Eric Schliesser's Blog, page 6
February 19, 2023
The Aristotelian Causes in Hume
Yesterday, I noted that one way to understand Hume's significance to our conceptualization of causation is two-fold: first, that he whittled down four Aristotelian causes to just one kind of cause (previously known as 'efficient causation'); and, second, that he is the source of the modern conception of causation by offering a counterfactual definition of it in the first Enquiry. Hume is also taken to be the source of our modern discussion of convention, (recall here) although a very good argument can be made that Hume is greatly indebted to Locke (see also this more recent post and this one as a follow up). In today's post I suggest that Hume's account of convention itself is greatly indebted to the Aristotelian causes. Let me explain by first re-quoting a familiar passage from Hume:
But if by convention be meant a sense of common interest; which sense each man feels in his own breast, which he r emarks in his fellows, and which carries him, in concurrence with others, into a general plan or system of actions, which tends to public utility; it must be owned, that, in this sense, justice arises from human conventions. For if it be allowed (what is, indeed, evident) that the particular consequences of a particular act of justice may be hurtful to the public as well as to individuals; it follows, that every man, in embracing that virtue, must have an eye to the whole plan or system, and must expect the concurrence of his fellows in the same conduct and behaviour. Did all his views terminate in the consequences of each act of his own, his benevolence and humanity, as well as his self-love, might often prescribe to him measures of conduct very different from those, which are agreeable to the strict rules of right and justice.
In the posts linked above I argued that Hume's analysis of convention has eight parts (most also to be found in Locke's Second Treatise and the Essay):
a sense of common interest
felt in each person's breast;
It (viz, (i)) is observed in others;
this fact (the existence of (i&iii) creates collaboration & reliable expectations;
the collaboration is structured in non-trivial ways;
and this has good consequences or positive externalities for society.
A Humean convention is explicitly contrasted with practices founded in explicit promises and/or in practice regulated by formal governmental law. In addition,
the process (I-III) need not be verbalized at all. It can be entirely tacit.
I call I-VIII: ���the Humean template,��� and they are jointly sufficient, although (VII) is not necessary.
Now, the Humean template has quite a few moving parts. And given that in Locke the Humean template is used but, as far I am aware, not explicitly analyzed it's worth asking to what degree he would have been fully conscious of the Humean template. It's always a risk with the kind of structuralist analysis I offer here that it is merely a projection of the historian onto an earlier text. Even if that were so it can still be illuminating, of course, but to use the 'Humean template' about Locke would be straightforward anachronism (albeit useful anachronism).
But even though Locke does not explicitly analyze the Humean template, i don't think it's a mere projection on my part for three reasons (the first two of which outlined in the linked posts): first, as I realized by reflecting on work by Martin Lenz (Socializing Minds) Locke is clearly responding to lacunae in Puffendorf's account of the origin and stability of conventions. Second, the Humean template can be found in the second Treatise and the Essay (and is evoked later in the Essay). These two reasons are internal to Locke's project.
In addition, third, we can discern the portfolio of Aristotle's four causes in the Humean template. For, (VI) is the final cause(s) of a convention. And (I) is the formal cause. In addition, (II-V) are the efficient and material causes of the convention. I mix these causes here because jointly they tie the formal and final cause together in the workings of the convention.
If Locke's use of the Humean template presupposes the Aristotelian causes then it's also no surprise that he doesn't need to offer an explicit analysis of the Humean template. His readers would have noticed it without his saying so. In Hume, the template is made explicit precisely because a reader familiar with Hume's philosophy cannot take for granted that Hume would draw on the non-efficient Aristotelian causes.
That (VI) is a final cause strikes me as uncontroversial. But it is surprising to find it in Hume, who is really an explicit and implicit critic of final causes (see here also for references). Of course, in virtue of providing the mechanism for its functionality one may well say that the Humean template naturalizes or presupposes a naturalized teleology. One may also claim that in human affairs, a certain kind of intentionality and goal directed is inelimenable.
The real question here is to what degree the common interest that a tacit convention secures is fully foreseaable and articulable ahead of time. For example, Adam Smith famously criticized the deployment of the Humean template in Hume's account of the origin of justice in circumstances that echo a state of nature because Hume's account seems to presuppose awareness of the final cause, or at least assume common interest, in a context where this sense of unity or mutual loyalty, seems unlikely. (See here for the full story.)
The passage at the top of the post is near the conclusion of Smith's diagnosis of the error in Hume. Interestingly enough, in Part II of the Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Dugald Stewart notes Smith's criticism of Hume, and quotes the passage in order to illustrate "a common error," which Stewart associates with the "dangerous" revitalisation of utilitarianism (he explicitly discusses Paley and Godwin in context). Stewart praises Adam Smith because "he always treats separately of their final causes, and of the mechanism, as he calls it, by which nature accomplishes the effect; and he has even been at pains to point out to his successors the great importance."
To be sure, Smith's criticism does not touch all instances of Hume's use of the Humean template. For, in some contexts the common interest is knowable even known and the efficient and material causes of the Humean template can do their work without presupposing that all the benefits from the convention are presupposed in the mechanism that gives rise to the convention or that these benefits are or would have to be obscure to the agents involved.
This problem does not even arise in Locke. For, of course, the natural reading of much of Locke's writings is that he embraces a God given providential order. (But recall this post for the debate.) So, in Locke the use of the Humean template is completely natural and without a blemish of inconsistency.*
* I am not denying that Aristotelian formal and material causes get reinterpreted in Locke. I am grateful to discussion with Susan James, Martin Lenz, Charles Wolfe, Spiros Tegos, Katarina Peixoto and others in Budapest.
February 18, 2023
A fairy tale on Causation (and Hume)
Once upon a time there were four aristotelian causes; then Hume came along and discredited final, formal, and material causes. By a ruthless process of elimination efficient causation simply became causation. And, while in the Treatise Hume modelled such causation on the template of then ruling mechanical (scientific) philosophy with its emphasis on contact between and regular succession of cause and effect, in the more mature first Enquiry (1748) he invented, as the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy claims with surprise ("surprisingly enough,"), the modern conception of causation by offering a counterfactual definition of it, "We may define a cause to be an object followed by another, and where all the objects, similar to the first, are followed by objects similar to the second. Or, in other words, where, if the first object had not been, the second never had existed.��� Proving, once again, that lack of logical rigor need not prevent fertile insight.
The fairy tale is not wholly misleading. But note three caveats: first, final causes remained respectable throught the nineteenth century in various scientific contexts (not the least physics and biology). I leave aside to what degree teleology is still lurking in contemporary sciences.
Second, the reduction from four to one kind of cause hides the deployment of a whole range of 'funky' causes. Among the more prominent of these funky causes are (i) eminent causes, where qualities or properties of the effect are already contained in the cause.* Crucially, the cause and the effect are fundamentally unalike or differ in nature.* But also (ii) immanent causes that aim to capture the idea that some effects take place within the cause of them. In recent metaphysics such causes are understood as (free and) moral agents, but in Spinoza, immanent causation is a feature of the one and only substance (who is not well understood as a moral agent). The most controversial funky cause were causes that (iii) were simultaneous with their effects over enormous distances. Hume goes after this with an argument that, if succesful, would suggest that the existence of simultaneous cause-effect relations would undermine the very possibility of succession, and so no motion would be possible, "and all objects must be co-existent." (Treatise 1.2.3.7-8) And as the new science became organized it became very tempting to treat (iv) laws of nature as (second) causes.+ (This is especially prominent in those who denied occasionalism.)
A final example of what I have in mind here is (V) the significance of causes that can jump the invisible/visible or (insensible/sensible) barrier(s). The hidden causal sources are often called 'powers,' which are responsible for manifest effects. In fact, in the early modern period this is one of the main expanatory causal schemes. It's because this is scheme is so influential in the early modern period, that in the Treatise, Hume uses features of it to articulate the problem of induction, which, of course, even in Hume contains multiple problems of induction [recall here].
