Is Derek Parfit a Speculative Realist?

Posted on March 21, 2012 by

The term Speculative Realism designates an apparently new trend or movement within philosophy. The term is said to have been coined in 2006 by Ray Brassier1 in preparation for a conference held at Goldsmiths College, London, in April, 2007. Participants in that meeting included Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux; Alberto Toscano served as the moderator.

According to Graham Harman, the designation, Speculative Realism, was selected as a way of accommodating some disparate positions held by the participants. So, as Harman notes:

“Speculative realism” is an extremely broad term. All it takes to be a speculative realist is to be opposed to … the sort of philosophy (still dominant today) that bases all philosophy on the mutual interplay of human and world.

As is probably to be expected of any group identified primarily in terms of what it is not, the Speculative Realists have “already begun to break into various fragments”.2

Steven Shaviro says3 that, despite differences in approaches and emphases, what the Speculative Realists continue to have in common is that they “all seek to break away from the epistemological, and human-centred, focus of most post-Kantian thought” which “gives a privileged position to human subjectivity or to human understanding” and “subordinates ontology to epistemology”. In seeking this break, these thinkers – with the “new questions” they have asked – are supposed to have provided a “shock” to the world of philosophy.

However, that shock would have to arise from something other than the observation that ontology and metaphysics have been subordinated to epistemology. After all, it has been rather apparent for quite some time that the most lauded forms of human thought in our age – both within and outside of philosophy – are those which seem to present the best impersonal justifications for claims to knowledge. But, this situation is likely more directly the result of the rise to cultural prominence on the part of science than it is to the musings of any philosophers.

And it is not at all apparent – in fact, it would verge on the preposterous to assert – that science in any way privileges human subjectivity. Even within philosophy itself there is nothing terribly new in attempting to subordinate, deny, or even eliminate subjects and the subjective in favor of the objective and its constituent objects.

For instance, in his book, Reasons and Persons, first published in 1984, some two decades before the first Speculative Realism conference, Derek Parfit says, “a person is what has experiences, or the subject of experiences.” But, according to Parfit, this is true only “because of the way in which we talk.”4 And, he says, we do not actually have to speak in that manner; we do not actually have to speak as if persons were entities.

Continue reading →

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Santa Claus: Myth or Lie?

Posted on December 24, 2011 by

At The Secular Outpost, Jeffery Jay Lowder has a brief blog piece about Tom Flynn, the Executive Director of the Council for Secular Humanism, and some of the reasons Flynn puts forth about why parents should not tell their children that there is a Santa Claus.

Of particular note are Flynn’s claims that parents “lie” in order to “perpetuate” the myth about Santa, that such “deceptions” lay “traps” for children’s intellectual development and, as a result, promote “unhealthy” fear along with selfishness and acquisitive attitudes among children.

Seriously?!?!?!

Lowder notes that Flynn’s presentation is imbued with “considerable humor”; so, perhaps – and let us hope – that humor is meant to be found in the pseudo-science (to be charitable in characterizing whatever non-sense there is) that is purported to actually support the notion that the Santa Claus myth is to be held in disdain and assuredly avoided.

Do parents “lie” to their children when they tell them tales about Little Red Riding Hood, the Three Little Pigs, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, or the Ugly Duckling?

Of course not.

If nothing else, myths, stories, and tales are critical – indeed, they are absolutely necessary – to the development of imagination and, therefore, the fullest flourishing of the intellect.

Contrary to Flynn’s (humorous?) assertion – or has it yet attained the status of myth itself? – that the Santa Claus story “encourages lazy parenting”, the shortcomings in parenting come not from the use of such tales; rather, any inadequacies in parenting that there might be come about as a result of parents’ failures to eventually tailor lessons to be had from such stories, including the Santa Claus myth.

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Hegel and the development of Feyerabend’s thought

Posted on December 19, 2011 by

In his paper Two models of epistemic change (1970), Feyerabend argued that we can distinguish between two approaches to prolonged stability of theories or concepts. The first interprets durability as a measure of success: on an instrumentalist view, it may be possible to improve predictive tools but there is little motive to overhaul the underlying framework; and for a realist, a commitment to increasing the degree of verisimilitude permits the development of theories but not of incommensurable concepts or the deliberate undermining of assumptions. The opposing view, which Feyerabend attributes to Hegel and Mill, holds that constancy is an indication of failure: there are always improvements to our theories to be made or sought and indeed a desire to escape the confines of a particular theoretical framework is, for Feyerabend, the spontaneity that is essential to science. (On the second view, it could even be argued that realism in a sense collapses into conceptual instrumentalism. This is to say that the assumptions involved are not required to be tested or subjected to further challenge because the success of the theories based upon them does not warrant it and even speaks against it.) Feyerabend concludes the paper by declaring the methodological lessons:

Do not work with stable concepts. Do not eliminate counterinduction. Do not be seduced into thinking that you have at last found the correct description of ‘the facts’ when all that has happened is that some new categories have been adapted to some older forms of thought, which are so familiar that we take their outlines to be the outlines of the world itself.

