Dustin Arand's Blog

We're all familiar with the Aristotelian syllogism, and its most famous exemplar:

MP: All men are mortal.
mp: Socrates is a man.
C: Socrates is mortal.

But notice that the major premise depends upon an inductive inference, based on the empirical observation that we have not yet met anyone who has survived beyond a certain age. It could be the case that Socrates will be the person who finally disconfirms this inference.

That is the vulnerability of all inductive knowledge. Consequently, the flaw in the syllogism is that it basically assumes that which it sets out to prove, since the claim that "all men are mortal" depends upon Socrates (among others) also being mortal.

Another way to put this criticism is to say that deductive syllogisms cannot produce information in their conclusions that is not already contained in their premises. But this seems to call into question Kant's distinction between "synthetic" and "analytic" statements, that is, between statements whose predicates explicate or illuminate the nature of their subjects, and those that merely state a definition (e.g. "A bachelor is an unmarried man.")

What difference is left between them if the supposedly synthetic statements are ultimately begging the question?
But this worry leads to another, for if all logical argument is analytic, what becomes of justification? Plato tells us that knowledge is justified true belief, but Wittgenstein retorts that, eventually, our spades will hit rock and be turned back.

All justifications must end somewhere, and if all justifications consist of analytic statements, then eventually they curl back on themselves, and knowledge is revealed to be a web of interconnected definitions, suspended in thin air. The only alternative is an infinite regress.

Is this good news for cynics, nominalists, and post-modernists?

Perhaps if there were only one possible web of interconnected definitions, the claim that knowledge was not ultimately justifiable would have some force.

But happily knowledge is a buyer's market. For any given set of empirical observations, there are an infinite number of theoretical explanations, some of which will clearly be better than others in the sense that they will fulfill more of needs, answer more of our questions, and suggest more avenues for further research.

We should think of knowledge not as a process of adding true statements to an ever increasing body, but as an endless series of creative re-imaginings of the entire web of definitions by which we divide up the world. It is therefore not statements per se that are true or false, but whole systems - theories - that are either already, or not yet, falsified. No system can be said to be true without reservations.

“One can ascribe states of consciousness to oneself only if one can ascribe them to others. One can ascribe them to others only if one can identify other subjects of experience. And one cannot identify others if one can identify them only as subjects of experience, possessors of states of consciousness.”
- P.F. Strawson, Individuals

Is the self – the ego – the only thing of which we can be certain? Do we come to know other minds by analogy with our own? Philosopher P.F. Strawson argues the opposite is true.

Assume one had no concept of other minds. Would one need to represent to oneself that one felt pain or fear? Of course not, Strawson argues. One would just FEEL pain or fear and react appropriately. “How can it be right to talk about ascribing in the case of oneself? For surely there can be a question of ascribing only if there is or could be a question of identifying that to which the ascription is made.”

Strawson’s thesis is that the concept of the person is logically prior to the concept of the self, and recent empirical evidence seems to support this claim. Yale researcher Laurie Santos has found that rhesus macaques prefer to steal fruit from her assistants when they can see the assistants aren’t looking. In other words, the macaques appear to understand that others might NOT know things (I’m stealing your fruit) that they do. (see http://www.smithsonianmag.com/…/think...…) Yet we have no evidence that macaques possess a sense of self. Granted, testing for selfhood in other animals is tricky business, but Strawson’s argument, and Santos’ evidence, confirm the common sense judgment that, so far as survival and reproduction go, appropriately reacting to social and ecological cues is a more pressing problem than reflecting on one’s own inner narrative.

But Strawson goes further. If our concept of others’ minds is prior to our concept of our own, then our concept of a person as a combination of both material and mental phenomena is prior to our concept of a disembodied ego. This MUST be the case because our only evidence of others’ mental states consists of the actions of their physical bodies. The idea of a disembodied ego depends on the idea of a private subjective experience, but this depends on the concept of the self, which is itself dependent upon the concept of others. Thus, Descartes had it completely backwards when he held that the existence of his self was the only thing of which he could be certain.

In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick made the case for a strong libertarianism. According to Nozick, the only kind of obligations by which we can justly be bound are those we assume voluntarily. The imposition of any further obligation on an individual is a violation of his inherent right to liberty. Starting from a state of perfect liberty, any future outcomes, so long as they are the result of purely voluntary transactions, are just.