As an aside, which is also the implied moral of the fairy tale, that more than four causes were tried out during a fertile intellectual age like the early modern period is no surprise. For, if we want to distinguish and classify the great variety of differences that, in a sense, make a difference even Aristotle's four causes may seem too few. I suspect the historical path dependency of this fact -- a great variety of differences that make a difference were labeled a 'cause' -- has made it so elusive to offer a unified, semantic analysis of causation. Historically there have been many paradigmatic causes that really fit in different boxes. And so our contemporary, ingenious analysts can always generate a counter-example or find an intuitive challenge to any attempt to offer a hegemonic definition or analysis.**
The aside is really the third caveat. In so far as one notion of causation predominated (be it the regularity, counterfactual or manipulative view) in which the homogeneous causal-effect structure is fairly restrictive, but what can enter into the relata is rather permissive, this predominance re-opens the door to new kinds of causes that aim to track differences that make a difference not well served by such homogeneity, especially if these can be operationalized with new mathematical techniques and improved computing power falling in price. We can understand, say, probabilistic causation as one such example, and hybrids that we find in causal networks as another kind of example.
*Structurally that's very close to a formal cause, but the formal cause can be highly abstract entity or feature whereas the eminent cause need not be so. (Although confusingly an eminent cause can, in scholastic jargon, cause formally.) In addition, the content of a formal cause often is similar in nature to the effect (or features of it).
+Second because God would then be the first cause.
**Notice that my explanation here is compatible with Millgram's of the same challenge in The Great Endarkenment, but differs in emphasis.
February 17, 2023
Monographs > Journal articles (hear me out)
Here are three well founded truisms:
Most monographs in professional philosophy would be best left as the journal article from which they originate. Arguably many could even be a long read blog post; but I would say that, wouldn't I?
Once you have a foot in the door it's easier to publish a monograph than an article in professional philosophy, all things being equal (which they are often not).
In most sub-fields of philosophy it's (drafts of) journal articles that set the agenda or demarcate the research frontier. If you referee a lot or are in thorough research networks the journal article is the vehicle to stay abreast of developments.
In addition, a well crafted Analysis article is highly nourishing brain candy. Even so, and despite the fact that reading a book is a far greater time commitment than reading an article, I find reading monographs far more satisfying than reading journal articles especially as I grow older and want to explore and be informed about areas outside my own expertise/specialization. (And by reading a monograph I don't mean downloading a chapter from Oxford scholarship online.) Here's why.
First, the writing tends to be (aesthetically) more pleasant. I believe this is primarily due to the fact that in journal articles papers get made referee/objection proof (recall truism 2). But I also suspect that people writings books have modest fantasies of grandeur and hope to appeal to a wider audience than their immediate peers and their students.
Second, for all the ingenuity and dazzling brilliance that goes into most of the arguments in our journal articles, they tend to stand and fall by the common ground that is assumed in the premises of the argument. In most cases that common ground shifts after a few years -- it's philosophy after all. We notice this less in papers that become field defining because in their case their premises end up anchoring the common ground of the field. But unless one is in the field and fully committed to those paradigmatic commitments those premises look weird to outsiders.
Meanwhile because of the modest fantasies of grandeur associated with a monograph, the argument tends to be articulated in terms of a broader horizon with a set of commitments that are, all things considered equal, not merely reflecting the research frontier (in fact they may well be trailing by the time the book is published). I don't mean to suggest that the premises we find in a monograph are always more plausible, but there is more space to anchor them in a wider range of evidence and commitments. So, the book tends to provide a richer picture of how a position or arguments hang together with a wider range of commitments. Especially when I am reading outside my area of expertise, this is very helpful.
Third, and even if the premises remain the same (recall truism 1), they are often better supported in a monograph. Just because there is more space to bring more evidence to bear on them. In papers we often stipulate a lot of commitments for the sake of argument, or we are permitted to treat things as primitive. (As you can tell, I am not a fan of treating key concepts as primitive in monographs.)
Fourth, books tend to try to motivate the project in ways that appeal to a slightly broader audience. This is completely unnecessary in a journal article which reflects ongoing debate and can take its own urgency for granted. And if it motivates the project it is either through short-hand or through the existing common ground of the sub-specialty. But I actually find it incredibly helpful to know and understand what is motivating a project fundamentally before I evaluate the arguments and the position.
Finally, I am not claiming that because books germinate a bit longer -- authors, even 'have to live with' the manuscript for extended periods -- they must be better than journal articles because I suspect a lot of books are either glorified dissertations or exist primarily because of sunk cost fallacies or opaque tenure requirements. (And just before you google my CV, I am a lot better at finishing articles than books.)
February 15, 2023
The Great Endarkenment, Part I
Perhaps eventually an overall Big Picture will emerge���and perhaps not: Hegel thought that the Owl of Minerva would take wing only at dusk (i.e., that we will only achieve understanding in retrospect, after it���s all over), but maybe the Owl���s wings have been broken by hyperspecialization, and it will never take to the air at all. What we can reasonably anticipate in the short term is a patchwork of inference management techniques, along with intellectual devices constructed to support them. One final observation: in the Introduction, I gave a number of reasons for thinking that our response to the Great Endarkenment is something that we can start working on now, but that it would be a mistake at this point to try to produce a magic bullet meant to fix its problems. That turns out to be correct for yet a further reason. Because the approach has to be bottom-up and piecemeal, at present we have to suffice with characterizing the problem and with taking first steps; we couldn���t possibly be in a position to know what the right answers are.
Thus far our institutional manifesto. Analytic philosophy has bequeathed to us a set of highly refined skills. The analytic tradition is visibly at the end of its run. But those skills can now be redirected and put in the service of a new philosophical agenda. In order for this to take place, we will have to reshape our philosophical pedagogy���and, very importantly, the institutions that currently have such a distorting effect on the work of the philosophers who live inside them. However, as many observers have noticed, academia is on the verge of a period of great institutional fluidity, and flux of this kind is an opportunity to introduce new procedures and incentives. We had better take full advantage of it.--Elijah Millgram (2015) The Great Endarkenment: Philosophy for an Age of Hyperspecialization, p. 281
There is a kind of relentless contrarian that is very smart, has voracious reading habits, is funny, and ends up in race science and eugenics. You are familiar with the type. Luckily, analytic philosophy also generates different contrarians about its own methods and projects that try to develop more promising (new) paths than these. Contemporary classics in this latter genre are Michael Della Rocca's (2020) The Parmenidean Ascent, Nathan Ballantyne's (2019) Knowing Our Limits, and Elijah Millgram's (2015) The Great Endarkenment all published with Oxford. In the service of a new or start (sometimes presented as a recovery of older wisdom), each engages with analytic philosophy's self-conception(s), its predominate methods (Della Rocca goes after reflective equilibrium, Millgram after semantic analysis, Ballantyne after the supplements the method of counter example), and the garden paths and epicycles we've been following. Feel free to add your own suggestions to this genre.
Millgram and Ballantyne both treat the cognitive division of labor as a challenge to how analytic philosophy is done with Ballantyne opting for extension from what we have and Millgram opting for (partially) starting anew (about which more below). I don't think I have noticed any mutual citations. Ballantyne, Millgram, and Della Rocca really end up in distinct even opposing places. So, this genre will not be a school.
Millgram's book, which is the one that prompted this post, also belongs to the small category of works that one might call 'Darwinian Aristotelianism,' that is, a form of scientific naturalism that takes teleological causes of a sort rather seriously within a broadly Darwinian approach. Other books in this genre are Dennett's From Bacteria to Bach and Back (which analyzes it in terms of reasons without a reasoner), and David Haig's From Darwin to Derrida (which relies heavily on the type/token distinction in order to treat historical types as final causes). The latter written by an evolutionary theorist.* There is almost no mutual citation in these works (in fact, Millgram himself is rather fond of self-citation despite reading widely). C. Thi Nguyen's (2020) Games: Agency as Art may also be thought to fit this genre, but Millgram is part of his scaffolding, and Nguyen screens off his arguments from philosophical anthropology and so leave it aside here.
