Laws are pretty tricky, philosophically speaking

A lot of ink has been splashed around trying to construct watertight formal definitions of laws - and here, of course, I am talking about scientific laws or laws of nature - not the legal kind. But, if you think about it from another angle, such laws are very mysterious in all sorts of ways - ontologically, metaphysically, and so on.
Try considering, for example, how a law of this kind might be created or in some other way come into existence. Imagine trying to set about the task of bringing it about that there are such laws. Where would you start?
Here's one thought: laws cannot precede objects (i.e they cannot be created out of nothing). But then, if there have to be objects (using that notion in the widest sense), wouldn't any laws relating to them be derivative - that is: dependent on their nature? So could we not deduce some sort of essentialism from the the very existence of laws?  Laws can only exist if the relevant objects have certain definite properties?
The underlying thought here is if ontology takes priority, then laws are descriptive - after the fact entities, if you like. Can we conceive of a world in which there are just laws, and nothing else?
In such a world, if objects come into existence, they will be bound by these laws. But, what does the binding?
Imagine you have god-like powers. How would you create laws starting from scratch? Isn't it misleading to think of laws as some sort of metaphysical glue that can make sure that objects do what they are supposed to do?
Perhaps it is a mistake to think of laws as being separate from entities. How, in an empty world, do laws get going? If objects emerge in such a world, wouldn't their law-like behavior have to be a function of their very nature rather than a result of conformity to pre-existing laws?

Another sort of puzzle about God

The existence of God has often been invoked to answer very puzzling questions like: "How is is possible for this world to have come in to existence?", and, more generally, "How is it possible for anything to exist?" But, the answer fails to impress those who are bugged by such questions because it simply provokes a further question "How is it possible for God to come into existence/exist?"
     It is difficult to get purchase on such a question, and even theologians struggle, finding themselves resorting to dubious properties like 'necessary existence' which then have to be subjected to endless refinement in the face of even the mildest critical scrutiny.
     But, there is a related puzzle in the vicinity - one that it seems is rarely discussed: "How is it possible for God to actually have the incredible powers commonly attributed to such a being?"
Imagine God reflecting on these powers: "How did I get these?"
Presumably, God would not be satisfied with anything along the lines of "Because I just happen to have them" (that surely makes them contingent, if not arbitrary). And, "Because I have to have them" or "Because it is just in my nature to have them" would be opaque, and hence equally unsatisfactory.
    Presumably, God would have an answer (if the question makes sense). But, there seems to be no way we could ever understand it.
     Of course, this way of describing things projects a very human-like psychology onto God. But, absent that, it's not clear that we can ever gain any understanding of God (this suits some theologians, along with others who find the smokescreen of 'mysteriousness' rather handy), and, more importantly, it's even less clear that God can ever understand us (which, some might say, would explain a lot).

Having v Being: Marx and the accumulation that robs us of our humanity

I recently came across some passages in Lionel Trilling's wonderful book Sincerity and Authenticity that, to my mind, speak both insightfully, and poignantly, to many of our current problems - from the decline of the arts and humanities to the degradation of the natural environment. There is not enough space to quote in full, but perhaps enough to inspire some useful thoughts. Trilling's book is much neglected these days, but it was given a honorable mention in Bernard William's Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy, and although it is a bit old-fashioned, even quaint, in its approach at times, it contains many treasures like the following:

"The human autonomy which is envisioned by Schiller, Wilde, and Nietzsche is, we perceive, in essential accord with the conception of moral life proposed by Rousseau and Wordsworth when they assigned so high a significance to the sentiment of being. Indeed, the preoccupation with being informs most speculation about the moral life throughout the nineteenth century. The intense meaning which Wordsworth gave to the word 'be' became its common meaning in moral discourse. And it came commonly to be felt that being, which is to say the gratifying experience of the self as an entity, was susceptible to forces which either increased or diminished its force. There was a pretty clear consensus, for example, that among the things which increased the experience of self, art was pre-eminent. And, there was no question at all of what diminished the experience of the self - the great enemy of being was having ... it is accumulation robs you of being."

