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.
So long as you regard “thinking” abstractly enough so that even paramecia can do it, this sounds right. They clearly don’t live in “unconnected chaos”, because they exhibit behaviors consistently helpful to their survival, very nonrandom.
Do you not believe that quadrupeds roamed the Earth long before humans could conceptualize.
Do you seriously believe that the circle that you provided as an example in a previous post hasn’t changed?
So you think that the perfect is a copy of the imperfect?
I am no mathematician so I think I should leave mathematicians to fight over that one. But I would say that I do not regard infinity as an unfeasibly large number. I think with infinity we have stepped beyond numbers and so the normal rules of arithmetic do not apply.
The following thoughts are not for your benefit Neil, but for those more like myself whose grasp of complex mathematics may be somewhat limited.
A line in two dimensional space has two end points but if that line is taken to infinity the end points merge to become one. Look at the diagram in the addendum here
As the red circle moves towards the centre of the grey circle the green circle expands. When the circumferences of the grey and red circles pass through each other’s centres the green circle has expanded to become a straight line. This is the famous vesica piscis.
The truths I was talking about are more to do with form than with number.
I am not sure how young children are taught basic arithmetic these days but I think that it can be done in a much less abstract way than the way I was taught. Learning to count by addition is not a good way to bring an understanding of the connection between numbers. We can introduce numbers in a more living way if we start with say one sphere. We divide it in half to give them the concept of two and so on. IMO this would give them a better understanding and a more enjoyable introduction to arithmetic.
Do you believe that the concept “four” when applied to Jurassic tetrapods is a useful fiction? Do you believe that the concept “evolution” is a useful fiction?
Where did I insist this?
I haven’t really considered that. Mathematical concepts only exist as ideas in human heads and recorded in knotted string, clay tablets and so on. I’m convinced by the reality of legs as exapted lobe-fins and of the reality of mutation and selection as a motor of such changes. Models of such processes are invariably simplified due to our incomplete knowledge of past events. These could be described as fictions, I guess.
ETA HTML
I tend to follow Elizabeth’s admiration for e-prime.
When I see a philosophical discussion full of “is” and “are”, I strip out all the statements depending on the verb to be, and see if anything remains.
Yes but its sometimes nice to read posts to me or concerning me that aren’t against me or my views. I don’t have a problem with people jumping in and saying what’s on their minds and besides it doesn’t interfere with my replies. I can still speak for myself.
Sure. I just thought the exegesis was somewhat pointless when you are here and we can ask you. 😉
Well, I’m not speaking for Mung, but I deny that the ideal circle should be thought of as a map.
Which won’t be the ideal circle I am talking about.
I take it you aren’t familiar with Heraclitus?
I say that numbers are fictions. I do not see concepts as fictions. I don’t see concepts as objects, either. In some sense, they are behaviors (cognitive behaviors), though I would not push that to extremes either.
🙂
ok, but why rob me of the pleasure of saying I was right? :
😀
I think it’s interesting to see how two different people can look at what Charlie wrote and see two different things. I think that actually happens a lot here. I nominate that for understatement of the year.
Does it lend credence to the goal of the site that we should be more willing to listen to others? Perhaps.
Then I would suggest that your epistemology begins from the point of there being a distinction between subject and object. I would say that by starting from this point you have already made an unwarranted assumption.
But can you perceive spacetime with your senses?
Ever heard of kinaesthesia?
When you gaze out at the natural world what do you experience? Do you think it is the real world or a representation of it?
Human cognition is involved in our knowledge of the sun. Does that make it subjective?
I didn’t say that the real world is an unconnected chaos. I said it would appear that way to pure sense perception.
How do you know this? How could anyone possibly know this?
It seems very much an a priori dogmatic pronouncement about “pure sense perception”.
And we still don’t know, apart from a long quote by Steiner, why we should accept the Parmenidean thesis that the intellect can transcend the senses and arrive at knowledge of eternal and unchanging beings.
