What is Reality?

From contributor Phineas Upham

If there were a brain in a vat (BIV) that had the same beliefs, experiences, and memories as I do, would he be as justified in its belief about the external world as I am? Would I have a better epistemic position than the BIV? This question invokes the debate between the reliabilist and the internalist. The reliabilist holds that a perceptual belief is either justified or unjustified based on the epistemic reliability of the process or processes that are used to generate it, while the internalist believes that the criteria for reliability is dependent on the cognizer’s knowledge about his belief and his knowledge about the processes of arriving at them. By this analysis the reliabilist would hold that the BIV was not justified in holding it’s beliefs and that I would be in a better epistemic position than the BIV. He would argue that the BIV’s processes for generating his beliefs were unreliable (since it was only the whim of the scientists that held them consistent) and mine were more epistemically justified. The internalist would disagree, claiming that both the BIV and I had the same evidence available to make a judgment, and so the quality of our judgments was the same. It seems to me that the internalist gets the better of this argument since it is unclear how good our own epistemic position in relation to the world is.

The brain in a vat and I have the same evidence upon which to generate beliefs. If I were justified in believing my conclusions and the BIV were not, based on external facts, what use would the term justification retain? The BIV, from his perspective, has acted identically to me. If I am epistemically praiseworthy, he ought to be too, if I am epistemically blame worthy, he ought to be too, and if I am justified, he ought to be too. The term justified should have to do with how responsible you were with evidence. Let us imagine two BIV’s. The first was very haphazard with his evidence, and jumped to conclusions based on whims. The second was very careful to accumulate evidence before believing something, and made sure he had as much evidence as he could find that his methods of reaching conclusions were reliable. For the reliabilist, both BIV’s would be equally unjustified positions to know anything since both used equally epistemically unjustified mechanisms to arrive at their conclusions. But does this not seem to violate the intuitive feeling that the second BIV was more justified in believing his conclusions? The internalist would conclude that the second BIV was justified, and the first was not. But if we conclude that some BIV’s are more justified than others, then ought we not to side with the internalist and say that the BIV with identical experiences, beliefs, and memories is equally reasonable and equally justified?

The most troubling aspect of the argument that the BIV is less justified than we are because his mechanism was unreliable is the assumption that we are in a better epistemic position than the BIV. How do we know we are not a BIV? In other words, how do we know that our mechanisms are reliable? We do not. But if we do not know that we are in a better epistemic position than the BIV, how can we claim that we are more justified? In the end it seems to me that the BIV with our memories, experiences, and beliefs would be as epistemically justified as we are, no more, no less.

Phineas Upham is a regular contributor to Philosophy Insider. Find more of his work on his website by visiting him at PhineasUpham.com.

Physical Continuity, Self and the Future

Via Philosophia

By Oritsegbubemi Anthony Oyowe

Abstract

Jeff McMahan’s impressive recent defence of the embodied mind theory of personal identity in his highly acclaimed work The Ethics of Killing has undoubtedly reawakened belief that physical continuity is a necessary component of the relation that matters in our self-interested concern for the future. My aim in this paper is to resist this belief in a somewhat roundabout way. I want to address this belief in a somewhat roundabout way by revisiting a classic defence of the belief that enormous changes in the contents of a person’s psychology does not preclude justified fear of future pain. I have in mind Bernard Williams’ The Self and the Future (1970) in which he argues, against the psychological view, that physical continuity is necessary for survival. I examine Williams’ second thought experiment which ostensibly supports that intuition and afterwards defend two related claims. First, I argue that a close examination of the second thought experiment reveals that one’s prior commitments to a particular criterion of personal identity can influence one’s response to that thought experiment. Second, I argue that Williams’ second thought experiment is set out in questionbegging terms. I do not claim, however, that the intuition under consideration lacks justification; I only claim that Williams’ second thought experiment does not provide the needed support.

[Full article available here]

Language-Using Apes

Via Philosophy Now

Excerpt

J’aime Wells is an ape talking about the possibility of apes talking.

I live a few blocks away from some unusual neighbors: three chimpanzees who fluently use American Sign Language. Their names are Tatu, Dar, and Loulis, and their more famous family member Washoe was the first non-human to acquire a human language. Their home is the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute (CHCI), located on the campus of Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington. I have been a volunteer docent [public educator] there since 2007.

