Doxastic Autonomy: A Preview

Can the value in philosophy consist in part in its contribution to something that might be called "Doxastic Autonomy" -- where philosophy would generate this value independently of its value as a source of knowledge? It can produce knowledge, let's suppose, and that is a Very Good Thing, but it can also produce doxastic autonomy.

I have sometimes thought that one good reason to do philosophy is it allows for gaining a kind of ownership over central features of our believing lives. It might be that I began my adult life knowing that P, and I continue to know it, and never ceased to know it. But now, having engaged in thought about foundational issues, I can take special responsibility for my belief that P, while before I couldn't. This talk of ownership suggests close connections to agential concepts.

You also might join Nagel (see The View from Nowhere) in being moved by certain analogies between skepticism and hard determinism to think that our doxastic lives can be defective in virtue of being non-autonomous. The skeptic and the hard determinist both often proceed by showing that we are in the relevant respects leaves on the wind.

I am pretty suspicious of this stuff, though. Partly, the problem has to do with disanalogies between acting/deciding and believing. The will is involved in each in different ways, and you might expect that this has consequences for the applicability of the concept of autonomy. But I think there is something here... so expect more on this soon!

Grace

I saw it in a video:

A weird eclipse light shines over Southern California in the mid-seventies. Among the ruinous detritus of the previous decade, beautiful feral children skate in dry swimming pools.

Don't look over your shoulder. Snarl cool defiance. Soar up over the pool's edge, twist, and whirl back down again. Display amazing feats of arbitrary skill. You are punk before your time.

Again up to the edge.

I think: the world holds its breath for you. Go!

But what you don't know (and won't discover for years) is that since you tumbled from your mother's womb you've been falling -- and won't stop.

This is what no one says.

A Remembrance

Being Five Years Old

One Sunday, after church, I went to sleep in a drowsy sunspot on the rug in my parents' bedroom.

I flattened myself close to the floor - since the warmth hovered only a few inches above it - and looked sideways at the kitten that joined me in the light. Her white fuzz was blindingly over-exposed against the carpet's dark arabesques.

Down the hall (very far away), my brother practiced Fur Elise on the piano: stopping, starting, stopping, starting again.

At a certain point, as I fell asleep, the orange light that shone through my eyelids must have blinked out. Hard to say when.

Later, I tried to describe to my family the dream I'd had: There was a girl and on her head were stacked the following items: a cup and saucer, a grey dove, some pots and pans, and a loaf of bread.

Music Blog: Tradeoff

"Tradeoff" is little tune and the fruit of this last weekend's labors. It is un-utterably funky. I call it "Tradeoff" in light of the way it trades various extremely funky chops to and fro between a flute, an electric piano, and what sounds like a de-tuned guitar (but which is really a synthesized upright bass uptuned two octaves).

Here it is.

A Short Argument: Modal, Schmodal!

Since other possible worlds are spatio-temporally distinct from our own, how things are at another possible world can have no causal influence on our own. Since how things are at another possible world can have no causal influence on our own world, our world would be the way it is no matter how things were at other possible worlds. So our world is the way it is, no matter how things are at other possible worlds.

Obviously something funny is going on here and it probably has something to do with ways our world is. For example, the modal facts -- which sure seem to be ways our world is -- would change with many alterations in how things are at other possible worlds. And a lot of philosophical ink has been spilled in showing how facts that don't seem to be modal facts really are modal -- e.g. causal facts, facts about knowledge, perception and the like. How things are with other possibilities matters more than Grandma might have supposed. So we have reason to believe the argument is unsound.

...and yet...

Imagine, however, that God has the power to change what is possible -- perhaps only for restricted forms of possibility. Suppose, then, that every 10 seconds he institutes changes in the local modal neighborhood such that what is now nomologically possible becomes nomologically impossible. Yet He leaves our world intrinsically untouched. Lots of things would be in flux: the laws of nature (by definition), the causal facts (what causes one thing in one 10 second span will cease to exert causal influence the next), the "epistemic" facts (we'll shift from knowing/perceiving many things to not).

On the other hand, from our perspective (I strongly intuit), nothing will shift. Since these changes are changes that exert no causal influence on us, it will seem as if the world remains unchanged. So part of what remains the same would be our consciousness. But, the sameness is not just phenomenal: similar events still follow one another as before. Even if Xs no longer cause Ys (because the modal facts have shifted), there would seem to be something like causation. Xs still follow Ys -- Xs HUMECAUSE Ys, you might say.