On the face of it, this conflicts with Feyerabend’s argument in his Consolations for the Specialist that proliferation, which Feyerabend is recommending in these lessons, is supportive of a principle of tenacity. This latter principle provides for the retention of stable concepts and theories, even in the face of anomalies or evidence to the contrary, because development and improvement are always possible; indeed, an accommodation between the theory held to tenaciously and the difficulties it faced may eventually be possible. However, in Feyerabend’s explication of the second approach to conceptual and theoretical stability, both principles emerge from a Hegelian perspective.

The influence Feyerabend attributes to Hegel is itself of interest to Feyerabend scholars. (Although the similarity between Feyerabend’s view of the development of theories and Hegel’s thought has been noted by Barnett (1998), he insists that Feyerabend did not mention Hegel.) In setting out the second (Hegelian) model of epistemic change, Feyerabend asserts that, following Hegel, any complete description of an object (such as a concept or a theory) is self-contradictory since it contains its negation and participates in all other objects. Through the dialectic process, which for Feyerabend involves ensuring that concepts interact with observations, experiments and basic statements (and vice versa), the negation of an object does not result in the same thing or nothing at all but instead in an enriched object, which is the unity of the original object and its negation. For Feyerabend and for Hegel, this process is a developmental one: it requires not merely attending to the possibility of change but noting that stable concepts and theories are those for which internal contradictions have yet to be revealed or exposed, and for which the apparent stability is actually born of isolation.

In this reading of Hegel we can perhaps find something of the Popperian Feyerabend: the dialectic process calls for the negation of the theory under examination and this is seen as a positive step. However, the development is more than falsificationism provides for because the original theory is retained: for Feyerabend, we strengthen the knowledge we already possess by subjecting it to negation and vigorous challenging, even to the extent of undermining it, attacking it via alternative theories or by asserting that whatever concepts and theories we believe are secure should be treated with skepticism and assaulted. As an example, Feyerabend points to the Newtonian concept of space, retained for most purposes in spite of the development of Einstein’s version and yet permitting an enhanced understanding of the former’s utility and limitations.

On Feyerabend’s account, this skepticism cannot be selective. The result of such an approach is that we must constantly seek to criticise our theories via undermining their stability and elaborating alternatives, as well as using this process to enhance (and therefore preserve) what we started with. It is here that we find the principles of proliferation and tenacity emerging from Feyerabend’s reading of Hegel, which support the lessons Feyerabend has already taken from Mill (hence his claim in the paper that the second model of epistemic change can be characterised as following from either Mill or Hegel). Note also that these principles, derived from Hegel and Mill, are therefore intended by Feyerabend to be entirely positive.

References:

Barnett, S. (1998) Hegel after Derrida (London, Routledge).
Feyerabend, P.K. (1970) Two models of epistemic change, in P.K. Feyerabend (1981) Problems of empiricism: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).
Feyerabend, P.K. (1970) Consolations for the Specialist, in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (Eds.) (1970) Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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Evidence, Beliefs, and ‘Wise Blood’

Posted on November 30, 2011 by

In a previous essay, it was noted that the most objective, the most invariant-across-contexts feature of evidence is that evidence fits with a story.

To regard evidence as that which fits with (and, thereby, supports) a story is not to suggest – much less say – that being able to come up with a story makes the included evidence or that story as worthwhile as any other simply by virtue of there being a story.

Furthermore, evidence is not disparaged by identifying or regarding it as a facet of a story. After all, to say of something that it is a story is not necessarily to assert that it is comparatively unimportant, fictional, or in any way untrue.

Even so, describing a presentation as a story does often connote that what is presented is either fictional, untrue, more doubtable than not, or more a matter of subjective opinion than of objective fact.

Terms such as narrative and explanation seem less likely than story to suggest the possibility that what is being presented is relatively insignificant, extensively subjective, fictional, or false. Amongst narrative, explanation, and story, it is explanation which currently tends to be more readily, reflexively, automatically related with facticity and truth, and this is probably because explanation is most closely associated with the activities (and accomplishments) of science.