The language capabilities of non-human apes have been studied in several important projects, with widely different methods.

[Full article available here]

April 30, 2012 | Posted in: Reason |

What is Emotion?

By Phineas Upham

The study of emotion is a difficult one from many perspectives. For one, it seems to suffer from a lack of agreed upon definitions; Or it suffers from too many common, everyday definitions and this creates too hazy a realm to fully capture with one definition. For another, it is an intrinsically maddening concept to try to study. One must rely on what people say about their emotions and people are not always fully aware of the order, complexity, or magnitude of their emotions. The size of an emotion seems a hard question, and different emotions are rather incommensurable. Emotion seems to play an enormous role in our life and, along with consciousness, another heavily debated concept, it is one of those perplexing things of which we are fully aware and about which we are almost fully ignorant.

Richard Lazarus claims that in almost all cases (he allows for the possibility that some hardwired emotions are an exception) cognition precedes – is necessary and sufficient for – emotion. His claim can be glossed with the idea that the world must be mediated with cognition since one must at a very minimum understand/interpret the objects of the world around oneself before one can emotionally react to it. In dealing with the counterargument that emotion seems to come very, very quickly and at the very beginning of some situations before full understanding has been processed, he argues that cognition can be partial and, once internalized, very quick. The disagreement can be seen in the statement “I would certainly agree that a person need not be aware of his or her cognitive appraisals — but I would argue against the idea that some appraisals (Zajonc refers to preferences) are non-cognitive” (1022). But if we are defining cognition as any sort of appraisal, then it does seem logically true that we must unconsciously appraise a situation before we can have an emotion to it. One some level it seems we must register “edge” or “snake” or merely “snakelike characteristics” upon which our fear and emotional reactions proceed.

[Full article here]

About the Author
While an undergraduate student at Harvard University, Phineas Upham was the Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Review of Philosophy. He graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and currently works as an investor in New York City and San Francisco. Visit his website at PhineasUpham.com.

The Freedom of Judgment

Via International Journal of Philosophical Studies

By Mark Thomas Walker

Abstract

This is the sequel to my paper ‘Against One Form of Judgment-Determinism’ ( IJPS , May 2001), wherein I argued that theoretical rationalization, that is, the forming of judgments by way of inference from other judgments, cannot simply be identified with any kind of predetermination of conclusion-judgments by premise-judgments. Taking ‘free’ to mean ‘neither mechanistically explicable nor random’ (where something is mechanistically explicable if and only if it is either predetermined or probabilified in a certain way, and is random if and only if it is not why-explicable at all) I attempt here to establish that all judgments, whether rationalized or not, are necessarily free.

[Full article available here]

Better Never to Have Been?: The Unseen Implications

Via Philosophical Papers

By Joseph Packer

Abstract

This paper will directly tackle the question of Benatar’s asymmetry at the heart of his book Better Never to have Been and provide a critique based on some of the logical consequences that result from the proposition that every potential life can only be understood in terms of the pain that person would experience if she or he was born. The decision only to evaluate future pain avoided and not pleasure denied for potential people means that we should view each birth as an unmitigated tragedy. The result is that someone who seeks to maximize utility could easily justify immense suffering for current people in order to prevent the births of potential people. This paper offers an alternative framework for evaluating the creation of people that addresses Benatar’s asymmetry without overvaluing the potential suffering of potential people.

[Full article available here]

Religion, Relativism, and Wittgenstein’s Naturalism

Article from International Journal of Philosophical Studies.

By Bob Plant

Wittgenstein’s remarks on religious and magical practices are often thought to harbour troubling fideistic and relativistic views. Unsurprisingly, commentators are generally resistant to the idea that religious belief constitutes a ‘language‐game’ governed by its own peculiar ‘rules’, and is thereby insulated from the critical assessment of non‐participants. Indeed, on this fideist‐relativist reading, it is unclear how mutual understanding between believers and non‐believers (even between different sorts of believers) would be possible. In this paper I do three things: (i) show why the fideist‐relativist reading of Wittgenstein is not wildly implausible (Sections 1–2); (ii) argue that, despite its initial plausibility, this reading fails to take into account Wittgenstein’s naturalism (Sections 3–4); and (iii) explain what sort of naturalism this is, and how it sheds light on Wittgenstein’s remarks on religious belief (Sections 5–6).

