Notes

I am not going to be able to read Jaspers' book soon, because I will not be able to get to any library soon for that purpose. However, Herman Pietersen's article in the previous entry is at least a place to start. Pietersen starts by noting the major reason for Jaspers' choice of this particular group of four people: A more mundane, and partial explanation is that the book originally forms part of one of Jaspers voluminous works on philosophy and philosophers, and that his interest in the four men had a more proper philosophical goal, namely, to examine the nature and impact of their thought and actions from a comparative perspective, as a venture into philosophical anthropology. He then goes on to state that he has his own reason for singling out these four people: That is, namely, that these individuals can also be shown to be major exemplars of distinct (meta-paradigmatic) types of understanding in human history. In this respect, I am very intrigued by h

It sounds like a work for you to have a look at, in that case, is Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus (1962) by Karl Jaspers. He examines the lives of such paradigmatic individuals. Here, I am aided by an article in The Examined Life , by Herman Pietersen, called " Paradigmatic ways of understanding Karl Jaspers' 'Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus' ". On page 1 of the article, Pietersen states that the four paradigmatic individuals: had a mission of guiding the human spirit to the level of ultimate values; and shaped and still shape the minds and cultures of large parts of humanity. Most people will presumably never obey the ethics of these individuals with much consistency. But that does not mean that the ethics stop being worth preaching. For one thing, people's lip service to said ethics can't be all hypocrisy, in that people might well be even worse if they did not prach said ethics. In one of the good passages in Metaphysics as a Guide to M

What happens, however, if one judges various actions as moral or immoral, but is a hypocrite about one's own judgements? This was exactly the problem that I encountered that sparked the Masters thesis in the first place. I was looking at a community of scholars who seemed content to prescribe ethical theories that not only nobody else was going to obey, but they would not obey themselves. In this case, they could be said to be making moral observations, from which one could legitimately derive a centralist, utilitarian theory. Yet this theory would only be hypocritically supported. I would not mind if nobody else obeyed my ethics, but I would still have to obey it, otherwise I would never be convinced that it was a worthwhile activity. Yes, but in this respect, you are up against an ivory tower mentality. The idea is that the study of ethics is not tightly connected to practice, so that hypocrisy, if it arises, is a separate issue. It cannot be a separate issue, because thi

Discuss: The difficulty of classifying any view as non-naturalistic is, at bottom, the cost of allowing non-reductive versions of naturalism. It seems to me that if you are going to call yourself a non-reductive naturalist, then you leave yourself open to the same challenge. Can you give us an example of a non-naturalistic ethics? Well, the short answer is that a non-naturalistic ethics is one that is not grounded in moral observations. In section 4.2 of my thesis, I explore the possibility of moral observations. I note that if we think of an observation as a bare percept, then it seems clear that moral observations are not possible, because we only percieve facts as such, not values. However, an observation involves more than a bare percept; it also involves an interpretation of that perception that infuses it it with a point of view. This point of view can consist in an intuition or value that couples with a perception, but it could also be something as complex as a theor

I tried to get The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding from the university library today after work, but the library still has limited hours until 7th March. It won't be open after business hours until Tuesday, by which time I will be busy rehearsing for my play, so I won't really be able to get to the library until 8th March anyway. I was only curious about the term anyway. But if attitudinalism is meant to be similar to non-cognitivism, then I am sure I will not accept that as an approach to ethics, because as I understand it, ethical non-cognitivism means that moral statements have no truth-value, which I cannot believe. They do have a truth-value; it is simply what determines that truth-value that can be problematic. The difficulty of classifying any view as non-naturalistic is, at bottom, the cost of allowing non-reductive versions of naturalism. Excuse me, WTF is non-reductive naturalism?? Some lecture notes from the University of Michigan

