My Humean reason-choosing post at PEA Soup

The nice folks at PEA Soup invited me to their blog more than a year ago, and I hadn't put up any posts yet. So I've done a big one over there on how Humean views of motivation can explain the choosing of reasons. Feel free to comment here if you're afraid of going up against the Reason-Fu of terrifyingly skilled top ethicists in comments over there. Or for any other reason.

Norms of democratic representation

I've been reading political scientist Jonathan Bernstein's blog lately, partly because he's been an excellent predictor of what was going to happen with health care reform. He was able to keep the political actors' incentives in mind a lot better than most people and especially news-of-the-day-obsessed pundits.

Anyway, he has an interesting view about how norms of representation work in democracy, and I wrote a big post on it at the other blog.

Matt's top ten

I've been reading Matthew Yglesias since 2003, and he's been a huge influence on my political views. He studied philosophy at Harvard, and he just put up a list of the ten books that had the most influence on him. Reasons and Persons is at the top. Lots of other interesting things there too. As somebody who teaches philosophy, it made me happy.

Your intention is _____

When p is the case and you believe that p, we say that your belief is true. When p is the case and you desire that p, we say that your desire is satisfied. When p is the case and you intend that p, what do we say about your intention?

"Your intention is true" sounds bad. "Your intention is satisfied" sounds a lot better, though I think I'd say "Your intention is achieved."

I don't know how much weight this should have in getting us to prefer accounts on which intentions are desires to accounts on which intentions are beliefs. But it seems to me that it has a little bit of weight.

Supervenience, Australian and American

Do Australians and Americans tend to use the term "supervenience" in different ways? The way I've heard Aussies (and honorary Aussie David Lewis) use the term fits the characterization in the Stanford Encyclopedia: "there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference". But I've heard some Americans use the term to mean something that adds a conjunct to make supervenience something much stronger: "there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference, and A's aren't reducible to B's." Were these Americans just being weird?

Back from India

It was good! If you haven't been to rural India and are curious, I have a big post here with lots of photos and it might interest you.

In India

I'm flying out to India tomorrow. Most of next week is going to be spent in rural West Bengal, where there will be many cows but probably no internet. I'll be back around February 21st or so.

We're not really sure where Mom's village, Bikrampur, is on Google Maps. But our guess is that it's somewhere here. Dad's village, Kadakuli, is about two miles northwest. If you happen to be in town, come by and say hi!

Not the best way to criticize Kant

I like my Kant-bashing as much as the next utilitarian who defends the Humean theory of motivation and works on Nietzsche. But this really isn't the best line of attack:

In his latest title, Lévy launches a scathing attack on the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, calling him “raving mad” and a “fake”.

The book, De la guerre en philosophie (On War in Philosophy) , has been greeted with the customary rapture, and its ubiquitous author has been a fixture on television and in the press all week.

In framing his case, Lévy – BHL to the Parisian cognoscenti – drew on the writings of the little-known 20th century thinker Jean-Baptiste Botul – author of The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant , and a man Lévy has cited in lectures.

The problem? Botul never existed. He was invented by a journalist from the satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné 10 years ago as an elaborate joke. And since the hoax was revealed, BHL has become a laughing stock.

“As it turns out, it was a hoax,” admitted the author in a blog post after the blunder was spotted by a journalist from Le Nouvel Observateur .

Claire Danes on Jonathan Dancy's leather pants on Craig Ferguson

Claire Danes spent several minutes discussing her father-in-law, Jonathan Dancy (of particularism fame), on Craig Ferguson's show! Dancy was on my dissertation committee. He read my dissertation and let me know that it was done. That was very helpful, especially coming from an opponent of my view.

Korsgaard, Yawgmoth, and personal identity

In “Personal Identity and the Unity of Agency: A Kantian Response to Parfit,” Christine Korsgaard writes:

It is, I think, significant that writers on personal identity often tell stories about mad surgeons who make changes in our memories or characters. These writers usually emphasize the fact that after the surgical intervention we are altered, we have changed. But surely part of what creates the sense of lost identity is that the person is changed by intervention, from outside. The stories might affect us differently if we imagined the changes initiated by the person herself, as a result of her own choice. You are not a different person just because you are very different. Authorial psychological connectedness is consistent with drastic changes, provided those changes are the result of actions by the person herself or reactions for which she is responsible.