This could seem to suggest that evidence better relates to explanation than it does to story. This, in turn, might seem to recommend considering evidence as that which fits with an explanation rather than that which fits with a story, particularly since not all stories are necessarily intended as explanations.

However, it is when explanation is isolated from any connoted facticity that another characteristic of evidence becomes more apparent. Continue reading →

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About ‘Militant Modern Atheism’ and Religion

Posted on October 7, 2011 by

Abstract: This essay first discusses the non-eliminable shortcomings (or vacuousness) found in the most vociferous versions of contemporary atheism as put forth in Philip Kitcher’s “Militant Modern Atheism”. The essay then proceeds to the problems which Kitcher’s preferred secular humanism project would do well to anticipate as a result of the manner in which Kitcher frames the religious perspective. Finally, this essay addresses the very religious sense and experience which Kitcher too quickly dismisses as being useless to any evidential role. (In certain respects, this essay expands on some of the remarks found in this comment.)

1.

Philip Kitcher commences his paper, “Militant Modern Atheism”1, by paying homage to the atheism most commonly associated with the likes of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett as well as Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris.2 Kitcher says that their Militant Modern Atheism is “an effective and necessary critique of fundamentalist forms of religion”. He then goes on to note that this atheism is also “incomplete (and likely counter-productive)”.3

It is not immediately obvious how a critique can be both effective and likely counter-productive; the militant modern atheists certainly do not intend to be counter-productive.

Kitcher provides a bit of an explanation regarding the conjoining of effective and counter-productive when he reports that he, “a secular humanist, … shares many of the conclusions of the Militant Modern Atheists” but also thinks that “valuable options are being foreclosed” with the approach undertaken by those sorts of atheists.4 Basically, then, Kitcher’s point is that the critiques produced by the militant modern atheists are, at best, only initially effective and, even then, only within a very narrow (or shallow) – certainly a very limited – part of the domain concerning religion and faith.

Kitcher’s contention is that Militant Modern Atheism “fails to attend systematically to the roles religion fills in human lives”, and the ultimate “challenge is to develop a well-articulated and convincing version of secular humanism.”5 Kitcher clearly intends that this well-articulated secular humanism would attend to those fulfilling roles which – for the most part and to this point, according to Kitcher – have been and are most effectively served by religion. Presumably, Kitcher thinks that the development of just such a secular humanism is in the long-term interests of the militant modern atheists inasmuch as, without it, it is irrational to expect that religion would – or should – disappear. Continue reading →

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Selves, Subjects, and Reductionism

Posted on September 9, 2011 by

In a recent blog entry, John Wilkins denounces the notion of an existent self saying, “Humans have an insistent need for illusions. … The most interesting illusion to me is that we have selves. It is quite obvious to me that selves are dynamic, fractured, transitory things that occur largely in a single head, which is why we think they are unitary.”

Responding to one commenter’s question about whether the “me” which Wilkins uses has a referent, a referent which might well be the very sort of self which Wilkins seemingly denies, Wilkins explains, “I often rail against what I call the Reification Fallacy: the notion that if we use a word as a noun there has to be a thing the word denotes. ‘Me’ is a social, legal and semantic concept … I, me, we and the other self-referent terms … are just a way to anchor talk. It does not follow that there actually are unitary selves.”

Is Wilkins’ position simply “that selves are dynamic, fractured, [and] transitory” rather than “unitary”? Since “dynamic, fractured, transitory” selves are “obvious”, is it only the “unitary selves” which are illusions?

The state of being dynamic or transitory is not necessarily incompatible with being unitary. Indeed, the very notion of dynamic suggests a coherence – a unitariness – despite changes, and transitoriness does not assuredly preclude unitariness, either by itself or in conjunction with dynamism. This, then, leaves the term fractured as the only descriptor which Wilkins offers that might eliminate the possibility that selves are unitary.

The problem is that fractured is the most loaded of these three descriptors; it can either be intended simply as another way of denying (instead of arguing against) unitariness, or it can be used (in this case by opponents of Wilkins) to indicate an original (even if no longer existent) unitariness. Wilkins could then substitute some other term. He might, for example, replace fractured with disjointed, but it is very highly unlikely that any such substituted term would itself be anything other than a shorthand representation for a more involved argument.

Does Wilkins provide any indication of just what might be such an argument?

