ... 😉🙂
But interesting article that I'm still chewing through -- lots of food for thought there, lots of avenues to pursue. Amused to see, in Wikipedia's article on induction, the quip, from C.D. Broad, that induction is "the glory of science and the scandal of philosophy". Seems about right -- too many philosophers, maybe more interested in job security than getting to "The Truth", have been starting off on the "rong" foot.
Offhand, it seems that "deductive and inductive logic" is something of a false dichotomy, induction being more of a hypothesis than an "inexorable" set of rules and laws of inference. Consistent with D.C. Williams' "notable idea" (according to Wikipedia) that "the reliability of statistical sampling solves the problem of induction". Though "correlation is not causation" and all that. But a substantial part of your point if I'm not terribly mistaken.
In any case, somewhat more broadly, and since you're a philosopher of science, I wonder if you've run across Paul Griffiths -- lately at the University of Sydney, now retired, philosopher of science, and co-author of "Genetics and Philosophy" -- and, in particular, his "What are biological sexes?":
https://philarchive.org/rec/GRIWAB-2
I'd sent him a couple of emails which he had kindly responded to with a link to another related paper by Muhammad Ali Khalidi on "Are sexes natural kinds?" I've only more or less skimmed it, enough I think to get the gist of it, and I kinda think Khalidi "snatches defeat from the jaws of victory" at the last moment, but still a useful question to pursue:
https://philpapers.org/rec/KHAASN
Seems to me that much of the transgender clusterfuck -- excuse my French ... -- turns on two profoundly different ways of looking at the sexes. Most people, including too many ostensible biologists and philosophers, see "male" and "female" as, more or less, "immutable identities" based on some "mythic essences" -- as Jane Clare Jones, a UK feminist "philosopher" (the jury is still out ...), once put it. But more rational and credible biologists and philosophers -- Griffiths & Khalidi in particular -- see "male" and "female" as denoting transitory reproductive abilities based on "accidental" properties. As Griffiths puts it in the Abstract to that paper of his:
PG: "Finally, the fact that a species has only two biological sexes does not imply that every member of the species is either male, female or hermaphroditic, or that the sex of every individual organism is clear and determinate. The idea of biological sex is critical for understanding the diversity of life, but ill-suited to the job of determining the social or legal status of human beings as men or women."
The problem in a nutshell.
Which is largely why I have tried to write something of a "Guide for the Perplexed"-- in my most recent post (Rerum cognoscere causas) -- that would provide a broader and deeper justification for the standard biological definitions for the sexes, i.e., to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexless. But of maybe some particular interest to you, my argument is largely based on an article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP, quite a useful resource) on "Mechanisms in Science":
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/rerum-cognoscere-causas
https://plato.stanford.edu/Archives/win2021/entries/science-mechanisms/#toc
Hard to imagine a more fundamental "natural kind", at least as far as biology is concerned, than the mechanism of "produces large or small gametes", one that characterizes and defines literally millions of species.
> Offhand, it seems that "deductive and inductive logic" is something of a false dichotomy
I do rather agree, although I think his argument is still good overall.
The real trouble of course is how effortlessly this kind of philosophical argumentation can produce monsters like Hume's fork. It would be nice to say "Philosophy makes messes and then philosophy cleans them up," but, would it really be obvious that Eugene's argument was good if we couldn't see that induction obviously worked perfectly well? Without knowing the answer in advance, I don't think philosophy can reliably clean things up. Obviously Eugene thinks it can, but I don't have the heart to test him directly with a simple question like "Does morality exist, and why or why not?" knowing that philosophers still have made minimal progress towards answering it after thousands of years.
Mostly though Steesman, I just wish you could be convinced not to constantly write about sex and gender.
> "I do rather agree, although I think his argument is still good overall."
Hume's? Not quite sure of the nitty-gritties of it myself, but Wikipedia informs me that his original formulation was more to do with the dichotomy between analytic and synthetic statements:
"An analytic [necessary] statement is true via its terms' meanings alone, hence true by definition, like 'Bachelors are unmarried', whereas a synthetic [contingent] statement, concerning external states of affairs, MAY be false, like 'Bachelors age badly'."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hume%27s_fork
Maybe there's something intrinsic to "bachelor" or to swans that make it necessarily true that all of the former "age badly", and that all of the latter are white. But absent a universal cause, an underlying and essential MECHANISM, the conclusions -- "bachelors age badly", "swans are white" -- are only contingent, are only suppositions, and not brute facts.
