Political Philosophy and Ethics discussion
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Reason, Informal Logic, Evidence, and Critical Thinking
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Feliks
(last edited Jul 03, 2019 10:42AM)
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Jul 03, 2019 10:40AM
Looks like a good pick. Question: on the book page itself, there's a brief indication (in the summary) that the author might encourage a return to 'trusting one's instincts'? That's rather a waggle-phrase which can evoke enthusiasm or dismay depending on who uses it and what they mean by it. We've carefully chatted about it right here in this forum. Not to re-invoke past debate here in this thread, but while I personally admire instincts I recognize that (Alan) you've made a strong case that they're not to be trusted. I like what the book-blurb says about the author's emphasis on 'dissent'. Hard to tell from such a brief promo-paragraph but I like the notion on the face of it.
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The Goodreads and Amazon descriptions state in pertinent part: "Sunstein shows that when individuals suppress their own instincts about what is true and what is right, it can lead to significant social harm." Until I read the book, I will be unable to determine whether this is an accurate description of what Sunstein says. In any event, I would guess that Sunstein would appropriately qualify any such statement. Instinct is a very dangerous impulse: it has led to Nazism, racism, lynchings, and all kinds of abominations. One may say that this was the whole point of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn: Huckleberry's "instinct" based on his cultural and religious indoctrination was that it was wrong for him to help a slave escape and that he would probably go to hell for doing so. On the other hand, Huckleberry had another instinct that compelled him to facilitate such an escape.
Wouldn't that Huck Finn encapsulation indicate that many fine human instincts, after all, can not be suborned from without, and that noble instincts residing within us, can't be overpowered by indoctrination? I'm inclined to the view that instincts can be improved and honed by self-examination and life-experience and thus, win out over any forced educational programs, or any manipulation. Maybe I'm being idealistic in these matters. Anyway I'm not speaking in terms of 'absolutes', of course. Oh well. (p.s. Alan, I recall from previous conversation that this Clemens novel had a very great impression on you ...)
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Yes, Huckleberry Finn (which I read sixty years ago in my early teens) made an impression on me—much more so than Tom Sawyer, which didn't approach any significant political issues, though it captured very well and very imaginatively the mentality of children. I always thought that Huckleberry Finn got a bad rap—from the political right (criticizing Huck's departures from Victorian conventionality and polite speech) during my youth and from the political left (criticizing Huck's use of politically incorrect language, which the left fails to see is ironic and illustrative of Huck's mental conflict) today. Mark Twain had his personal faults (most notably in his falling for certain speculative, ruinous financial schemes), but he otherwise had a great mind and a great heart. He was an implacable foe of slavery and of human oppression everywhere. Winston Churchill reported (in his pre-World War II autobiography, My Early Years, if I recall correctly) a conversation he once had with Clemons in which Churchill was hard put to defend his "my country right or wrong" support of British imperialism. Churchill tells this story at his own expense. Like Clemens and Lincoln, Churchill had a fine wit that often pierced to the heart of the matter. That said, speaking of faults, Churchill still defended imperialism in his old age.
I have Sunstein's book on my private to-read list, although at the rate it's growing, I will probably never get to it. I read Huck Finn in high school and the humor at the time utterly escaped me. I read the opening chapters again a few years ago and found it absolutely hilarious. It is probably as funny now as when Mark Twain wrote it, if not more so, because of how inappropriate it is. Of course, the overarching message of the novel is in step with contemporary mores. I hope to revisit it sometime.
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The Age of American Unreason"
Great book! I read it in 2008.
Oh, aye? I am going to re-visit the book page then, and seek out your review. This national tailspin ...a continually timely topic as each year passes ...
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Didn't rate or review it. Don't remember why more than 10 years later.
In the interests of "reason," you might want to look at Sabine Hossenfelder, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, NY: Basic Books, 2018. I found out about this book after stumbling onto her blog, "Backreaction."Despite the facts (1) that Hossenfelder is a theoretical physicist and (2) that "math" appears in her title, this book is readable, sometimes amusing, sometimes even novelistic. It is true that readable is not always understandable. Try as she might, she can't always make physics simple enough for me. But explaining physics is not her main aim.
Her main concern is with the evaluation of theories in physics. She thinks too much weight is given to criteria clustered around "beauty" (e.g., simplicity, elegance, natural, etc.). Evaluation is crucial because it is becoming more and more difficult to devise tests in physics and more and more expensive to pay for the tests one devises. A lot of faith was placed in these particle colliders built around the world, costing millions, even billions, but results have more often than not failed to be what various theories predicted. Testing a theory is a major undertaking so one needs good ways of evaluating which theories are worth testing.
These difficulties have even led some physicists to give up the idea that a theory must be experimentally tested successfully before being accepted fully. Hossenfelder considers that view to be the end of science as we know it.
The idea of multiple universes is evidently popular among physicists, but the evidence for it is entirely mathematical. There was one attempt to see if evidence could be found
that our universe collided at some point with another universe, but that turned up nothing. The multiple universe theory assumes that "the only final theory is one in which all mathematics exists" (106).