This is what comes of the reification of words like “liberty.” We had better speak of capacities to act, and incentive structures within which those capacities are exercised. Then we would see that 1) there is no neutral incentive structure, 2) consequently there is no ideal state of perfect liberty, 3) individuals’ choices to exercise their respective capacities are sensitive to the incentive structure in which they are embedded, 4) the incentive structure is itself sensitive to, and can be reshaped by, individuals’ choices to exercise certain capacities rather than others, 5) that as a result there may be many instances in which individuals would prefer NOT to have a choice regarding some capacity, so long as no one else had that particular choice either, because foregoing that capacity would make some other capacity possible that would not be possible otherwise, and, finally 6) there need not be any end to the expansion of our capacity for action, but the process of expansion will necessarily involve the subsumption of some previously “free” actions under rules.

A simple and straightforward example of this is the problem of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The prisoners in this game would sure like it if their hands were forced. Giving up a trivial capacity (one that they wouldn’t relish exercising), in exchange for years of freedom, is a solid deal.

Other examples abound. Public education comes to mind. You don’t have to have a child to benefit from free public education. An educated citizenry makes possible economic activity that would never occur in its absence. Indeed, the specialization of labor and consequent improvements in technology and the standard of living are prime examples of a deeper, broader phenomenon, one we see everywhere: the subsumption of lower-order processes into automatic mechanisms, followed by the emergence of higher-order processes, then repeat.

Imagine how little time you would have to devote to art, philosophy, science, or any other endeavor, if you had to constantly make sure your heart was beating. By locking in certain physiological processes, making them automatic, natural selection frees up cognitive power to tackle harder, more rewarding, tasks. The same may be said of societies. Say what you want about the state, but it’s what makes your iPhone, your car, your computer, your refrigerator, and your TV possible, among other things.

In his monograph on the Yanomamo, Napoleon Chagnon noted that Yanomamo villages tended not to grow larger than 150 souls before “fissioning” into two smaller villages, with one half of the villagers picking up and moving elsewhere. Perhaps, he noted, there is an upper bound on the size of a society that can be held together by purely informal means. If so, Nozick’s Utopia would turn out to be a Hell, a nasty, brutish camping trip from which you could never return. If you were lucky, it would be short.

Atheism is not a religion, nor does it require "faith" in the sense that that word is used by religious people. Many atheists, justifiably put off by assertions to the contrary, have pushed back in the opposite direction, claiming that to be an atheist means nothing more than to lack a belief in a God or gods. While this may be true as a matter of semantics, it ignores the important role that politically conscious atheists play in modern American society.

Individual and group identities can form around any of a number of traits that are rendered salient by the social, political, economic, and cultural conditions in which individuals find themselves. When we speak of Palestinians, of the "Black Community," and of atheists (at least in America), we are talking about groups whose members identify with one another because they have a shared sense of having endured, and still enduring, some form of oppression, marginalization, or antagonization on the part of the larger societies in which they find themselves.

When atheists go to Reason Rallies, or Apostacons, or other atheism/agnosticism/freethinker/secular humanist conventions, they do not go as votaries to a sacred ritual, but they do go as members of a community defined by much more than the mere lack of a belief in God. There is no essence of the atheist community, but there are overlapping and criss-crossing values - skepticism, intellectual honesty, anti-authoritarianism, etc. - that form the background for the conversations and debates such gathering inevitably lead to.

One of the things many formerly religious people grapple with is how to find meaning in a world without God. But many eventually realize that what they missed was not so much God but the sense of community, of being a part of something larger than oneself, that comes with belonging to a church. Given the degree to which non-believers are marginalized and demonized in American society, it was almost inevitable that many atheists would be drawn to a community of like-minded persons dedicated to secular activism.

Recently, I appeared on: Road to Reason - A Skeptic's Guide to the 21st Century
, where the hosts and I discussed the questions of identity and community among secular Americans. I join the show at 18:00.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFzVH...

Mathematics is (or purports to be) a deductive science. Unlike the empirical sciences, whose conclusions are only ever tentative, once a mathematical theorem is proved, it is proved for all time. But what does it mean to “prove” a theorem? I suppose it means proceeding in logical steps from a set of premises to a conclusion. As long as the steps taken accord with rules that are accepted as valid, then the steps will be valid, and thus the conclusion will be valid.

In the book Fermat’s Enigma, Simon Singh tells the story of Andrew Wiles, a brilliant mathematician who proved Fermat’s Last Theorem, a seemingly intractable problem that had baffled mathematicians for over three hundred years. The problem can be stated simply enough: the equation a^n + b^n = c^n has no positive integral solutions where n > 2. But to solve it, Wiles had to use a number of highly sophisticated mathematical concepts – like modular forms and elliptic curves - and his proof was so esoteric, so impenetrable, that only a handful of the world’s brightest mathematicians had the knowledge and skill to check his work.

