Last night I was talking with an old friend of mine, an atheist Jew, who is now in the best relationship of her life with a devout Roman Catholic. We talked about the fact that she was more surprised than he was about the fact that their connection transcends their difference in metaphysics. He sees himself as a devout Roman Catholic; she sees him as a good human being.
This conversation reminded me of an older thought that’s been swirling around in my head for a few weeks: the disunity of reason.
It is widely held by philosophers (that peculiar sub-species!) that reason is unified: that the ideally rational person is one for whom there are no fissures, breaks, ruptures, or discontinuities anywhere in the inferential relations between semantic contents that comprise his or her cognitive grasp of the world (including himself or herself as part of that world).
This is particularly true when it comes to the distinction between “theoretical reason” and “practical reason”. By “theoretical reason” I mean one’s ability to conceptualize the world-as-experienced as more-or-less systematic, and by “practical reason” I mean one’s ability to act in the world according to judgments that are justified by agent-relative and also agent-indifferent reasons (“prudence” and “morality”, respectively).
The whole philosophical tradition from Plato onward assumes that reason is unified, and especially, that theoretical and practical reason are unified — different exercises of the same basic faculty. Some philosophers think of them as closer together than others — for example, Aristotle distinguishes between episteme (knowledge of general principles in science, mathematics, and metaphysics) and phronesis (knowledge of particular situations in virtuous action). But even Aristotle does not doubt that episteme and phronesis are exercises of a single capacity, reason (nous).
However, as we learn more about how our cognitive system is actually structured, we should consider the possibility that reason is not unified at all. If Horst’s Cognitive Pluralism is right, then we should expect that our minds are more like patchworks of domain-specific modules that can reason quite well within those domains but not so well across them.
To Horst’s model I’d add the further conjecture: that we have pretty good reason to associate our capacity for “theoretical reason” (abstract thinking and long-term planning) with the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and also pretty good reason to associate our capacity for “practical reason” (self-control and virtuous conduct) with the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (and especially in its dense interconnections with the limbic system).
But if that conjecture is on the right track, then we would expect to find consistency between theoretical reason and practical reason only to the extent that there are reciprocal interconnections between these regions of prefrontal cortex. And of course there are reciprocal interconnections — but (and this is the important point!) to the extent that these regions are also functionally distinct, then to that same extent reason is disunified.
And as a consequence, metaphysics and ethics may have somewhat less to do with each other than previous philosophers have supposed.
Neil,
Sure it does. Otherwise misperception would be impossible.
Nonsense.
Neil,
Do you have a counterargument?
What is it supposed to counter? You haven’t given an argument.
Neil,
Are you playing dumb, or do I really need to spell it out for you?
You wrote:
I responded:
Suppose you’re running a high fever, and you see a dozen inch-tall koalas running up and down your bedspread, singing “Waltzing Matilda”. The four other people in the room — normal, healthy. and sane –don’t see or hear the koalas. You’re obviously hallucinating them, most likely due to the high fever. Right?
A sensible person would say yes. You, however, would have to say no, because according to you, “how the world is” has no meaning apart from “how we perceive or experience the world”. You experience and perceive the inch-high koalas. Therefore, according to you, that’s how the world actually is. The koalas are not a hallucination.
Do you really want to nail your colors to this particular mast?
That was an assertion, not an argument. I don’t doubt that you thought it trivially obvious that your assertion was true. But then, I see it as trivially obvious that your assertion is false.
LOL. Hallucination is not misperception. This is an absurd line of argumentation.
I’ll note that “how we perceive or experience the world” is very different from “how I personally am perceiving and experiencing the world at this very instant”.
Your argument is, at best, a poor argument against the latter. It does not touch the former.
LOL. And this comes from someone who has quite clearly nailed his banner to theism, ID and dualism. I’ve stopped pointing that out to you, but it is still as obvious as ever, though I don’t doubt that you are in full denial of this.
By the pure concept I mean that which is unique to the number four, its essence. Everyone who holds this concept will be able to agree that they perceive the same things which match this number. They will agree that the dog in front of them has four legs, a square has four sides and that they have four fingers and one thumb on each hand (barring accidents or birth defects). Whether they consider the number four to be a real number, an integer or a whole number makes no difference to this agreement.