The novelistic quality of some chapters arises from the fact that she incorporates material from interviews with a number of physicists, including some Nobel laureates. Rather than present this material in transcript form, she turns these physicists into characters with personalities and stages the dialogues she had with them.
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Thanks, Bob. I downloaded this book on Kindle a few months ago but have not yet gotten to it. Your fine review reminds me that I need to read it soon. Although a word search of the Kindle edition produces no results for “free will,” there are many entries for “determinism.” Accordingly, this book may be relevant in some way to my current research on free will. On the surface, at least, it appears to question some of the dogmas of contemporary “scientific” thinking.
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Elsewhere in this forum we have discussed the issues of fallacious analogy in general and the brain-computer analogy in particular. I am nearing the end of reading a very interesting book by neuroscientist Peter Ulric Tse titled The Neural Basis of Free Will: Criterial Causation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). I will probably review this book sometime within the next few days. In the meantime, however, I thought I would excerpt some of Tse’s comments on faulty analogy and the computer metaphor for the human brain. Since each paragraph of this book (other than abstracts) is assigned a separate subsection number and since the Kindle edition of the book does not contain real page numbers, I cite the book by section number and not by page number.
§8.24 Understanding that neurons and brains need not fundamentally be algorithmic frees us from the confusions that sometimes emerge when we apply the dominant metaphor of our age, namely, that the brain is a kind of computer. The questionable usefulness of this metaphor is apparent once we realize that there is no hardware–software distinction in the brain and computers do not rewire themselves continually as neurons do. Computers also do not enter teleological states, such as lust or hunger, and they lack consciousness. Metaphors are useful in that they help us understand something that we do not understand in terms of something that we do understand. The danger is that two things can be alike in some ways and totally dissimilar in other ways, and unless we pay attention to these differences we are likely to extend the metaphor too far and make conceptual mistakes as a consequence. For example, while a neuron’s threshold imposes a point of no return beyond which an action potential will occur, and a toilet’s handle does something similar for flushing, it would be absurd to extend the metaphor to the point that one believes that a neuron really functions like a toilet. But precisely such metaphorical overreach has occurred with the computer metaphor in modern neuroscience. While the initial users of this metaphor, particularly the founders of the cognitive revolution, had good reason to do so—they wanted to put something “scientific” in the black box in their efforts to overturn behaviorism—many neuroscientists and cognitive scientists today speak as if the brain really were a kind of computer. If neural information processing is an instance of nonalgorithmic criterial causation, we should search for the answer to the neural code not in computational algorithms, but in a deeper understanding of how criteria are set up and satisfied in dendrites, individual neurons and circuits of neurons. There is much that is yet to be understood in the brain sciences, and the neural code has yet to be deciphered. But we can free ourselves from the misconceptions of at least one brand of functionalism that is presently dominant in neuroscience, namely, machine-state functionalism (Putnam, 1960, 1967, 1975), according to which the brain is a fundamentally algorithmic and computational device equatable with a Turing machine.One of the most fascinating things about the foregoing discussion is the implicit reference to three of Aristotle’s four causes. Professor Robert Wess (a member of this group) will certainly appreciate this fact. Specifically, Tse tacitly invokes Aristotle’s material, formal, and final causes. He also discusses (again implicitly) the importance of Aristotle’s formal cause in other discussions. And his discussion of efficient cause is implicit in his whole critique of classical (prequantum) physics. Tse never mentions Aristotle in his book—most likely because it is the equivalent of academic suicide to admit being influenced by Aristotle’s discussion of causation. Centuries of modern science and philosophy militate against any such analysis. Nevertheless, such a discussion is necessary, even when it is called by different names.
§8.25 Functionalists typically argue that the material implementation of a set of functions is irrelevant to its functions. Certainly in the case of, say, a pipe, this is largely true. Whether a pipe is made of copper or steel is irrelevant for most plumbing applications. But in the case of neurons, the particular physical implementation of criteria is likely to be very difficult, if not impossible, to mimic in another physical substrate. For example, a functionalist might say that mental input–output relations and causal chains could be implemented in a series of tin cans connected with strings that is as big as the world, and that implements a millisecond timescale brain operation over weeks of tin can operations. For a functionalist, as long as the functional causal chains were equivalent, then functional relationships would be the same, and the mental state realized in such a collection of tin cans would be the same as that realized in the analogous brain process. The problem here is that neurons take advantage of properties of physical causation in realizing mental events that are not available to tin cans connected by strings. For example, it is only because synapses are the size that they are, and diffusion constants are what they are at the temperatures that real brains are, that neurons can harness the noise of Brownian motion in the synapse to introduce variability and novelty into neural information processing (§§4.66, 4.67). If the functional properties of NMDA receptors can only arise in something the size and shape of NMDA receptors, the function cannot be split off and transferred to a new “platform.”