I had glanced at Millgram's book when I wrote my piece on synthetic philosophy, but after realizing that his approach to the advanced cognitive division of labor was orthogonal to my own set it aside then.++ But after noticing intriguing citations to it in works by C. Thi Nguyen and Neil Levy, I decided to read it anyway. The Great Endarkenment is a maddening book because the first few chapters and the afterward are highly programmatic and accessible, while the bulk of the essays involve ambitious, revisionary papers in meta-ethics, metaphysics, and (fundementally) moral psychology (or practical agency if that is a term). The book also has rather deep discussions of David Lewis, Mill, and Bernard Williams. The parts fit together, but only if you look at them in a certain way, and only if you paid attention in all the graduate seminars you attended.
Millgram's main claim in philosophical anthropology is that rather than being a rational animal, mankind is a serial hyperspecializing animal or at least in principle capable of hyperspecializing serially (switching among different specialized niches it partially constructs itself). The very advanced cognitive division of labor we find ourselves in is, thus, not intrinsically at odds with our nature but actually an expression of it (even if Millgram can allow that it is an effect of economic or technological developments, etc.). If you are in a rush you can skip the next two asides (well at least the first).
As an aside, first, lurking in Millgram's program there is, thus, a fundamental critique of the Evolutionary Psychology program that takes our nature as adapted to and relatively fixed by niches back in the distant ancestral past. I don't mean to suggest Evolutionary Psychology is incompatible with Millgram's project, but it's fundamental style of argument in its more prominent popularizations is.
Second, and this aside is rather important to my own projects, Millgram's philosophical anthropology is part of the account of human nature that liberals have been searching for. And, in fact, as the quoted passages reveal, Millgram's sensibility is liberal in more ways, including his cautious preference for "bottom-up and piecemeal" efforts to tackle the challenge of the Great Endarkenment.+
Be that as it may, the cognitive division of labor and hyperspecialization is also a source of trouble. Specialists in different fields are increasingly unable to understand and thus evaluate the quality of each other's work including within disciplines. As Millgram notes this problem has become endemic within the institution most qualified to do so -- the university -- and as hyper-specialized technologies and expertise spread through the economy and society. This is also why society's certified generalists -- journalists, civil servants, and legal professionals -- so often look completely out of their depth when they have to tackle your expertise under time pressure.** It's his diagnosis of this state of affairs that has attracted, I think, most scholarly notice (but that may be a selection effect on my part by my engagement with Levy's Bad Beliefs and Nguyen's Games). Crucially, hyperspecialiation also involves the development of languages and epistemic practices that are often mutually unintelligible and perhaps even metaphysically incompatible seeming.
As an aside that is really an important extension of Millgram's argument: because the book was written just before the great breakthroughs in machine learning were becoming known and felt, the most obvious version of the challenge (even danger) he is pointing to is not really discussed in the book: increasingly we lack access to the inner workings of the machines we rely on (at least in real time), and so there is a non-trivial sense in which if he is right the challenge posed by Great Endarkenment is accelerating. (See here for an framework developed with Federica Russo and Jean Wagemans to analyze and handle that problem.)
That is, if Millgram is right MacAskill and his friends who worry about the dangers of AGI taking things over for rule and perhaps our destruction by the machine(s) have it backwards. The odds are more likely that our society will implode and disperse -- like the tower of Babel that frames Millgram's analysis -- by itself. And that if it survives mutual coordination by AGIs will be just as hampered by the Great Endarkenment, perhaps even more so due to their path dependencies, as ours is.
I wanted to explore the significance of this to professional philosophy (and also hint more at the riches of the book), but the post is long enough and I could stop here. So, I will return to that in the future. Let me close with an observation. As Millgram notes, in the sciences mutual unintelligibility is common. And the way it is often handled is really two-fold: first, as Peter Galison has argued, and Millgram notes, the disciplines develop local pidgins in what Galison calls their 'trading zones.' This births the possibility of mutually partially overlapping areas of expertise in (as Michael Polanyi noted) the republic of science. Millgram is alert to this for he treats a lot of the areas that have been subject of recent efforts at semantic analysis by philosophers (knowledge, counterfactuals, normativity) as (to simplify) really tracking and trailing the alethic certification of past pidgins. Part of Millgram's own project is to diagnose the function of such certification, but also help design new cognitive machinery to facilitate mutual intelligibility. That's exciting! This I hope to explore in the future.
Second, as I have emphasized in my work on synthetic philosophy, there are reasonably general theories and topic neutralish (mathematical and experimental) techniques that transcend disciplines (Bayesianism, game theory, darwinism, actor-network, etc.). On the latter (the techniques) these often necessetate local pidgins or, when possible, textbook treatments. On the former, while these general theories are always applied differently locally, they are also conduits for mutual intelligibility. (Millgram ignores this in part.) As Millgram notes, philosophers can make themselves useful here by getting MAs in other disciplines and so facilitate mutual communication as they already do. That is to say, and this is a criticism, while there is a simultaneous advancement in the cognitive division of labor that deepens mutual barriers to intelligibility, some of this advance generates possibilities of arbitrage (I owe the insight to Liam Kofi Bright) that also accrue to specialists that help transcend local mutual intelligibility.** So, what he takes to be a call to arms is already under way. So, let's grant we're on a precipice, but the path out is already marked.
*Because of this Millgram is able to use the insights of the tradition of neo-thomism within analytic philosophy to his own ends without seeming to be an Anscombe groupie or hinting darkly that we must return to the path of philosophical righteousness.
+This liberal resonance is not wholly accidental; there are informed references to and discussions of Hayek.
** Spare a thought for humble bloggers, by the way.
++UPDATE: As Justin Weinberg reminded me, Millgram did a series of five guest posts at DailyNous on themes from his book (here are the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth entries.) I surely read these, and encourage you to read them if you want the pidgin version of his book.
February 13, 2023
On the General Hermeneutic; Quentin Skinner on the task of the Historian, part I
As Sam James���s debate with the great John Pocock showed, there are very special problems attendant on writing the history of the present, because you���re going to be writing about people who can answer back. I mean, I never had the problem that, when I explained the precise ideological orientation of Hobbes��� political philosophy, Hobbes will be able to publish an article in which he rubbished what I had said. But this, of course, was what John Pocock sought to do in this particular case. I���m not going to try to adjudicate; I thought that Sam James���s work was wonderful, and very challenging.
Perhaps because when I was younger I was rather polemical toward Quentin Skinner's methodological (and interpretive) historiographic positions an unusual number of people called my attention to the interview with Skinner I have partially quoted above. I had little interest in reading the interview because Skinner has been interviewed rather frequently, and by people who don't really challenge him. But because so many people suggested to me I should read it, I decided to take a look. Somewhat predictably it has triggered a new round of polite disagreement in me.+
I am happy I did so because the interview is fascinating; in it we learn a lot about the origins and development of the Cambridge Texts series that shaped how multiple disciplines could teach the past and how scholars could research it. In addition Skinner says insightful things on the frequently self-deceptive nature of autobiographical writing. And -- the piece has a lot of riches --for people who have just come to the Cambridge school he makes some helpful claims about its intellectual roots of it in twentieth century philosophy.* Go read the full interview yourself!