That just means that your individual set of concepts is personal to you. It has no effect on the unique concept of four which is universally agreed upon. It will always remain the same no matter what term is applied to it.
Fair enough. I’m not an essentialist. I see concepts as having to do with conventions, not essences.
Did diplodocus suddenly possess four legs only when the first fossil specimen was dug up by humans? Why did humans bother sending any data along with the voyager and pioneer spacecraft if they didn’t think it would be understood by aliens?
What is universally agreed on is, at most, certain behaviors involving “4”.
A behaviorist about mathematics!
Neil, I think you are being a little bit too hasty in dismissing the argument from hallucination.
If one is going to be direct realist, and in particular a direct realist about affordances, then I think the right move would be to say that hallucinations are not genuine perceptions because they are not integrated into a system of motor skills. The real coffee-mug “invites”, as it were, counterfactual movements and correlated counterfactual sensations — for example, if I were to pick it up and lift it over my head, I would see its bottom. The merely imagined or hallucinated coffee-cup isn’t integrated into my motor skills, which is why it is not a genuine perception.
This is still too hasty. There are some serious problems with direct realism. I think it’s probably true, and I also think — here I’m in a minority position, I know – I also think that direct realism is the epistemological ground of both scientific realism and moral realism.
keiths:
Neil:
Let me get this straight. You, Neil Rickert, think that I, keiths, am a theist, an IDer, and a dualist?
Yes, for sure. Number theory is a study of the consequences of idealized counting behavior. Geometry is a study of the consequences of idealized measuring behavior.
I’m going by Gibson’s view, that perception is the acquiring of information. Gibson carefully distinguished between sensation and perception. And it looks to me as if hallucination has to do with sensation, not with perception.
No, not at all.
However, I think you rely on a theists conception of truth. I think you understand perception in terms of how a perception system could be designed by an intelligent design (as distinct from what might evolve). And you strongly believe in the existence of immaterial things such as propositions.
keiths:
Neil:
Then I don’t think you understand what “nailing one’s colors to the mast” means.
If I had actually nailed my colors to the mast of theism, ID, and dualism, then I would be vowing to defend them to the end.
You’re wrong about those things, but since it’s off-topic, let’s leave it for some other time.
I was responding to this yesterday when the power went out, then my cable modem never worked again, and my ISP decided that two modems I purchased weren’t going to be allowed, etc. So this is…later.
It’s obvious enough today, but in the past people might think that you were seeing a spirit realm. Why not? You saw it, after all, and why would you see something that isn’t there? Dreams, hallucinations, they let us perceive what isn’t ordinarily sensed–in one view. One may quibble about sensation vs. perception, but how would one know the difference between the two in the past?
No, that needn’t follow. How we perceive and experience the world includes knowledge from science and from surrounding individuals. By now we’re doing best to conclude that, while it’s logically possible that hallucinating individuals are seeing a spirit realm, the brain can often be fooled into seeing something that, by all coherent empiricism and reason, apparently is not there. At least the phenomena is only conjured up by the brain.
To be sure, I think that there is some sort of world out there that has a real impact on what we perceive and experience the world, providing a check against hallucination and individual delusion. That said, we are beholden to how we perceive and experience the world, so that, for instance, we think in terms of colors, which do not seem to actually exist in the objects themselves. I don’t think that Berkeley’s idealism could not be the case, then, rather than that the world “really is,” say, 3-D, even though I’d say that it probably is.
I just don’t see how hallucination necessarily affects the argument. Fine, we’ve learned to discount certain apparent “perceptions,” but that doesn’t change anything about our reliance upon our perceptions that we will never be able to check against “reality.” The best we can do is to check perceptions across sensory modes and with different persons, but we’re all stuck necessarily living “in our heads” without unmediated knowledge of “reality.”