> " Philosophy makes messes and then philosophy cleans them up,' ..."
Haven't really read all of your essay yet, but kinda think you have your thumbs on the scales, that you're not judging science and philosophy by the same "metrics". One might say the same about science since it hasn't yet resolved the "conflict" between relativity and quantum mechanics. Reminds me of Lee Smolin's "The Trouble with Physics" -- highly recommended, not least because he was highly critical of the lack of progress on that dream of a "Grand Unification". Some have suggested it is something of a chimera if not a wan hope:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything#Arguments_against
But maybe when physicists have "cleaned up" that "mess" then they'll be in a position to throw stones at the philosophers for not having done so in their own bailiwicks? ... 😉🙂
Seems there are inherent limitations in any system of logic -- mathematical, physical, or philosophical. Kind of the nature of the beast. Largely a matter of assumptions, of axioms, of articles of faith that we don't know, can't know, the "truth" of until we get to the end of some chain of "reasoning". NP-Complete? 😉🙂
> " I just wish you could be convinced not to constantly write about sex and gender. ..."
One-trick pony? When the only thing you have in your tool box is a hammer ... 😉🙂
Though "constantly" seems a stretch since it seems the last time I commented on the topic here was last April:
https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/how-many-genders-are-there/comment/14837425
But some reason -- many reasons, in fact -- to argue that the fate of western civilization hangs in the balance on how we resolve that issue, and that you're more a part of the problem than of the solution. Not sure yet whether the latter is because you're "unclear" on some important philosophical principles, or because you're careless, or because you're engaged in some serious, and seriously problematic "motivated reasoning". Lot of that -- all three "modes" of "thinking" -- goin' round these days.
But relative to the former, you at least might appreciate, or you should appreciate, a post at "The TransAtlantic" on the Royal Society -- founded 1660 -- and its motto, on what it has nailed to its masthead: "Nullius in Verba, On No One’s Word". But what is particularly apropos of that "sex and gender issue" is this statement by its author which I think nails the whole problem:
TA: "The dislocations experienced around gender identity ideology have revealed the great threat couched in abnegation of the scientific disposition."
https://thetransatlantic.substack.com/p/self-id-or-nullius-in-verba-between
The biological definitions -- analytic statements that are true "by definition" -- stipulate that to be a member of the sex categories is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexless. You may reasonably suggest that there are other definitions, other "analytic statements" that get closer to the bedrock of that "natural kind". Or you can come up with your own idiosyncratic, highly subjective, and quite unscientific definitions for the sexes -- as too many transloonie nutcases insist on doing. But then it ain't biology.
You may wish to consider reading my open letter to the erstwhile reputable biology journal Cell which had asked, apparently in all seriousness, "Is 'sex' a useful category?" to see how far the rot from that "abnegation of the scientific disposition" has progressed -- the prognosis is not encouraging:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/is-sex-a-useful-category
> > "I do rather agree, although I think his argument is still good overall."
> Hume's?
No, Eugene's argument. And it's not promising when a post-length comment begins with a misunderstanding.
> Haven't really read all of your essay yet
*Rubs temples*
> "No, Eugene's argument."
Your pronoun was rather "obscure" at best -- there was nothing that gave any indication at all who you were referring to, and quoting "deductive and inductive logic" is most consistent with Hume.
In addition to which, your "induction obviously worked perfectly well" seems to miss the point -- which I expended some effort to try to clarify. It really doesn't work well at all, unless it is clearly understood as a hypothesis -- maybe all swans ARE white?
> "*Rubs temples*"
Like I said, much of your post is something of a clear case of having your thumbs on the scales when it comes to criticizing philosophy. Which Eugene seems to agree with. Which I also expended some effort to show why I thought that way. Not that you seem much willing to consider that argument so it's moot why I should expend any more effort elaborating on its other deficiencies.
> "constantly write about sex and gender."
Fighting words my man ... 😉🙂 Particularly given they didn't hold much water at all, at least here on your Substack. Your gender article in particular is, sorry to say it, riven with no end of contradictions and sloppy reasoning. For one example, you say:
Jack: "what’s your gender? Are you a male or female?
Snail: ... Snails are hermaphrodites [sex, producing both gametes].”
