Tolerance from the other side

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, May 15, 2012

On the religious side, there are those who manage to harmonize with the non believers, and those who respond aggressively. Naturally, I’m more sympathetic to the former.

I often encounter believers whose religiosity is sustained by two guiding motifs: one is the mystery of internal experience and the external cosmos; the other is love. For them, their deepest sensibilities guide their understanding of their religion, and their scriptures are far less important than their personal faith. That’s consonant with my own sense of what it is to be here alive, in this place, in this time and together.

The mystery motif impresses me with its poetry. I don’t dismiss it as mere poetry. There’s more to life than just truth — there’s also sensibility. How we approach inner and outer experience cannot be rationalized: those who are lucky enough to be able to suspend rationality or consistency far enough to be able to believe in a deity, are open to a profound and exalting sensibility of a cosmos shot through with beauty and meaning.

I describe it as poetic because it overlooks the bitter injustice and brutality of the natural and human world. For my part, if there is a god, then I deplore him or her. Mickey Mouse could have done a better job with creation from a moral point of view. At least MM has a conscience and shame and tries to fix his messes. Behemoth and Leviathan notwithstanding, the still small voice has a lot to answer for, and no sophistry is clever enough to satisfy the integrity of my notion of justice. But as poetry, the adoration of a deity is almost enough to melt craggy inconsistencies into a placid release from truth. Those who can buy into it are truly lucky. A long list of inspiring religious music testifies to it.

Love is an appealing place to begin a moral view (though not to libertarians), but dwelling on love is double-edged. Love is wonderful by definition, I venture. But it is not our only nature, and therein lies a danger of denial. For a while I worked for a church (I made my living briefly as a vocalist). The environment struck me as, above all, a ground for cultivating hypocrisy. All this pretending to be loving, denying every genuine mean sentiment, shocked me. It really shocked me. I couldn’t believe it. I’d never been in a social circumstance where denial and hypocrisy was so readily and easily assumed. It seemed to me that the prostitutes who lived in my neighborhood in the LES back in the 80’s were far more honest, decent and real than anyone in their Sunday suits and dresses (except when the occasional male functionary in the church would privately out with a racy or frankly obscene joke).

Humans have a lot of dark emotions. Understanding them is useful, but it just doesn’t work to repress them or deny them. If they lead to harm, avoiding those consequences should be the responsibility of the state, not morality.

That said, I am much readier to listen to believers who base their morality on love, than those who base it on some scripture. I find fundamentalism appalling and threatening: certainty is an approach to battle.

My Proudest Moment (and the problem with Dawkins)

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, May 15, 2012

One of my proudest moments:

A religious student in one of my linguistics classes challenged Darwinian evolution as “just a theory.” For a moment I thought I’d try to explain that the theory of evolution is scientific because it could be wrong, whereas Creationism is not scientific because it can never be wrong, but I realized that even if I spent the rest of the hour explaining that conundrum of falsificationism, they’d come away thinking that science is false and Creationism is necessarily true, so I’d not only be digressing from class topic, but it would be counterproductive.

Instead I suggested that the difference between the millions of years of evolution that resulted in the complexity and usefulness of natural language, on the one hand, and on the other, the clumsy strictures of standard languages, are exactly like the difference between god-given perfection and the imperfect creations of the human hand: helicopters, extraordinary as they are, crash; dragonflies don’t. The theory of evolution is the scientific way of explaining what in religion is called the god-given.

Thereafter whenever I mentioned evolution, I’d parenthetically add, “or in the discourse of religion, the god-given.” Not only did this make her happy, it allowed her to appreciate fully the content of the course without further objection. Here were two opposing theories which now seemed to work together, harmoniously, if not perfectly. It was as if theoretical swords had been turned to plowshares. And that is a desirable result overall and in itself.

When Dawkins calls atheists “brights” he does nothing to sway his opponents, he merely insults them. The religious may be irrational, but they are not stupid. And, after all, we are all irrational, no matter how smart: there is no reason to strive to live; there is no reason to enjoy pleasure; there’s no reason to know truth. There’s no questioning first motives or desire or rationalizing them. Dawkins should understand this, since he knows he’s just vehicle for a selfish gene of no final value.

It’s too often forgotten that the Catholic Church promoted science throughout the Middle Ages until the Church became defensive during the Counter-Reformation. The battling between science and religion leads to pseudo-scientific religious theories like ID which, it seems to me, waste everyone’s time. The whole conflict needs a touch of Dao.

hard to believe

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, October 29, 2011

To the extreme positivists who insist that science should stick with the surface data only, not speculative theories, and that science can only describe the world never explain it, here’s another homegrown example to add to your shortcomings.