What is preserved if the modal facts are allowed to vary willy-nilly? And anyway, how could the modal facts matter?!

It is also epistemically possible that the imagined scenario is not genuinely possible... it certainly seems to put the Lewis-machinery through the wringer to imagine the space of possible worlds itself being reconfigured. Anyway, you might affirm the following exciting thesis: Modal facts supervene on actual facts, in which case the imagined scenario is impossible.

A technical (and probably totally opaque) note: Since the local modal neighborhood is defined by similarity, God would have to change the accessibility relation while he's at it... or something. But no doubt God could pull it off, whatever is required.

Oh, Canada...

Hat tip to Evan K for his amusing commentary on the upcoming debate about polygamy... Check it out:

Heather Has (N, where N is a positive integer) Mommies

*OK, so linking to other people's blogs is a lazy, terrible excuse for blogging, but, honest, I have been really, really busy goofing off this weekend. Anyway, everyone should read evank.com all the time and this posting can be justified on the grounds that it reminds everyone of this fact.

**Goofing Off = music, reading other people's blogs, dissertating, and working up some material that responds to some of Robby G's sagacity. Neither of this weekend's projects are done. The music is still half-baked and philosophy is hard.

More Music Blogging

I've been trying to blog-on with no success for a little while, so I've some old business to get out of the way before moving on to more substantial matters. To whit: a new bit of computer music... Imagine it is the 1970s and you've been listening to Ziggy Stardust, Pink Floyd's Animals, and some groovy fusion (Weather Report is so cookin', man!). Also, you are amazed at the Apollo landings and expect that 2001 is prophetic. Here is what you'd write... ahh... dig it...

It is a little less crowded than the previous experiments... one must resist the urge to be like a new cook, who characteristically puts to many exotic ingredients into his dishes.

Now what do I have to do to obtain better versions of this software, a synthesizer, and a good microphone for my guitar? ...other than, I mean, getting my Ph.D. and a job first... ahem.

Technical Note: the file is large-ish, so if you're on a PC, save to disc instead of trying to stream it. Any media player will play *.aif files, as far as I can tell.

Rob on Analysis

Rob notes that maybe the psychological project is not so bad. First we cannot hope for better -- as we're in no position to distinguish between what is merely our conception of the facts and what the facts are. Second, our access to the facts is mediated by our conceptions (this is the reason for the first claim). So it seems that I was hankering after too much and my frustration was misplaced.

Imagine a scientist who wants to discover what fire is. His colleagues spend their days generating analyses of fire...

Fred: Is it really necessary that fire be hot? I can imagine a cold flame...

Sally: Maybe being fire is a historical property: you have to involve flames in the account, but they need to be non-deviantly caused by rubbing two sticks together.

Fred: I object! Some guy from the School of Forestry once told me that a fire was caused by lightning!

Sally: Whoah!... Well, that just shows that lightning is a form of stick-rubbing... as Hobbes is well-known to have claimed.

Etc.

The scientist ought to be annoyed: the method of inquiry his colleagues are using doesn't seem to be the sort of thing that ought to reveal the facts about fire. (We know it wouldn't have done the trick. Partly our justification here is empirical: look at how the nature of fire was in fact revealed: it required laboratory work and so forth [hands are waived].)

It seems that the scientist could have provided a more a priori objection: his colleagues were primarily scrutinizing their own minds rather than fire.

Rob's claims would seem out of place if they were made on behalf of the weird fire-science. Now why is that? And, if they are out of place on the behalf of weird science, then, one might have thought, they'd be out of place on behalf of metaphysics.

Of course, Rob should point out, there is a difference between metaphysics and science. I am not sure that the traditional metaphysical questions are amenable to empirical inquiry: we cannot run experiments on causation as we can on fire. Fire is amenable to science because we have a grip on it -- via experience -- independently of our conception of it.

But now I worry: it might be that our access to the facts re: perception is as it would be if we were weird fire-scientists -- which is to say: not really access at all. Their inquiry was unsuited for uncovering the world.