You ask about "gender" then say "there’s something significant about two biological sexes—it’s just that not everyone fits within them." You're conflating sex and gender, changing horses in midstream, despite acknowledging they're different kettles of fish.
You might consider using "male" and "female" for the sexes and "masculine" and "feminine" for the genders, the two halves of a multidimensional gender spectrum. Particularly since you said, "Gender and biological sex are not really the same thing. One is cultural, the other biological; but clearly the two are related."
Make up your mind -- are they the same or different? Conventional wisdom more or less endorses "different", and recognizes that in the general use of "masculine" and "feminine".
For another example, of many, you say: "To say you are an atheist is a good answer to the question 'What religion are you?' "
No it's not. Atheism is the absence of a religion -- "I don't have one" is a better answer. But you and too many others seem to balk at the idea that many people can be of neither sex -- and by standard biological definitions, "sexless" includes about a third of us. But consider an analogy: IF religion was a binary -- say Christianity and Islam -- then atheists are "religion-less", neither Christian nor Muslim. Neither religion nor the sexes are "exhaustive" -- there can be many entities outside those binaries.
> > "No, Eugene's argument."
> Your pronoun was rather "obscure" at best
It wasn't really obscure or "obscure."
> > "*Rubs temples*"
> Like I said, much of your post is something of a clear case
Steersman, you clicked the Like button on a post you didn't even read. You also have trouble reading the mood of the person you're having a conversation with.
I've known you for more than a year now, man. You've been banned from another Substack for going on and on about sex and gender, and you're still doing it to me after I asked you not to. I think you have a problem. I think you don't spend enough time really looking at what other people are saying or feeling, most likely because you don't really respect them. You might think about this, or you might just scatter a few more random smilies and return to your own blog, but either way, I'm done with this conversation.
Yes, yes exactly, and then where did philosophy go after this? What did it achieve?
To be clear, I don't think that philosophers haven't been using the principle of non-contradiction in their arguments, but rather I think that philosophers were doing too many things besides using non-contradiction that don't work. If you're genuinely interested in where I'm coming from, you should probably not be starting with this post; you might take a look at earlier posts like this: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/art-can-be-objectively-better-or
For some reason, when physicists and mathematicians follow their usual methods, and even when they reason by the seat of their pants and ignore likely difficulties, everything still comes out easily and well, whereas when you try this in philosophy you sink immediately into the swamp. Do you have any advice for a person who is trying to build a raft for making tentative forays into this swamp?
I think a starting point is to come in with a little more humility. I'm not saying that as a put down. You seem to have constructed 'philosophy' as this monolith of useless nothingness. I read that other piece you wrote, and I think that overall you are coming at this with a deep misunderstanding of what philosophy has done over the course of time.
I'm a philosopher of science by training. One pretty widely agreed on idea in the philosophy of science is this: philosophy is the starting point of all the sciences. That is, if you look at where and how different scientific disciplines begin, they start out with philosophers getting interested enough in a topic to start to develop methods, foundational ideas, etc.
So, for example, although Aristotle was wrong about almost everything as a natural scientist, Galileo was educated in a natural philosophy tradition that existed because of him. Galileo's specific brand of thought experiment that you like was not unique to him. Check out Jean Buridan and Nicole Oresme for example. These guys were monks: scholastic philosophers. But because one part of scholastic philosophy was the natural philosophy of Aristotle, they critiqued Aristotle's physics using thought experiments and came up with ideas such as the concept of impetus, which contributed to the development of inertia, one of the key aspects of the scientific revolution. There is no boundary between natural philosophy and physics, historically. The natural philosophers doing physics just get more specialized and better at math and develop more specific methods and eventually you have a new discipline.
Economics is another good example. Adam Smith is a totally standard enlightenment philosopher who happened to be interested in markets. He is a lot like John Locke and David Hume, in his assumptions, his methods, his topics. His thoughts on how society works (standard thing for philosophers to talk about going back to Plato) were just very very fruitful and people ran with it, developing and mathematising concepts from him and other philosophers of political economy until you have economics.
Machiavelli was a Renaissance humanist who wrote political philosophy. His stuff is still incredibly, incredibly relevant and good. He is in a direct tradition of political philosophy that includes Cicero, Aristotle and Plato. He just has a different take on how to think about politics: don't start with what makes a ruler good or what justice is or what kinds of state there are: start with how you get and keep power (I'm oversimplifying a little, but you get the idea). He's a philosopher. He is also usually considered the first political scientist.