Standing in the communal shower at the public pool, my pool-friend the anti-Chomskean linguist, put forward his view of the unfortunate fact that the showers always seem to get too hot to bear. I explained that it is likely because the boiler overheats the reservoir of water. If you turn all the showers at once, to draw that hot water reservior out and bring cold water into the boiler reservoir, you’ll notice that the showers will get cooler.

He scoffed. He, instead, goes from shower to shower, using the few seconds of colder water that has been sitting in the pipe, and cobble together a quick shower from among them.

I pointed out to him, that my theory is falsifiable, and I’ve empirically tested it several times. I turn on all the showers; they get cooler. Let the showers stop; the remaining shower gets too hot again. You could even gauge the rough quantity of the reservoir in the boiler, if you could gather the water in the showers — all without actually going to look at the boiler.

He insists that my theory is mere speculation and not science.It’s not true, he says.

So I asked him for his theory of why the water is too hot but sometimes gets cooler. His answer: there are areas of scalding hot water, and areas of cooler water. That’s all.

Notice that this is a no-theory theory. It’s akin to “God likes it that way.” In fact, it leads to that belief. Why is the water hot now or cooler now? Because it’s hot now or cooler now. The dormitive power. This is not predictive, and prediction is the justification of any theory. Truth can’t be the justification of a theory, because we don’t have absolute access to truth. I mean, it could be that the boiler-deity just does what she likes with the water. No theory can disprove that. But to the extent that my theory is predictive, then who needs the boiler-deity even if she exists? I’ve got a better theory: the boiler-deity theory isn’t predictive even if true, while my theory is predictive even if it isn’t true.

That’s science. Holding that scientists believe their theories are true, is probably the reason people balk at scientism. But scientists themselves don’t believe their theories are true, they hold them because they are predictive or because they are consistent with all the other predictive theories or because they are maximally efficient and informative (elegant). Science is not knowledge so much as an investigation into knowledge contingent on evidence, however that is construed. An investigation is a process, not a body of knowledge. What qualifies as evidence is a bugbear. But that’s as much a problem for the extreme positivist as for a theory-builder.

Stephen Hawking’s latest

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, April 9, 2011

In his The Grand Design Hawking seems to take pains to set the record straight on his view of creation — no need for a prime mover, no intelligent design, no anthropic principle. None of that surprises me, since arguments for prime movers are logically inconsistent, if there’s a design here Mickey Mouse could have done better, and I can’t make coherent head or tail of the anthropic principle. What did surprise me was Hawking’s trashing of Aristotle on a scale with Bishop Tempier’s. He berates him for applying rationality where he should have observed, a peculiarly Procrustean habit of philosophers. In the context of rejecting prime movers and teleological causes (like the anthropic principle and intelligent design) it’s not surprising that Hawking is critical of Aristotle, who relied on both. But it seems a bit extreme. At one point he even says, without any further comment, “Philosophy is dead.”

I’m an Aristotle fan, not for his physics, but for his logic. A good logician doesn’t necessarily make a good empirical scientist and philosophers have always been weak on knowledge. Their motto should be akin to “those who can’t do, teach” — “They who don’t know anything, philosophize.” Perfect for logic, a science without content.

Social illusions, freedom, autonomy, authenticity

 Originally published on Language and Philosophy, March 25, 2011

The Times the other day had an interesting piece about free will: When people are persuaded that their actions are deterministic, they give reign to their desires irrespective of ethics. People who believe themselves to be free agents tend to curb their selfish inclinations in consideration of the consequences for others.

It’s a wonderful support for the notion of moral realism and moral universalism: as soon as people believe they are moral agents, they incline towards the universal principles (see below a couple of posts ago “Jesse Prinz at Philosophy Now”). It’s not conclusive — there might be cultural pressures — but it makes a great test for other cultures. It turns morality into an empirical question, which really is kind of wonderful.

The piece goes on to wonder whether people actually are moral agents — are we free? It seems odd to me that this is still a question. On the one hand, if you reject determinism, you still can’t give an account of freedom. Suppose your choices originate from yourself. So what is that self? If there’s a motivation behind it, then it’s not free. If it has no motivation, then it’s just mere randomness, not a coherent self.

On the other hand, if you accept determinism, there’s no reason to reject selfhood and responsibility. Just because it’s an illusion doesn’t mean you can’t believe it and hold to it, and allow yourself to be treated as if it were real — for the simple reason that you believe it and insist that others believe it too.

Surely we all by now know that the self is an illusion. It isn’t integral, it is moved by unconscious motives, it shifts according to context and emotion, it is deceived by motives that are hidden from itself.