Tse makes a related point in § 7.6n2: “One reason present-day computer programs have thus far failed to deeply mimic human cognition or creativity is in part that computer programs are based on algorithms that are intentionally deterministic, rather than being based on a feedforward/feedback hierarchy of criterial pattern detectors that can harness randomness to generate novel solutions to unforeseen problems . . . .” This might be understood to relate to Aristotle’s formal cause.
Very toothsome indeed. The point about academic enmity towards Aristotle's Four Causes -- is that due to the possible connotation of 'cause' with a religious aspect?
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As a result of the work of Thomas Aquinas, the medieval church synthesized Aristotle with Christianity. Part of this synthesis was the transformation of Aristotle’s four causes into theological dogma. Modern philosophy and science objected to Aristotle's four causes, especially what was called “final cause” or teleology. Final cause had become identified with the Christian God. This, of course, would have been anathema to the pagan Aristotle, who wrote of an unmoved mover that had no resemblance to the God of Christianity. For one thing, Aristotle taught the eternity of the universe. Accordingly, there was no creator in Aristotle’s metaphysics.
Modern philosophy and science emphasized efficient cause, the standard example being one billiard ball hitting another. Newton's laws of motion appeared to describe all causation. Well, almost all—Newton admitted defeat in trying to explain gravitation, And, indeed, modern science has been unable to explain gravitation to the present day. Even Einstein could not figure it out. Modern physics has been somewhat impoverished by its obsession with efficient cause and the corollary doctrine of (pre)determinism to the point that Einstein and some other modern scientists had grave reservations about the findings of quantum physics in the twentieth century. Today, most scientists accept quantum physics, but there are still a few refuseniks who claim that quantum mechanics is ultimately deterministic. Tse and my forthcoming book on free will discuss these, among other, issues.
Alan remarks in post #273, Alan remarks, "One of the most fascinating things about the foregoing discussion is the implicit reference to three of Aristotle’s four causes. Professor Robert Wess (a member of this group) will certainly appreciate this fact." Alan, you're right.
Aristotle should fare better in the 21st century if it proves to be a century of biology, as appears likely at this point.
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I am currently reading Steven B. Smith’s book Spinoza's Book of Life: Freedom and Redemption in the “Ethics” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). The following is an excerpt from page 28 (italics in the original):
One important difference that distinguishes Spinoza from other early modern thinkers is worth noting at the outset. It is a standard conceit of early modern thought to deny the viability of final causes of all sorts and to regard human desires as produced by efficient causes. The result of both claims was to see all human behavior purely in terms of power and power relations. Machiavelli and Hobbes both saw politics as a science of power. So did Spinoza. But unlike his predecessors, he did not attempt to divest power from some notion of telos or human perfectibility. Spinoza was a critic of the doctrine of divine or supernatural teleology, which he took to task in the appendix to part one and the preface to part four of the Ethics . But he still regarded human beings as teleological creatures whose actions only make sense as expressions of certain goals or purposes. This does not rule out the proposition that our ends have antecedent causal conditions, but to know the background causes of an action is only to know a part. It is a central theme of the Ethics that we are essentially goal-directed animals and that life is, at bottom, the expression of an ideal or goal. We are beings who are constituted by a desire or endeavor (conatus) not just to live but to live freely, and freedom, properly understood, constitutes the perfection of the individual. There is a single word that unites Spinoza's psychology, politics, and ethics. That word is freedom .Bob Wess will be pleased to know that Smith favorably references Richard McKeon’s book on Spinoza, which is on my reading list.
Somewhat rhetorical question here. Alan, you've stated on past occasions that forms of logic such as computational or Boolean logic have no close relationship to either politics or ethics and that therefore they are extraneous to productive discussions which take place here. We don't delve into them. I'm curious then, about the more traditional role of logic with regard to these aspects of society. What types of logic do play a part in political ethics, how do they play a part, and where do they play a part? Is it all found in the conceiving of governmental forms, such as Plato's Republic, or the Magna Carta, or the Bill of Rights? Or is logic found more actively in legislation; or jurisprudence? In what application does it really come to the fore?Said another way: it is easy to see how the development of logic has helped our powers of reason and rationality. How can it actually shape our behavior?
Even if this question is ultimately simplistic and can be satisfied with a simplistic answer, I'd still like to hear an opinion or two...
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Type "informal logic" in the search box for this forum, and you will find my discussions of informal logic. What is called "informal logic" applies to human affairs. What is called "formal logic" applies mainly to computers and mathematical or quasi-mathematical theory. See also the books I cite on informal logic.
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Feliks wrote: "Somewhat rhetorical question here. Alan, you've stated on past occasions that forms of logic such as computational or Boolean logic have no close relationship to either politics or ethics and that ..."Feliks there is a useful distinction to be made between logic and reason. Logic is rigid, reason is labile.
Thankfully we abandoned the fallacy that human reason must be logical when we abandoned scholasticism in the 1400's.