Trilling buttresses these views with some telling quotes form the early Marx, among which the following stands out:

"The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life - the greater is the saving of your alienated being. Everything which the economist takes away from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth. And everything which you are unable to do, your money can do for you; it can eat, drink, go to the ball and the theatre, It can acquire art, learning, historical treasures, political power, and it can travel. It can appropriate all these things for you ... but although it can do this, it only desires to create itself, and to buy itself ..."

With regard to this, Trilling makes an important point about the alienation involved (note, alas, his naive optimism about what "will be readily seen"):


"It will readily be seen that alienation does not mean to Marx what it meant to Hegel. It is not the estrangement of the self from the self which Hegel sees as a painful but necessary step in development. Rather it is the transformation of the self into what is not human. Marx's concept of alienation is not wholly contained in what he says about money; but certainly money is central to it and provides the most dramatic way of representing it."

(Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1972,pp.122-123. The Marx quotation is from Early Writings: Karl Marx, T.Bottomore (ed. and trans.), McGraw-Hill: New York, 1964, p.171-2)

The Anti-Private Wittgenstein Argument: a light-hearted observation

Wittgenstein seemed to have had  a morbid fear of not being understood. James Klagge says some interesting things about this in his book Wittgenstein in Exile. But, perhaps he makes too much of it. And, perhaps, at times, Wittgenstein did too.
Shouldn't he at least have shown us a glimpse of the irony in the very idea of there being a private Wittgenstein, someone who uses words and has thoughts only he can understand? Recall, it wasn't just Joanna or Joe Soap who would be left in the dark - even verbally astute philosophers like Russell would not be able to understand him. At the same time, isn't there something dubiously realist, and unWittgensteinian, about the notion of there being words and thoughts the meaning/content of which are unavailable to others?

Morals without worlds

If there hadn't been a world, if there had been just nothing, would there still have been a basis for morality? Some philosophers seem to think there would. For example: there would still have been reasons to do the right thing regardless (i.e. regardless of whether anyone existed to do it). But, this is hard to make much sense of: reasons drifting around outside of space and time, unattached to anything?
   Dissolve the universe leaving no physical remainder, then, or so the idea appears to be, this would have no effect on the existence of, say, moral principles. Here, we might agree up to a point. We might accept that such principles cannot be destroyed in the way the thought experiment envisages. But instructive puzzles remain.
   Suppose there is a world in which the existence of certain moral principles is recognized and that world ceases to exist. Here, we might want to say that the principles in question have some kind of latent operational status. In such circumstances it still remains true, for instance, that it would be wrong to do X. This has to mean something like: if beings capable of moral judgement and behavior were to exist, then it would be wrong for them to do X.
   If we go along with this, we end up with a world filled with all possible moral principles. For from each instance of 'if there were to be creatures who lived in such and such ways', we can derive the existence of moral principles relevant to their behavior. This encourages us to think of moral principles sitting there waiting to be discovered. We might also wonder whether we can ever to sure about our own moral status. Might we not fare very badly in that respect when scrutinized in the light of moral principles that we have not yet discovered?
   But, if you think about it, the chances are that we are already faring badly. For moral principles that we are unaware of already exist. Ignorance will not get us off the hook.
   Recall, however, that we were originally thinking of the case where there is simply no world in the first instance. Doesn't even latent operational status becomes nebulous in this case? Can we say "no" without having to lean on platonic myths as support for so saying? Are we happy to allow that moral principles can neither be created or destroyed, but are just there?
   A pragmatist can agree that all sorts of new moral principles might be 'discovered' in the future, and even that we might look bad in the light of them. But, these will be created at the time, out of the social circumstances that happen to exist then. To think of them already being there in splendid isolation, waiting to be found, is the kind of mistake that the philosophical imagination has been prone to for far too long.