All knowledge is subjective. That’s unavoidable. The “knowing” part amounts to knowing by a subject.
I’ll disagree with that. But then I’m inclined to see “pure sense perception” as meaningless.
If we were passive receivers of sensory stimulations (as some AI folk and some philosophers seem to think), then indeed that would be an unconnected chaos. Or, as William James once put it, “a blooming buzzing confusion”. But once you add the word “perception”, you are no longer talking of raw sensory stimulation.
And so paramecia think, as you are using the term.
I think that this idea has deep roots, certainly in Hume and in Kant, that “pure sensation” would be “pure chaos”. James introduces that phrase when describing the perceptual awareness of a newborn baby. But I don’t think that more recent psychological research on babies shows that they are as “blank” as James argues.
Likewise, we know that nonhuman animals have rich conceptual repertoires of their own. The interesting question here is figuring out how the acquisition of a language transforms the kind of concepts that a minded animal can use in perceiving, thinking, and acting.
In any event, the idea of “pure sensory perception” certainly has a long history in Western philosophy, from Heraclitus through Hume to Bergson, James, and C. I. Lewis — but it is nevertheless a philosopher’s fantasy, not known either to careful phenomenology of perception (e.g. Merleau-Ponty), ecological psychology (e.g. Gibson) or to embodied-embedded cognitive science (Varela, Thompson, Wheeler, Clark).
Well, maybe if you take enough LSD or ayahuasca 🙂
I was at a meditation retreat about a year ago and sat down for a partnered exercise with a lovely woman in her late seventies. By way of introduction she said “My name is ________ and I like ayahuasca.” At the end of the retreat she invited me to join her and some of her friends for their yearly ayahuasca experience on an island off Greece. Sadly, I couldn’t make it.
I could ask her about transcendence….
Some people would say that sense percepts exist as pictures in human heads and we can never experience what is really “out there”. I am not one of those.
I believe that our senses give a view of reality which is limited but can be made complete by reuniting the objects of our senses with the corresponding ideas. These ideas in reality belong to the objects of our perception. It is only because of our organisation that we separate them. Through thinking these two aspects of reality can be recombined.
I don’t like the term “pure sensation”. Normally, “sensation” refers to conscious experience. My comment was about the raw signals that impinge on us, rather than about concscious experience. Gibson’s view, as I read it, was that perception is prior to sensation.
I don’t think that’s even relevant.
If apparently meaningless signals impinge on our sensory detectors, then the input will be pretty much meaningless. That’s the basic problem.
If I walk to a nearby intersection, there’s a traffic signal controller which manages the traffic signal. The controller sensors do receive meaningful signals. What makes them meaningful, is the way that they are built to depend on certain causal actions (vehicles passing over detectors).
The traffic signal controller thus does have meaningful inputs. So, in some sense, it has intentionality. But it is a derived intentionality, derived from the causal structure of the system as setup by the highway department when it installed the traffic lights.
That’s not possible with an animal. Whenever the animal moves, it changes it’s causal connections with the world. So the only possibility for getting meaningful information, is if the animal coordinates how it picks up signals with its changing orientation. That’s why passive receiving cannot work. The animal’s behavior — its coordination of signal pickup with orientation — is an essential part of getting useful information from the environment. The behaviorists are right when they insist that perception is a behavior. And the meaning of the information picked up depends on the behavior used to get that information.
I agree that numbers by themselves, in and of themselves with no connection to anything else are a fiction. I would say that in this way they are an erroneous concept. But I don’t see how anyone could say that applied numerical values are a fiction. How about unity? Do you believe that you are one person among many or is this a meaningless phrase to you? How about duality? Do you believe you as subject experience the external world as object? Do you believe that outer and inner, up and down, expansion and contraction, and that these are dualities?
You may not see concepts as objects but do you not agree that there is such an entity as an ideal circle? Leave out the question of whether it is subjective or objective for the moment. Do you agree that this entity, which we can both understand by its laws, is internally consistent, it needs no other laws but its own? It is not subject to time and space. The ideal circle conceived by Plato, or you, or me, or by an intelligent alien living somewhere in Andromeda is the very same circle.