Now, the paragraph I quoted from the interview occurs in the context of a question about a debate between Samuel James and Pocock about Pocock's "earlier work." Somewhat oddly, during the interview with Skinner it is never stated that James is denying the purported unity of the Cambridge school (concluding there are at least two "strands" if not two "enterprises"). As it happens this is a topic that has already been broached during the interview because Skinner had already stated, "I don���t think it���s helpful to suppose that there���s a Cambridge School." And while there is a way to parse Skinner's claim that makes it distinct from James' argument it is quite at odds with Pocock's own claim (reiterated in response to James) to have helped lay the foundations for the Cambridge school that (on Pocock's telling) was invented by Skinner in his famous (1969) essay! That is, Skinner has already denied the terms of the debate between James and Pocock, so, if Skinner is right, there is no need to adjudicate it. There is, if one presses on this topic, much more such comedy running through the interview (not the least the status of Skinner's utterances on the nature of the Cambridge school in light of the "very great difficulties" diagnosed by himself.) Perhaps, I'll return to that some time.
But my present interest is in the status of a general hermeneutic that seems to be applicable in all circumstances. Now, what is striking and highly revealing in Skinner's formulation of such a hermeneutic, is that "The goal of the historian, as I���ve been talking about this figure, is to show the contingency of the questions that are raised in the history of philosophy." I leave aside the really question whether a general hermeneutic is really possible. Although to note skeptically that it reminds me of the hope that methodologists of science once had to discover a logic of induction or a general methodology of science.
Rather, here I focus on the oddity to posit this ["the contingency of the questions that are raised in the history of philosophy"] as the goal of any historian let alone the historian of philosophy for at least three reasons: first, shouldn't the purported contingency of the questions be established by historical enquiry and not be presumed? I don't deny that sometimes, perhaps often, this is a conclusion of historical research. Some historians allow us to celebrate such continency (think of Daston, Justin Smith, etc.). However, even if one denies that there are eternal questions, it is still possible, say, that bits of philosophy are institutionalized as authoritative in a context (think Aristotle and Thomas in the Catholic Church, or Mencius in the Chinese bureaucracy, or Buddhism in the Ashoka empire and its aftermath) that then shapes centuries of fairly constrained enquiry,
One need not be a structuralist to see that if one posits a trade-off between population and luxury spending (as Socrates does in the truthful city) the modeling space is highly constrained even if there are huge technological and demographic changes (as Malthus noticed). Fill in your own example. I put it in terms of types of models because it is far more likely that there is going to be continuity between or rediscovery of those, even though the tokens have all kinds of external commitments unrelated to the trade-off under issue. That may sound like cheating, but often later authors (not just Malthus, but also Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Berkeley, Smith, and Mill pretty explicitly refer back to Plato's version).
Back in 1969, Skinner linked the denial of the sameness of questions to the impossibility of learning from the purported "solutions" of past thinkers to our (perennial) questions or the ones we put to them. Fair enough. But this criticism cannot be directed at the idea that Plato's solutions (birth-control, enhancements, different property arrangements) are very much still explored in much greater depth in these types of two-factor models. (Not that I want to turn you into a population ethicicist or an anachronistic political economist.)**
Second, shouldn't the historian of philosophy, especially, be allowed to focus on other goals (e.g., what happened, why did it happen, how did we get from then to now, which arguments are worth a second look, etc.)? I don't mean to be exhaustive here. There are a plurality of goals in the pursuit of historical enquiry as such and also in the history of philosophy. In a lot of these, the question of contingency may arise only side-ways.
Of course, I don't mean to deny -- in fact it is highly salient -- that Skinner's position is articulated in, and received some of its plausibility from, the historical aftermath of the what was thought to be the demise of the principle of sufficient reason (which is highly intolerant of contingency). This demise was marked by Lovejoy's Great Chain of Being and Russell's rejection of the PSR (alongside Bradley's idealism). But if historical fortune shifts, and the PSR is re-animated (as Della Rocca argues) then it's foreseable Skinner's approach will seem just special pleading.
Third, there seems to be an unstated assumption that if we understand a question in its proper context, it's contingency is revealed; but this, too, presupposes what needs to argued or shown. Why can't the original context reveal that a certain question was over-determined? Once Hershell discovered the first binary star system and that they obeyed Kepler's laws, it was pretty predictable that questions about the nature and mechanism of action at distance would be re-openend. Of course, this debate was constrained by new theories and conducted in terms that were more mathematized than earlier versions. Even if one allows, as I do, genuine incommensurability between scientific theories, the continuity of and refinement in evidence creates the possibility of asking questions that are overdetermined and that are, in a certain sense, continuous with each other even if particular at a time.
Skinner also seems to be claiming, in addition, that if the questions are contingent then it follows that the concepts used in answering them, including our own, will also be contingent. (I infer that from his implied claim we have to see our "own concepts as having the same kind of contingency.") But even if one grants that the questions philosophers have asked are contingent, it does not follow that the conceptual structure that are part of the answers to these questions are contingent. After all, given certain starting point X -- that, let's stipulate is contingent -- what follows from X, namely the answers or concepts Y, can be a kind of hypothetical or conditional necessity. And it would be odd to call Y 'contingent.' Certain questions can have only a narrow range of answers, not the least because earlier folk can shape the manner of later uptake.
Skinner is, thus, naturally read as claiming that his general hermeneutic is callibrated to show that all philosophical questions and answers are contingent. In fact, in the interview this is the view he attributes to Collingwood (something already present in Skinner's famous 1969 essay) as follows:
[Collingwood] and his numerous followers always insisted that the history of philosophy, and perhaps especially of moral and political philosophy, should be written as an account, not of how different answers were produced for a set of canonical questions, but rather as a subject in which the questions as well as the answers are always changing, and in which the questions are set by the specific moral and political issues that seem most salient, most troubling, at different times ��� and they will continually change and people will continually find that the pressures of their societies are operating in such a way as to raise new questions.
This is indeed Collingwood's view in the Autobiography. The only sameness that Collingwood allows there is the process that gets one from one question to the next answer. But in Collingwood the claim is linked explicitly to a metaphysical claim, which is simultaneously a claim about metaphysics: that at any given time metaphysics just is what people "believe about the world's general nature" and the history of such beliefs. In fact, the whole Autobiography is almost a carricature, albeit an highly entertaining one, of late historicism. Back in 1969, Skinner Himself granted that it was "excessive" because according to Collingwood (and now I quote Skinner 1969): "we cannot even ask if a given philosopher "solved the problem he set himself.""
Such historicism may be true, of course, but it is odd to think that it can be safely presupposed in one's general hermeneutic today. Skinner himself is, of course, much more cautious than Collingwood and, as far as I know, does not rest his own case on such historicism or such claims about metaphysics. But once we remove it from this wholly skeptical position that only a history of beliefs is possible and no knowledge (not even partial of the world's general nature) there is really not much to say on behalf of the idea that "there are only individual answers to individual questions."
But -- you can probably see this coming a mile away -- while Collingwood's 'logic of question and answer' is fully intelligible, even anchored by, and part of a whole cloth that involves such a historicism (including commitments to the unity of epochs and cultures, the denial of the PSR, etc.), in Skinner it is just special pleading. While I will not assert that one's hermeneutic is always beholden to one's metaphysics -- if that were so no historical understanding would be possible --, it should also not be the case that one's hermeneutic settles metaphysical questions by fiat.
Without Collingwood's broader metaphysical commitments, Skinner's focus on contingency seems arbitrary. That is, somewhat paradoxically, the general hermeneutic is itself best understood as more informative of the commitments of the Skinnerite historian, perhaps even revealing of Skinner's unwritten autobiography, and so best applicable to the recent present than the past.++
+Yes, I am mellowing. Also, Skinner has charmed me. It's much easier to be polemical with a person you have never met or who can't talk back, then someone you may run into at the British Liberary.
*There is one oddity: Skinner says that "Straussianism was, and is, in the United States the prevailing way of approaching texts in the history of moral and political philosophy. " I really don't think that's right anymore, if it ever was so.