There is some sense in which all our access to the facts (including the facts re: the matter of science) is conception-mediated. I take it that this means something like: people with different conceptions of things will draw different conclusions about what's what. But that this is true, as I guess it probably is (at least in certain domains), doesn't excuse the scientists -- who had some independent grip on the facts (thank you experience!) -- nor does it justify the practice of the analytic metaphysician.

OK, so that is addictive

Check it out:

www.umich.edu/~hughesa/Tabla4.aif

Now I have spent the last two days playing with this music authoring program. My right hand is actually numb from excessive mouse-holding... Can I also expect hairy palms? Ha ha ha... Sorry Grandma.

Expect a return to normal postings.

-Idris

How I spent my Afternoon

At this rate, it is only a few years before computers will allow even the most amateur hack to ROCK YOUR FREAKIN WORLD -- viz.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~hughesa/Master3.aif

Thank you Garage Band.

Dissertation: Analysis as a (Crap) Method

The axe hanging above my head has become especially vivid of late. And so I am resolved to blog on topics relating to my dissertation. Never fear, dear reader (that would be me, as far as I can tell), I'll begin by tying the topic into some of the preoccupations of this blog as it has proceeded thusfar.

Here is the question that began my dissertation efforts: what is it to visually perceive (see) a given particular (rather than nothing at all or something else). The standard view is something like this: to visually perceive a thing is to be subject to an internal state (call it a visual experience) and for this internal state to depend in the right way (probably by being caused by the perceived thing in the right way) on the perceived thing. Thus, giving a thorough theory of visual perception requires two things: giving an account of visual experience and getting straight about the dependence relation.

There are two deep problems with this whole damn project, as far as I can tell. First, determining the right kind of dependence is difficult. Not merely difficult, but maybe essentially incompletable. The experience must depend in the right kind of way on its object. It seems that you can always say more about what this right way is -- it requires causation, for example. But it is not sufficient that the experience be caused by its object. It is further required that the experience be caused by its object in the right way. Maybe in addition it has to be caused in such a way as to counterfactually depend on some range of ways the object could be. But this is not enough: the counterfactual dependence has to be the right kind of counterfactual dependence. Sigh... It seems that the theory is essentially incompletable. If that is the case, I don't know what this means. Does it mean that there cannot be an interesting philosophical theory of perception?

The second problem is especially metaphilosophical. The standard methodology works like this: You provide an initial theory -- based on a consideration of paradigm cases of visual perception. Next, you consider the inevitable counterexamples (where these are revealed by intuition). Now try to accommodate them by refining your analysis. Repeat. (So we have the first problem. There is inductive evidence that the repetition will be endless. And this is upsetting because it is boring. The iterations don't seem to provide any special philosophical pay-off.) The problem with the methodology, other than what seems to be its essential endlessness, is that I do not have confidence that it can be expected to reveal the truth about seeing.

The worry here is that the method seems best suited to merely revealing the our (my?) conception of seeing. Call the project of revealing such a conception the psychological project. But my stance -- qua metaphysician -- is that this is not an interesting question. I want to know what seeing is, not how I/we think about seeing. Moreover, supposing that my project really is (surprise, surprise) the psychological project, it is a problem that the terms of the analysis are theoretically sophisticated terms. If our goal is to reveal our (that includes you Grandma!) conception of the facts, and our conception is limited by the concepts we possess, then it really ought to be illegitimate to give an analysis in terms like counterfactual dependence or possible worlds. Grandma don't know from counterfactual dependence and so you might think that her conception of seeing don't involve any such exotica.

I guess this is the same old post-Quinean problem. And yet many of us philosophers seem to follow a practice that looks like the psychological project. Is there a compelling solution to worries like mine that everyone but me got the memo on?

Politics: Dirty Hands

Does it trouble people who vote Republican that their party has a (recent) past that included being appealing to pro-segregationist southerners -- the Dixiecrats who left the Democratic party during the civil rights movement? Now it is true that the Republicans had traditionally been better friends of the African-Americans -- representing as they did New England's merchant interests and ideology over southern agrarian interests and ideology. That counts for something. But the more recent history -- from the 60s -- seems to trump that. Moreover, the Dixiecrat tradition seems to be alive and well in the Republican party. Vote Republican and throw your hat in with the Klu Klux Klan!