I refer to the article mentioned in the previous entry, Scientific Naturalism and the Value of Knowledge : This motivation for the view constrains the kind of epistemological theory one can adopt, and my goal is to show how these constraints push inexorably toward a kind of attitudinalism or non-cognitivism in epistemology, an attitudinalism modeled on non-cognitivist approaches in ethics. OK, I want definitions for attitudinalism and non-cognitivism before I go any further. Well, "attitudinalism" is hardly a common word. It only appears in Google on 19 pages, and the top-ranked page is a reference to a book written by the same author who wrote the above article, Jonathan L. Kvanvig. Nothing else on the page looks like an explicit definition of the term. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy does not include it, and the only place where it seems clearly explicated is indeed in this book written by Kvanvig. Given the fact that this book was only published in October

I have gained an insight into the nature of a Kuhnian paradigm from reading that section on the regress problem. I had no idea that holistic coherentism could explain it so effectively, but it clearly can. Surely I can't be the only person who has noticed this. Trying the search string, "holistic coherentism Kuhnian paradigms", nothing comes up. On the string, "holistic coherentism scientific paradigms", I get 70 results. I guess that's typical, that the contributor of a new idea often doesn't get the credit that he deserves, even if everybody ends up using his idea--unless he's Edward de Bono. ;) The top-ranking article is Scientific Naturalism and the Value of Knowledge . If I am going to contribute to this general area of study, then this sounds like the sort of thing that I should be reading, so let's do that. Philosophical naturalism is, arguably, the dominant philosophical tradition in contemporary western philosophy. I think

According to foundationalism, the regress is found by finding a stopping point for the regress in terms of foundational beliefs that are justified but not wholly justified by some relationship to further beliefs. (My emphasis.) This is a turning point. According to this claim, some foundational beliefs could therefore be justified but not wholly justified by some relationship to beliefs derived from them. This sounds like subsumptive justification is more compatible with foundationalism than I thought. Coherentists deny the need and the possibility of finding such stopping points for the regress. In that case, the specific use for subsumptive justification that I have in mind is definitely foundationalist. I really don't think that science progresses if it isn't supported by some kind of foundationalism, as paradigmatic assumptions. This is what allows scientific debate to end, and be resolved one way or the other in order to move onwards from there. Sometimes

Just reading more of the article on Coherentist Theories of Justification . I already note a statement made about the infamous "regress problem" in epistemology: Skeptics maintain that the regress cannot be avoided and hence that justification is impossible. Now, I am sure that I never heard of this problem when I actually studied epistemology. Nevertheless, it does seem to me to be a necessary first step in that study. I actually arrived at this skeptical conclusion myself as an undergraduate, based on my own reflection at the time that I was studying epistemology. My--very unclear--language at the time that I used to express this view was "Nothing can be ultimately justified", by which I meant that nothing can be justified in the final analysis because it ultimately rests upon some assumption(s) that has not been justified. Infinitists endorse the regress as well, but argue that the regress is not vicious and hence does not show that justification is impo

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a valuable internet resource. I here refer to its article on coherentist theories of justification . The article says: Coherentists typically hold that justification is solely a function of some relationship between beliefs, none of which are privileged beliefs in the way maintained by foundationlists, with different varieties of coherentism individuated by the specific relationship among beliefs appealed to by that version. The above characterisation of coherentism must be understood as very weak. Specifically, it is really only the negation of foundationalism: Coherentism thus claims, minimally, that not all knowledge and justified belief rest ultimately on a foundation of noninferential knowledge or justified belief. If we understand coherentism in this weak sense, then clearly subsumptive justification is a form of coherentism. However, note that because coherentism is so broadly construed, radically different systems of j

