Hélio Steven > Hélio's Quotes

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
― George Orwell

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“There is no "religious language" or "scientific language". There is rather the international notation of mathematics and logic; and English, French, Spanish and the like. In short, "religious discourse" and "scientific discourse" are part of the same overall conceptual structure. Moreover, in that conceptual structure there is a large amount of discourse, which is neither religious nor scientific, that is constantly being utilized by both the religious man and the scientist when they make religious and scientific claims. In short, they share a number of key categories.”
― Kai Nielsen, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion

“Science constantly furnishes us with astonishing ideas about the nature of reality. Physics tells us that there may be an infinite number of universes, of which ours is just one, and that perhaps two particles in no physical contact with one another can somehow influence each other’s properties. From evolutionary biology we learn that birds are the only living descendents of dinosaurs. Geologists reveal that, as a result of the current trajectory of the Earth’s tectonic plates, Australia will eventually collide with Alaska. Contemporary educated people have grown used to the idea that, at least where the causal structure of the world uninfluenced by human agency is concerned, our stock of“commonsense” assumptions and principles is systematically unreliable as a guide to the facts. Our everyday scale of perceptions, along both its temporal and its spatial dimensions, is simply too pinched and unrepresentative to be trusted as a direct window onto wider truths, at least about physics, geology, astronomy, microbiology, and so on.”
― Don Ross

“Intuition must be taken seriously in the absence of substantial theoretical understanding, but once such theoretical understanding begins to take shape, prior intuitive judgments carry little weight unless they have been endorsed by the progress of theory. The greater one's theoretical understanding, the less weight one may assign to untutored judgment.

All this applies equally well to the case of appeals to intuition in philosophy. We sometimes hear philosophers speak of some intuitions as 'merely' driven by theory, and thus to be ignored. While it is certainly true that judgments driven by bad theories are not to be taken seriously, the solution is not to try to return to some pure state of theory independent judgment, before the fall, as it were; rather the solution is to get a better theory. Intuition in the absence of theory does not count for nothing, especially if no credible theory is available. But this is not to award high marks to intuitive judgment before the arrival of successful theory, let alone after, when the initially low value of such judgment drops still lower.”
― Hilary Kornblith, Knowledge and Its Place in Nature

“Lewis famously advocated a metaphysical methodology based on subjecting rival hypotheses to a cost-benefit analysis. Usually there are two kinds of cost associated with accepting a metaphysical thesis. The first is accepting some kind of entity into one's ontology, for example, abstracta, possibilia, or a relation of primitive resemblance. The second is relinquishing some intuitions, for example, the intuition that causes antedate their effects, that dispositions reduce to categorical bases, or that facts about identity over time supervene on facts about instants of time. It is taken for granted that abandoning intuitions should be regarded as a cost rather than a benefit.”
― James Ladyman, Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized

“People pontificate, "Suicide is selfishness." Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“[...] proficiency in inferring the large-scale and small-scale structure of our immediate environment, or any features of parts of the universe distant from our ancestral stomping grounds, was of no relevance to our ancestors’ reproductive fitness. Hence, there is no reason to imagine that our habitual intuitions and inferential responses are well designed for science or for metaphysics.”
― James Ladyman, Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized

“In most sciences, there are few findings more prized than a counterintuitive result. It shows something surprising and forces us to reconsider our often tacit assumptions. In philosophy of mind, a counterintuitive “result” (e.g., a mind-boggling implication of somebody’s “theory” of perception, memory, consciousness, or whatever) is typically taken as tantamount to a refutation. This affection for one’s current intuitions, sometimes amounting (as we saw in the previous chapter) to a refusal even to consider alternative perspectives, installs deep conservatism in the methods of philosophers. Conservatism can be a good thing, but only if it is acknowledged. By all means, let’s not abandon perfectly good and familiar intuitions without a fight, but let’s recognize that the intuitions that are initially used to frame the issues may not live to settle the issues.”
― Daniel Dennett

“Good intentions are ubiquitous in politics; what is scarce is accurate beliefs.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“The usual touchstone of whether what someone asserts is mere persuasion or at least a subjective conviction, i.e., firm belief, is betting. Often someone pronounces his propositions with such confident and inflexible defiance that he seems to have entirely laid aside all concern for error. A bet disconcerts him. Sometimes he reveals that he is persuaded enough for one ducat but not for ten. For he would happily bet one, but at ten he suddenly becomes aware of what he had not previously noticed, namely that it is quite possible that he has erred.”
― Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

“Successful revolutionaries do occasionally end up in positions of power, but they seem more likely, on the historical record, to end up dead, courtesy of their comrades. In any case, revolution has its own logic, and it is, like that of politics, a logic of power. So revolution, like politics, selects out for success those with the desire and ability to wield power.”
― David D Friedman

“It is commonplace to note that the Homo economicus model, so defi ned, does not accurately describe human agents. Like Homo economicus, we have preferences. Unlike Homo economicus, we have preferences directly relating to the welfare of others. Some may regard this as controversial. Psychological egoism is the thesis that all human behavior is purely self-regarding. Responding to obvious counterexamples, defenders of psychological egoism sometimes say we act in apparently other-regarding ways only because we reap “psychic” rewards from helping others. As philosophers well know, psychological egoism thus embellished becomes airtight at a cost of becoming literally inconsequential. It does not tell us that soldiers will never give their lives for their countries or that people will never make anonymous donations to charity. It does not predict that Ebenezer Scrooge will never buy Bob Cratchit a Christmas turkey. It offers no testable predictions. Instead, it avoids having false implications by having no implications whatsoever. It merely expresses a determination to stretch the concept of self-regard as far as necessary to fi t all behavior, no matter how diverse observed behavior actually turns out to be.