But it’s a useful illusion. The question of agency is one of personal dignity. We accept responsibility in order to maintain the fiction that we have integrity and dignity. Otherwise how would we take credit for our accomplishments? I helped that family — I get to congratulate myself. I wrote that book — I’m proud of myself. I fixed up that chair — how clever I am! My friends like me — me for me, not for some robot. It’s all foolishness, but a very pleasant foolishness.

It’s a sham but one we cherish. And it seems to be determined for us. We all have it as individuals. But it’s also convenient socially. It’s the basis of criminal law and punishment and an integument of social, business, academic, interpersonal interaction.

We don’t hold to it categorically. The criminally insane are not held responsible. We fudge on our own self identity. We are always in a twilight between the illusion of integrity and succumbing to selfish interests, aware or unaware. The whole point of the illusion of free will and agency is a kind of self flattering. It is itself a selfish interest, but with a difference. It’s about human dignity, which is well beyond mere selfishness. It’s noble, even if completely false. And its nobility only emerges in traditional, universalist morality.

The selfhood that brags about its great accomplishments, however delightful to ourselves, is, after all, repulsive to everyone else.

Yet more again (see “Why explain” below)

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, March 19, 2011

Here’s another weakness of empirical inductive statistical observation: it can’t define the range of data to exclude obvious exceptions, exceptions “that  prove the rule” and degraded data. Consider a stuck key on the keyboard. The repetition of letters on the screen has to be included among the behaviors of the key strokes. So the statistical account of the relation between keys and screen letters has to indicate that each stroke can result in multiple letters on the screen. At best it indicates an aberration, but the anomaly doesn’t rise to an indication of failure. It’s just a falsification of the inductive inference. Uninformative.

If you have a description of the machine independent of the stroke-letter correlation, you can systematically rule stuck key behavior out of the data set of machinery-ideal behaviors. The exceptional repetitions are now “mistakes” derived from machinery malfunctioning.

The same applies to linguistics. If the linguist, following Bloomfield or Diver, takes English to be all the utterances of English, how rule out stuttering utterances, stumbling utterances, half-finished sentences? What about utterances spoken by non native speakers who barely know English? How can the empirical purist rule out those speakers?

The generativist has a principled answer. Her account of English is based on a description of an independent phenomenon, the brains of English speakers. The account of those brains in turn depends on an independent description of brain evolution. And it goes like this:

1. All normally developing humans and only humans have this kind of language. Therefore, it is a species trait.

2. Humans learn language without being taught it — they learn it just by exposure. Therefore it is an instinct (via imprinting, “imprinting” broadly defined, along with internal extrapolation and selection).

3. Humans learn language during the maturational period. Therefore native language can be roughly defined by imprinting, selection and extrapolation during the maturational period.

From these three, it follows that only native speakers of English have command of the natural language. And since comprehension is part of the language capacity, the degraded data can be described as mistakes, the utterances of non native speakers can be excluded, and there is no circularity in defining the speakers (the circularity of the definition of English speakers was an embarrassment of the empiricist).

Hempel and Goodman point out the importance of counterfactuals and subjunctive conditionals for laws. But neither of these establish the authority of a law. Of course it’s true that a law provides counterexamples and subjunctive conditionals that mere statistical descriptions can’t. But what justifies the application of the counterfactuals and conditionals? No mere inductive generalization can support a counterfactual beyond mere conjectural hypothesis. What licenses the law is the independent background theory — the description of some other phenomenon that defines and determines the explananda. Newton’s laws of motion are a theory about bodies, not about special planetary motions. The theory of bodies explains the planets and at once categorizes planets as independent bodies like all other independent bodies, not special objects set in Aristotle’s rotating spheres. The independent background theory explains and redefines the phenomena, categorizing them and identifying those that belong and why those that don’t don’t.

If the key were to get stuck, the letters would repeat on the screen. If an utterance were spoken with prepositional phrases embedded with cross relations over its embedding, it would be incomprehensible. The machine explains.

Follow up on Weinberg (see previous post below)

 Originally published on Language and Philosophy, March 16, 2011

To finish up: Weinberg sets out the problem of explanation as a question of fundamentality, generality and derivation. Are Newton’s laws more fundamental than Kepler’s? Maybe not, if the laws are derived from Kepler’s orbits. And Kepler’s orbits, he points out, apply to electrons where Newton’s don’t, so we can’t easily determine which are more general.

I’m suggesting that these are not the right questions at all. It’s a question of, well, questioning. When the purely descriptive inductive inference is falsified, there is no question to ask. You can’t say, why did the key fail? You’ve simply got a statistical degrading. But if you’ve got a theory about the machinery, then you can ask “what went wrong with it?” Then you can fix it. That’s what “why” is all about. How to fix.