Reason should look to logic only as so far as to ensure it doesn't fall into obvious error but beyond that it is up to humans to create reason / reasons. Reason is allied to normative structures like ethics and values. We value democracy for instance and we give reasons but they have little to do with logic.
Logic is simply a formal structure of proof testing - it's maths in language.
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Thankfully we abandoned the fallacy that human reason must be logical when we abandoned scholasticism in the 1400's."
Gerard, you make some interesting points. I have a somewhat different perspective on this. See, among other of my comments in this forum, my post 1 in the present topic, including the books I cite. I am a proponent of “informal logic,” which boils down to critical thinking—both inductive and deductive logic—in ordinary human discourse. I am not much interested in “formal logic,” which I understand applies to computers and some forms of mathematical or quasi-mathematical analysis. There are some great books on informal logic and its application to everyday arguments, some of which I have cited in post 1. It may be, however, that we are essentially talking about the same thing. It may be a semantic matter.
I think that most of the evils in human society could be eliminated if people just learned to think and argue rationally. I understand there is some effort in pre-college and college courses along this line, but all we have to do is look around at the world right now (especially the USA) and observe how insane people can be. I could cite examples, but I think that is unnecessary for our group members.
Good stuff by Gerard and Alan both.Pointing me towards informal logic was a timely reminder for me. I was inexplicably blanking on the whole concept when I originally posted.
Let me now phrase my curiosity another way. If informal logic is plainly used to help correct existing society (via jurisprudence, for example) can it --or, does it --play any part in the designing of society? Is there any style of rationality which we are now aware of, which might have given the Founders any better tools than they had at the time? (Setting aside the issues re: equal rights which were overlooked for some citizens).
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Pointing me towards informal logic was a timely reminder for me. I was inexplicably blanking on the whole concept when I originally posted.
Let me now phrase m..."
One could argue (and it has been argued) that the republic designed by the Founders was the most rational polity ever formed. Of course, we are aware of its many defects, especially slavery. But it otherwise was an attempt to use Enlightenment reason (no mention of God in the Constitution, and the First Amendment prohibited--at that time only on the federal level--merger of church and state) to construct a polity from scratch. The monarchists, theocrats, and Erastians in Europe thought it was insane and doomed to failure.
Today, informal logic and critical thinking is most useful in the arena of political debate. The books I cited are especially helpful in that application, though they also explain how informal logic can and should inform many aspects of human life.
The lack of such rationality in today's political world is quite obvious. If not reversed (and soon), the US political regime will be fundamentally changed in the direction of fascism, as is currently happening in many places around the world. We are already well along that road.
The one distinction I remember from the freshman course in logic that I took is between validity and truth, logic being the arbiter of validity not truth. Consider the following syllogisms:All humans are mortal.
Trump is human.
Therefore, Trump is mortal.
All tall people tell the truth.
Trump is tall.
Therefore, Trump tells the truth.
Logically both of these are equally valid, but only the first is both valid and true.
This distinction can serve as a gateway to Aristotle's two analytics. His Prior Analytics explains how to distinguish valid from invalid forms of logical reasoning. His Posterior Analytics explains how to combine validity with truth. The second chapter of the first book of Posterior Analytics takes up the characteristics premises must possess for syllogistic reasoning to produce truth.
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All h..."
Bob, I read portions of Aristotle's Prior Analytics and Posterior Analytics decades ago. Somewhat more recently, I read part of his On Sophistical Refutations. I have the impression that you have more thorough acquaintance with these works than I. Although I intend to get back to them when working on my forthcoming Reason and Human Ethics, I need to finish my book Free Will and Human Life first. In the meantime, perhaps you can comment on my following understandings/recollections:
• I have always thought that the Prior Analytics involves mainly deductive logic and that it was the “go-to” text for medieval scholasticism, which loved to assume certain premises (e.g., about God) and then argue deductively from them.
• Additionally, my recollection is that the Posterior Analytics is about inductive logic, which was later picked up by such philosophers as John Stuart Mill.
• I recall that On Sophistical Refutations addresses common logical fallacies—both among the “intellectuals” (sophists) and among people more generally.
“Informal logic,” as I understand it, has to do with all three of the foregoing concepts—deductive logic, inductive logic, and common fallacies—though it focuses especially on inductive logic and on fallacies (which can be fallacies of either inductive or deductive logic). This is the area of my interest, as distinguished from the theoretical formal logic of mathematics, quasi-mathematics, and computers. Symbolic logic leaves me quite cold.
Readers of the present post might look at my comments about such matters throughout the present topic, for example, posts 211, 212, and 214.
Thoughts?
Alan, I've spent more time on Posterior Analytics than Prior Analytics, but I'm far from expert on either. The last chapter in Posterior Analytics (Book 2, ch 19) begins, "As regards syllogism and demonstration, the definition of, and the conditions required to produce each of them, are now clear. . . . As to the basic premises, how they become known and what is the developed state of knowledge of them is made clear by raising some preliminary problems" (Mure translation in McKeon's Basic Works). It is at this point that induction enters to find the "basic premises" introduced in Book I, chapter 2.