She then states the broader thesis that these reflections serve: “the sort of continuity needed for what matters to me in my own personal identity essentially involves my agency” (123).

However, drastic changes that are fully intended consequences of one's own agency can similarly disrupt one's personal identity. Consider the following story:

Yawgmoth was the cruelest of demons, and he liked tormenting the damned. But his greatest wish was to leave Hell and wreak horrible misery upon the happy people living above. He knew why no demon had ever done such a thing – the gates of Hell were enchanted so that only a creature of pure benevolence could exit. So he learned how to make a potion that would wipe all the malevolence from his mind and replace it with benevolence just for one minute, allowing him to leave and then become cruel again. He poured it into a goblet, strode to the gates, and drank.

But what happened then? Having become a creature of pure benevolence, he recoiled at the horrors that the living would endure if the cruelest demon of Hell was among them. Instead of passing through the gates, he ran back into Hell. And wishing to spare even the damned from the torments of a furious and frustrated Yawgmoth, he bravely pulled a cleaver from the hands of another demon, struck off his own head, and perished.

Intuitively, Yawgmoth becomes a different person after drinking the potion, no less than Dr. Jekyll or any victim of a mad surgeon. That he intends this change and is responsible for it does not make him the same person before and after.

This is not to reject Korsgaard's broader thesis that personal identity has some interesting esential relation to agency. Nor is it to say that intentionally causing the changes in oneself is wholly irrelevant to personal identity – just that it is one among many more or less significant sorts of psychological connectedness.

What are they doing to KCL Philosophy?

I presented my defense of universal hedonism at King's College London during June of last year. Question and answer period there was one of the most lively, stimulating, and productive sessions I've ever had. A couple of the faculty came out for coffee afterwards, and my only wish was that I could've talked with them longer.

That's part of why it's astonishing to hear about the people losing their jobs there. You don't usually hear about this kind of thing happening at top departments. Shalom Lappin and Charles Travis, in particular, are big people who have continued to be very productive researchers.

Violating duties to yourself is hard

I'm not big on duty, but I think that people who are would consider this a generally plausible principle:

Conditional Release: If A has a duty to B, B can conditionally release A from that duty by choosing that A act otherwise, rather than fulfill the duty. Then if A acts otherwise and does not fulfill the duty, A has not violated the duty.

Now what happens in the case of a self-regarding duty, where you are both A and B? Then you can choose to act otherwise rather than fulfilling the duty, and when you do it, you haven't violated any duties. So it's pretty hard to violate duties to yourself.

Maybe there are some duties for which Conditional Release doesn't hold. Maybe I have a duty not to kill you, and you can't release me from it. Then you could still get a duty not to commit suicide. And if you can violate duties without making any choices, perhaps by falling asleep at an unfortunate time or forgetting about them, this won't get you off the hook for those duties.

Frege-Geach whiteboard

I have a whiteboard in my office. I've used it three times over the 18 months or so that I've been here. Each time was to draw up the Frege-Geach problem for students.

Do a whale's hip bones have a function?

I think the right answer is 'no'. (So says this evolution website: "These bones resemble those of other mammals, but are only weakly developed in the whale and have no apparent function.") They had a function for whales' ancestors who walked on land in the distant past and needed hip bones for their leg bones to attach to. But lacking legs, whales have no use for hip bones, rendering these structures without function in the present.

This is a problem for evolutionary accounts of function. On these accounts, the function of the whale's hip bones is something like connecting up with the whale's leg bones. That's because evolutionary accounts of function are historical. On such accounts, the selection pressures that caused a particular part to exist are what gives it its function. I'm fine with saying that whale hip bones had the function of connecting with legs in the past, when they were in whale ancestors who had legs. They just don't have it now.