When you have a background hypothesis that is more than just a statistical correlation among phenomena, that’s when you can ask, “why?” Conversely, if you ask “why?,” you’re appealing to some hypothesis beyond the statistical description. The two approaches, empirical and generative/law-governed, give very different answers to “how does it work?” One leads to a successful fix, the other to an inferential failure.

To be fair, Weinberg recognizes up front that explanation is part of what science does, and he criticizes those who try to eliminate explanation by reducing it to mere description general or description fundamental or description derivational. As he says, it’s not for scientists to redefine our common language words. If a scientific explanation happens also to be a description, then it is both a description and an explanation: a description of a broad range of phenomena that the description classes together; and, sometimes just by virtue of classing them together, an explanation of those phenomena. No reason for description and explanation to be mutually exclusive.

But I think that those explanations that do no more than categorize — this flower inclines towards the sun because all flowers incline towards the sun — may be explanatory, but it’s little more than a broader inductive generalization. It gives a sneaking feeling of question-begging. Why does this flower incline? Because all flowers do. But why do all flowers do? Somehow, the inductive generalization hasn’t got beyond just describing. Why does this flower incline? Because it’s a flower. Why is it a flower? The answer to that will likely be genuinely circular unless there is a deeper hypothesis, like photosynthesis, than “flowers incline to the sun.”

I don’t see why it would matter whether photosynthesis is more general than inclining, or whether scientists discovered photosynthesis by deriving it from inclining, or whether inclining is more fundamental than photosynthesis. What’s important is that the explanation appeals to something other than flower behavior. Photosynthesis is a phenomenon independent from the flowers. It’s not about the mere inclinations. The science of photosynthesis regards a separate theory, and that theory added to the knowledge of flowers predicts the behavior the empiricist observes among the flowers. But the empiricist doesn’t observe photosynthesis directly. Photosynthesis does not logically require inclinations at all. It’s about sunlight and chemical transformations.

A true non-question begging explanation has to appeal to a theory that is separate from the mere observation.

Now, the curious may ask, so why is there photosynthesis? And there should be a further answer reaching back into genetics, and if the curious ask about that, there should be a further answer reaching even further into basic chemistry and physics, and, if we keep asking, we may get to a final answer about the fundamental physical “laws of nature.” And it’s likely that someday we won’t be able to ask “why” any further. But it won’t be because we don’t know how to look beyond. It’ll be because the universe is just so and there isn’t anything beyond. Maybe.

Will that end in circular answwers and question-begging? I guess, but at least it won’t be our fault.

Why explain?

 Originally published on Lauguage and Philosophy, March 15, 2011

I just read Steven Weinberg’s “Can science explain everything? Anything?” in his Lake Views. Weinberg is a Nobel-prize-winning physicist who writes frequently on science in, among other venues, the NY Review of Books. Here he addresses a basic problem for the philosophy of science: what is an explanation?

Many contend, including some scientists, that science only describes. What purports to be an explanation, they say, is just more description or more general description or broader and more comprehensive description. Others, more contentious still, claim that science should only describe; that any pretense to get beyond description, underneath the phenomena, inside the phenomena, anything but just the phenomena, is philosophy maybe, but not science.

There are, for example, linguists who believe that science must limit itself to the statistical occurrences among words. To them, there is no fixed grammar, only statistical correlations among words. The study of language is the study of those statistical relations only. Positivists, empiricists and behaviorists hold to this purity in their research. It’s admirably spare. For them, language is nothing but the stream of sound and its meaning.

At the other end of the extreme are the linguists who find that the statistical correlations are just the descriptive first step. Discovering the underlying machinery that generates the correlations is the scientific goal. They are looking for the explanatory story, the explanation of the correlations. The empiricits believe that the explanation is unjustified, chimeras. Weinberg asks as well, which explains, the correlations or the discovered machine. Do Newton’s laws explain Kepler or does Kepler explain Newton? Newton derived his laws from Kepler, yet we think Newton explained Kepler. What’s going on?

The romantic scientist dreams of explaining, telling a long and complicated story, full of surprises and apparent digressions that turn out to be essential, a plot that brings all the characters and twists into one simple conclusion. Satisfaction and surprise, that’s what the romantic scientist promises.

I’m a romantic. So I’m going to try my hand in making simplicity out of this troublesome conflict over explanation.

Suppose you’ve got before you a mysterious machine with a screen and a keyboard. When you tap a key a letter appears on the screen. Each keystroke brings a different letter on the screen. What is this thing before you?