So one worry about voting Republican is the following: Voting is an expressive act and, as with expressive acts generally, it is beyond the power of the individual to determine their content. Voting Republican may very well express solidarity with anti-segregationism.

Voting for Democratic candidates is similarly fraught, by the way. There is a tradition of anti-anti-communism among some Democratic constituencies. Anti-anti-communists were, as far as I can tell from the historical record, willfully blind to the mass murder typical in Stalinist dictatorships. Vote Democrat if you advocate willful blindness to the starvation/torture of millions! You jerk.

Of course, as the history of the Republican Party suggests, traditions change and with them (I guess) the expressive meaning of partisan acts. There are interesting questions, then, about the precise expressive meaning of voting one way or another here-and-now.

Quasi-Realism and Natural Language Semantics

Surely this has been remarked upon elsewhere by someone clever, but if quasi-realism is committed to the view that sentences containing moral terms do not have truth-values (i.e. don't express propositions) but rather truth-like-values (i.e. express accept-o-sitions or some such), then wacky things might be expected to happen to the semantics for natural language.

Compare "Killing Rob softly with my song is fun" and "Killing Rob softly with my song is very wrong". The standard view of all of the expressions (ignoring "wrong" for the moment) in these sentences is that their meaning consists in their contribution to determining a truth-value at different situations. So, for example, the meaning of "Rob" is such as to get together with "Killing __ softly with my song" to determine a value that then gets together with "__ is fun"
to yield, as it happens, TRUE as the value.

Somehow, however, once you enter a moral term, like "wrong" into the sentence, it had better turn out (if quasi-realism is true) that these words function to contribute to determining a truth-like-value (an accept-o-sition) instead.

One way for this to happen would be if every term in the language had two semantic values: one that contributes to determining truth-values and one that contributes to determining truth-like-values. This is cool, I suppose, because it makes work for semanticists and, as we all know, idle hands are the devil's tools. The point about idle hands applies especially to semanticists, who are a motley bunch.

Another way for this to happen, I suppose, would be to retain the normal truth-determining values for terms, but for words like "wrong" to have a type-shifting semantic value: they convert truth-value-determining meanings to truth-like-value-determining meanings. They'd have to take wide-scope over the whole sentence in order to manage this trick... Actually, I am not sure that "scope" is the right term, but they'd have to be last in the computation. All the non-moral terms do their work, making a partial determination of a truth-value and then the moral terms convert this semantic value into a truth-like-value.

Opaque, no? Obviously, I need to sit down and do the math.

I might have expected that if either of the previous two possibilities were actual, then linguists would have stumbled across the quasi-realist phenomenon independently of moral philosophers.

*A third possibility, and one I suspect, not having read his book, that Gibbard advocates: There is no ambiguity. Sentences do not have truth-values in the first instance, but instead express a kind of function that in some circumstances yields a proposition (and thence a truth-value) and in other circumstances yields an accept-o-sition (and thence a truth-like-value).

Frege-Geach-Hughes: Gapping Argument

I have an argument against some version of quasi-realism! Either David Velleman is wrong about Gibbard, or Gibbard is wrong about some of the facts.

David Velleman claims that Gibbard's response to the Frege-Geach problem requires that logical operators -- and I'd guess propositional operators ("believes that", "It is necessarily true that", etc.) -- be ambiguous. It goes like this: take, for example, "It is not the case that __". The standard account has it that negation expresses a function that takes a truth-value as an input and yields a truth value as an output. So, if the input is TRUE, then the output will be FALSE, and the other way around. But the Frege-Geach problem begins with noting that we can say things like the following "It is not the case that your pants are OK." If "It is not the case that __" expresses a truth-function, then this sentence ought to crash the semantic computation -- it ought to be semantically defective. It puts something that lacks a truth-value (on the Gibbardian view) into the scope of a truth-functional operator.

Gibbard's solution to the Frege-Geach problem is to generate a semantic value for moral statements that behaves like a truth-value -- it is bivalent and partitions a space of possible worlds. Gibbard's proposal aims to solve the F-G problem by providing proxies for truth-values -- i.e., truth-like-values.

Now, Velleman claims, operators like "It is not the case that ___" are going to be ambiguous on Gibbard's view. Sometimes they take truth-values as inputs and yield truth-values as outputs. Other times they take truth-like-values and yield truth-like-values.