**In the piece Skinner endorses Annabel Brett's idea that the historian, in the present, can be position "precisely as an outsider, a critical observer or reporter" who can unmask and bring to light the ideological slant of what is reported/found. Whether these types of models are ideology or something else is certainly worth asking, perhaps even necessary to ask; but the stance of an outsider is one of many a historian of philosophy can occupy.
++I don't think any of this criticism undermines Skinner's works on the past.
February 9, 2023
Zera Yacob and Intellectual traditions; a note on the origins of Africana Philosophy
What should we make of this similarity? Note that it would be anachronistic to describe Zera Yacob���s argument as ���Lockean,��� for the Second Treatise of Government was published over two decades after Zera Yacob wrote his Hat��ta. This points us toward the limits on the usefulness of viewing Zera Yacob and Locke as sharing an early modern world. Consider Richard Tuck���s Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (1979), which explores categories of Roman law, locates the birth of natural rights discourse in the late medieval period, and examines figures like Hugo Grotius, John Selden, and Thomas Hobbes before giving Locke attention in the final chapter. Scholarship like this places Locke in a certain lineage of thought, which shaped him just as much as the political context of his times. Zera Yacob does not stand in that lineage. Indeed, when comparing Zera Yacob to Descartes and Locke, we should remember that Locke read and was influenced by Descartes, learning from his approach to philosophy even while rejecting central views of his. There is a sense in which Locke and Descartes share a modernity that Zera Yacob does not, a point that need not lead us to deny that Zera Yacob is a modern philosopher but rather to say that he inhabits a different modernity. (p. 130)
[W]hile Zera Yacob can be seen as similar to Descartes but must be recognized as outside the lineage leading to and branching out from him, Amo, like Locke, did philosophy in the wake of Descartes and critically responded to his work. (p. 132)
What I think this means is that, for Cugoano, as for Zera Yacob, the idea of natural rights is not really embedded within a modern European intellectual tradition. Certain formulations of it may be paradigmatically European, but it is ultimately a concept that transcends cultural boundaries, which also means that one can come up with paradigmatically Fanti formulations of it. Cugoano thus does not fit neatly into the framework of modern Africana philosophy as a form of modern European philosophy into which Amo and Haynes fit. But, of course, neither is he disconnected from the European tradition in the way Zera Yacob is. Cugoano, I believe, represents modern Africana philosophy as a convergence of African and European intellectual trajectories, a hybrid case of radicalizing European thought from within, as with Haynes, while also modernizing African thought through comparing indigenous and foreign viewpoints and using reason to decide what makes the most sense, like Zera Yacob.
I take Cugoano to be, in this way, a model for Africana philosophy going forward. The riches of the Western philosophical tradition must be valued but also made sharper and more liberating through the use of a critical philosophy of race lens. At the same time, there must be constant efforts to transcend the Western framework by rooting Africana philosophy in oral and literary traditions from Africa and the diaspora. In many instances, we may come to a conclusion like Cugoano���s about natural rights: that what we thought of as particularly Western is not and that the cross-cultural recognition of a shared concept may strengthen our sense of commitment to the value at stake. (p. 138)
The quoted passages are all from Chike Jeffers' (2017) "Rights, Race, and the Beginnings of Modern Africana Philosophy." The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Race. This is a text that I assign as required background reading to the session that roughly goes from Las Casas to Cugoano and discusses slavery, mercantile political economy, and rights in my lecture course on the History of Political Theory. This is a required course with enrollments between 500 and 600 students. Jeffers' paper is short and hits the sweet spot because it offers helpful historical context, makes important distinctions, and it explains the ongoing significance of the material discussed. It's also astonishingly brief, and clear. I warmly recommend it.
But as I was preparing my quiz about the text, and so re-reading it, I became uneasy in reflecting on the passages quoted above. To be sure, the underlying idea of what Africana philosophy should be going forward (articulated in final paragraph, but also made available throughout the chapetr) strikes me as rather attractive and is not something I am going to challenge here. In fact, in some ways I am going to reinforce Jeffers' main point because I want to suggest that Zera Yacob is much more connected to what Jeffers calls 'the European tradition,' although what I prefer to call the (partially overlapping) 'Abrahamic-Platonic traditions' that also shaped non-trivially Descartes and Locke. What do I have in mind?
First, Yacob (1599 ��� 1692) is, in part, polemicizing against the Jesuits and, now I quote Jeffers, "as ���Fran��,��� a Ge���ez word that literally means ���foreigner.��� But note that he uses that word in a way that is interchangeable with ���Catholic.���" (p. 131) And, in fact, if you read Zera Yacob���s Hat��ta "or ���inquiry,��� commonly called his Treatise" (p. 128) it's very clear that Yacob was rather acquainted with their teachings (which he largely rejects).+ Now, Descartes was taught by Jesuits at La Fl��che. (Descartes was there between 1607-1614.) So, there is a non-trivial sense in which they were exposed to largely the same views. (The Jesuits standardized their curriculum.) Obviously, I am not claiming that they had the same teachers (although Jesuits did move around so it's not wholly impossible they encountered the same people--how cool would that be?), but I would be amazed if the Iberian Jesuits who are his targets did not bring with them ideas shaped by, say, Francisco Su��rez's metaphysics and moral/political theory, including his theory of rights. (Su��rez was an intellectual celebrity of the age.) Su��rez is rather important to Descartes and, as I have noted (here), Su��rez also shaped the social contract tradition (including Hobbes and perhaps -- I will not make the case today -- Locke).
Second, Yacob is quite clearly evoking Augustine's Confessions at various points. This is not just in virtue of the auto-biographical style, but also in particular details of the narrative (not the least the early sinful behavior and the attraction to various alternative intellectual traditions). One important commonality is the significance of David's Psalms to both. I don't think either can do without an explicit or implicit allusion to Psalms on a single page! (I suspect one can write a PhD about this.) I return to this below. Either way, Descartes' debts to Augustine, and Augustine's Confessions has itself generated a huge scholarly enterprise. In saying this, I don't mean to suggest there are no differences between Descartes or Yacob, but just to point to the fact that they share in an overlapping tradition even if they may be mediated by different sources and contexts. (I don't mean to suggest that Descartes himself was especially shaped by Psalms--I leave that aside, although intrigued to reflect on it.)
Third, a good chunk of (what we might call) the philosophy in the Hat��ta draws on the Book of Wisdom (which Yacob, as is common, attributes to Salomon). I don't want to make this claim more precise here. But while Yacob is plenty critical of the particularity and some of the laws of Judaism, the Hebraic sources in his text are abundant. This he does share with Hobbes and Locke. I don't mean to suggest that the sources are exclusively Jewish; I would love to know, for example, if Al-Ghazali's Deliverance of Error (with with the Hat��ta and the Meditations share non-trivial commonalities) was circulating among the Muslim scholars he encountered and debated.
But it's only if one denies that the Book of Wisdom (which itself is shaped by Hellenistic philosophy) is philosophy or insists that the Hebrew Bible is non-philosophy (as some who are in the grip of the opposition between Jerusalem and Athens might claim) that this is not part of the overlapping tradition(s). (I have argued against this claim in many digressions, but start here.) In addition, it's quite clear that Yacob identifies with David's enforced exile from court, and perhaps (I put this more tentatively) even the Israelites in the dessert.
So, while it is undoubtedly true that Yacob and Descartes and/or Locke did not share the exact same modernity, I also suspect that in some non-trivial respects they did. It is striking that both politically and religiously the question of religious pluralism and the role of using state authority to impose a single religion dominate France and Ethiopia (and England) in their life-times, including rather dramatic reversals of fortune. I am not especially fond of 'modernity' because it is often inscribed in complex conceptual hierarchies (involving 'feudalism,' civilization vs barbarism, etc.), but it can be useful to point to the symmetry of conditions that these thinkers faced.