I think induction and deduction are interrelated, not opposed. In induction, you look for similarities, but to determine the similarities that matter you need to bear in mind what is needed for "demonstration," as detailed in Posterior Analytics. For example, Book 1, chapter 4, distinguishes different kinds of attributes that you would encounter in induction and explains why demonstration requires those that are "commensurately universal." Not just any similar attributes will do.
In induction, you treat subject matter and different subject matters pose different problems and allow for different degrees of certainty. That leads to the differences in Aristotle's different sciences.
An analogue in McKeon is his interest in what he calls historical semantics, which traces how in the history of philosophy philosophical demonstration is sometimes based on "things" (e.g., Aristotle), sometimes on "thought" (e.g., Kant), and sometimes on "words and deeds" (e.g., the twentieth-century's "linguistic turn").
I'm interested in how philosophical demonstration differs among these, because of these differences in fundamental subject matter, ultimately with the goal of getting back to "things."
Prior Analytics operates at an level that can be treated abstractly. For example:
All B is C
All A is C
Therefore, all A is B
This is invalid. Imagine C as a big circle with B and A inside it. B and A may or may not overlap, so there is no valid inference about their relationship. Aristotle classifies different kinds of syllogisms and forms of valid and invalid deduction. But my memory of details is foggy.
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The last chapter in Posterior Analytics (Book 2, ch 19) begins, "As regards syllogism an..."
Thanks, Bob, for your information. I appreciate it.
My understanding/recollection is that induction leads to the premise that is the starting point for deduction (syllogism). Accordingly, induction is trickier than deduction. If the premise of a syllogism is incorrect (because of improper induction), the entire syllogism will be defeated even though it is internally logical. This was, I believe, the great error of medieval scholasticism. They delighted in syllogistic logic but did not pay enough attention to their premises and how they were (or were not) established.
I also have a vague recollection that Aristotle did not call it "induction" but had a different name for it. I also recall that he illustrated the difference between the two concepts by way of a racetrack simile that he borrowed from Plato. But it's been a long time, and I will have to revisit all of this after I finish my reading/writing on free will.
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Alan, I don't recall a racetrack simile, but in Book 2, chapter 19, he does use an odd military one: "It is like a rout in battle stopped by first one man making a stand and then another. . . . When one of a number of logically indiscriminable particulars has made a stand, the earliest universal is present in the soul: for though the act of sense perception is of the particular, its content is universal--is man, for example, not the man Callias" (100a11-100b1).I've never studied medieval philosophy enough to make an informed judgment, but I know McKeon didn't share the customary view. I did have occasion to read some William of Ockham a few years ago. What I read anticipated some things philosophers were doing early in the 20th century and arguably did at least as good a job as they did.
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Now it’s coming back to me. It’s in Nicomachean Ethics 1095a-b (book 1, chap. 4) (Bartlett/Collins translation): “But let it not escape our notice that there is a difference between the arguments that proceed from the principles and those that proceed to the principles. For Plato too used to raise this perplexity well and investigate it, whether the path is going from the principles or to the principles, just as on a racecourse one can proceed from the judges to the finish line or back again.” Now the context in the Nicomachean Ethics is different from inductive/deductive reasoning, but I think I recall this simile in reference to that context as well, perhaps in Plato (though I don’t remember where). The path going to the principles is inductive logic. The path proceeding from the principles is deductive logic.
Messages 283 and 284 would benefit from distinguishing "society" from "government" and noting that the Greek "polis " does not distinguish them, thus giving "polity" some ambiguity. "Society" is surely not created by rational action, though it may be rationally modified (slightly, and with the problem of unanticipated consequences), often through government action. (See the "Great Society" program and possible effects on the Black family.) *** As an unrelated comment re "informal logic", I suggest looking at Arthur Murphy's Paul Carus lectures The Theory of Practical Reason. (UC note: Murphy was one of those who left UChicago in connection with McKeon's arrival.) jv
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Thanks, Jim. You are, of course, correct about the use of the word “society.” A similar confusion arose in an exchange I had with a former member of this group who used it in the way Feliks used it in #283 (and who resigned from the group as a result of that and related exchanges: see posts 29, 31, 33, 37-42, 44, 47-48 here and posts 51-53, 58-60, 62-63, 65, 67, 72-73, 75 and 80 here).
As for my use of the term “polity” in #284, I was relying on definition 2a of that term in Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary Online: “a specific form of political organization: a form of government . . . .” I meant no invocation of the πολις, in which—as you accurately point out—there was no separation of government and society (at least in Athens and, I suppose, elsewhere in ancient Greece).
James W Vice Jr wrote: "As an unrelated comment re "informal logic", I suggest looking at Arthur Murphy's Paul Carus lectures The Theory of Practical Reason. (UC note: Murphy was one of those who left UChicago in connection with McKeon's arrival.)"