Worlds without Explanations

Student: “Why is there so much suffering?”

Shunryu Suzuki: “No reason”.

That there has to be a reason for everything is an appealing thought. It is hard for us to accept the notion of something just happening, or just being there, for no reason. And, when we are thinking along these lines, “reason” is usually short for “reasoned explanation”. Can we imagine a world in which this kind of thinking has no application? This is not easy. Imagine a world in which there are no intelligent beings: our world, if things had gone differently. Isn’t this a reasonless world? In one sense, perhaps, yes. But, we will still want to ask of that world why it is like it is – why it is reasonless, for instance. All worlds seems to invite such questions, as does their absense.

          Will the quest for reasons run out of steam at some point? Not because we are intellectually exhausted (although we can imagine that happening), but rather because it comes up against a natural boundary beyond which such a quest makes no sense?  Some think that this world, our world, constitutes just such a boundary. We can ask of things in it “Why this?” or “Why that?” - “Why is the sun so hot at its core?”, “Why do earthquakes occur in some places and not others?” And so on. But, when we start to ask certain questions of that world considered as whole, then, or so some people believe, these questions implode. We don’t know how to press them further because no answer seems possible even as we begin to raise and reflect on them. “Why does this world exist?” and “How is it possible for this, or any, world to exist?” are examples of these questions.

          Of course there are standard answers to such questions which are liable to satisfy many people. “Because God made it” is one. And, “As a consequence of the big bang” is another. But, anyone inclined to take the thrust of the initial questions seriously will not be so easily satisfied. 
        They will want to ask these questions of the very phenomena invoked in the answers: "Why does God exist?", “How is the existence of God possible?”, "Why did the big bang occur?", and “How was the existence of the big bang possible?”
More on this some other time.

Succinct Summary: Surprising Source

"The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything."
                                                            Charles Moore (Margaret Thatcher's official biographer, former editor of The Telegraph, etc.)

A bit more on visual goings on in Wittgenstein's later work

Actually, this is just a bit more about some of the philosophical consequences of the ubiquity of linguistic awareness thesis (ULA) that propped up the previous post.
Consider, for example, Eugen Fischer's Wittgensteinian claim "Pictures rather than propositions determine most of our philosophical convictions" (Philosophical Delusion and its Therapy: Outline of a Philosophical Revolution, p.21). ULA implies that this cannot be right (so it also looks (sic) as if the envisaged revolution can only be an abortive one). For only a linguistic interpretation of a picture can do the work of forming convictions by interacting with our stock of beliefs. And, a picture in itself cannot determine such an interpretation (something that Wittgenstein seems to be committed to anyway). Here, of course, we will want to say that pictures have some causal role. But, it appears that we cannot define it non-arbitrarily at any useful level of generality. This holds for the general relationship between our beliefs and the world if we think of that relationship as being primarily non-linguistic.
Fischer tends to explain 'pictures' in terms of what might best be called linguistic models - so the visual aspect turns out to be redundant and the relations that are important are inferential.
My main concern here, I guess, is that, frequently, the philosophical use of visual language might itself be the product of thinking that requires therapeutic intervention - something Rorty cottoned on to in Philosophy and the mirror of nature (though he also slipped into pictorial mode all too often).

Visual goings on in Wittgenstein

In PI 122, Wittgenstein famously says that "A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of our use of our words". He goes on to claim that "our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity" and that "a perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in 'seeing connections'".
But, what does 'commanding a clear view', one that enables us to see connections, involve? It has always concerned me that the visual analogies relied on here cannot do the work required of them. For what, when it comes to language, do we see it with? Just our eyes? Surely not. For these can
reveal nothing philosophically interesting without embodying an element of linguistic interpretation. And, when we rely on eyes that are linguistically enhanced, so to speak, then what we see is already infected with the confusions we wish to allay. The assumption here, of course, is that all visual awareness that tells us anything interesting is linguistically saturated.