The strict empirical positivist will answer with an investigation into the correlation between the keys and the letters. This key to the far left brings up an “a,” the one to its right brings up an “s.” When he’s done, you’ve got a complete inductive account of the keyboard.

Does the “a” key always bring up the letter “a” on the screen? Induction can’t go so far as to prove it, but that is the inductive hypothesis. And if it happens that the “a” fails, then the inductive hypothesis is falsified and the inductive account came to nothing but a statistical probability.

Now, you’re already way ahead of my story. You want to break open the mysterious machine, look at its parts, see how it functions and give an account of why and how the keys relate to what appears on the screen. Why stop at the statistical correlation of the mere phenomena? Don’t we want an explanation of that correlation?

Is that an explanation? Or is it just more description — a deeper description or a description of more stuff related to the correlation? How can science be anything more than just description?

Well, there is a difference between mere description of phenomena and a description that explains. Suppose you’ve figured out the machine and how it appears to work. And suppose now that the “a” stroke suddenly fails to bring up the letter on the screen. Has your hypothesis about the machine failed? Not at all.

When your computer keyboard doesn’t respond, you don’t come to the conclusion that you were wrong all the while about computers: the keys aren’t designed to bring up letters, that’s just a statistical likelihood. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. There’s no more to be said.

No; you don’t stop there. When your keyboard doesn’t work, you think: either the keyboard is broken, or the connection is loose, or the software has a bug or the processor has got a virus, or — you know there’s an explanation in that machine. You know where to look. If worse comes to worst, you know where to go for help at the Apple Store. You see, the statistical probability is minimally informative, too minimal to be qualitatively useful. It’s not explanatory. It doesn’t tell you why. It doesn’t tell you anything when the inductive hypothesis fails. You have no reply to its falsification.

When you’ve explained the machine (described how and why the keys work) and the key fails, your hypothesis doesn’t fail now at all. If the key fails, your hypothesis now has an opportunity for counterfactual support. Because according to your hypothesis, if a key fails, there must be a failure in the mechanism’s hard or software. This is the moment of experimentation. You look to find the mechanical failure. If you find it, then you have additional support for your hypothesis.

And you can experiment further. If you can predict how each mechanical piece works, you can fool around with the mechanism and predict how those changes will change the operations. If you succeed, you’ve got more counterfactual support.  Remove this piece, no “a” on the screen. Replace the piece, restore the “a.”

Getting back to the linguist. The positivist, behaviorist linguist objects to the use of made-up sentences that are a hallmark of generative linguists. If language is just the stream of speech — he’s pounding his fist on this one — how can anything be learnt by inventing experimental sentences that have never been said?

Believe it or not, there are schools of linguistics that hold this purism. No experiments. English is speech spoken among those who understand English. The data of English are only utterances from those speakers.

(Note that the empiricist has a chicken and egg problem. How does he know who the English speakers are? But I think even generativists have to face this one too.)

For starters, the empiricist ignores that comprehension of English is just as much a part of English as speech is. Comprehension may not be the same faculty, but it is patently a part of English and it is closely related to the speech faculty, since people who can’t speak English generally can’t understand it either. That correlation is more than just a coincidence.

And if comprehension is part of English, then the comprehension or lack of comprehension of experimental sentences is a datum of the language, even if the sentence has never been spoken. So there is nothing unscientific in making up experimental sentences. At least they tell us something about comprehension. But not least, if comprehension is integral to the language, they tell us about the structure of the language, its speech indirectly, as well as comprehension directly.

What’s more, when you’ve analysed the grammar through the use of counterfactually supportive experimental sentences that define the language, laying out its boundaries, then you can say when an utterance is a fumbled sentence, or an unfinished sentence, or a sentence distracted midway and returned to. The empiricist, relying only on speech can at best identify statistical aberrations. The generativist can say with confidence: that sentence was half finished, it’s not reflective of English as English speakers know and understand it.

That’s just the beginning of explanatory power. But you have to look behind and beyond the correlations of the phenomena. You have to look at what it is that’s generating those correlations. When you’re done, of course you’ve got another description — a description of a generative machine. But that generative machine does something new for your phenomenal correlations. What had been statistical aberrations in a pure but naive view of phenomena now are counterfactual support for what’s really going on, a reality that was not apparent, but which now is now both apparent itself and apparent in the workings of the phenomenon.

addendum

In linguistics it’s generally not possible to open up the machine and look at it. Linguists usually figure out the machine by experimenting with sentences (see the entry “Syntax for the uncertain” below), not by opening up the skull as you might open up a computer to see what’s inside.