Wilkins seems to view favorably the notion that “there is no single you … instead there are a bunch of interconnected, arguing neural networks”, but that notion in no way precludes the unitariness which Wilkins denies. As a matter of semantic fact, that notion actually endorses unitariness (via “bunch” and “interconnected”).

Of course, Wilkins accepts “’Me’ [as] a … semantic concept … just a way to anchor talk”, and it is reasonable to expect that he would be perfectly at ease acknowledging self as a semantic concept. Wilkins would likely also accept the idea of a semantically unitary self, in which case remarks about selves being illusions or fictions are, at best, merely provocative semantics.

But what is the point of such provocative semantics? Is it supposed to effect consideration into the possibility that the self is not irreducible? After all, Wilkins says that it is the notion of experience as (or in terms of ) “an irreducible something or process … that I am disputing.” The question which then immediately rises to the fore is: What does it mean for anything to be irreducible? And, close upon that is this question: Is there anything which is irreducible?

That which were irreducible could be called simple, yet it is exceedingly unlikely that anyone who thinks or speaks in terms of selves regards a self as simple. Wilkins does not object to describing a semantic self in terms of neural networks, but neural networks are not irreducible. For that matter, neurons are not irreducible.

So, what is it that Wilkins thinks distinguishes a reducible neural network (and neurons) from a reducible self?

Well, he does say that “we should not accept things exist that have no definite and expressible nature and which are not investigable.” It is very difficult to imagine how a self is not investigable. On the other hand, it does seem more correct to describe a self as indefinite rather than as definite at least inasmuch as the self is dynamic and since the self is (seems) largely or often unpredictable. Still, these characteristics of the self hardly seem to justify the claim that selves do not exist.

Be that as it may, the really interesting point regards the notion that accepting the existence of a thing somehow depends on there being something expressible about that thing. As a practical or instrumental matter, this is certainly the case. However, as stated, the necessary expressible condition tends towards the most radical conceivable subjectivism, and that certainly is not what Wilkins intends. Rather, it is only the “objective feature[s] of the world” which he seems to mean to have accepted as existing.

Now, the semantics for the term objective is no simple matter. As an antonym of subjective, the term objective is commonly used to indicate mind-independence. In this way an objective feature would be one which exists regardless of whether or not – and regardless of in what way – any mind conceived of or was aware of that feature. In like manner, the term object at its most basic (in this type of discussion) is supposed to indicate something that exists regardless of whether any mind is in any way sensitive to or aware of that object.

A subject, on the other hand, is not just that which is sensitive to any object. A nerve, for example, can be sensitive, reactive, and, yet, it is not a subject. This is why a subject is most commonly equated to a mind. Is a self necessarily something other than a subject? For that matter, is a subject something other than a mind?

If there is no difference between self, subject, and mind, then consistency would demand of Wilkins that if he denies that the self exists outside of semantics, then he also needs deny that subjects and minds exist.

Some strict reductive physicalists will be inclined to deny that minds exist. They will claim that minds reduce to brains. But, brains are also reducible as are the components of brains, and, yet, at some event in the reductive process, awareness is lost.

Wilkins says that “’consciousness’ [is] a word that has, so far as I can tell, no actual meaning whatsoever, and should be abandoned”, and some physicalists may be willing to call for the abandonment of the use of the term awareness for the sake of reductionistic explications in terms of simple physical objects.

The result will be an assured and unremitting unintelligibility (an unintelligibility which might be at least mitigated with a non-reductive version of physicalism).

Wilkins resorts to an apparent attempt at giving some degree of primacy to the matter of what exists. Philosophy of – or in terms of – existence has come to be often referred to as existentialism. There are, of course, varieties of existentialisms, and it is worth noting what Jacques Maritain had to say about this matter:

there are two fundamentally different ways of interpreting the word existentialism. One way is to affirm the primacy of existence … as manifesting the supreme victory of the intellect and of intelligibility. This is what I consider to be authentic existentialism. The other way is to affirm the primacy of existence, but … as manifesting the supreme defeat of the intellect and of intelligibility. This is what I consider to be apocryphal existentialism, the current kind which ‘no longer signifies anything at all.’ [Existence and the Existent, p. 13]

Eliminativist physicalists (or, possibly more precisely, denialist physicalists), some of them at any rate, may shrug off Maritain’s remarks or assert that it is science alone which provides for the “victory of the intellect” while also claiming that it is their physicalism alone that follows from science. Such physicalists are woefully unreflective about science, and that woeful condition was well captured by Karl Jaspers when he said:

materialism and a naturalistic realism have always been with us; similarly, man’s disposition to believe in the absurd is as unchanged as ever … It is only the contents of this faith in the absurd that are partly new: for example, belief in the advent of a definitive happiness for all in a classless society magically brought to birth through violence. … The absurd faiths of the modern era, ranging from astrology to theosophy, and from National Socialism to Bolshevism, suggest that superstition has no less power over the human mind today than it had formerly. … Absurd modern faiths may very well make occasional use of scientific results, without grasping their origin or meaning.