Does anything hinge on this? Well, I am certainly not the first to note debts of Africana philosophy to Hebraic and Abrahamic sources more broadly. But when in 2019 Peter Adamson (who has collaborated with Jeffers) writes, in the context of Zera Yacob that the "Ethiopian philosophical tradition simultaneously belongs to at least two larger stories: that of philosophy within various Christian traditions of the East, and that of African philosophy," that is factually true, but it effaces the Hebraic contribution to at least the former (and, perhaps the latter--in so far as Hebraic philosophy itself was developed, in part, under African skies). A similar claim can be made "about ancient Egyptian philosophy" (which Adamson goes on to mention) in so far as Philo is a rather signicant presence in it.
I don't think this is merely a matter of geographic score-keeping. It has important contemporary political salience when 'philosophy' plays a role in identity formation and articulation (as it seems to do within Africana philosophy--that is not a criticism!). That there is also a very clear Hebraic root in Yacob [!] and all the figures discussed in the Beginnings of Modern Africana Philosophy (with perhaps partial exception of Amo) is, thus, non-trivial (if only because the bondage and exodus of Israel resonate within it). It also may facilitate discussion today among Africana and philosophy that takes Hebraic sources seriously. This is no small matter given the polarizing effects of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism in our world.
Including the Hebraic tradition(s) into the narrative may also be epistemically useful if Yacob is right. Because he thinks that when different traditions agree, we are more like to find truth, whereas their differences reveal their errors--and in religious conflict we de facto always defend error. It's probably more natural to read him as saying that this is so because when traditions agree they latch onto the truth (a thought like this can be found in Montaigne, too). But I'd like to read him Spinozistically as suggesting, and I'd like to argue for this at some point that this is his view, that through dialogue when we find ways to agree, and so live in peace with each other, we instantiate or generate the truth.*
+I am not quoting from any editions because I have only access to rather (manifestly) imperfect translations, and I don't want to rest my case any any matters of detail.
*Obviously, this mechanism does not work if the truth is imposed.
February 7, 2023
On (Roy Cook on) The Historiography of Frege's Logic
Before I get to the quoted passage, it is fair to say that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (hereafter: SEP) is the most valuable philosophical resource on the internet today and that within it the entries on logic and its history take pride of place. This state of affairs is a consequence of certain path dependencies that need not concern us here, and it is not intended to cast aspersion on it or other philosophical projects online (or groups of entries in the SEP).
I know Cook as the author of a highly entertaining and instructive essay on Logical Pluralism (in Philosophy Compass). In the passage quoted above, Cook kind of treats Frege as a foreign country (hereafter: Fregeland) which requires total immersion in order to acquire expertise about it. (I didn't use 'language' in the previous sentence in order to avoid confusion about what the language one must learn really is.) This immersive stance goes against the idea that one can acquire the right sort of knowledge of Fregeland via a (Quine-ean) translation manual.
The immersive stance also presupposes a kind of soft incommensurability between modern logics and the ones one might find in (or of) Fregeland. (Perhaps this is his own pluralism speaking.) I use 'soft' because Cook clearly rejects the idea one can do a strict piecemeal comparisons between Fregeland and more recent logcs when one lacks the sensibility and skill acquired after immersion. His entry reveals that after immersion one can certainly do so in fruitful ways (sometimes aided by the expressive strengths of modern logics and sometimes by those found in Fregeland).
There are fascinating pay-offs to Cook's approach, the most notable for me (but only after a first reading) is that (see, for example, the treatment of Basic Law III) Cook is willing to make claims about what gaps in Fregeland might reveal about, say, Frege's awareness of the incompleteness of his own logic as opposed to an awareness of a more anachronistic in principle incompleteness of second-order logic. (In context, Cook is disagreeing with Dummett.)
There are prominent historians of philosophy, who think of themselves as contextualists and as rejecting anachronism (interestingly, in context Cook quotes Dummett, who I tend to think of as a Whig historian of philosophy, who, in the quoted paragraph explicitly relies on a rejection of anachronism). These contextualist historians of philosophy also embrace, often without full self-awareness, a kind of positivism about past texts and only allow explicit statements as evidence into their analysis or historical treatment. And so such historians of philosophy cannot allow lacunae and silences to be significant to those they study in the past. This has the unfortunate side-effect that in some respects philosophers of the past and the past as such are thereby dumbed down.
As an aside, since some of you know of my fascination with the role of esoteric writing in the past, I wish to add that the silences I speak of in the previous paragraph may be of a different kind. Silences can also be indicative of shared background commitments or the common ground in a language game that do not need to be made explicit to thinkers in a particular age. And sometimes they are indicative of an aesthetic or formal sensibility where explicitness on a certain Y ruins the clarity X being aimed at in Z.
Be that as it may, and returning to Cook, and to what I take to be the most striking effect of his methodological stance: once one is immersed in Fregeland, one may well discern advantages to Frege's approach even when compared to modern deductive systems (see what Cook has to say about Frege's treatment of the rules of inference at the start of Cook's section 3.4). To make this plausible is quite an achievement on Cook's part because after more than a century of progress along multiple dimensions, it is very hard to have a sense of the possible costs or limitations of such progress. This is especially so because in our education we are drilled in the modern approaches, and we don't tend to teach the route we got here. To make such costs or paths not taken visible to the reader is, in fact, one of the higher purposes of the historian of philosophy today. I don't mean to suggest this is Cook's own stance; he clearly implies that he sees his main task as disclosing the past to us, that is, to be a guide in our journey of discovery.
Obviously I am not endorsing Cook's analysis of Fregeland--this endorsement would be worthless anyway because while I claim some expertise in early analytic philosophy, I am no expert on the very contested terrain of Frege (and a below average logician given the disciplinary baseline). You read his entry and make up your own mind (although I suspect that once immersed you may find yourself with different questions). But I do think it's fair to say -- and I do claim some standing here -- that at the moment SEP is also at the forefront of the historiography of philosophy not the least in its (very diverse) entries on Frege. And given the significance of Frege to the self-conception of analytic philosophy as a tradition -- and as I note to outsiders analytic philosophers do not usually think about the nature of tradition or working in it, but do have a strong self-conception in which Frege does figure to some degree -- that in itself is worthy of some commentary.
One final thought. In a series of provocative posts (many of which have prompted digressions by me), Liam Kofi Bright has strongly suggested (recall here); but earlier here and here) that our age is in the midst of shift in philosophical sensibility (akin to a Kuhnian paradigmatic crisis). One need not accept Hegel or Kuhn's historiography to agree that the high quality of historical writing about Fregeland is also an indicator that such a shift is, indeed, taking place, even intensifying.
February 2, 2023
The Epistemology of Discursive Authority (ah yes, foucault, Quine, and postmodernism)
What, in short, we wish to do is to dispense with 'things'. To 'depresentify' them. To conjure up their rich, heavy, immediate plenitude, which we usually regard as the primitive law of a discourse that has become divorced from it through error, oblivion, illusion, ignorance, or the inertia of beliefs and traditions, or even the perhaps unconscious desire not to see and not to speak. To substitute for the enigmatic treasure of 'things' anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse. To define these objects without reference to the ground, the foundation of things, but by relating them to the body of rules that enable them to form as objects of a discourse and thus constitute the conditions of their historical appearance. To write a history of discursive objects that does not plunge them into the common depth of a primal soil, but deploys the nexus of regularities that govern their dispersion.--Michel Foucault (1969) "The Formation of Objects" chapter 3 in The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith [1972], pp. 52-3 in the 2002 edition.
More than thirty years ago there was a buzz around Foucault and 'social constructivism' on campus. I don���t think I was especially aware of what this was about, but along the way I took a course in the ���experimental college��� (a relic from the campus turmoil of an earlier generation) where I was introduced to the idea by way of the classic, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, then twenty five years old. (It was published in 1966.)