In general, it is supposed to be a strike against a theory that it postulates ambiguity. I am not sure about that. But it clearly would be a mistake to postulate ambiguity where there is none. And I think there is reason to suppose that the postulated ambiguities don't exist.

Gapping Arguments, as they are called, can be used to test for linguistic ambiguity. If gapping is permitted in a context, then that is reason to suppose that there is no ambiguity in that context. If it is not permitted, then that is reason to suppose that there is ambiguity in that contenxt. You can gap across moral and non-moral contexts. You'll see what this stuff about gapping is all about by examining some examples.

Pardon the crude example, Grandma, but my imagination has been stunted by long exposure to undergraduates:

Claim: "Piss" (verb) is ambiguous.
Justification: "I pissed off John and into the snow." The test sentence is defective (ungrammatical) and so "pissed" is ambiguous. Gapping doesn't work here.

Consider by way of contrast "I ran into the store and then off to work." This test sentence does not show "ran" to be ambiguous. That is: it means the same thing when it takes "into the store" as an argument and when it takes "off to work" as an argument. Gapping does work here.

The Argument:

Claim: "It is false that ___" does gap when applied to moral statements and when applied to non-moral statements. So it ain't ambiguous in those contexts.
Justification: "It is false that those pants are wrong and, additionally, that 2+2 = 5." Gapping works here.

See also "I believe that 2+2 = 4; and that taking Rob's life is wrong, as well." Gapping works.

See also "I believe that 2+2 = 4 and Rob that Melissa is evil." Gapping works.

OK: so either Gibbard is wrong for having committed himself to the ambiguity claim, or he is not wrong because he isn't committed in the way Velleman claims. ...and I am a genius.

A Worry re: Ideal Responder Theory

So an ideal responder would differ from me and you in various ways, while remaining similar in other ways. The ideal responder must escape our various, merely parochial, limitations if his responses are to have any normative authority. On the other hand, however, should his responses be too alien from our own, we cannot accept that his responses ground the precise values we want them to. (Evidently this responder isn't after the Tasty after all, but rather the Nasty!)

Obviously, something like an ideal responder plays a role in our thinking about value. For example, when my conscience is activated I simulate a kind of idealized version of myself to help me determine whether or not an act deserves guilt. Or when I try to determine whether or not, for example, jealousy is warranted, I try to imagine how a creature like myself -- only more sober-minded, or something -- would respond. [Shout out to Remy Debes and Rob Gressis!]

But, here is just one problem with IRTs: it can be a matter of controversy which features of myself the ideal responder must retain and which features the ideal responder must vary. Our grip on which features must vary and which must remain unchanged is to be explained by an independent grip on the values in question. Presumably, if an IRT is supposed to be a realist theory there is some fact of the matter about which features constitute the ideal responder for a given value. And these facts, if I had to guess, would require that the values in question have a status independent of the responder.

Ideal Responder Theory

So here is a view about a certain kind of value -- say the kind that pleasure appears to track: what it is to be valuable in the relevant way is for it to be true that an ideal person would take a certain stance toward it. Call theories along these lines Ideal Responder Theories. One is inclined to describe the stance of the ideal person as being pleased by or as approving.

Note first that this is not a quasi-realist view: if such Ideal Responder Theory is true, then my pleasures are up for evaluation as true or false (fact-matching or not). I need only ask: does my pleasure respond to a feature of things to which an ideal responder would respond with the value-conferring response.

Note two things:

1) This account of the value could not be meant to capture the conception of value embodied in the felt character of pleasure. The reason is simple: pleasure is a conceptually undemanding state. If ideal responder theories require that our representing something as valuable in the relevant way involves possessing the concepts in terms of which the account is given, then they require too much of pleasure. I guess this is probably an obvious point. It is not meant as a criticism, but rather as a qualification on the content of the theories.

2) The temptation to describe the response of the ideal responder as approving or being pleased by should probably be resisted. The ideal responder cannot, if the account is to avoid circularity, respond to the state of affairs in question with a state like our own. That is, his response cannot represent the thing as possessing a value that warrants pleasure independent of his response. [I need an argument here, I know.] This raises the Interesting Question: what kind of response on the part of an ideal responder confers value?