[Full article here.]

April 18, 2012 | Posted in: Religion |

What is the World? by Phineas Upham [Part 4]

By Phineas Upham

[Part four of a four-part essay]

Construal applied to theories of emotion

Emotions and construal are intricately linked. We feel emotions about the way we believe the world is (at least for those emotions which are instrumental) and the world is as we construe it. But the relationship also goes the other way – not only do we feel emotions through the lens of construal, but we construe through the lenses of emotions! Thus there is a very strong feedback loop between these two concepts. Our emotional states deeply affect the way we perceive the world around us. This implies that even in identical situations, our emotional state will be a very important moderator to our interpretation and construal of the world (and vice versa).

The debate between Lazarus and Zajonc is one in which construal is very central. The central question is whether or not cognition (which crucially includes construal) proceeds emotion. Lazarus claims that in almost all cases (he allows for the possibility that some hardwired emotions are an exception) cognition precedes – is necessary and sufficient for – emotion. His claim can be glossed with the idea that the world must be mediated with cognition since one must at a very minimum understand/interpret the objects of the world around oneself before one can emotionally react to it. In dealing with the counterargument that emotion seems to come very, very quickly and at the very beginning of some situations before full understanding has been processed (before the world has been fully digested and construed), he argues that cognition can be partial and, once internalized, very quick. The disagreement can be seen in the statement “I would certainly agree that a person need not be aware of his or her cognitive appraisals… but I would argue against the idea that some appraisals (Zajonc refers to preferences) are non-cognitive” (1022). But if we are defining cognition as any sort of appraisal, then it does seem logically true that we must unconsciously appraise a situation before we can have an emotion to it. One some level it seems we must register “edge” or “snake” or merely “snakelike characteristics” upon which our fear and emotional reactions proceed.

If we had just gained our eyesight (after being blind) the world around us would have no meaning and would just be flashes of undifferentiated color and light – i.e. we would not construe meaning into the world we would just observe the meaningless colors and shapes. This seems too weak a definition for “thinking” or true “cognition,” and this is exactly the point Zajonc pounces, but then he goes further and I do not follow. “My definition of cognition required some form of transformation of a present or past sensory input. ‘Pure’ sensory input, untransformed according to a more of less fixed code, is not cognition” (118). This seems like a perfectly fine necessary condition for cognition but he treats it as a sufficient one, which clashes with my earlier point (and Lazarus’s argument is suddenly back from the dead – pun intended). A man who has never seem a snake/poison toad will not react emotionally to it, will not construe it as an object of danger either consciously or unconsciously. Clearly, one must register it as a snake (perhaps globally, or tentatively, or incompletely) and then ones automatic emotional reaction can occur. I am not sure what Zajonc, who I believe has the better of the argument in general, would respond to this. Nevertheless, I think Lazarus is begging the question with his definition of cognition and that more is required – that some sort of construal is necessary.

Isen and Baron’s piece, speaks of “positive affect, defined as pleasant feelings induced by commonplace events or circumstances”. Whether we are going to define such “moods” or “states of mind” as emotions is questionable and, to be fair, the authors never claim to. The essay claims that a positive state of mind, often easily induced by giving someone candy or a warm welcome, significantly effects their actions and social behavior for the better. This change is significant enough for Isen and Baron to suggest that the field of OB might be benefited from looking at this effect for workplace and sales applications. In its essence, we consrue the identical actions or things in certain moods than in others.

The world of Taylor and Brown is especially illuminating to the idea of construal. It made the argument that wearing rose-tinted glasses (as Shakespeare put it) could be (and generally is) an adaptive strategy. It thus put itself at odds with the literature which defined mental health as having an accurate picture of self and with the normative claim that this would even be desirable. It shows us yet again that the central tension in construal between truthfulness and usefulness is real. Rose tinted glasses may be useful (for some hard-wired cognitive reason, or some intrinsic-structural ego reason) but it is not necessarily illustrative of ones real abilities or skills.