They aren’t? I never thought one should drive on psychedelic drugs, but once I was coming off of a trip and my sister called for me to get her and her friend, I was way less trippy than I had been, and she needed a ride (her friend’s parents had taken off and weren’t available), so ok, I went to pick them up. Damn if I didn’t see someone on the shoulder of the road, and I knew it wasn’t very likely real because it was dark, but fine, I just whiz past, no problem. But then I’m in the lit street, and some idiot has to be in the crosswalk, and I have no idea if it’s a real person or a hallucination. I didn’t want to stop for nothing, in case a cop was watching, and I didn’t want to run over the person, so in the end I went sailing through the crosswalk hitting nothing. I’m sure that the person injured in that vicinity was from something completely different. No, I am kidding, I’ve never been that uncaring no matter what–I stopped for the hallucination/person, said person went on into the night, and I never have known whether or not it was a person or my brain making things up. My motor skills reacted the same whether or not the person was hallucinated, with only the doubt about what I was seeing making a possible difference, although in the end I had no choice but to stop (this was not recent, to be sure).
That said, had I tried to catch up to the person on foot, I almost certainly would never have touched anything solid if it were indeed a hallucination. I get that, hallucinations don’t carry across the senses any too well. But then, so what? What if there were spirits that had no solid bodies? Air isn’t solid, water isn’t solid, non-solid spirits might well exist. We know at this stage of the game that they’re pretty unlikely, but that’s not because we could always be certain that spirit entities didn’t exist. Probably the most straightforward interpretation of non-solid perceived beings would indeed be that there simply are non-solid beings that we sometimes can see, but can’t feel because they’re just not composed of solid matter.
No, I really don’t think hallucinations obviously are not perception, not without a good body of knowledge indicating as much. Accumulated knowledge tells us what’s real and what’s not, while perception alone can readily lead to belief in the “supernatural.” I don’t see much value to belief in (acceptance of, whatever your preference) direct perception, either, probably in part because of hallucinations not obviously being non-perception, but especially because we know a lot about perception today. The braincase is quite literally a black box, and yet it manages to make sense of a bunch of nerve spikes, apparently without having any access to the outside except via information coming across the afferent nerves.
Glen Davidson
Neil you sound like a proper presuppositionist 😉
Did I ever tell you that we could have some good conversations on the front porch over a beverage?
peace
But I don’t rely on a theistic conception of truth.
Presuppositionalism is right in that we all operate based on some presupposition or other. Inasmuch as we don’t, we are inconsistent and incoherent. But the kind of presuppositionalism that insists on not examining its own presuppositions is defective.
From presuppositions and premises, conclusions follow. Failure to examine the presuppositions and premises means failure to ensure whether the conclusions are valid and sound.
Erik,
Once proven, a presupposition isn’t a presupposition any more.
But yes, standard Christian presuppositionalism is defective in that the presuppositions, on which the whole edifice rests, are wild and unjustified.
As long as not proven, it’s unknown whether the conclusions from the presupposition follow or not. And you like it this way.
You are a strong force keeping things irrelevant here. Let’s just keep talking past each other.
Erik,
Are you kidding? I’ve been arguing for months that fifth should justify his presuppositions if he wants to be taken seriously.
But you gave him this pretext – once proven, they are not presuppositions any more.
My view is that if not separately proven, presuppositions may be flawed. It’s important to be open about one’s presuppositions and to demonstrate their validity. The demonstration consists in the statement of the presupposition being a conclusion in an acceptable argument.
How do you “separately” prove presuppositions?
For instance how would you “prove” the law of noncontridiction with out assuming and even appealing to that law?
Thanks in advance
peace
I know that is what you claim
But you do recognize that others rely on Christian presuppositions even when they don’t realize it. Even when they profess to deny the existence of God all together.
That is Presuppositionalism 101
peace
I see this as a serious problem in analytic philosophy. Truth is a core concept, but no adequate account has been given. There is a large (and, in my opinion, unjustified) reliance on a theistic conception of truth.
When you say Christian presuppositions do you mean presuppositions that did not exist before Christ preached or presuppositions that existed before Christ and are adopted by all Christians?
I took fifth to be mainly talking about how people view truth.