The Truly Tasty

It might be that aliens arrive on Earth years from now, long after our species is gone, and discover my secret stash of Ding-Dongs. (Still fresh, after all those long years!) They, like us, have chemoreceptors on their tongues and assay a taste-test of my Ding-Dongs. "Disgusting!", Thad-welk the Magnificent shrieks, and throws the delicacy to the ground. Sadly, Thad-welk is missing out on the facts. Fact is: Ding-Dongs are tasty. Obviously his tongue is broken, or something.

Why is this silly -- when a similar move regarding the wrongness of killing Rob G., is not so silly? It is no explanation to point out that our moral thinking admits dispute and correction where our thinking about tastiness does not. Instead of explaining, the previous sentence merely reports the facts. What feature of our tastiness thoughts makes attributing a cognitive failure to Thad-welk an unreasonable thing to do?

Hughes Prog: Quasi-Realism/Response-Dependence

Recall the question: how are subjectivist views really any different from error theoretic accounts? The worry, of course, is just that if, for example, it is essential to a thing bearing a value that we respond -- or are disposed to respond -- to it, then our evaluative states are defective.

Now I was asked by the Daily Akratic whether or not I was ashamed, as a long-time student at the Michigan Philosophy Department, to find myself wondering about this. Daily Akratic's question barely warrants explanation, since we are all Michiganites, but, in case grandma is reading, a little explanation...

[If you're not grandma, feel free to skip ahead.]

Explanation for Grandma: Michigan is a hotbed of moral anti-realism, which is to say, a hotbed of subtle attempts to defeat the appearance (google Harman and Mackie) that our moral attitudes are in error. Allan Gibbard, were he to read my blog (!), would no doubt shake his head with mild disappointment.

Gibbard, like Simon Blackburn, advocates what has been called a quasi-realist position regarding moral attitudes. To whit: when we engage in moral thinking -- thinking for example that something is forbidden, or that guilt is warranted -- our thinking is not truth-apt. That is, moral judgment is not like belief in being susceptible to truth or falsity, nor (I'd guess) does it aspire to knowledge. So the appearance of error is explained away with the following move: the moral attitudes are not so much as candidates for epistemic error. They can't lose 'cause they ain't playing.

The standard response to the quasi-realist position is to invoke the Frege-Geach problem. Moral judgements embed in other judgments as if they were truth-apt. For example: Just as I can believe that 2+2 = 5, I can believe that murder is wrong. Also, I can believe that it is true that murder is wrong. Gibbard has some (I trust) clever counter-response involving states of hyper-decision. Whatever. I am inclined to make the Moore maneuver on responses to the Frege-Geach problem. I am dogmatically confident that something is wrong with all of that.

End Explanation for Grandma.

My main beef with quasi-realism comes from its apparent conflict with my own experience of evaluating. Evaluative states just seem intentional. I say: Save the appearances! ...even (a bit weirdly) at the cost of error theory. So, while Gibbard claims that moral attitudes ain't playing the game and therefore cannot lose, I claim that they are playing the game.

So am I ashamed to be expressing worries about subjectivist theories? Well... a little, yes. But, insofar as I am committed to a representationalist conception of most everything, I can start thinking more about the problems for such views... and ignore the Gibbardian subtlies. What do you think? So, ignore quasi-realism for the time being and focus on subjectivist theories.

True for me/Good for me

Recall your irritation at hearing a student say "Well: P might not be true -- since nothing is -- but it is, at least, true for me." The problem is something like this: "true for me" doesn't pick out a kind of truth. Plausibly, then, the content of the student's assertion is just this: I believe P. And this is not news. Moreover, that they believe that P makes them bound by the norm of truth and so insofar as their claim that something is true for them is meant to be part of a package of views denying either the existence of truth or the normative force of truth their position is incoherent.

Merely believing that P, does not somehow make it so. Or, belief does not by itself create truth -- excepting the obvious truths about what is believed. The values in light of which epistemic norms are generated are not realized in the very act of believing.

The student supposes that his belief, independently of any relation to the facts (for there are none), realizes a kind of epistemic value. Because the belief is true for him he is permitted to do the normal things one does with belief: rely on it for inference, act on the basis of it, assert it publicly, not seek justifications for it, etc. I think that this would explain the intent behind claiming that P is true for him. But these practices are only intelligible (permitted) on the supposition that the belief in P is actually regulated by the aim of truth.