Bob Dylan, Wisdom, trivial coincidence, ... or not

Bob Dylan gave a puzzling  introduction to a new song at the Albert Hall in 1966: "I would like to dedicate this song to the Taj Mahal. It's called 'I see you've got your brand new Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat'". I was there, bunking off school. I heard him say it.

Going over some very old philosophical ground recently, I thought I might have finally found a solution to the puzzle: "Suppose someone is trying on a hat. She is studying it in a mirror. There's a pause and then a friend says 'My dear, the Taj Mahal'. .... To call a hat the Taj Mahal is not to inform someone that it has mice in it or will cost a fortune." ('Philosophy, Metaphysics and Psychoanalysis', John Wisdom, 1953).

Coincidence? Probably. But, I know Dylan has eclectic reading habits, and like to think that Wisdom's eccentric remarks would have appealed to his quirky imagination which was, after all, working overtime in those days.

Insidious realism: some backtracking

Looking back over what I have said about it, it seems that I have not yet nailed down what I call insidious realism. So let me say a bit more. Often when philosophers try to get clear about something, they assume, tacitly or otherwise, that the something in question is there, complete in itself, waiting to be properly explored and subsequently described. But in the interesting cases, this is rarely true  - if it were, philosophy would be much easier or redundant (think about it).
How often do we find philosophers discussing something like, say, desire as if the term "desire" designates something independent and complete in itself that accounts of it can either match or fail to match? Moreover, when a philosopher evinces some views about desire that are later worked up into a conception of desire by other philosophers working from an historical perspective, then the same assumptions about that conception often come into play. This generates two thick layers of fog.
In the latter cases, it is usually best to try to untangle what is there, so to speak, from what can be added, where the constraints on the additive process involve considerations such as consistency, utility, elegance and economy. Some times a degree of charity concerning one or more of these should come into play.

Unlocking the mysterious attraction of metaphysics

Metaphysics has once again become a key subject in philosophy. Indeed, it could well be attracting more sustained attention from the philosophical community than anything else. I must confess that I didn't even notice this until relatively recently. And then, I was simply left wondering "How did all this happen behind my back?". It's not that I believe the positivists succeeded in cutting off metaphysical thinking (i.e. the vestiges of it that survived Hume's critique and Kant's abortive 'purified by reason' version) at its roots long ago. It's rather that, since hanging out with pragmatists, I have had little practical use for the term "metaphysics". Whenever I see it deployed, either it seems to constitute the equivalent of a blank space in the relevant sentence or there seem to be better plainer speaking terms readily available - so it usually cries out to be replaced by one of them.
Consider Eric Olson's otherwise rather nifty book What Are We? Here are the opening sentences: "This is a book about a question: What are we? That is, what are we, metaphysically speaking? What are our most general and fundamental features? What is our most basic metaphysical nature?" Olson goes on to say that he is not going to try to define "the daunting phrases here" (e.g. 'our most basic metaphysical nature'), but will instead "give their meaning by example". However, it strikes me that the rest of the book can be made good sense of without referring back to these phrases or invoking their components. "Metaphysics" and "metaphysical", in particular,seem to be redundant throughout.
I guess I will say more about why I am suspicious of the current metaphysics growth industry in other posts (clue: it is far too often linked with insidious realism). For the moment, I just want to speculate that metaphysics has become so attractive again because it is such an effective enabler of philosophical fantasies - especially those that conjure up special powers of discernment regarding matters of ultimate concern and correspondingly special areas of inquiry (e.g. fundamental ontology). Yesterday, for example, I was reading Kit Fine's 'What is metaphysics?' and even though that paper seems to deal with the question in the clear-cut, reasonable way one expects given the author, it struck me that it can be read as one long philosophical fantasy (more about that later as well, perhaps).