The two paradigms of justification are foundationalism and coherentism; where does subsumptive justification fit in with that? Foundationalism is the method of justification whereby derived claims are justified in terms of fundamental claims. Coherentism is justification whereby claims are justified in terms of how well they cohere with other claims. Well, it clearly doesn't seem to fit in with either of those, although it can be seen to be the reverse of foundationalism. So really, are we not talking about a kind of reverse foundationalism? 'Subsumptive justification' is a bit of a mouthful, so let's just call it 'derivationalism' instead, since I think that a clear case can be made for it as its own kind of justification. Note that one advantage of derivationalism is that it can be fruitfully combined with foundationalism while moderated by coherentism. Both kinds of justification rely on a conceptual hierarchy of claims, with higher claims derivin

True non-coercive agreement is not possible without a commonality of shared assumptions. These assumptions can themselves be argued for or against. In that case, however, the arguments will still themselves ultimately have to rely on assumptions, making for infinite potential for disagreements. How, then, can agreement be non-coercive? We have already seen that science requires assumptions to be made on the grounds that they thereby make an opening for the reception of other truths that depend upon them. This is worded deliberately similarly to a claim of Jeremy Bentham's: There are truths which it is necessary to prove; not for their own sakes, because they are acknowledged, but that an opening may be made for the reception of other truths which depend upon them. (Source: Bentham, Jeremy, Of Promulgation of the Laws and Promulgation of the Reasons Thereof , Section 2, Promulgation of Reasons ) Note, however, that science achieves its progress not by attempting to pr

I think many misunderstandings can emerge because of a confusion of incommensurability (read: lack of level 2 commensurability) with relativism. Cultures with radically disparate histories can arrive at similarly disparate foundational assumptions about ethics. This can result in a certain degree of cultural incommensurability, at least in the short term, but it does not follow that the meta-ethical thesis of cultural relativism is correct. The claim of cultural relativism, I take it, is that whatever a culture decides is right-for-it, so that it is inappropriate to disapprove of the practices of other cultures. This cannot be correct, if only because we naturally value not only that we practice a certain thing ourselves, but also that others practice it as well. If we are to obey the rules of rational discourse, then we do not value forcing cultures to practice our ways if we think that their intentions are good. Instead, we are simply to attempt to persuade them by means of rational

I had a section in my thesis with this title as well. I don't remember exactly what I covered in that section now, but I probably have a sharper idea of a moral observation now than I did back then anyway. The basic idea comes from a set of two examples suggested by my lecturer in Moral Psychology. Consider a physicist seeing a streak of light in the window of a cloud chamber and thinking, "That's a pi meson." Next, consider someone looking at some kids setting a cat on fire, and thinking, (presumably among other things,) "That's wrong." There is an enormous body of theory that must exist for the physicist to make this 'observation'. How, then, is it different from the values that must exist in the latter example to make the judgement of wrongness from the empirical data provided? It seems that both agents have an equal claim to have made an "observation". What, then, makes a moral observation different from a garden-variety mor

In the journey discussed at the end of the previous entry, however, I do not want to get too far ahead of myself. I was very impressed by a discussion in Lila: An Enquiry into Morals, by Robert M. Pirsig. The basic claim was that top-down development, at least of books, is not nearly so efficient as bottom-up development. Pirsig had thousands of little slips of paper that he used like note cards that he kept filed away, and it made it very easy for him to develop his book when he decided that it was time. All he had to do was take any two slips, say, "Which comes first?", and arrange them in the appropriate order. To integrate a new slip into the queue, all he had to do was ask himself the same question with the top slip, and then work his way down the queue until he determined its proper place. Over time, he found that the slips were organising themselves into sections, the sections into chapters, the chapters into parts, and the parts into a book. Now that's develop

I have reached a point where I am quite satisfied with the Theory of Commensurability as I currently state it. Unfortunately, it is difficult for me to really know what to do with it now that I have polished it until it shines. I can do little but refer to my internal reviewer's comments about my Masters thesis, to know why this theory was considered a contribution. He said that it seemed to him a real contribution to discussion about the different kinds of human disagreement that are within the pale of rationality. My thought is that when we wonder about how ethics and, say, science differ, it is good to focus on the nature of disagreement in the different domains. The reviewer said this thought was a good one, and I made it well and really added to discussion that has been going on about this important issue. So does that mean that we should be looking at how ethics differs from science? I don't see why not. I know that I went to great lengths in a previous blog e