I never got around to reading Foucault as an undergraduate, but I was in graduate school studying with Martha Nussbaum when her (1999) polemic against Butler appeared. (I assume the essay was triggered by the second edition of Gender Trouble, but I am not confident about it.) This essay has a passage that nicely sumps up the general attitude toward Foucault that I was exposed to:
I was not nudged into reading Butler���s Gender Trouble during my graduate research (eventually when I became an instructor my own broad eduction started). However, I was confronted with the recent prominence of French postmodernist thought in works that now would be classified as foundational to STS, but that I was reading in virtue of my interest in the history of science such as Pickering���s The Mangle of Practice, which could generate heated debate among the PhD students. What made those debates frustrating was that we lacked distinctions so we often would talk passed each other.
A good part of those debates died down and were, subsequently domesticated after the publication of Hacking���s (1999) The Social Construction of What?, which we read immediately after it appeared. Hacking didn���t settle any debates for us, but allowed us to do more sober philosophy with it and while I do not want to credit him solely without mention of Haslanger, his book certainly contributed to the normalization and disciplining of the debate. Hacking and Haslanger also visited shortly thereafter, and so could ask for clarifications. Interestingly enough, in that book Hacking treats Foucault as a constructivist in ethical theory akin to Rawls, although he notes that others (Haslanger) treat Foucault as an ancestor to the idea that reality is constructed 'all the way down.'
As regular readers know my own current interest in Foucault is orthogonal to questions of construction. But I was struck by the fact that in his Foucault: His Thought, His Character, Paul Veyne treats Foucault fundamentally (not wholly without reason) as a Humean nominalist (and a certain kind of Nietzschean skeptic). And, in fact, the nominalism is itself exhibited by a certain kind of positivism about facts. (Deleuze might add quickly: a positivism about statements.) Veyne is not a reliable guide to matters philosophical, but I wondered if Foucault���s purported social constructivism was all based on a game of telephone gone awry in translation and academic celebrity culture.*
Now, if we look at the passage quoted at the top of the post, we can certainly why Foucault was treated as a social constructivist. The first few sentences in the quoted paragraph do look like a form of linguistic idealism. And this sense remains even if one has a dim awareness that the passage seems primarily directed against a kind phenomenology [���presentify��� is clearly an allusion to Husserls [Vergegenwartigung]], even (perhaps) trolling Heidegger (���primal soil���).
However, the point of the passage is not ontology. It���s method. (No surprise because that is sort of the general aim of the Archeology of Knowledge.) And this, is in fact instructive of Foucault���s larger project. In the passage, Foucault is, in fact, explaining that he will try to leave aside questions of ontology in his own project. This is not to deny he is interested in what we might call epistemology. But the epistemology he is exploring is what one might call discursive authority. And the effect of such authority is ���the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse.��� (emphasis added).
In fact, Foucault here is not far removed from Quine (but in a way to be made precise). In one of the most Whitehead-ian passages of Two Dogmas, Quine writes: ���The physical conceptual scheme simplifies our account of experience because of the way myriad scattered sense events come to be associated with single so-called objects; still there is no likelihood that each sentence about physical objects can actually be translated, however deviously and complexly, into the phenomenalistic language. Physical objects are postulated entities which round out, and simplify our account of the flux of experience.���
Now, don���t be distracted by Quine���s ���sense events��� or empiricism. For, what Foucault is interested in is the manner by which (to quote Quine again) ���myriad scattered sense events come to be associated with single so-called objects.��� In particular, (and now I am back to Foucault) ���the body of rules that enable them to form as objects of a discourse.��� This body of rules is characteristic of an authoritative discipline. And in particular, Foucault is interested in what the social effects are of simplifications produced by postulated entities in the human sciences on these sciences and larger society. I don���t mean to suggest this is Foucault���s only game. He is also interested in the social structures that stabilize the possibility of semantics across disciplines in a particular age.
To be sure, in Quine the epistemology of discursive authority is only treated cursory (in the context of regimentation). Whereas Foucault is focused on how the sciences acquire and constitute (even replicate) such authority. But that is compatible with all kinds of ontologies in Quine���s sense or, to be heretical for a second, a metaphysically robust realism; notice Foucault���s own hint of a ���rich, heavy, immediate plenitude.' One will not get more than hints from Foucault on what his answers might be to the kind of epistemological or metaphysical questions we are trained to ask. That, of course, is a feature not a bug of his project.
*As an aside, we can see the shifting perspectives on Foucault's role in social constructivism in Philosophy Compass review articles. Back in 2007 Ron Mallon treats Foucault as a kind of fellow-traveller of social constructivism:
By contrast, ��sta, writing in 2015, treats Foucault (quite rightly) as a source for Hacking's account of the The looping effect which "is the phenomenon where X is being described or conceptualized as F makes it F." And then notes that "scholars disagree over whether Foucault himself allows for a role for epistemic reasons or whether the development of institutions and cultural practices is determined by power relations alone3 should not commit us to the view that the only force of human culture is power. " Here in a note ��sta cites not Foucault, but Habermas' famous criticism in ��� Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present���. Cf. Nussbaum's hedged on this very point in the passage quoted above.
February 1, 2023
The Fascist Alternative, Fukuyama, and the End of History,
The post-historical consciousness represented by "new thinking" is only one possible future for the Soviet Union, however. There has always been a very strong current of great Russian chauvinism in the Soviet Union, which has found freer expression since the advent of glasnost. It may be possible to return to traditional Marxism-Leninism for a while as a simple rallying point for those who want to restore the authority that Gorbachev has dissipated. But as in Poland, Marxism-Leninism is dead as a mobilizing ideology: under its banner people cannot be made to work harder, and its adherents have lost confidence in themselves. Unlike the propagators of traditional Marxism-Leninism, however, ultra nationalists in the USSR believe in their Slavophile cause passionately, and one gets the sense that the fascist alternative is not one that has played itself out entirely there.
The Soviet Union, then, is at a fork in the road: it can start down the path that was staked out by Western Europe forty-five years ago, a path that most of Asia has followed, or it can realize its own uniqueness and remain stuck in history. The choice it makes will be highly important for us, given the Soviet Union's size and military strength, for that power will continue to preoccupy us and slow our realization that we have already emerged on the other side of history.--Francis Fukuyama "The End of History?" The National Interest , Summer 1989, No. 16 (Summer 1989), 17-18.
I realized the other day that I (partially) misremembered Fukuyama's famous essay. I had thought it claimed that (as it does) "Fascism was destroyed as a living ideology by World War II. This was a defeat, of course, on a very material level, but it amounted to a defeat of the idea as well." (p. 9) And by fascism he means (helpfully) "any organized ultra-nationalist movement with universalistic pretensions���not universalistic with regard to its nationalism, of course, since the latter is exclusive by definition, but with regard to the movement's belief in its right to rule other people." This is I think a useful definition because it allows us to recognize fascism even where it presents itself in a suit.
I always thought the view that fascism was destroyed oddly optimistic not the least in virtue of Fukuyama's emphasis that historical consciousness is the driver of history. Why couldn't this defeat not be (thought) temporary, and facism return in a modernized face? In effect, this possibility haunts the French students and generation after Koj��ve and it is what gives French intellectual thought (associated not just with names like Aron and Furet, but also Deleuze, Beauvoir Derrida, and Foucault its enduring vitality). And it is peculiar, I assumed, that Fukuyama, who understands himself in terms of Koj��ve lacks this sensibility.