Freud gets out of jail again

Freud was a great and tremendously interesting writer, but he could be pretty slippery. Below is a nice example:

1. A contradiction to my theory of dream produced by another of my women patients (the cleverest of all my dreamers) was resolved more simply, but upon the same pattern: namely that the nonfulfillment of one wish meant the fulfillment of another. 
2. One day I had been explaining to her that dreams are fulfillments of wishes. Next day she brought me a dream in which she was traveling down with her mother-in-law to the place in the country where they were to spend their holidays together.  Now I knew that she had violently rebelled against the idea of spending the summer near her mother-in-law and that a few days earlier she had successfully avoided the propinquity she dreaded by engaging rooms in a far distant resort.  And now her dream had undone the solution she had wished for;  was not this the sharpest contradiction of my theory that in dreams wishes are fulfilled? 
3. No doubt;  and it was only necessary to follow the dreams logical consequence in order to arrive at its interpretation.  The dream showed that I was wrong.  Thus it was her wish that I might be wrong, and her dream showed that wish fulfilled (italics original).                                                                         Sigmund Freud, The Interpretations of Dreams (New York: Avon, 1966)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

Morality and Money

I came upon these comments in a notebook. They were written some time ago, but still seem relevant:

Money has always provoked moral debates in which its capacity to corrupt plays a key role. However, over the past forty years or so this kind of debate has itself been corrupted. Ideas that created money’s reprehensible image seem to have been either abandoned or turned on their head.
            Unfettered pursuit of money simply for its own sake, exclusive use of monetary sums to calibrate values and social status, the flaunting of wealthy attributes, conspicuous consumption of luxury goods, vast disparities in both assets and income as between individuals within the same community, avid avoidance of taxes, and the assumption of large debt are somehow no longer obvious causes for moral concern.

“Somehow” is a vague term. But, ambiguity is appropriate here. For it is difficult to pin down when and why such sea change in moral perception occurred. One of the main reasons for this is that the process of uncoupling of money from morality has been deeply obscured by the fog of financial innovation. It is tempting, therefore, to put the causal blame on finance theory, and that insidious constellation of views has certainly been highly influential. However, to do this would be to invoke a separation between theory and practice that does not exist. It is a great irony that the longstanding leftist project of aligning theory with practice has already been accomplished by what can best be called, with still further irony, the finance community. But, what is this community?

It is a loose collection of financial institutions and the clients they are supposed to serve. This is held together by economic and political beliefs that yield both a sense of immunity to ordinary moral scrutiny and, strangely, a sense of moral accomplishment in being able to do the very things that such immunity allows.

The Sufficiency of Relaxed, Low Key, Natural Ontology

I have been reading Sellars' Naturalism and Ontology. The discussion veers between the direct and the oblique. This leaves me wondering whether a direct Wittgensteinian approach would be sufficient. Consider the ontological confusions concerning attributes.
How are we to explain "Yes, there are attributes" when it is voiced in response to a question like "Are there attributes?" (where the person asking, 99.999% of the time it's going to be a philosopher, is fishing for possible commitments to abstract objects or some such)? Can we not simply respond: "If we are able to attach a practical sense to "there are attributes" (meaning we know what to do with the phrase - can fit it into intelligible contexts, put it to communicative use, and so forth), then we need not invoke ontological talk and consequent puzzles about what it is for an attribute to exist, etc."?
Isn't the temptation to resist this sub-philosophical approach one that conflates reluctance to indulge in certain imaginative extrapolations (e.g. one imagines attributes floating around in metaphysical space waiting to get hooked up to something appropriate) with a supposed limitation of intelligence, whereas, clearly, intelligent insight is required to see that such imaginative extravagances are redundant - rather as one realises that angels are not real beings and then automatically feels relieved of any need to imagine what they look like, where they reside, and so on?
But then, can we not apply this to "there are infinities"? How does that square with my previous posting? Is it simply that we can again talk about infinities without dragging in the imagined realist underpinnings?

Deeper into insidious realism

A real realist thought: there are no infinities.
Another thought about this thought: if x supposedly has the characteristic of being infinite, then x does not exist.
Supposition behind this: all entities must have finite boundaries.