I'm a little concerned about level 3 now. It seems a little strange to talk about commensurability when there is no possibility in principle of non-coercive agreement. That certainly sounds more like a condition of incommensurability than commensurability, and this is how Kuhn uses the word "incommensurability" himself. Do you think that you could change the scale so that you just had levels 1 and 2 of commensurability, and then you could have two corresponding levels of incommensurability? Level 1 incommensurability would be the absence of level 2 commensurability, and level 2 incommensurability would be the absence of level 1 commensurability. What I like right now about the three levels of commensurability is the elegant way that they represent the Trade-off of Science: At the prescientific stage, pre-science starts off with nothing but level 3 claims. To achieve a paradigm, pre-science trades in some of its level 3 claims for level 1 claims in order that the re

I want to elaborate on my reductio against level 4 disagreements, mentioned earlier this morning. It may be that a person cannot form cogent arguments for his own claim but will not admit defeat of his view. In order for this to be a level 2 defeat, his argument must really be rationally indefensible in principle--meaning that, somewhere at least, he must be contradicting some assumptions that have been made. These assumptions can be either exclusively his own, or some level 1 assumptions, or both. If he really is this irrational, he might well not admit this defeat of his position, but because the cogency must therefore exist on the side of the negation of his view, his claim is still a level 2 falsehood. In other words, a dispute can exist at level 2 independently of whether both sides are willing to admit that a proper resolution has been made. This is simply part of the nature of rational discourse, and part of why it can be so difficult to resolve disputes. We don't always kno

The previous section led me to reflect that 'commonality' is a better keyword for level 1 commensurability than 'agreement'. I have therefore changed it accordingly, but as this is not a substantive change in my understanding of commensurability, I have not seen fit to give it a new version number. Furthermore, I think that the propositions put forward in the account of commensurability are now relatively strong and detailed. I therefore now think that I have enough there to constitute a veritable theory of commensurability. I will therefore name it as such in my hypertext link on the right-hand side of the page.

Actually, in strengthening the demarcations between the different levels of commensurability, I no longer consider any level viable below level 3. Level 3 now denotes the impossibility in principle of non-coercive agreement, due to fundamental divergence of basic assumptions. It is now, therefore, a proper Kuhnian account of Kuhnian incommensurability. In order to contain a level below 3, therefore, one would have to be saying that at this level, the possibility of forming cogent arguments for or against the claim in question is impossible. Yet this cannot be the case if we are meant to understand any one dispute as simply involving the truth-value of a specific claim (as I do). Let's suppose for the sake of a reductio ad absurdum that a level 4 dispute is in fact possible. If you cannot form a cogent argument that proposition A is true, say, then this ipso facto constitutes a commenusurately cogent argument that not-A is true, and therefore falls under a level 2, not a level 4, d

In order to be consistent with Kuhn's use of the term 'incommensurable', then I should state that level 3 discussions are unresolvable in principle. Without a commonality of shared assumptions (level 1), any non-coercive agreement is impossible in principle (level 2). Note that this is a much stronger claim than that the justification for calling a debate level 3 is that no non-coercive agreement is likely. If the debate is properly at level 3, then insufficient commonaly of assumptions exists for the debate to be resolved one way or the other in principle. This will involve a strengthening of my characterisations of the different levels of incommensurability in my account. This is a minor revision, so the new version number of the account will be 3.1.