If construal theory, in this essay, has shown us one thing, it is that the world is interpreted for our use, and that while truthfulness is a component of that , it is not the only one by any means. Our minds have an amazing ability and a heavy burden. Our minds have the ability to construe the world, to interpret the world, to shape our perceptions of the world. But they also have the burden if doing this shaping in such a way that they preserve the sometimes contradictory ideas of truthfulness and usefulness. What is ‘real’ in the world or the way other see it, is not necessarily the way we do, or ought. But at the same time, there is some value to seeing things as others do (both so you can predict their actions and so you have a common frame of reference in which to cooperate). Lastly, there is a third force which this work has shown us affects the construal process. It is the environmental and cognitive background of the world – the moods, emotions, light-exposure, air-pressure, etc.. While these are often useful in viewing the world, in these cases they seem to be intruding where they are apparently not helpful (it is hard to see how less light ought to make one feel worse about oneself). So our construal process moderated between these three forces in order to give us our world-view, understanding of causality, value judgments, emotions, and interpretations of the world. Perhaps humility in the face of such complexity and such amazing achievements of nature to make, through construal and other cognitive processes, the incomprehensible comprehensible, the complex relatively understandable is best summed up by Ecclesiastes: “vanity vanity, all is vanity… and that which is crooked shall not be made straight, and that which is lacking shall not be counted.”

Readings:
Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics biases. Science, 185: 1124-1131.
Markus, H. (1977). Self-schemata and processing information about the self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35: 63-78.
Bem, D.J. (1972). Self-perception theory. In L. Berkowitz (ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 6.
Aronson, E. (1969). The theory of cognitive dissonance. In L. Berkowitz (ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 4. New York: Academic Press.
Steele, C.M. (1988). The psychology of self-affirmation: Sustaining the integrity of the self. In L. Berkowitz (ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 21. San Diego: Academic Press (pp. 261-302).
Staw, B. M. 1981. The Escalation of Commitment to a Course of Action.Academy of Management Review, 6: 577-587.
Lazarus, R. (1982). Thoughts on the relations between emotion and cognition. American Psychologist, 37: 1019-1024.
Zajonc, R.B. (1980). Feeling and thinking: Preferences need no inferences.American Psychologist, 35: 151-175.
Zajonc, R.B. (1984). On the primacy of affect. American Psychologist, 35: 151-175.
Isen, A.M. & Baron, R.A. (1991). Positive affect as a factor in organizational behavior. In B.M. Staw & L.L. Cummings (eds.), Research in Organization Behavior. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 13.
Taylor, S.E. & Brown, J.D. (1988). Illusion and well-being: A social psychological perspective on mental health. Psychological Bulletin, 103: 193-210.

What is Wrong with Husserl’s Scientific Anti-Realism?

Article from Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.

By Harald A. Wiltsche

Not much scholarly work is needed in order to stumble across many passages where Edmund Husserl seems to advocate an anti-realist attitude towards the natural sciences. This tendency, however, is not well-received within the secondary literature. While some commentators criticize Husserl for his alleged scientific anti-realism, others argue that Husserl’s position is much more realist than the first impression indicates. It is against this background that I want to argue for the following theses: a) The basic outlook of Husserl’s epistemology as well as his more substantial comments regarding the natural sciences indeed result in a (sophisticated version of) scientific anti-realism which bears certain resemblances to Bas van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism; b) This scientific anti-realism can be defended against the two most common objections raised in the secondary literature; c) It is only by means of this sophisticated version of scientific anti-realism that phenomenology can circumvent the problem of “scientific objectivism”.

[Full article here.]

April 10, 2012 | Posted in: Science |

Presentism and Causation Revisited

Article from Philosophical Papers.

By Sam Baron

One of the major difficulties facing presentism is the problem of causation. In this paper, I propose a new solution to that problem, one that is compatible with intrinsic, fundamental causal relations. Accommodating relations of this kind is important because (i) according to David Lewis (2004), such relations are needed to account for causation in our world and worlds relevantly similar to our own, (ii) there is no other strategy currently available that successfully reconciles presentism with relations of this kind and (iii) resolving the problem of causation by accommodating intrinsic, fundamental causal relations provides the presentist with a far more general solution to the problem of causation than those currently on offer.

[Full article here.]

April 5, 2012 | Posted in: Reason |