I could go on, but let me direct you to something I wrote that addresses the question of 'does philosophy progress, and if not why not'. The first half is about Hume's problem, and the second half talks about why people won't believe Hume's problem is solved.
https://philosophynow.org/issues/119/How_I_Solved_Humes_Problem_and_Why_Nobody_Will_Believe_Me
Eugene, I want to thank you very much for such a thoughtful response! I feel especially lucky to have attracted your attention, as I've read your essay from Philosophy Now some years ago, and it actually informed some of my more recent attitudes towards the discipline. On reading it again I notice you even cited David Stove, whose essay on What is Wrong With Our Thoughts (Chapter 7 of his Plato Cult) is probably my favorite work by any philosopher of the 20th century.
I am well aware of the way the easier problems in philosophy boiled away from the discipline, leaving a much less tractable residuum. I do note that in your essay you specifically bring up the idea that that these intractable problems swirling around philosophy may only be difficult to *convince* anyone about, rather than being genuinely difficult to solve, but the problem remains essentially the same. Or rather, I suspect that the problem is even worse than you argue there, since I do think you gloss over some problems in your essay, e.g. "We can’t even imagine how a logical contradiction could be true" doesn't take dialetheisms into account.
My main disappointment is that your remarks here at my own blog imply that, ultimately, you haven't come upon any ideas regarding how to move forward. Is that really the case, or, were you simply trying to put a more positive light on what philosophy has been able to accomplish?
That’s cool you read the Hume piece previously! Glad it was useful.
I would say my own skepticism about progress in philosophy is ultimately not that deeply rooted: it’s more based on the idea that it’s hard to build a consensus than that the problems are unamenable to solution. I think even in the difficult residuum of problems left to philosophy departments, questions get answered all the time. But many of those answers will not catch on despite being correct, and many of the answers are also to problems that philosophers raised themselves, and so don’t really accomplish much (consider the refutation of Hume’s problem: if we accept it’s right, we just learned something everyone already knew).
With philosophy specifically I think the main value is that it teaches people to think better. This more often than not has the most benefits when people take that to practical problems outside philosophy, but despite the massive amount of wasted effort philosophers do on occasion do useful work. To take a salient example, pretty much all the thinking on AI risk and superintelligence is philosophical: some of it by actual academic philosophers like Bostrom; some by computer scientists, or mathematicians or politicians, but all of it essentially applied philosophy.
Or to take another example, anything intelligent anyone has said about cultural evolution involves a lot of philosophical work, whether or not the people were philosophers— most aren’t.
Philosophy in the academy has some awful aspects to it but there is still cool stuff that comes out of it, even if most of it is useless.
So I don’t really think there’s a huge problem of how to move forward: it’s happening, especially in the areas that are connected to empirical problems or math and logic. It’s just kind of slow and inefficient and there’s a lot of very redundant back and forth and missing the point and bad work generally. But in some areas genuine progress is made and knowledge expands.
I think non-contradiction is a terrible foundation of philosophy, since it leads to ideas like "free will is an illusion". Since the notion of free will contradicts the mechanistic nature of science, people will try to eliminate it philosophically in the name of non-contradiction.
That will not make us stop talking and reasoning as if free will existed for real. So the entire exercise just makes philosophy as a whole seem ridiculous.
I agree somewhat but from the other end, 'sorta'’ kinda’ with both of you.
A lot of philosophical thickets arise because of quite logical extrapolations, in a very large 'solution' space. (Or art space to quote Hofstadter.) I call them thickets because the amount of time it would take to get to know them, or just learn about them is enormous. Let alone work through them, sift them …. This is why I am a fan of J. N. Nielsen’s substack. I read everything he is cross-posting from a big back catalogue on substack. And his work is just reviewing on philosophy/history|history/philosophy.
Here is a recent one on Vico whose assumes things are made, obviously, and makes very logical arguments, that one can see reflected today in intelligent design arguments. https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/giambattista-vico-and-ideal-eternal
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/tetralemma
If non-contradiction or the excluded middle raises is ugly head it probably means one is using the wrong framework. The tetralemma is a method to be aware of this 'framing' issue to avoid being stuck in a neural-net learning pot-hole. It is not a counter-argument on the same level. It is not a rook taking a bishop, it asks, why are you playing chess here?