Maybe we could build a better account of function by looking at the way that some part relates to an animal's present interests. This gives many of the same intuitive answers as to what the function of a particular part is, but it deals better with vestigial structures that have lost their function. I don't see any reason why the function of some part needs to connect to the process that produced it -- natural objects that we find can be put to some purpose, and thus acquire a function. If I find a bunch of rocks and use them as ballast in my submarine, their function is to add weight so that the sub will go down, even though that has nothing to do with the process that produced them.

Dolphins Are Smart!

Being a longtime cetacean fan, I'm excited to see these scientists (and a philosopher) saying dolphins are smart enough to have some of the rights we accord to persons. All popular science article warnings apply, but there's a pretty good roundup of their cognitive abilities at the linked article.

Assuming that humans don't screw things up by killing ourselves or the dolphins, I think there'll be a time when humans can engage in much fuller communication with dolphins than currently possible. We'll probably need some really crazy neurotechnology to make this work out, but I think humans will eventually put that together given enough time. When it happens, it'll be one of the coolest things our species has ever done.

Werewolf blogging

People who are following this blog for werewolf-related reasons might be interested to see my brief review of New Moon, which I saw last evening with a group of people including several philosophers.

Secret identity

Dana McCourt and James Chartrand are like Hesperus and Phosphorus. In a world where astronomical facts could reveal a pretty horrendous level of sexism in society.

Reference magnets are as bad as primitive intentionality. Psychologize!

On Ted Sider's suggestion, I read Rob Williams' Phil Review paper "Eligibility and Inscrutability" with hopes that it would lead to my being less creeped out by reference magnets. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. I got more worried that we'd have to appeal to the darned things in building theories of reference, but I dislike them just as much as before. Depressing.

I take it that this is how the reference magnet strategy is supposed to work: Say we're trying to reduce intentional relations to something nonintentional. We do the whole Ramseyfication thing, and... uh-oh, we either have too many equally good candidates for what our terms refer to and many of them are counterintuitive, or as Williams' paper suggests, something counterintuitive ends up being the winner. So on the reference magnet strategy we say that the intuitive things have a certain kind of primitive naturalness to them, and that's why they get selected. Now we've reduced the intentional successfully to something nonintentional!

But it's hard for me to see any real theoretical gain here. We've avoided using primitive intentionality by introducing another primitive -- naturalness -- that's just as ontologically extravagant. If naturalness did some other interesting kind of theoretical work so we needed to appeal to it, there would be something to be said for it. But it's hard for me to see what kind of work it's going to do. A notion of natural kinds, which we might maybe be able to get out of the sciences, isn't going to do enough work for us, because we're going to need lots of primitive naturalnesses that go beyond what scientists use in explanation and prediction. We don't just need primitives like 'electron' and 'orangutan', we need 'corset' and 'film noir' and 'Optimus Prime.' We don't have primitive intentionality, but we have a bunch of primitives that are shadows of the intentional relations we were wanting to reduce. So in the end our overall theorizing ends up just as complicated, and the reduction of intentionality is a hollow victory.

I'm quite attracted to the idea of somehow psychologizing the naturalness out of the picture, so that instead of having primitive naturalness in the world, we have some kind of psychological state that does the work of selecting what ends up being the most intuitive referent for a term. There's good explanatory reason to posit something like this -- it explains people's behavior, namely, their yes- and no-saying behavior when you ask them whether this or that thing is the referent of their term (or in complicated cases that support semantic externalism, whether this thing or that thing would be the referent of their term if the world turned out to be a certain way). What's explaining their behavior when you ask them these questions has to be something in their heads, and it's there for us to appeal to.

Teaching Early Modern

I don't think they're going to make me teach a survey course on early modern metaphysics and epistemology anytime soon. But I thought this post by Dana at Edge of the American West on how to do it had all kinds of good stuff.

Travel observations

When you're at 30,000 feet wearing the clothes in which you're going to present a paper and you're opening a container of airplane-provided yogurt packed on the ground, it's best to open it away from you.

I looked down when the plane went over the Australian Outback, and it looked like I was flying over Mars.