What is the status of such remarks?

In the light of them, can we interpret "infinite" in ways that do not have existence implications - e.g. "the series 1,2,3,..... is infinite" means that there is no procedure for establishing an end point, and no more than that? But then, do we not need to avoid the temptation to think "this is what 'infinite' really means"? Why would there be such a temptation if we were immune to the attractions of insidious realism and could use "really" innocuously?

Logic and language: how crude the discussion of the relationship here has so often been. Is logic necessarily an extension of ordinary/natural language  - so that it cannot have the autonomy required for it to serve as an independent means of clarifying/reforming such language? If it is an extension, what is wrong with the notion of language turning back on itself to clean itself up?

Imagine a professor kicks off a lecture a by putting a long string of unknown symbols on the blackboard, then, for whatever reason, makes no effort to explain their significance. Could sense be made of them without embedding them in some natural language narrative? If not, does this tell us something about the primacy of language? Could logical notation attain a level of autonomy such that it could be displayed (written/spoken) to purposeful effect absent any natural language contribution, and without the prospect of it ever being translated? Could sense be made here just by linking the symbols involved with other symbols? Could the border be crossed over into mathematics? Could someone get by speaking only mathematics?

Insidious realism again: back to some preliminaries

What makes the prospect of insidious realism so enticing? Is it that we find the idea of a metaphysical space, a place that is only constrained by logic, so attractive? But, why does such an idea tend to get a grip on us? Do we somehow feel we need some such space where, or so we imagine, we can park things like the members of infinite sets?

Insidious Realism

What do I mean by 'insidious realism'? The phrase is intended to refer to certain kinds of realist assumptions that lurk all over the place in philosophy. Wittgenstein was extremely good at sniffing them out, and even better at dismantling the imaginary pictures that encourage them. Think, for example, of his various assaults on the platonic imaginings that infect philosophical accounts of mathematics. Though here, it might be better to speak of imaginary, imaginary pictures because we our imaginations cannot conjure up pictures of, say, an infinite series of numbers. But, more next time!

Returning

I have taken some time out to pursue some research and progress a number of publishing projects, but I will be blogging again shortly. One of the topics that I might well explore concerns an insidious form of realism that pervades a great deal of modern philosophy. Consider the tacit assumption that linguistic phenomena - concepts, word meanings, etc. - have a real existence independently of social practices.

Money Never Sleeps: The Financial Crisis Revisited

The eruptions and possible transformations in the middle east have captured the media's attention for the moment, and rightly so. But, the global financial crisis continues to unfold - and it is important to keep our eye on the ball. I am ploughing through the recent six-hundred page report.

It is more hard-hitting in its criticisms than I expected, but still underestimates the moral element. Many commentators, especially those connected with the finance industry seem to be pretty squeamish about morality (when they are not simply being cynical) - as if it requires them to be pious goody-goodies with no business backbone.

Simple counterfactuals help highlight the causal impact of immoral behaviour: What if X (investment bankers, ratings agencies, hedge fund managers, etc.) had not been willing to Y
(choose from a long list of dubious actions)? Well the common answer, the one that straddles such questions, is that the crisis would not have happened. However, it will require a change of ethos to put the voluntary ethical constraints in place which can prevent such a crisis happening again. And, it is unclear, despite the surface rhetoric, that the finance world really wants such an ethos (even leaving aside the unfounded squeamishness just mentioned). Regulatory reform is a start, but it can never be sufficient if the prevailing moral attitude is wrong. For then, the first reaction is to look for ways to circumvent the rules or, as so often happens, turn them to the finance industry's further advantage.

By the way, Money Never Sleeps, the second Wall Street movie, is rather weak. It had a chance to nail the activities and atttitudes that caused the crisis, but after a promising start, it merely scratches the surface. One of the signs of the sorry state of our culture in the West is that its
art and literature have not yet been able to tackle the very grave issues raised by the current crisis. I suspect history will not look back on us very kindly in that respect.