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.
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.
posted by Idris at 5:24 PM
2 Comments:
In response to my defense of (big letters) The Psychological Project, Alex points out an area of inquiry where The Psychological Project is obviously the wrong approach: namely, finding out what fire is. That is, using conceptual analysis to figure out what fire is won't get you very far. As Alex put it, "[the scientist's] colleagues were primarily scrutinizing their own minds rather than fire."
Why is this bad? Because "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's a claim here: analyzing your concepts doesn't uncover anything about the world. Now, I could be persnickety and point out that people and their concepts are part of the world, but I'm not going to do that, because I think there's a useful world/concept distinction. So let me make the claim more precise: analyzing your own concepts about x doesn't uncover anything about what x is independently of your concepts. This to me seems undeniable, because tautologous. But there's a more interesting claim here: undertaking a conceptual analysis of perception won't reveal anything about what perception actually is, that is perception independent of our concepts of perception.
But wait, now I'm confused. What is "perception independent of our concepts of perception?" Before I answer that, let me say what fire is independent of our concepts of fire. There's what you might call a narrow sense and a broad sense of conception-independence. The broad sense of conception-independence might be what Kant called the thing-in-itself, which, on the "two aspects" readings of Kant runs something like, "what something is independent of any of our concepts of it"; concepts in this case include things like causality, substance, quantity, being in space and time, etc. What fire looks like if we imagine that causality, substance, etc. are categories that our mind invents in order to make sense of the world is ... well, I don't know what it is. Pretty much all that's left of something like fire when we imagine it uncategorized is very little; perhaps just something that self-identical, if that. What perception looks like from a broadly conception-independent point of view is very little, but so's fire. So it's no slight to metaphysicians if they can't get broad conception-independent access to perception.
Let's look at the narrow sense of conception-independence. Very roughly (I haven't thought of this for a long time), here's the narrow conception-independent story of fire. We have a conception of fire. It runs: billowy, often produces smoke, orange or blue or red or white, you can move right through it, it gives off heat and light, etc. Now, I've just done some (narrow) conceptual analysis of fire. What is fire like independent of those properties? Well, science tells us a story; it describes fire from a perspective that we can't get at using sense-perception, or analysis of our concept of that thing (in this case, fire) sense-perception lets us know about. According to the scientific story of fire, fire is ... well, I don't know the scientific story, but it's going to involve terms like "energy", "bonds", "molecules", and so on. And these are terms that you couldn't get just by sensing fire. So, science gives us a conception-independent account of fire, in the narrow sense of conception-independence.
Now, how would that work with perception? Well, the only thing I can think of is that science can give us an account of the neurological processes that go on when someone perceives something. But what is it for someone to perceive something? What's the concept at stake? In order to answer this question--that is, in order to produce a referent for science to analyze--we have to perform conceptual analysis of perception.
Now, my language was pretty strong there. It's not clear that we "have to" do that; perhaps the unarticulated folk understanding of perception is good enough for scientists to know what kinds of mental behavior they're looking for neural correlates of; but maybe not. And if not, philosophers can help scientists. And even if they can't help them in that way, philosophers could perhaps help scientists interpret their results (if, for instance, idealism was true).
I fear that Rob and I are talking past one another... There’s a tangle of issues here that I fear I am not being clear about. So Rob, I think you’ll have to wait for a more substantial response to your commentary.
Some things get clear about:
The activity of science.
The activity of analysis.
The domain of facts for which scientific activity is/is not an appropriate method.
The domain of facts for which analysis is/is not an appropriate method.
Instead of getting clear about the above, let me begin with what I take to be trivial points. Because I have not been clear, I suspect that Rob is misunderstanding what my worries are.
First, I could mention that Rob and I are in agreement about the trivial but persnickety point that the Psychological Project can be expected to reveal specifically psychological facts – facts about ourselves and our opinions about things. It is standard to ignore this kind of thing and focus on the controversy as we’re doing. So I won’t mention it.
Second, I think Rob thinks I am worried along the following lines: Since our grip on the facts is always causally mediated by our own belief forming dispositions (including, for example, our innate and learned folk theories and their associated taxonomies) we can never _really_ know what the facts are.
A related worry: When we think about things it is inevitable that we think about them as this way or that. But the properties we inevitably think of things as having are not really properties things have. So in some sense our grip on the facts is defective. (See the Churchlands for an example of this kind of claim applied to a particular domain).
If someone were going on about whether or not such and such methodology gives access to the facts independent of our conception of things, then you might be forgiven for supposing he was worried along above lines.
These are not my worries... or I don't think so anyway. In part, this is because I think there is reason not to be worried along the above lines. Things in themselves have an impact on our theorizing via experience. The practice of science is about responding to the impact on us of things by generating knowledge. It succeeds in that. I don’t know exactly how it pulls off this trick, but if I had to guess it does so because it taps into the causal impact on us of things in themselves.
Whatever the right explanation of its knowledge-producing power, science pulls off some interesting tricks: it seems to allow for conceptual innovation. Science introduces new concepts – introduces us to the possibility of ascribing new properties to things. Also scientific practice attends to properties for which it is possible to revise our fundamental understandings. It is now definitive (where definitions are understood here as cultural artifacts) of water that it is H2O, when this wasn’t the case some years ago.
So I do think that it can be useful to say “science reveals things independently of our conception of things”. This indicates several kinds of facts. First, the taxonomies of scientific theories are innovative. Second, science counts as a mode of access to things in themselves – an not just our thinking about things in themselves – because science is evidently constrained by things in themselves and their properties. There is probably more to be said.
OK… so that wasn’t all trivial... What I should like to do next, I guess, is connect Rob’s talk of conceptual-independence in the broad and narrow senses to the above. But that will have to wait. Also, Rob, I’ve been ignoring some substantive issues over the last few days in order to achieve some clarity… so I’ve been ignoring some of your comments in favor of doing what I must first do in order to set up a full-dress response. Just because I haven’t mentioned it yet doesn’t mean I don’t think you’re wrong, wrong, wrong!
I love you though, dude.
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