Insofar as there is any real content to the claim that we get psychic rewards from helping others, we can admit that, of course, we tend to feel good about helping others. But this fact does not begin to suggest that our real objective is psychic benefit rather than other people’s welfare. On the contrary, there can be no psychic reward for helping others unless we care about others. Imagine Bob helping someone across the street and then saying to her, “Other things equal, I would rather you had been hit by a bus. Unfortunately, helping you is the price I have to pay in order to reap psychic rewards.” The fact that we get psychic rewards from helping others proves we are directly concerned with the welfare of others. The mark of a purely self-regarding person is not that he really wants to help others but rather that he really doesn’t. That is the obvious and much celebrated difference between Homo economicus and us.”
― David Schmidtz, Person, Polis, Planet: Essays in Applied Philosophy

“The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”
― Wilfrid Stellars

“Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”
― Milton Friedman

“Scientists, famously, use a lot of mathematics, at least in many disciplines (including both cognitive science and economics). Much of this is simply statistics, and derives from the importance of exact measurement. But that is not the whole story. Natural languages and the distinctions they draw are evolutionary products shaped by the interaction of cultural and genetic selection. They therefore encode, in deeply embedded and mutually reinforcing levels, distinctions important to folk theories—that is, the nonscientific social-cognitive structures that organize relationships important to special human purposes. Mathematical language is quite different, and this reflects differences between the nature of mathematical and of practical reasoning. Mathematical reasoning begins from sets of rigorously fixed procedural concepts, and these fixed points then have absolute authority, relative to special purposes in application, over what can and cannot be stated in the language. If we suspect there may be some particular structural fact but cannot figure out how to express it mathematically, this does not show that there is no such fact; but it implies that we must do some more work, either logical or empirical or both, before we can say that we are quite sure just what the putative structural fact is that we are trying to claim.”
― Don Ross

“And so come the cults, claiming to meet the needs that science has thus far failed to meet--and offering the prospective inductee a place on the ground floor. Some cults may be harmless enough, but whenever false doctrine is propagated there is some cost. Many such doctrines are dressed up as science in their own right. For even though established science may be distrusted, "science" is still a thumps-up word for most people. So we find many of these theories borrowing liberally from genuine science, and many more using terms that sound, to the uninitiated, like the stuff of which true science is made. Now many of the bogus doctrines are actually unintelligible; their seeming content simply vanishes when closely scrutinized. But given the incomprehensibility of so much genuine science for so many of us, that very unintelligibility can be mistaken as a sign of authenticity. Alas, it can even inspire reverence.”
― Willard Van Orman Quine, The Web of Belief

“[W]here the rationalist sees contact with theoretical considerations as a source of contamination, we should instead view such influence as potentially beneficial. Theory-mediated judgment is not automatically “contaminated”; under the right circumstances, and under the guidance of appropriate theory, it is instead a source of correction and illumination. We should not search for a realm of reason somehow insulated from and uninformed by our best available theories. Instead we should welcome the prospect of a conception of rational inference which is itself fully vetted by all available evidence.”
― Hilary Kornblith

“Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“[T]he idea of treating Mind as an effect rather than as a First Cause is too revolutionary for some–an "awful stretcher" that their own minds cannot acommodate comfortably. This is as true today as it was in 1860, and it has always been as true of some of evolution's best friends as of its foes. For instance, the physicist Paul Davies, in his recent book The Mind of God, proclaims that the reflective power of human minds can be "no trivial detail, no minor by-product of mindless purposeless forces" (Davies 1992, p. 232). This is a most revealing way of expressing a familiar denial, for it betrays an ill-examined prejudice. Why, we might ask Davies, would its being a by-product of mindless, purposeless forces make it trivial? Why couldn't the most important thing of all be something that arose from unimportant things? Why should the importance or excellence of anything have to rain down on it from on high, from something more important, a gift from God? Darwin's inversion suggests that we abandon that presumption and look for sorts of excellence, of worth and purpose, that can emerge, bubbling up out of "mindless, purposeless forces.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

“The road to bad philosophy is paved with simplistic conceptual identities.”
― Don Ross

“Perhaps also there are some necessary truths about mind, language, and perception after all, a compendium of superscientific truths awaiting discovery and dissemination by philosophers.

If so, however, one would expect the same to be true of other subjects. For example, one would expect there to be a set of necessary truths about all possible living things; and another set about all possible stars and galaxies; and another set about all possible forms of matter; and so on. One would expect, that is, a significant compendium of a priori knowledge on almost every significant subject: space, time, motion, light, matter, planets, fire, cosmology, life, weather, medicine, and so forth. Given the thousands of years philosophers have had to penetrate these subjects, we might well ask in which books the apodictic fruits of so much a priori labour have been written down.