That got me thinking. In Proofs and Refutations, philosopher Imre Lakatos argues that one never really proves what one sets out to prove. The reason is that, when a proof is offered, other mathematicians will offer counterexamples that attempt to show that one of the assumptions the proof relies on is false. At this point, disagreement arises as to whether these are actually counterexamples, and deciding this questions depends on how broadly or narrowly certain concepts in the proof are defined. Define them broadly, and it becomes easy to find counterexamples. Define them narrowly, and it becomes harder. But don’t define them too narrowly, because then the “proof” covers so few cases that it ceases to be interesting.

The neat proof that results from this process hides the fact that many of its key concepts’ definitions have had to be renegotiated by the community along the way. “Discovery does not go up or down, but follows a zig-zag path: prodded by counterexamples, it moves from the naïve conjecture to the premises and then turns back again to delete the naïve conjecture and replace it by the theorem. Naïve conjecture and counterexample do not appear in the fully fledged deductive structure: the zig-zag of discovery cannot be discerned in the end-product.”
Put more bluntly, Lakatos argues, “one does not prove what one has set out to prove.”

Lakatos’ argument is reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s discussion of what it means to obey a rule. One example of following a rule is using a word correctly, but can one do this privately? Wittgenstein makes the point that following a rule is not the same thing as thinking one is applying a rule, since in the latter case one may be mistaken. Without other members of the community checking our usage of words, we could never say we were using them consistently, and every act of recognition would be a new act of definition. Similarly, Lakatos underscores the public nature of proofs and the dialectic essential to arriving at a consensus definition of concepts central to the proof.

The manuscript of John Dewey's "Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy" had been lost for some sixty years until researchers discovered it in the Dewey archives at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois. Though unfinished, the existing manuscript, at around 350 pages, conveys the gist of Dewey's thesis that modern philosophy is in fact shot through with pre-modern ideas.

Dewey argues that most of the dualisms that prevail in both philosophical and common sense thinking - body and mind, material and ideal, practical and theoretical, subjective and objective, things and persons - are false dichotomies. When western philosophy began in Ancient Greece 2500 years ago, the philosophers were of the aristocratic class, conservative and unburdened by the need to engage in manual labor.

Analogizing from the specific socioeconomic situation of Ancient Greece, the Greek philosophers saw the labor of the mind as fundamentally distinct - and better - than the labor of the hands. The objects of the mind were conceived as eternal, immutable, and possessed of greater dignity than the objects of the senses, which were degenerate and susceptible to corruption.

Medieval Church philosophers expounded upon this distinction. Whereas the Greeks had seen these dichotomies as part of Nature, a reflection of Nature's dual character, the Churchmen further separated them by declaring mind, idea, soul (the sine qua non of persons) and reason to be our inheritance from God.

Descartes, the father of rationalism, accepted this abrupt division when he declared that only humans were endowed with reason, all other animals being mere automata. Similarly Locke, the father of empiricism, believed that the human intellect was capable of discerning simple ideas - from which all other ideas could be built up - by virtue of the Reason given to it by God.

Dewey argues that modern philosophy has never been truly modern in that it has never fully shaken off the vestiges of Greek-Medieval thinking. A modern philosophy would recognize that what constitutes a "fact" cannot be divorced from the socio-cultural context in which it is acknowledged and acted upon as such; what constitutes a "mind" cannot be divorced from the environment that places particular demands on its attention and interaction.

The pre-modern view, with its false dichotomies, offers a take-it-or-leave-it ontology and a take-it-or-leave-it ethics. Because objects and their moral qualities are antecedently given, they are not analyzable nor are they justifiable. But this puts the cart before the horse. Actions are not moral in themselves, nor are beings in themselves entitled to moral consideration. Rather, "it is in and because of interplay among expectations, demands, fulfillments and evasions, with accompanying praise and blame, reward and penalty, approval and disapproval, that modes of behavior take on acknowledged social importance and become representative of social values; that is, of activities which are taken by the group to be important for group welfare and perpetuation. Human beings as the bearers of these representative functions, or offices, come into possession of the properties that describe a personal being."

By contrast, a modern view would see knowledge and ethics as the products of an ongoing evolutionary process, capable of improvement but never completion.

Last November, nearly two hundred people were injured during clashes between police and devotees of the self-proclaimed faith healer known as Rampal. Rampal was wanted in connection with a 2006 murder, but at the time he and thousands of his followers were holed up in an ashram in the Indian state of Haryana.