Yes. Rudolf Steiner called it “sense of movement”. He described twelve senses in total.
I worry that plane figures in Euclidean space may be too closely tied to human spatiotemoral awareness to serve as the example you need here.
What are you are after here is the idea that mathematics deals with concepts that are the same for all rational beings (regardless of whether they are human, alien, etc.).
And that seems perfectly correct, from what I can tell.
But the reason why mathematics does concern concepts that are the same for all rational beings is that it does not deal with objects at all.
This is the big discovery of Frege, and it revolutionized 20th century mathematics.
We are not, in fact, beholden to ancient Greek diagrammatic practices as a paradigm of mathematical reasoning. Mathematics for the Greeks was a kind of special perception: it involved being able to construct diagrams. And it’s not that the diagrams merely illustrated the proof: for the ancient Greeks, the construction of the diagram was the proof.
What changes with Frege is this: mathematics becomes a purely rational enterprise, which means that it is purely conceptual. There are no “entities” of mathematics; a set does not refer to anything. In mathematics we deal directly with sets, dimensions, numbers, and other concepts that can be the same for all rational beings precisely because they are dealt with in a formal language from which all reference to objects has been systematically eliminated.
There is still the question about how to think about the metaphysics of mathematical concepts. I don’t have a view about this.
From cases of people born blind who receive their sight for the first time later in life. In these cases the subjects first experience their sense of sight and then they have to use their thinking processes in order to make sense of the images which at first appear chaotic.
A couple of examples:
here
CharlieM,
Those are certainly interesting examples, but they don’t show what you think they show.
What they show is that sensory influx is meaningless when the modality-specific information is not integrated into a feedback-correcting process involving movement. It is as the person moves about that novel visual stimuli become meaningful wholes. The cognitive power that you want to assign to “the intellect” really belongs to the body.
I think that they show is that complete perception depends on neural development. Further, brain plasticity allows that development to occur later in life.
I would not call such neural processing “using the intellect” however.
I do agree that full, proper development likely requires the ability to move. But people with locked-in syndrome can still hear and feel being touched, so movement does not seem to be needed once the brain has developed perceptual processing. In fact, that applies to anyone, come to think of it. ((One can see too, of course, but perhaps you might appeal to saccades for this).
You pointed out experiments on babies. I believe babies can discriminate for face-like shapes early in life. What they hear in the womb affects their language preferences very early as well. It seems there is limited perception even in the womb, based on brain development and perhaps movement in that environment, I would guess.
If they are erroneous, under what standard do they commit an error?
For me, all that I require of a concept is that it be useful.
Sure. But now you are talking about counting behaviors rather than about abstract objects.
But only as an abstract object (useful fiction).
I have not had the opportunity to discuss circles with any aliens from Andromeda.
I think Frege was wrong about that.
Once you have axioms, then proof from axioms is a purely rational exercise. But coming up with useful axiom systems is also an important part of mathematics.
I don’t think that’s quite right. A concept ought to have something to do with how we conceive of things, and that is surely subjective.
What we can say, for mathematical concepts, is that they follow the same rules for all. But we cannot say that everyone conceives of them in the same way.
Right — but once the brain has developed perceptual processing is the key phrase here, and I think that does require the circular causal loops between prediction and prediction-error minimization (with caveats about “minimization”). In the absent of those plastic loops, I don’t see how any firing of auditory or optical nerves is going to be meaningful to the organism.
Part of my new approach, or slightly new approach, is to really make the cognitive neuroscience of animals as central as I can to philosophy of mind and epistemology. That means thinking about what a concept is in terms of animal cognitive neuroscience. On this approach, which Clark exemplifies (though Rouse is also key for my work here now), a concept just is an attractor in the state space of activation patterns. If we think about concepts in those terms, a lot of traditional epistemological problems are transformed or jettisoned.