There are two kinds of presuppositions. Some are conclusions in a separate valid argument. Others are such that make any rational argument possible in the first place. Those latters can be called axioms. To dismiss an axiom of logical argumentation means to refuse to have a rational discussion to begin with.
Axioms cannot be proven the way other propositions can, but they can be identified, formulated, and reasons can be given to accept or reject them. Refusal to do this is refusal to examine one’s own coherence of thought and expression.
Yes, this is good. There’s a subtle but really important distinction between the assertions validated by first principles and the vindication of the first principles themselves. Neglect of this distinction leads to much wailing and gnashing of teeth in seminar rooms and Internet chat sites.
I agree completely with this. Did I just break one of the seals mentioned in Revelations?
Neil,
You also wrote, addressing me:
Do you mean that you think my conception of truth relies on a “God’s-eye” view of reality? If not, then what do you mean by “a theistic conception of truth”?
keiths,
Neil has argued quite a few times that any “correspondence” theory of truth will be implicitly theistic.
The idea seems to be this: in order to be assured that our thoughts are (or are not) aligned with the world, one would need to be in the right epistemic position to determine the adequacy of thoughts with the world. And that requires, however paradoxically, being able to step outside of one’s own thoughts in order to look “sideways-on,” as it were, to see if they correspond to the world or not.
Seen this way, the correspondence theory of truth only makes sense if there is something like a God’s-eye view, since God is (presumably) in the right epistemic position to know whether our thoughts line up with how the world really is — whereas we cannot know this, since we can only know what our our thoughts are, and we cannot step outside of those thoughts to observe the relationship between those thoughts and the world.
(As the old joke goes, “we’re not sure who discovered water, but we’re pretty sure it wasn’t a fish.”)
Neil does not always put it quite this way. I am leaning on my extensive familiarity with Davidson’s, Rorty’s, and Putnam’s criticisms of the correspondence theory of truth and of metaphysical realism.
It’s an interesting line of thought, and I think it certainly puts the burden of argument on the naturalist who wants to defend a correspondence theory of truth. I’ve been urging for a long time that the burden of argument can be met, but thus far Neil is unconvinced.
A singular truth that applies to every statement, and is the same to every agent, whether past, present, future, alien from Andromeda, etc.
Either that, or it is vacuous (circular).
It’s the axiom kind that I am concerned with. I suppose you could call me a Axiomialist
We are in 100% agreement here. That is why I often ask folks how they know what they claim to know.
I’m trying to get them to identify their presuppositions (axioms if you like).
We need to do this in order to evaluate to see if they are sufficient to serve as a foundation for reason.
It’s my firm conviction that only the Christian God can suffice for such a thing but I am open to hear evidence for other axioms.
peace
I would argue that any “coherence” theory of truth is also implicitly theistic in that every non-Christian worldview is necessarily inconsistent at some often unexamined point.
But that is another kettle of fish
peace
Easy to assert, impossible to demonstrate.
Not at all.
We demonstrate it by examining the various premises that the coherence theorist believes to see which of them are contradictory
peace
Why necessarily?
Because God is the only sure foundation for reason
quote:
The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.
(Pro 1:7)
end quote;
My hypothesis is inherently testable all you have to do is show me a consistent set of axioms that denies God and is at the same time sufficient for reason and my claim is falsified.
peace
Over at UD you can get banned for that. Here at “The Skeptical Zone” you get applauded for doing it.
I was weeping much because none was found worthy to open the scroll and to loosen its seals…
🙂
??? Why do you need axioms, rather than empirical observation? And why must empirical observation DENY your god, rather than simply have no use for that hypothesis?
Conversely, a strong argument can be made (and indeed you make it quite regularly) that your particular god is antithetical to reason, and actively suppresses it.
Or it can just be recognized as a baseless claim, and your false dilemma discarded.
Glen Davidson
How do you know empirical observation is the way to discover truth?
Please try and think deeply about this
You do know that empirical observation is not a person and it can not deny anything. Don’t you?
What is the foundational basis you wish to start from to make your case and how do you know it is true?
peace
How do you know it’s a baseless claim. Please be specific
peace