Fukuyama's argument in the essay draws heavily on Burnham (or beyond Burnham on the elite-theorists like Mosca and Pareto) and also on Leo Strauss. (If you want I can spell that out with evidence some time, but I assume this would not be original.) And what is characteristic of both Burnham (of the 1940s) and Strauss is that they both rebel against historicism and insists that certain political realities are enduring or at least can make a genuine come-back despite apparent 'progress' in some other direction. And this is, in fact, where Fukuyama ends his essay (with a Nietzschean look at the longtermist future), that eventually "history" can be "started once again." (p. 18)
As an aside, it is worth emphasizing (if only because Fukuyama became associated with triumphant neoliberalism in some quarters) that "The End of History?" is fundamentally a polemic against then contemporary Chicago economics. He describes his main target as follows: "there is on the Right what one might label the Wall Street Journal school of deterministic materialism that discounts the importance of ideology and culture and sees man as essentially a rational, profit-maximizing individual. It is precisely this kind of individual and his pursuit of material incentives that is posited as the basis for economic life as such in economic textbook." (p. 6)
Be that as it may, in re-reading "The End of History?" the passage quoted at the top of the post caught my I attention. Fukuyama did discern that Glassnost could end in (what he calls) fascism, and stay there. He deserves credit for his prescience. But he also seems to think that it could never threaten the ""Common Marketization" of world politics." (16; this has echoes of Schmitt, by the way.)
That is to say, he does not seem to allow that the success of fascism somewhere makes the end of history itself fragile. But what we have learned since is that the fascists stuck in history are a source of inspiration (and perhaps also sources of financial and material assistance) to those who wish to return to it.
Or to be precise, Fukuyama does allow this very possibility on a conceptual level. For he writes, "What destroyed fascism as an idea was not universal moral revulsion against it, since plenty of people were willing to endorse the idea as long as it seemed the wave of the future, but its lack of success." (9. This is, in fact, the very next sentence from the one I quoted in my first paragraph above.) For, what this entails is that when fascism is sufficiently sucessful anywhere, it will inspire others. The end of history was always going to be a temporary affair.
January 31, 2023
My First GPT assisted toy model
A few days ago a prominent economist hereafter (PE) I follow on twitter and enjoy bantering with mentioned, en passant, that PE had used ChatGPT to submit a referee report. (I couldn't find the tweet, so that's why I am not revealing his identity here.) Perhaps PE did so in the context of me entertaining the idea to use it in writing an exam because I have been experimenting with that. I can't say yet it is really a labor saving device, but it makes the process less lonely and more stimulating. The reason it is not a labor saving device is because GPT is a bullshit artist and you constantly have to be on guard it's not just making crap up (which it will then freely admit).
I don't see how I can make it worth my time to get GPT to write referee reports for me given the specific textual commentary I often have to make. I wondered -- since I didn't have the guts to ask PE to share the GPT enabled referee report with me -- if it would be easier to write such a joint report in the context of pointing out mistakes in the kind of toy models a lot of economics engages in. This got me thinking.
About a decade ago I was exposed to work by Allan Franklin and Kent Staley (see here) and (here). It may have been a session at a conference before this work was published; I don't recall the exact order. But it was about the role of incredibly high statistical significance standards in some parts of high energy physics, and the evolution of these standards over time. What was neat about their research is that it also was sensitive to background pragmatic and sociological issues. And as I was reflecting on their narratives and evidence, it occurred to me one could create a toy model to represent some of the main factors that should be able to predict if an experimental paper gets accepted, and where failure of the model would indicate shifting standards (or something interesting about that).
However, back home, I realized I couldn't do it. Every decision created anxiety, and i noticed that even simple functional relations were opportunities for agonising internal debates. I reflected on the fact that while I had been writing about other people's models and methods for a long time (sometimes involving non-trivial math), I had never actually tried to put together a model because all my knowledge about science was theoretical and self-learned. I had never taken graduate level science courses, and so never had been drilled in the making of even basic toy-models. This needn't been the end of the matter because all I needed to do was be patient and work through it in trial and error or, more efficiently, find a collaborator within (smiles sheepishly) the division of labor. But the one person I mentioned this project to over dinner didn't think it was an interesting modeling exercise because (i) my model would be super basic and (ii) it was not in his current research interests to really explore it. (He is super sweet dude, so he said it without kicking down.)
Anyway, this morning, GPT and I 'worked together' to produce Model 7.0.
Model 7.0 is a toy model that represents the likeligood a scientific paper is accepted or rejected in a field characterized as 'normal science' based on several factors. I wanted to capture intuitons about the kind of work it is, but also sociological and economic onsidations that operate in the background. I decided the model needed to distinguish among four kinds of 'results':
Ri: replications
Rii: results that require adjustment to the edges of the background theory;
Riii: results that confirm difficult to produce predictions/implications of the background theory;
Riv: results that refute central tenets of the background theory (so called falsifications).
The model is shaped by the lack of interest in replications. Results that refute central tenets of a well confirmed theory need to pass relatively high evidential treshholds (higher than in Rii and Riii). I decided that experimental cost (which I would treat as a proxy for difficulty) would enter into decisions about relative priority of Rii and Riii. In addition, there were differences of standards in fields defined by robust background theories (or not so robust). As robustness goes up baseline standards of significance that need to be met, too.
I thought it clever to capture a Lakatosian intuition that results in a core and result on a fringe are treated differently. And I also wanted to capture the pragmatic fact that journal space is not unlimited and that its supply is shaped by the number of people chasing tenure.
So, in model 7.0 we can distinguish among the following variables
�� represents the centrality of the topic (Theta).
�� represents the statistical significance of the results (Sigma).
�� represents the robustness of the background theory (Rho).
�� represents the journal space availability (Alpha).
N the number of people seeking tenure,
C the cost of the experiments
I decided that the relationship between journal space and number of people seeking tenure would be structurally the same in all four kinds of results. As the number of people seeking tenure in a field (N) increases, journal space availability (��) also increases, leading to a decrease in the importance of the other three variables (��, ��, ��) in determining the probability of acceptance (P(Accepted) and so this became '�� / (�� + k * N)' in all the functions. k represents the rate of decrease in significance threshold with increase in number of replications, which GTP thought clever to include. (Obviously, if you think that in a larger field it gets harder to publish results at a threshhold you would change signs here, etc.)
The formula for accepting papers for four different kind of results in a given field with a shared backgrond theory is given as follows:
P(Accepted | Ri) = f(��, ��, ��, ��, Ri) = f(��, ��, ��, �� / (�� + k * N), Ri)
P(Accepted | Rii) = f(��, ��, ��, ��, Rii) = f(��, ��, ��, �� / (�� + k * N), Rii) * h(C, Rii)
P(Accepted | Riii) = f(��, ��, ��, ��, Riii) = f(��, ��, ��, �� / (�� + k * N), Riii) * h(C, Riii)
P(Accepted | Riv) = f(��, ��, ��, ��, Riv) = f(��, ��, ��, �� / (�� + k * N), Riv) * g(��, ��, Riv)
For Rii and Riii, the formula also includes an additional term h(C, Rii) or h(C, Riii) respectively, which represents the effect of cost on the likelihood of acceptance. The function h is such that as costs go up, there is a greater likelihood that Riii will be accepted than Rii. We are more interested in a new particle than we are in a changing parameter that effects some measurements only. For Riv, the formula includes an additional term g(��, ��, Riv), which represents the impact of the robustness of the scientific theory being tested and the quality of the experimental design on the likelihood of acceptance. The standard for Riv is much higher than for Rii and Riii, as it requires an order of magnitude higher level of statistical significance.
It is not especially complicated to extend this kind of model to capture the idea that journals with different prestige game relative acceptance rates, or that replications (Ri) with non trivial higher statistical power do get accepted (for a while), but that's for future work.:)
I decided to pause at Model 7.0 because GPT seemed to be rather busy helping others. I was getting lots of "Maybe try me again in a little bit" responses. And I could see that merely adding terms was not going to be satisfying. I needed to do some thinking about the nature of this model and play around with it. Anyway, GPT also made some suggestions on how to collect data for such a model, how to operationalize different variables, and how to refine it, but I have to run to a lunch meeting. And then do a literature survey to see what kind of models are out there. It's probably too late for me to get into the modeling business, but I suspect GPT like models will become lots of people's buddies.
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