Put thus bluntly, the question is embarrassing. There is no such accumulated compendium of important a priori truths on any of these topics. And this despite the fact that philosophers have been talking and theorizing with enthusiasm about all of them for over twenty-five centuries. Claims of necessary truth have regularly been made, but empirical refutation has been their most common fate. What has accumulated instead is a rich compendium of a posteriori knowledge, a compendium born of the continuing labours of various subdivisions of earlier philosophy, subdivisions now quite properly identified as sciences. It now seems silly to expect philosophical techniques to reveal important necessary truths about all possible planets, or all possible forms of matter, or all possible living things. But if it is just plain silly to expect this for planets, matter, and life, why should it be sound philosophy to expect it for language, mind, and perception?”
― Paul M. Churchland

“Darwin’s point about variation often goes unappreciated today in philosophical discussions, even though it has been uncontroversial for well over a century. Recent discussions of natural kinds, prompted by the seminal ideas of Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam, often assume that one can revive essentialism. Yet if species are natural kinds no such revival is in prospect. Kripke and Putnam largely restricted their discussions to the cases of elements and compounds, and with good reason. For, given the insights of neo-Darwinism, it’s clear that the search for some analogue of the microstructural essences can’t be found. No genetic or karyotypic property will play for species the role that atomic number does for the elements.”
― Philip Kitcher

“Attaching epistemic significance to metaphysical intuitions is anti-naturalist for two reasons. First, it requires ignoring the fact that science, especially physics, has shown us that the universe is very strange to our inherited conception of what it is like. Second, it requires ignoring central implications of evolutionary theory, and of the cognitive and behavioural sciences, concerning the nature of our minds.”
― James Ladyman, Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized

“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“In game theory, as in applications of other technologies that use RPT [Revealed Preference Theory], the purpose of the machinery is to tell us what happens when patterns of behavior instantiate some particular strategic vector, payoff matrix, and distribution of information—for example, a PD [Prisoner's Dilemma]—that we’re empirically motivated to regard as a correct model of a target situation. The motivational history that produced this vector in a given case is irrelevant to which game is instantiated, or to the location of its equilibrium or equilibria. As Binmore (1994, pp. 95–256) emphasizes at length, if, in the case of any putative PD, there is any available story that would rationalize cooperation by either player, then it follows as a matter of logic that the modeler has assigned at least one of them the wrong utility function (or has mistakenly assumed perfect information, or has failed to detect a commitment action) and so made a mistake in taking their game as an instance of the (one-shot) PD. Perhaps she has not observed enough of their behavior to have inferred an accurate model of the agents they instantiate. The game theorist’s solution algorithms, in themselves, are not empirical hypotheses about anything. Applications of them will be only as good, for purposes of either normative strategic advice or empirical explanation, as the empirical model of the players constructed from the intentional stance is accurate. It is a much-cited fact from the experimental economics literature that when people are brought into laboratories and set into situations contrived to induce PDs, substantial numbers cooperate. What follows from this, by proper use of RPT, not in discredit of it, is that the experimental setup has failed to induce a PD after all. The players’ behavior indicates that their preferences have been misrepresented in the specification of their game as a PD. A game is a mathematical representation of a situation, and the operation of solving a game is an exercise in deductive reasoning. Like any deductive argument, it adds no new empirical information not already contained in the premises. However, it can be of explanatory value in revealing structural relations among facts that we otherwise might not have noticed.”
― Don Ross

“In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.”
― John Maynard Keynes

“Tell me," Wittgenstein's asked a friend, "why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?" His friend replied, "Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth." Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“[U]nderdetermination problems can't be made to go away by logic alone. They can only be mitigated by having plenty of data. Pragmatically, one should stop worrying that one's model is underdetermined at the point where it would take superogatory levels of ingenuity to find a competing one.”
― Don Ross

“Here is what a person is: a set of basically compatible long-range interests that have co-opted a sufficient army of short-range interests into their coalition to maintain stable equilibrium. A person is that person just so long as her revealed preferences at the whole-person level don’t significantly cycle. This is why we can model people as (nonstraightforward) economic agents—just as we sometimes can, and should, model countries. Of course, a biological H. sapiens individual goes through changing external circumstances during its biography, so no one coalition of interests will stay in power forever. Becker and other mature anthropocentric neoclassicists have missed this point, whereas a Samuelsonian neoclassicist can accept it without difficulty. At the same time, the social pressures that discipline self-narratives tend to make people more and more like straightforward economic agents for increasing stretches of their biographies. These pressures are not external to their personal utility functions, as Sen supposes. They are what make (whole-) personal utility functions possible in the first place. Society does not struggle to civilize inner Robinson Crusoes, for people don’t biologically have such things. Instead, human society gives rise to something new under the evolutionary sun: creatures that act increasingly like the economic agents familiar among our asocial relatives, who nevertheless turn the trick of achieving the powerful network efficiencies that the asocial cannot.”
― Don Ross