Gödelian theorems on incompleteness is another frame raising question at a more meta-level remove, using recursive mapping, and indicates, or intimates, that the ugly-head is a deep part of any logical system. But if so, or if not, we may never know. It may be rash to assume anything. The gap may always remain, even if littler gaps disappear. (This is despite Gödel's intuitions about Plato's intuitions.)
We all love to through stuff into the gap.
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In Pyrrhonist terms (Sextus Empirius was the most notable follower) one does not clunk-on down into contradiction, but where it arises as a gap of understanding (among other occasions) then it is wise to suspend judgement until the numbers or evidence is in. And suspend even unto forever (this is different from the Academic Skeptics who dogmatically say you cannot know), And one does not rashly choose dogma to die by, or shibboleth together with. Ratcheting the whole thing into a logical mechanical boxed set is a rash thing to do they say.
Lots of philosophies/people/cultures do this, even if they are avowedly anti-mechanistic, because they rashly throw stuff into the gap/s. Sometimes they call it the name of god, sometimes they call these axioms, but ya-gotta-start-somewhere. [priors in Bayesian speak]
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This is why I say logic, successful logicks, is a hindsight. It is not a starting place. A gathering of wisdom perhaps.
The logic might be perfect and the gods themselves cannot make 2+2=5 but maths describes all kinds of crazy stuff, but it is in hindsight that we choose the best fit, the best mapping, for now. The best scrapping of axioms, starts, priors.
This wisdom applies to non-contradiction too, and the law of the excluded middle. Some peeps want to wield these laws as if they were some sort of mental hygiene, but this might be rash. (Even if those wielding them like mantras are doctrinal narcissists. This is bad worlding. Rationalists are in danger of this path.)
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"Prediction is hard especially about the future."
Consciousness is a Janus-faced bet-placing effort, as is life, looking back, guessing forward.
But survival often mistakes its success for future-proofing, as if learning finished once we work it out (like say, a law of non-contradiction) (metaphor doesn't give a flying about that mapping, and being alive is more like metaphor than logic.) The non-contradiction and excluded middles are abstract mantras in a hindsight game and are as good as far as they go. But no mantra will stop your children from being eaten by a shark. We don't see the toad of perfection excluding middles successfully on a day to day basis, even if the frog of understanding can see how the toad’s stomach works quite logically.
Even the basic mathematics of counting requires a point-of-view (POV), and logic is an extrapolation of that effort to align marks with consistent mapping across domains. Consistency and coherence require memory. Abstract laws seek power beyond that memory, beyond any POV towards some objective stance, which is thus a derivative of POVs (who may negotiate with each other.)
We must judge where we cut, score, judge, count and can we call the derivative of that a truly objective science? Why is there this bias everywhere we look? Ya-gotta-start-somewhere.
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And this is also why the worries about mechanistic whatevers.... in philosophical thickets... are easily over-emphasized. Non-mechanistic philosophies make the same rash mistakes. (Not all philosophies are analytic).
Note that 'metaphysics' ares often just other peoples' ‘philosophies’. It depends where you start. Where you start depends on fashion.
_________crazy stuff in maths________
Andrej Bauer: Constructive Mathematics - How to Not Believe in the Law of Excluded Middle, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96iHUx0aGDs
Also to here is some professional distaste about the thickets being called ‘boring’ so don't bother with them
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWHV-NtPoYA
but mind Keynes' nostrum that any economists who says they do not use theory is simply in the grip of an older theory (I tend to agree more with the less annoying of these two critics in the video discussing the very annoying Sam Harris).
I can't see how science would destroy free will because it is mechanistic. I *can* see how science might possibly do away with free will because it finds the universe is too *unpredictable.*
At the large scale many deterministic systems are chaotic - even very simple systems like a double pendulum behave chaotically: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwT0k09w-jw Most systems show more chaos than this, which is why (for instance) it's impossible to accurately predict the weather indefinitely far into the future.
But science is even less mechanistic at the small scale where human thought seems to be processed, since quantum mechanics holds that the behavior of subatomic particles like electrons is not even deterministic. As in, "What thought was I having? Wait, an electron tunneled and now my neurons are firing in the part of my brain dealing with pies again." And let's face it, apple pies are really, really yummy.
Ah, I interpreted "non-contradiction" in a too strict sense. Science and free will are incompatible or at least difficult to combine, but as you say, they do not contradict each other in the strictest sense of the word.