The natural sciences used to consist of a branch of philosophy because once upon a time they were at level 3. While a field consists of level 3 claims, it is not capable of progress. Progress, as that term is normally applied to intellectual endeavours, involves level 2 claims, so that the progress as such is progress towards non-coercive agreement. How, therefore, did natural philosophy manage to rid itself of its level 3 claims so that it could finally progress, and is the rest of philosophy capable of doing the same thing? The trade-off of science is that it exchanges some of its level 3 claims for level 1 claims. That is, it takes some of its unagreeable issues and simply resolves them one way or the other by means of respective stipulative assumptions--the level 1 claims. The justification of these assumptions is purely that they provide a framework within which the remaining claims that can still be made are all at level 2. Hence, in order for science to progress, it must nec

OK, I now have a permanent link on the right hand side to my account of commensurability. Anybody who visits the page can be taken to it at any time, and know that they will be getting the very latest version. The current version is a major revision of commensurability, so its new version number is 3.0. Major revision from 2.1 has been the rollback to six levels of commensurability. I convinced myself after formalising the representation of the account that the bottom two levels still made sense. I am now much clearer about what a level 1 claim is, so that a claim like "The moon is made of green cheese" can indeed be at level 1, but not necessarily so. If both sides agree that it is false, then it is on level 1, but if both sides disagree on the matter, then it can (must) be at a lower level. More can be said about this yet, but I'll save it for another entry. I note that the spacing is very wide in the entry. Unfortunately, there's not a lot that I can do abou

I was actually extremely skeptical about the claim at the end of the previous entry at the time that I took the course. I wrote as much in my essay, although at the time, I did not present the view at all persuasively. But basically, the reason for my skepticism was that I believed that no matter what theory you chose to adopt, it would not change your practices, because all the people around me just seemed to be hypocrites. These intutitions eventually found their way into my Masters thesis. I was trying to assemble some groundwork for an eventual theory that would be both preachable in principle and liveable in practice, and was looking to the epistemological tradition of empiricism to achieve it. Could I continue this line of reasoning today? Well, based on my blog entry titled " The Minimum for Moral Judgements ", I would say that if I were to re-write my thesis today, it would be nothing like it was back then. To start off with, my thesis back then began with a destr

Any level 3 enterprise has to find legitimacy in debate through means other than arriving at a consensus. The ultimate goal of any rational discourse is non-coercive consensus, but in the absence of its likelihood, one must content oneself with a lower level of achievement. For level 3 debates, that achievement is generally given as the deeper understanding of one's own view through the formation of intellectually respectable arguments. Level 3 debates also have some service in seeking the truth. If nothing else, they eliminate really silly claims from the spectrum of possible opinions a person can hold, simply because one cannot at the end of the day make them respectable. (Of course, some such claims will still be appreciable, such as certain cultural or religious claims, and a cultural exchange and mutual understanding is the goal of such level 4 discourse.) What, then, can philosophy do with this as its goal? Well, it is capable of a certain kind of progress of which science

Is it possible to adequately define a philosophical paradigm? Based on my investigations over the last few days, I would argue that it is a logical impossibility. The very reason that science rests at level 2 commensurability is precisely that it eschews all arguments that could reside at level 3. It does this by making a basic assumption about the matter on the grounds of the attractiveness of the theory that results, and on the fruitfulness of the experiments it suggests. The trouble is, these matters are exactly the kind of things that philosophers want to argue in the first place. In other words, the arguments science must of necessity eschew are precisely the kind of arguments on which philosophy thrives. The very brevity of my entry on the free will problem provides an example of this. If we are to incorporate free will or its absence into any level 2 paradigm, then our specific resolution relative to any level 2 field of enquiry seems obvious, and difficult to write much ab

Today I would like to elaborate on a passage from my entry on the use of farfetched examples : [M]ight we have simply decided on other grounds that eating meat and swinging the bat are morally different after all? If nothing else, they must surely reveal very different things about the character of the person who would do either. I often find this the only way to argue against some of the more altruistic moral theories. Singer, for example, employs an example in Practical Ethics that is very similar to Nozick's cowshead example as it pertains to Third World countries. He notes that we spend our money on ourselves in many unnecessary ways while people are starving across the world. Because he is a utilitarian, he is committed to claiming that this is the moral equivalent of murder (Singer's phrase). To illustrate this, he employs an example of someone actually travelling to a Third World country and machine-gunning down a village of people. Elsewhere in the chapter, h