We've seen this story before in places like Waco and Jonestown, but it would be wrong to write off the followers of people like Rampal and David Koresh as somehow fundamentally different from the rest of us. Indeed, if anthropologist and linguist Dan Sperber is correct, drinking the Kool-Aid is just the most extreme manifestation of the same behavior that causes us to trust our parents, teachers, and clergy, and that, in educated circles, causes us to find meaning in obscurantist writings or abstract art.

The idea is simple. No communicative act completely determines its meaning to the audience. In every case, the hearers/viewers make use of contextual clues (which may or may not be physically present) to interpret the communication, and in doing so they apply what linguists call the "principle of charity," a tendency to assume that the communicator has something to express that is worth taking the time to understand.

Of course, it's possible there is nothing there to understand, or that the surface meaning is all there is. What is important to note is that although we may revoke the principle of charity vis-a-vis someone whose past utterances proved unworthy of attention, we tend to apply the principle by default, and especially to the extent that the speaker is regarded as an authority figure. Thus Sperber writes:

"As children we were often told things that we didn’t quite understand but were clearly intended to. Little Lucy is told by her teacher that cucumbers are 95% water (an example I borrow from Andrew Woodfield). She thinks of water as a liquid. Now, cucumbers are solid, not liquid objects; water does not flow out of them; so what could the teacher mean? Accepting, however, the authority of the teacher, Lucy now believes, without fully understanding it, that, somehow, cucumbers are 95% water. The very difficulty of grasping this idea indicates to her that this is a relevant piece of information, worth remembering and thinking about until she can make better sense of it.

Lucy was also told by her parents and at Sunday school that God is everywhere. This too she believes with only partial comprehension. Whereas many children end up understanding how solid bodies such as cucumbers can mostly be made of water, the belief that God is everywhere remains impossible to fully comprehend. This mysteriousness is, if anything, even better recognized by theologians than by children. Given that, for the faithful, the relevance of the belief is beyond question, its very mysteriousness is a strong indication of its significance. Impenetrability indicates profundity."

http://www.dan.sperber.fr/wp-content/...

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife,
Nature I loved, and next to nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life,
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
- Walter Savage Landor, “On His Seventy-Fifth Birthday”

In The Age of Atheists, historian Peter Watson traces the history of the secular search for meaning and purpose, from Nietzsche’s declaration of the death of God to the present day. One of the most interesting themes of the book is the importance of poetry, not just to writers, but to other artists, scientists, and philosophers as well.

Reflecting on his imminent death from pancreatic cancer, the American philosopher and atheist Richard Rorty recalled the lines above by Landor and the comfort they had given him, and also these verses from Algernon Charles Swinburne’s “Garden of Proserpine”:

From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives forever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

But it is not just poetry’s power to give us solace in the face of death. Its value to secular thinkers goes much deeper and broader. Poetry transforms the mundane objects and events of life into something fleetingly sacred, essentially and irreducibly mysterious. In that sense, it mimics the oceanic feeling of religious experience.

When I was feeling my own ties to the faith of my parents ebbing away, I too found solace in poetry, especially the romantic poems of e.e. cummings. But the rational, scientific side of me still sought to understand why poetry could perform this function. What makes poetry a good spiritual surrogate?

In Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Dan Sperber and Dierdre Wilson argue that normal communication differs from poetry in that the latter is often concerned, not with evoking a precise interpretation, but rather with creating a diffuse amplification of many related aspects of the background knowledge we bring to our reading. In their words, poetry “achieves most of its relevance through a wide array of weak implicatures.”

An implicature is a term of art in linguistics that refers to what is suggested by an utterance, though not strictly implied or entailed in the logician’s sense. Having grown up Catholic and attended mass every Sunday, it seems clear to me that there is a parallel between religious ceremony and the reading of poetry, in that both are capable of evoking a richly textured web of concepts, even as their precise meanings remain elusive. Religion often pretends that there is at least one person – God – to whom these meanings are clear, but as an atheist, my guess is that there is no essential mystery, only the reduced explanation and the unreduced experience. Like a joke that becomes unfunny in the explication, it’s not that beauty and mystery can’t be fathomed; it’s just that sometimes we want to enjoy them for their own sake.

Last December, two news stories began circulating around the same time. One concerned the appalling acts of torture committed by the CIA, and sanctioned by members of the executive and legislative branches of government, during the years after 9/11. Another, appalling in its own way, concerned Korean Air Vice President Heather Cho, who demanded that her plane return to the terminal, causing the flight to be delayed 20 minutes, after the flight attendant served her a bag of macadamia nuts without opening it for her (even though company protocol dictates that the bags be delivered to passengers unopened).