… This science, however, whose name is invoked by everyone, is known to surprisingly few: indeed, there are many scholars … who are unfamiliar with its principles. A crucial feature of modern science is that it does not provide a total world-view, because it recognizes that this is impossible. … science [at least ideally] is always aware of its limitations, understands the particularities of its insights, and knows that it nowhere explores Being, but only objects in the world. … Down to the present, this science has been accessible to the masses only in the form of final results referring to the totality of things, a form that absolutizes and distorts the actual results of science, giving rise to spuriously scientific total views. These reflect modern scientific superstition rather than real knowledge or insight into the meaning, content, and boundaries of science. [Myth & Christianity: An Inquiry into the Possibility of Religion Without Myth, pp. 23-24]

Is a physicalism of the gaps any more justified than a so-called God of the gaps? No.

Posted in History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Science, Religion, Science | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Feyerabend and historiographic proliferation

Posted on August 28, 2011 by

In the introduction to his Against Method, Paul Feyerabend paraphrased V.I. Lenin by claiming that history is “always richer in content, more varied, more many-sided, more lively and subtle” than “the best historian and the best methodologist can imagine”. He went on to quote Einstein’s remark that the scientist who necessarily resists “the adherence to an epistemological system”, which the practise of science (rather than its form according to those advocating just such an epistemological system) requires, “must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a type of unscrupulous opportunist”. This characterisation has often been applied to Feyerabend himself and is one Feyerabend made of Galileo as he sought to establish Einstein’s (and, earlier, Mill’s) point. Based on this understanding of the historiography of science, Feyerabend constructed a reductio argument against those he called “capital R Rationalists” and anyone who proposed to methodologically restrict science. His reductio took the following general form:

i. Select a example from the history of science of a transition between theories that is paradigmatically accepted as scientific progress;
ii. Demonstrate that those actors involved argued (successfully) in irrational or non-rational terms (whether wholly or in part), where rationality is defined by adherence to the methodology purported to define or characterise science;
iii. Demonstrate further that they could not have achieved progress otherwise; and
iv. Conclude that insisting on the methodology at the time would have forced the actors to give up.

The result was to place the epistemic systematists in the absurd position of advocating a methodology for science that would have killed the very progress allegedly brought about because early scientists followed the methodology.

Although this reductio succeeds, I want to suggest that Feyerabend’s historiography, and perhaps the historical approach in general, is somewhat paradoxical. The aim of his historiography is to free us from methodological or epistemological strictures but we find ourselves using the lessons of history to show that there are no lessons to be learned from history. This is too simplistic, though: what Feyerabend argued was not that there is and can be no methodology worth adopting but rather that all methods have their limits. Nevertheless, the paradoxical aspect comes from considering the use Feyerabend makes of history. Faced with a methodological rule, we can look to the history of science – and to apparently paradigmatic cases of good practice in particular – and show that an application of the rule would have been disastrous. However, it seems that this relies implicitly on a fixed interpretation of the events under consideration; after all, if it were possible for a rationalist or anyone else to recast the episode in a more favourable light for the rule at issue, we might be able to show that in fact its application would have worked then as now. Cases like dogmatic falsificationism are relatively straightforward insofar as they present so restrictive a rule that almost any interpretation would contradict it, but what of others? If, for example, it is possible to view Galileo not as a master rhetorician and opportunist but as a prototypical or actual rationalist, then it would seem reasonable and indeed advisable to not be restricted in historiography any more than in methodology or epistemology.

How might Feyerabend respond? He would probably argue that this is exactly the kind of criticism that is needed and hence that if the rationalist can identify this limitation of the reductio then he will likely also appreciate and accept the limits on his own methodology. It might be objected that Feyerabend’s interpretation of historical events is but one of many, with the rationalist versions at least having the merit of supporting a rational account of scientific history. The difference perhaps lies in Feyerabend’s commitment to proliferation, notwithstanding that he would approve of the tenacity of the rationalist view; after all, we can view Feyerabend’s approving quote of Lenin as pointing to the inevitability of conflicting historiographies. This tension between tenacity and proliferation will be further explored in a subsequent entry.

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