Writing that last entry made me realise something about level 1 commensurability. Any claims about which two speakers can be in agreement relative to a particular argument can be said to be at level 1 commensurability relative to that argument. It stands to reason that not all of those claims will be 'trivial'. For example, a political argument between two left-wing theorists will quite legimitately imply many level 1 claims with which a right-wing theorist would never in her right mind agree. I was not fully aware of this at the time that I first devised the theory of commensurability, so now I will have to: Acknowledge that level 1 (and presumably other levels as well) is relative to the speakers in the discussion; and Stop calling the name of level 1 'triviality', on the grounds that not all level 1 claims will be trivial. Level 1 claims will, however, always be of a consensus, so my new name for level 1 commensurability will be 'consensus'. Thi

I take it that a basic 'subjectivist' approach states that morality inheres in subjects. A basic 'objectivist' approach states that morality inheres in objects. What makes it an interesting debate whether ethics is subjective or objective? The argument runs that if ethics is subjective, then we have no reason to take ethics seriously as a guide to human behaviour. If ethics is objective, then we do. I don't believe this claim for one second. First, let's suppose that when we judge human actions to be either right or wrong, this rightness or wrongness inheres in the actions themselves, rather than in the people judging them. Let's suppose that I do something that someone else judges to be wrong. According to this 'objectivist' view, someone is claiming that my action contains a specific property known as 'wrongness'. I am supposed to worry about what I have done because of it. On the other hand, if 'subjectivism' is correct, th

Issues with developing a hierarchy of intuitions can probably be pulled into sharper focus by examining dilemmas. I will use as my example the free will problem, purely because it was suggested to me by my supervisor. He said that Kant had written that our intuitions could inevitably pull us in two different directions, such as that our actions were caused and free. We need experience to form reliable intuitions, and all our experience surely tells us that our actions are free. What experience tells us that our actions are caused? We could imagine science one day discovering the causes for our actions, but this will hardly happen anytime soon, if it ever does. Maybe free will is simply an illusion based on the fact that we do not know the causes for our own actions, but this is unfalsifiable to begin with. As Paul Davies notes, emergent properties can appear in systems as they increase in complexity. Barring complications presented by quantum theory, physics can be entirely determi

What I want to do now is consider the use of trivial examples, for two main reasons: Based on what I have already covered, one would think that the use of trivial examples was okay. After all, they are firmly grounded in everyday experience, so we are likely to form reliable intuitions from examining them. Nevertheless, my supervisor objected to my use of trivial examples early in the development of my Masters thesis. I don't really know why, for my purposes today, that 2 would hold, however. For a start, my supervisor was referring me primarily to the comments made to him personally by one of the markers of my Honours thesis. Apparently, that marker had had a particular problem with some of the examples that I had used in a section on etiquette. He said that they seemed to be like "table manners". I'm afraid I don't really know what the problem would be with considering table manners in a section on etiquette, however. Based on my discussions with the

I have now made enough observations in the preceding sections to wager a tentative hypothesis: The strength (reliability) of intuitions is experience-dependent. We might think of intuitions as being strengthened by experiences. The intuitive compellingness of the Laws of Thought, for example, stems from their constantly repeated reinforcement by our experiences, so that when we look at an apple: It is an apple; It cannot be both an apple and a non-apple; and Everything in the world is either an apple or a non-apple. We can apply the above reasoning to anything else that we happen to observe. So perhaps this is why the Laws of Thought are so intuitively compelling. The experience of the imagination is, however, much weaker than the experience of the outside world. Indeed, if our experiences of our own imaginations were as strong as our experiences of outside reality, we may well be psychotic! The relative weakness of the experience of the imagination is important if intuit