My hunch is that someone who claims that pleasure is intrinsically good is doing something like the student who claims -- as part of a nihilistic package of claims -- that P is true for him. And so we ought to be equally irritated... well that is a little strong. There are mitigating circumstances: like a long tradition of this kind of relativism.

Proportional Pleasure

Let me amplify the point I made earlier about pleasure's being bound to track value. Notice that value comes in degrees, as does pleasure. We standardly critique pleasures not just insofar as they respond to a genuine good full stop, but also in regard to the extent to which the pleasure is proportional to the value. To be too pleased about something good can be a problem. To be insufficiently pleased by something good can be a problem. Again, though, I should note that as problems go, being more pleased than you ought to is a very small failing... but a kind of failing nonetheless.

Pleasure is bound by value-tracking norms, b'zatch!

So there are several philosophical threads on which I'd like to blog for the near future. One thread will consist in follow-ups to the Hughes Program. Another, as represented in the parable of the dog, has to do with a collection of worries about our grip on value. I'd like to say a little bit more about this right now. (Sooner or later, I'd like to also do some writing on the topic of my dissertation -- i.e. how particulars are revealed in experience.)

Eventually, I'd like to say more explicitly about the Parable of the Dog, but let me begin with some background. The upshot of the Parable of the Dog, I take it, is that some class of mental states are defective in a way that parallels the way in which belief that falls short of knowledge is defective. So let me say something to indicate the kinds of mental states I'm gunning for.

Sometimes we value things -- that is, we treat things as having some kind of value. Our valuing is typically a matter of being in particular kinds of mental states. One example of such a mental state is the belief that something is good. I am more interested in states other than belief. Some examples: being pleased, being afraid of something, loving, respecting, aspiring, wanting, being prepared to pay particular amounts of money for something, preferring one thing to another, being hungry, etc.

Actually, there are many interesting differences between these states (for example: some are propositional, others not; some have a mind-to-world direction of fit and others have a world-to-mind direction of fit, some are characteristically fundamental and others derivative), but I think they are all alike in constituting ways of treating things as valuable. In what follows I'll refer to these things as evaluative states.

Let me focus on pleasure: Some folks take pleasure to be itself a source of value. That I am pleased is itself a good. This may be true (though I am not convinced), but there is something funny about extending this point to suggest that an explanation of value in a situation bottoms out in the pleasure that occurs in it. There are at least two ways in which the funniness might be brought out.

First, it is my guess that pleasure is bound by norms of goodness-tracking. That is: pleasure ought to be a response to something that is good. (Though, of course, the ought here is not a very strong one. It is not so very bad to find pleasure in, for example, watching figure skating.) If this is right, then pleasure is regulated by the norm of goodness like belief is regulated by the norm of truth.

You might run with the analogy between belief and pleasure as follows: not only is pleasure regulated by some kind of goodness-tracking norm, but, more strongly, its being so bound is constitutive of pleasure.

I think reflection on the experience of pleasure supports something along the above lines. I experience my own pleasure as a response to a value that exists independently of my being pleased. And so, in being pleased, I am in a state that represents as good that about which I seem to be pleased. So it would not be surprising that pleasure should be bound by a value-tracking norm. It is bound by a value-tracking norm because it, as it were, purports to track value. As with any purporting, responsibilities are incurred.

Post Script 1: How does pleasure represent as good?

(Difficult speculation: It is hard to say exactly how this goodness-representing occurs. It need not be that the pleasure, so to speak, says that such-and-such is good -- like a belief might. It representation is more like implicature than assertion. [see below for a wee bit more on implicature] Being pleased represents that about which I seem to be pleased as good only insofar as it is experienced as a response to goodness. So this aspect of its representational character is derivative. It depends on the pleasure having a representational character of its own.)

Post Script 2: Implicature explained for grandma

Example of Implicature: Imagine the following dialogue:

It's pouring rain, you're two hours late already, and the car gets a flat tire.
You say: "This is a fine state of affairs!"
In some sense, it is as if you had said something like "This is a terrible state of affairs!"

Though of course, what your words meant -- what let's say you strictly speaking asserted -- was that this is a fine state of affairs. Implicatures are meanings that go beyond what is strictly speaking asserted. But their doing so is (typically?) parasitic on something having been strictly speaking asserted. You have asserted that things are fine and thereby, in the obviously sucky context, implicated that things really are not fine.