(This is not an explication of the concept of “concept” but a causal explanation of what concepts are in rerum natura.)
“The intellect” (in the traditional sense) emerges when the top-to-bottom information flow of semantically isolated, perceptuo-practical cognitive systems is supplemented with a top-to-top information flow that makes possible shared semantic contents and also therefore shared epistemic functions. And that involves the socio-linguistic dimension of a natural language.
Thinking of the practical-perceptual and socio-linguistic as different dimensions of conceptual activity, rather than as different kinds of intentionality, marks a slight change from what I said in my first book.
But we have to locate the “subjective” share here very carefully.
Just because you and I have different experiences with dogs, different emotional responses (suppose you’ve had a dog your entire life and I’m afraid of them), and different mental images doesn’t mean that you and I don’t share the concept dog.
I don’t think that concepts are “private”, in the sense that you sometimes seem to defend. They are (in my lights) objective by virtue of being social.
What makes a formal language special is that it has been stripped of everything bodily, perceptual, and affective. That is precisely why it can be the same for all rational beings. But what turns out to be the same for all rational beings is only what is expressible in a purely formal language.
In other words, there are absolute truths that are cognizable by finite human minds: those of mathematics, and possibly fundamental physics. But there are no absolute truths of ethics, aesthetics, etc.
Tying together a few strands of thought from what I posted above, we can note that since mathematics is a purely formal language, it tells us nothing at all about any objects. This is a huge advance that Frege makes over earlier conceptions of mathematics, such as Kant’s or Plato’s. Conversely, if you want to talk about objects, then one is going to need a natural language — one that incorporates into semantic content the appropriate perceptual and practical norms.
I think it will follow from this that, although there are indeed nonempirical concepts — the concepts of a formal language — there are no “nonempirical objects”. I will need to sit with that idea for a while.
My concept of “water” does not include substance XYZ on Twin Earth (from Putnam’s thought experiment). Putnam’s concept of water does (or did) include XYZ. Ergo the concepts are different.
We do not socially share concepts. We socially share some of their uses. Ordinary social use of “water” does not touch on whether XYZ is included.
Our concepts go well beyond the common core of shared usage.
But maybe I am just pointing out that my concept of “concept” is not the same as your concept of “concept”. Still, even that would be enough to establish the point.
But natural language is not a formal language. Mathematicians use a great deal of informal natural language when communicating their mathematical concepts. A formal language is just not enough for that task.
But concepts go beyond truth conditions, even in mathematics.
I think I agree with that, though it might require more thought.
Peter Unger has a paper “There are no ordinary things” (Synthese, 1979), which he argues based on sorites paradoxes. But I think the title is wrong. Quite clearly, there are ordinary things. I think he should have been arguing “there are no logical objects”, which I’m inclined to see as a correct conclusion. Ordinary things, as ordinarily understood, lead to contradictions if we treat them as logical objects.
But I do wonder what ontology could be about, if it isn’t about logical objects.
Whereas I’m willing to go just a step further: we share concepts by virtue of using them in similar ways. But yes, there are always going to be inferences that you endorse and I don’t, as well as circumstances of application. There’s always going to be disagreement at the marginal cases, and sometimes about more central cases. And one’s own meanings change over time, as well, with experience and sometimes also with reflection.
Conceptual content is always going to be up-for-grabs or contested, shifting, evolving. At least that is always going to be the case for any concept in a natural language.
Even at what point we decide that we’re disagreeing about the same thing or talking about different things — that’s itself not a stable or ready-made distinction, but itself one of the things being negotiated in dialogue.
Why couldn’t it be about ordinary things?
Fair enough.
I emphasize the differences, while you emphasize the similarities.
That’s partly because I see the differences as being relevant to understanding human cognition.
I suppose it could be, though I wonder why bother.
People can agree on the truth of natural language statements about ordinary things (such as automobiles), even though they disagree about whether my automobile is the same one or a different one, after I replaced the gas cap.