I am not familiar with Arthur Murphy, and his book is out of print (though it appears to be available from used book dealers). Perhaps you can explain, including the episode of his leaving UChicago.
I appreciate the distinction James drew for me; and glad of it. Thank you James. This group is always a learning resource; a place to 'fine-tune' one's dialogue and presentation-of-ideas. In this case I'm still curious about both horns of the question; logic in society as well as logic in government. Are there any grass-roots societal initiatives founded on 'being more rational' which citizens themselves can implement?
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This is really a question of proper education, both at home and at school. There are, I understand, efforts in some schools to introduce "critical thinking" into the curriculum, but, so far, they don't seem to be having much effect in the society at large. I will discuss these issues at some length in my forthcoming book on ethics, which will be prepared and published after my book-in-progress on free will (the question of free will must be addressed first, since ethical inquiry is impossible in the absence of free will, and many academics deny free will). My 2000 book on ethics (First Philosophy and Human Ethics: A Rational Inquiry) was also focused on rational thinking, but that book is now out of print and my views on some matters contained in that book have changed. Accordingly, I do not recommend that people read the 2000 book. My forthcoming book provisionally entitled Reason and Human Ethics will once again emphasize the importance of reason and informal logic, though human life also inevitably involves an emotional component due to our evolutionary heritage. But then reason itself is also a product of evolution by natural selection.
I am afraid I have been preoccupied with my own writing and have not followed these threads carefully. I may cut across lines and have missed earlier definitions and distinctions. I have two separate notes. 1. “Polity” in my Funk & Wagnalls “New International” (don’t ask me how I got it) gives as its second (of two) meanings for polity: “any community living under some definite form of government.” Thus, I felt a bridge to “polis.” Moreover, remember the Founders did not establish our entire form of governing. They only created the Federal government. The states and local governments continued largely unaffected. (I haven’t reread the Constitution with this in mind, but I don’t recall its intruding much into the internal workings of State and local government. The first thing that comes to mind is the Second Amendment which proclaims a right against all governments.)
2. Re the discussion of “informal logic” especially as applied to the writing of the Constitution. It seems to me the discussion might more productively focus on practical reason or prudence. Both of Aristotle’s Analytics deal with theoretical reasoning—valid forms and then from true premises. True premises/principles are known through “nous” (see Ethics VI,6). “Nous” is commonly translated “intuition.” Nous is attained through “epagoge”—a kind of induction from sense perception that falls under no logical category. (See F.E.Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms, a very useful book for those of us who do not read Greek.) The process is described in Post. An. Bk.II, ch 19.
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I consider informal logic (the avoidance of fallacious reasoning in both inductive and deductive logic, especially in the context of public discourse) part of practical reason or prudence. That is as true in 1787-88 as it is today, though today we seem to have a severe paucity of all of the above.
The topic at hand is "Reason, Informal Logic, Evidence, and Critical Thinking." Feliks (#283) steered this discussion into the role of informal logic "in the designing of society." As Jim observed, the word "society" does not really apply to the modern state, which (unlike the Greek polis) separates government and society. But, taking "society" to mean "form of government," I observed that the Framers, for all their errors, attempted to apply the informal logic attending the Enlightenment to design the US Constitution in a rational manner. Jim now points to the fact that the original US Constitution, for the most part, did not apply to the state governments. That is true, and some of the state governments of that time had a more polis-oriented political philosophy, e.g., merger of religion and government (the First Amendment Establishment Clause did not apply to state and local government until the Supreme Court so held in the twentieth century), laws governing personal morality, and so forth. Many of the original state governments had a kind of collectivist notion of the common good with an emphasis on duties rather than rights. In contrast, Madison and others formulated the new federal government on Lockean principles of individual rights. Jefferson (who was out of the country in 1787-88) presaged this new emphasis in his draft of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Jefferson, Madison, and many of the other leading Founders were men (unfortunately, women were not yet allowed to be political figures) of the Enlightenment. So I tried to answer Felik's question by pointing to the founding of the United States (especially the US Constitution) as an exercise in reason. In the ratification debates, the proposed Constitution was severely criticized on the ground, among many others, that it totally failed to mention God. Alexander Hamilton, one of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, is said to have responded, facetiously, that "we forgot." In the Convention itself, when faced with Franklin's politic (Franklin was a Deist, if not an agnostic or atheist) suggestion that they open each daily session with a prayer, Hamilton is on record as saying that they were not in need of foreign aid. (Note: Hamilton later publicly "found Jesus" after such scandals as his self-disclosed extramarital affair.)
Jim, you are correct (to the best of my recollection) about Aristotle’s understanding of inductive logic. It may be that John Stuart Mill’s approach to inductive logic might be more “on point” (to use legal jargon), though I have not recently read Aristotle’s logical works and accordingly hesitate to make any definitive pronouncements about them.