Note that implicatures need not be ironic -- taking back what was asserted. What it takes to be an implicature is to be a kind of meaning that goes beyond what is asserted. Question: "Will Sally be at the meeting?" Answer: "Her car broke down." Note that the answer given does not make an assertion that answers the question, though it plausibly makes an implicature that does.

The Parable of the Dog

Consider the Happy Golden Retriever: what it loves the most is to retrieve things for its master. It finds this pleasurable. Anthropomorphizing a bit: the dog would be subject to a number of evaluative states. If it reflected on its life full of fetching, it would judge its life a good one. It would aspire to retrieve. It would probably become dissatisfied with things if there were a long hiatus in fetching. Etc. To coin an expression: it would value fetching.

There is, of course, an explanation for the dog's syndrome of evaluative states: the happy golden retriever is the end result of intense selective pressures to develop animals that will assist humans in hunting. One very good way of getting them to do so is to confer a reproductive advantage on dogs that find it pleasurable to serve their masters by retrieving. Creatures tend to do what they enjoy. Of course, the happy golden retriever could have belonged to a breed that serves another purpose -- maybe it could have been a happy hound. It could, had its ancestors lived among humans with different priorities (getting dogs to run animals to ground), have found running animals to ground intensely pleasurable. Or one can imagine a breed of dogs selected to chase their own tails. Such dogs would cherish tail chasing.

Now imagine (this is a little stretch, I admit) the golden retriever becomes aware of the explanation for its evaluative states. It might think to itself as follows: I value what I do because I have been bred to do so. I could have been the result of a different breeding history
in which case I would find other things pleasurable. Our happy retriever might then, one imagines, find itself alienated from its evaluations: they will appear arbitrary in a certain way.

"Why is this so great?" it will wonder. At this point the happy retriever should find itself in a pickle, emotionally and intellectually.

Thank goodness nothing in human life is like this. For then we should be subject to something like skepticism, which (instead of showing that our beliefs fail in their aspiration to knowledge) would show some range of our evaluative states to be defective in a way similar to unwarranted belief. Now I wonder what that defect is and what the normative upshot of such an upshot would be. In the grips of the thought that I don't know P, I do not believe P. In the grips of evaluative skepticism, should I take an analogous stance? And what would that be? Etc.

The Hughes Program

I've been putting together a list of what I take to be particularly irritating -- i.e. deep, central, hard -- problems for philosophers. These are problems for everyone in our field. Naturally finding these issues puzzling requires being somehow dissatisfied with the current theories... if there are such. At any rate, there is a cluster of related topics here and if the answers should turn out a particular way, then philosophy is doomed. The issues are one's I've thought need addressing, but have lacked the courage to do so.

1) How is knowledge of moral and modal facts possible?

More of the same: How is knowledge of mathematics possible?

2) What is the use of invoking abstracta in explanations -- numbers, contents, rules, properties, events, etc.?

3) How is subjectivism (projectivism, ideal observer theory, etc.) regarding some topic, different from straight error theory regarding that topic?

[I just made up the term "subjectivism"... but it ought to be fairly clear what it means (even if hard to define) -- viz. there are facts re: some topic, but those facts are constituted by our responses, or dispositions to respond, or something along those lines.]

Why don't the considerations that subjectivists use against non-subjectivist realism imply error theory rather than subjectivism?

4) What is the use of intuitions -- except as a tool for elucidating the facts about our own psychology? I take it that we could ask a similar question about conceivability arguments [If P is conceivable, then P is possible. And: if P is inconceivable, then P is impossible.], probably
motivated by similar concerns.

If you can cook up satisfactory answers to these questions, I'll bear your children... or give doing so serious thought. These questions are as yet a bit un-refined, so obviously I'd like to work on refining them. If you cannot answer them, then no children from me; but if you help me refine them or otherwise enhance the list, then you will win special merit in the eyes of God.

Beginnings

My grandmother probably has her own blog at this point and I want in. I suspect that blogging shall be my entree to fame, riches, and supermodel/nobel-prize-winning girlfriends, so here it goes. I have so much to say and stuff.

I plan on posting on the things that interest me: movies, philosophy, news, the bald spot I am developing (but which I am assured is basically invisible), tasty things, my own superb soul.