Both of these stories illustrate a phenomenon that has recently been getting a lot of attention among psychologists and social scientists: the fact that high socioeconomic status predicts low levels of empathy for others. Why would an airline executive think that a minor flaw in service warranted delaying the trips of hundreds of people and publicly humiliating several employees? Why would high-level politicians and government lawyers think that waterboarding, beating, sleep deprivation, and “rectal feeding” are consistent with laws banning torture? Why would Mitt Romney think that half the country are nothing but lazy moochers? And why does Donald Trump say, well, pretty much everything he says?

According to a 2011 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (“Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior”), which gathered together findings from seven different studies on the effect of socioeconomic status on ethical decision making, persons of high social status were more likely to (1) break the law while driving, (2) exhibit unethical decision making tendencies, (3) take valued goods from others, (4) lie during negotiations, (5) cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize, and (6) endorse unethical behavior at work.

In one particularly interesting study, two subjects at a time were invited to play the board game Monopoly for fifteen minutes, but with one twist. A coin was flipped at the beginning of the game, and the winner of the toss received 2000 dollars to start the game, the right to collect 200 dollars for passing Go, and could roll two dice to move. The loser received 1000 dollars to start, 100 dollars for passing Go, and was only allowed to roll one dice to move. They were even given tokens that symbolized the differences between them, with the winner of the coin toss getting the Rolls Royce and the loser getting the shoe.

The privileged players inevitably crushed the poorer ones. “Initially, [the privileged player] reacted to the inequality between him and his opponent with a series of smirks, an acknowledgment, perhaps, of the inherent awkwardness of the situation. “Hey,” his expression seemed to say, “this is weird and unfair, but whatever.” Soon, though, as he whizzes around the board, purchasing properties and collecting rent, whatever discomfort he feels seems to dissipate. He’s a skinny kid, but he balloons in size, spreading his limbs toward the far ends of the table. He smacks his playing piece (in the experiment, the wealthy player gets the Rolls-Royce) as he makes the circuit—smack, smack, smack—¬ending his turns with a board-shuddering bang! Four minutes in, he picks up Glasses’s piece, the little elf shoe, and moves it for him. As the game nears its finish, T-Shirt moves his Rolls faster. The taunting is over now: He’s all efficiency. He refuses to meet Glasses’s gaze. His expression is stone cold as he takes the loser’s cash.” http://nymag.com/news/features/money-...

When asked after the game to account for why they had won, privileged players also invariably pointed to their decisions to purchase certain properties. Rarely did they acknowledge the lucky coin flip that essentially determined the outcome. For them, history was revised to validate their sense of agency and responsibility for their success.

These findings demonstrate why addressing inequality isn’t just about fairness. Highly unequal societies have a diminished capacity for self-correction, whereas more equal societies foster the empathy and honesty that makes it possible to learn from our mistakes.

“Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”
- William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

Earlier this year in a piece published in National Geographic, Francis Collins – the geneticist behind the Human Genome Project and the director of the National Institutes of Health – explained why he is a Christian, and why he feels science and faith are compatible.

“At the most fundamental level, it’s a miracle that there’s a universe at all. It’s a miracle that it has order, fine-tuning that allows the possibility of complexity, and laws that follow precise mathematical formulas.”

No beef with that assessment, but I don’t see how it gets you to Christianity. He says faith can be a better path than science when it comes to answering questions like “Why is there something rather than nothing? Why are we here?” But what kind of faith can he have in mind?

Back when I was reading the Bible, one thing that occurred to me was the difficulty of claiming a special place for a particular religious tradition. Say you claim the Bible is the inerrant word of God. That would make your religion special, but it would also make it absurd, as even most Christians today recognize that the Bible, if taken literally, is full of contradictions, factual inaccuracies, and beastly morality. But then if you say the Bible conveys “truths” through allegory and metaphor, I could just as easily respond that so do the holy books of every other religion, and many secular works of philosophy and literature as well.

Which makes me wonder, if we tried to take the common denominator of all human religions, what would we find? Would we even find anything, or are religions like Wittgenstein’s games, sharing many family resemblances but no common essence?
Even if we could find an essence of human religion, what if we took the inquiry to the cosmic level? Imagine a race of intelligent aliens who, having survived their technological adolescence, have moved on to colonize the galaxy over a span of billions of years. Would they have religion? If so, what, if anything, would it have in common with ours?

Look again at the quote by James. The laws of physics, of the chemical bond, of heredity and selection, are not seen, but only inferred. Theories do not map onto reality so much as they help us organize our thoughts and perceptions, so that we might bring our behavior into better alignment with the way the world is. Viewed this way, perhaps science, by eschewing absolute truths in favor of endless wonder at the world around us, is more religious than religion, at least in this most general, cosmic sense.