Feliks’s (and, earlier, Randal’s) use of the term “society” to mean something like “government” is confusing to me. I gather that such usage is common in left-wing writings that I have not (or have not recently) read. To my observation, “society” is usually used in the modern era in contrast to government—à la the writings of right-wing libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, and others supporting laissez faire economics. So, once again, I have stumbled on encountering the apparently left-wing and (to me) unfamiliar use of the term. Perhaps it is an invocation of Rousseau’s “general will,” which brings me back to the issue I had with Randal last year, both in this forum (see the posts cited in #293 above) and in the comments to my Goodreads review of Rousseau’s Social Contract.
Nicely summarized Alan. I'd just like to interject that my steering-the-thread-onto-this- topic will surely be temporary. There seemed to be room in the discussion to open up this little vein of inquiry; but I'm sure it won't derail more pertinent matters.With regard to 'government' vs 'society' --yes, both sides yearn to change government and it's frequently alarming. But on the other hoof: even if a government ever behaved perfectly as to its charter, perfectly as designed, 'right out-of-the-box' ...would it never fall short and need adjustment? Has that ever been true of any state or would it ever be true? I privately feel that the world poses too many complex problems for a 'static' apparatus.
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All political philosophers from Plato to Madison recognized that no form of government is perfect. In fact, it is a wonder that the US Constitution has lasted so long—but not without many significant amendments as well as implicit modification by way of judicial interpretation.
In Aristotle, the phrase "inductive logic" is out of place. The translation would simply be "induction." It is not a "logic." At some point which I do not remember, "logic" came to be seen/used as a method. Aristotle's "Methodics" as cataloged by Diogenes Laertius is long lost. The "Analytics" check the validity of a line of reasoning. They are not a method of investigating a subject matter. *** As a former student of F.A. Hayek, I rather doubt he ever confused society and government, but I don't pay any attention to the current "libertarians." *** Felix, I think I agree with you. There is a need for both conservation and change. The on-going, practical, piece-meal challenge is to balance them.
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Thanks, Jim. I will keep your comments in mind when I restudy Aristotle.
Didn't Thatcher claim there is no such thing as society? If so, what did she mean?Off topic, I know, but I'm not sure where to go with these questions.
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Off topic, I know, but I'm not sure where to go with these questions."
Funny. Perhaps UK conservatives think that the only ontologically correct category is the individual rather than "society." Sounds like Ayn Rand, but all I know about Thatcher is what I read in the newspapers long ago (before the internet, needless to say). Nevertheless, I believe that many modern-day libertarian types make a big distinction between state and society and side with "society," which presumably is the locus of all virtue. This would especially be true with American conservatives, who want to keep individuals in line with such social institutions as churches and other social groups. See Tocqueville.
Here are a few comments regarding the topic of "intuition" that Jim introduced in post #296, a topic that interests me; they also supplement what Jim said about the limitations of induction (post #300).Modern philosophy has tended to restrict the scope of Aristotle's intuition. Aristotle liked to say inquiry moves from what is "better known to us" to what is "better known in nature." His notion of intuition enabled one to get from one to the other. Modern restrictions tend to limit one to what is "better known to us." I'm interested in anything anyone knows about push-back against these restrictions.
These restrictions can be traced back to Hume's limitation of intuition to sensory intuition. This limitation also exposes the limits of induction. Hume illustrates with his famous billiard ball example. No matter how many times one has had sensory intuition of what happens when one billiard ball hits another (induction), one cannot be sure that next time "a hundred different events" might happen. (See Hume's Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section 4, "Skeptical Doubts Concerning the Operations of the Understanding," part 1, p. 44 in Library of Liberal Arts edition, 1955). Induction can never encompass all possible instances: every swan anyone has ever seen may have been white, but who is to say the next one may not be black, thus undermining the "swans are white" inductive generalization.
Kant complicated this picture, but he kept intuition to this sensory level, adding various "a priori" operations, including the sense of space and time, that the mind exercises on sensory experience to produce knowledge. In his account, repeated ad nauseam ever since, we have access to sensory experience (phenomena) but not the thing itself (noumena), which would correspond to Aristotle's "better known in nature." In other words, Kant limits us "to what is better known to us," while expanding on how this "known" encompasses a priori mental operations.
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My interest in induction has to do with the way people reason inductively, especially the fallacies commonly made in induction. I don’t recall whether Aristotle speaks to that precise issue, and I will need to revisit his logical works when I get back to working on my book on ethics (after I finish my book on free will).
Last year, I read portions of John Stuart Mill’s A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation, 8th ed. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1900) relating to inductive reasoning, especially his treatment of analogical reasoning and inductive fallacies. I didn’t then—and don’t now—have time to study this work in depth, but I was impressed by what I did read. See also Part 5 (“Inductive Logic”) of David Kelley’s The Art of Reasoning, 3rd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998) and, with regard to fallacies generally (including but not limited to inductive fallacies), W. Ward Fearnside and William B. Holther, Fallacy: The Counterfeit of Argument (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Spectrum, 1959); Hans V. Hansen and Robert C. Pinto, eds., Fallacies: Classical and Contemporary Readings (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995); Ralph H. Johnson and J. Anthony Blair, Logical Self-Defense (New York: International Debate Education Ass’n, 2006); Douglas Walton, Informal Logic: A Pragmatic Approach, Kindle ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Michael C. LaBossiere, 76 Fallacies, Kindle ed. (Amazon Digital Services, 2012); and Marianne Talbot, Critical Reasoning: A Romp Through the Foothills of Logic for Complete Beginners, Kindle ed. (Metafore, 2014). This is the kind of informal logic that interests me, as it relates to critical thinking in public discourse as distinguished from purely theoretical considerations.
