Everything and more

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, April 9, 2011

Btw, Wallace’s book on infinity, Everything and More, is an excellent, lucid treatment of the problems within mathematics (which implies scientific theory in general) and its application to the real world.

There are limits at the boundaries not only of mathematics, but also in logics — not only modal logics but even simple first order logic. Reminds me of a Kantian remark Russell made somewhere to the effect that our descriptions of phenomena only approach the phenomena from our descriptive perspective. The things themselves remain utterly mysterious. Worse, our descriptive apparatus is limited. Even ourselves as phenomena (pace Schopenhauer) cannot gain access to ourselves beyond our own descriptive apparatus — language, sensibility, logic and science. We can, at best, observe behavior and derive a few conclusions. Schopenhauer, prior to Darwin and armed only with Eastern religion, mistook that behavior for the thing in itself, when, really, it was just a character of evolutionary survival, not of the entire cosmos of phenomena or noumena. With sufficient scientific research, we approach explanation of both sentient and non sentient behavior … but substance itself? What can you say about the limits of knowledge? Is there a something beyond it or not? I’ve never been impressed with Wittgenstein’s cavalier gnome “It’s not a something, but it’s not a nothing either.” Well, so what? I think Rumsfeld said it better. We can have no access to it, and we don’t even know if there’s a there there.

Which brings me back to the notion of explanation in the sciences: the theory of evolution has explanatory value for psychology (despite Fodor’s just complaint that it is, at this point, merely post hoc and not predictive) because it is a theory independent of emotions or sensibility. It is not just a statistical account of emotions under conditions (the behaviorist model). It is a theory of species development in general. I think Fodor is right that it is post  hoc and unpredictive, but it still has explanatory power, just post hoc. Maybe that’s the best place to rest on Fodor’s complaint: natural selection is explanatory but not yet predictive.

Wallace’s solution

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, April 9, 2011

I’m a little uncomfortable reading Wallace’s book since it was a youthful work not intended for publication, was never published while he lived, and is being published now without his permission. And he left no later comments on it and can’t respond to critics.

Wallace’s solution depends on a scope difference in an alethic tensed modality. Using Taylor’s example: “if the battle occurred, then the admiral must have ordered it” is ambiguous between

1. if the battle occurred, then yesterday it was the case that the admiral must have ordered it

2. if the battle occurred, then it must have been the case that the admiral ordered it

Wallace admits that (1) entails fatalism, but points out that (2) doesn’t. According to (1), the admiral must have ordered the battle, and so had no choice. In (2) the admiral ordered it, but not under duress, as it were, of necessity (must). He had a choice — he might have contemplated several possible worlds in which he orders and several in which he declines to order. It’s just that none of those possible worlds turn out to have been real. That is, yesterday’s world in which the battle was ordered, turns out to have been the only possible world.

But if that’s the only possible world, why is it the only? Wallace seems to show successfully that the answer cannot be the logic alone.

Suppose you are at the moment of ordering. That moment excludes any moment in which you decline to order. That moment includes only moments in which you order the battle. The difference seems to be between whether you have free will or whether you have freedom. Wallace’s draws a nice distinction between fatalism and a kind of post hoc determinism.

Is this a difference without a distinction? If the admiral knows that the moment determines his order (he has no freedom), what does it serve him to have free will? Nothing in the real world. But that accords with our experience: no matter how we plan for the world, the consequences are beyond our ability to control.

The utilitarian/consequentialist effects of determinism and fatalism are equally discouraging. But the entailments for (Kantian)  moral sensibility are completely distinct. Determinism is consistent with holding moral sentiments. Not a fatalist, and that’s why even philosophers spurn it.

On the other hand, while Wallace has found a distinction, I’m not sure that it is telling against Taylor’s view. Relations of necessity among physical effects depend on circumstances, and these are explicit in Taylor’s assumptions. If there is no world in which the order for battle is not given, then the only possible worlds are those in which he chooses to order it. That entails a strange paradox: he is free to choose, but he can only choose one option, not the alternate choice.

How the logic of implication works entirely depends on how you set up the modal system — its axiomata or its inferential rules or both — and its consistency. What makes a system meaningful, assuming it’s consistent, is its usefulness or accuracy. Wallace uses our natural language notions of “it couldn’t have happened” and “it can’t have happened.” That’s good for his system, but not telling against Taylor, since Taylor is specifically using logic against natural language notions which, he is attempting to show, are wrong. And on the other hand,  Wallace’s distinction seems to violate our linguistic, and maybe real-world, understanding of “free.” It may be that the logical syntax should include an inference from

must yesterday order

to

yesterday must order

or it may be that the inference should be dealt with in the semantics, in the model — in any world in which there is only one option, there is no free choice.

Fear of fatalism

Originally published on Language and Philosophy April 8, 2011

Apparently the literature on Taylor’s fatalist argument — the motivation for Wallace’s book (see immediately previous post) — does not include the anepistemic solution I sketched. I’m guessing it’s because everyone is afraid to admit fatalism; everyone wants to believe in free will, and so insists on it. (Believing it and insisting on it are distinct: I insist you have no freedom, but I bet you believe you have. I’ll make a big deal out of that in a moment.)

Having no freedom does not entail making no choices. Freedom ranges over your choices, and your choices depend on your knowledge. If you don’t know the underlying determinations of your choices, those choices will appear to be determined by whatever you do know about. You seem to be making free choices, even though they are not in fact free.

This is not eliminativism, btw. It’s possible to insist that there is no autonomous self and no free will, and still insist that you have a mind and an awareness and your mind contains knowledge of which your mind is aware — or maybe your mind is that awareness of, among other things, that knowledge. Just because I think free will and autonomous self are fictions I am not compelled to give up the mind, knowledge and awareness. Just don’t ask me what awareness is or what role it plays in choice. I’m sure it plays a role, but how, I’m not sure, and having an account is not required for insisting that there is one.

Once you accept determinism, the response to Taylor’s argument is quite simple: the assertion under the modality of real time and its denial in a modality of knowledge don’t contradict. You can know that you are not free and also not know the conditions under which you will choose. So you can insist that no one is free, but still, not knowing the determinations of your choices, you can believe in the fiction of your will. Since you can’t know the sources of your choices, you may believe in any source, including yourself. You can attribute your choices to the devil or the demi-urge or a deity. If you have a sense of personal integrity, you’ll believe that the source is you, because believing in the fiction of you is all you have to be proud of. And those feelings like pride are sui generis. They may be determined by your genetic nature or your cultivated nurture, and you may question them and doubt them, but it’s always you questioning, doubting and feeling. The self has a dual nature: it’s a real melange of sensibilities and thoughts, yet not autonomous. No one has given a good account of it. That’s the appeal of the eliminativists and logical behaviorists and the Wittgensteinian behaviorists. They get on without one.

The formulation in the previous post might be amended to

~K(T) =>

K~K(T)

Not only do we not know the future, but we know that we don’t know. That Rumsfeldian modality suffices to absolves us from fatalism. However deterministic the world is, we, with our limited knowledge, know that we can’t know its determinations. That leaves us with our limited knowledge, so regardless of the facts of the future, we are not in a position to assert anything about it with certainty: the contradictory of K~K(T) is not ~T, but ~K~K(T); the contradictory of ~K(T) is K(T), and there is no entailment from ~K(T) in the present to K(T) or ~K(T) in the future — people change their minds or forget from time to time.