Alan, thanks for the references. Mill in particular is one of the books on my "to read" list.As I indicated, "intuition" is what interests me particularly. Let me illustrate my interest with an example that is sketchy in its brevity, but maybe it is enough to convey what interests me.
You've often remarked in connection with your current work on ethics that without free will there is no ethics. I agree with this linkage of free will and ethics.
Speaking for myself, I would see this linkage as based on intuition, specifically intellectual rather than sensory intuition. It is definitely not something one can "see." Rather, when one considers whether an act is subject to ethical judgement, one intuits that the act must at some level be one that was undertaken freely if it is to be subjected to such judgment. Intuition of this sort, it seems to me, is always involved at the level of the first principle of an inquiry.
In the case of scientific studies of free will (something I haven't studied), I would look for intuition of this sort at the level of the criteria by which evidence is determined to be credible or not credible. Thomas Kuhn recounts how such criteria change in the history of science in his famous The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2nd ed, 1970). The familiar idea of "paradigm" changes comes from this book
One of Aristotle's fundamental points is that you cannot prove everything. Proof involves inference from something indemonstrable, something one intuits. Aristotle addresses this issue in Posterior Analytics, Book 1, chapter 3.
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My 2000 book on ethics stated:
A premise of ethical inquiry is that human beings have some degree of free will to be able, upon sufficient reflection, to choose and act in accordance with the higher, rational part of their nature. Although various deterministic theories—both religious and nonreligious—have questioned the principle of free will, elementary reflection upon the human condition as well as introspection regarding one’s own life experiences demonstrate that human beings have by nature at least some degree of free will. Perhaps psychotics might be said to have lost any capacity for free will, but the great majority of human beings have at least some ability to improve their ethical posture and thereby become more truly human. (Alan E. Johnson, First Philosophy and Human Ethics: A Rational Inquiry [Philosophia, 2000], 32–33.)Last year, I began working on a new book on ethics to replace the 2000 book, as I now disagree with some of the statements in the earlier book and need to elaborate on some other statements as well as address additional matters. I have recently also determined that I have to write a separate book on free will before writing the book on ethics. I state my reason for this decision in the first paragraph of the draft preface to the new book on free will:
This book began life as a projected first chapter of a book on ethics that I was preparing in the late 2010s to replace my 2000 book First Philosophy and Human Ethics. The 2000 book assumed, without investigating the question, that humans have free will. In reexamining this premise, I became aware of a vast literature arguing that free will is a mere illusion. I take it as axiomatic that the question whether a philosophic approach to human ethics is even possible depends on a preliminary question whether humans have free will to develop and apply ethical principles. As I researched and wrote the chapter on free will for the replacement book on ethics, I came to realize that my discussion could not be confined to the limitations of a book chapter. Accordingly, I put my ethics book on hold in order to prepare the present book on free will.My 2000 book assumed, as a matter of intuition, that free will exists. But many scholars in the fields of philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, physics, and other academic fields claim, dogmatically, that consciousness and free will are illusory and epiphenomenal. They say we cannot trust our first-person subjective experience but must rather rely solely on third-person, scientifically verifiable data. My forthcoming book will refute that position. But I recognize that I cannot argue on the basis of intuition alone. Fortunately, some scholars, including some neuroscientists, have formulated empirical arguments based on evolution by natural selection to support free will. Then there are the quantum physicists who postulate a quantum-mechanical basis for consciousness and free will. My emerging book on free will addresses these various theories as well as the attacks by much of the academic community on the concept of free will. For additional details, see my comments (including my linked book reviews) in the Free Will topic of this group.
I will be tied up with preexisting commitments for the next couple of days and probably will not be able to post anything in this group until the weekend. At that time I will address any response that you or others have to my foregoing observations.
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In reviewing posts 306 and 307 this morning, I note that there are two questions regarding the role of intuition in free will: (1) the linkage of free will and ethics, and (2) the existence vel non of free will. I agree that the linkage of free will and ethics is axiomatic, though I would point out that some “compatibilists” in this field either deny such necessary linkage or redefine “free will” to mean something other than the traditional (and my) definition. See my review of Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves here. Along this line, I note that Aristotle’s point that the axiomatic principle of (non)contradiction is “the most certain of all” (quoting from memory in, I believe, his Metaphysics) is not universally accepted. See, for example, posts 1–2, 9, 11, 13–15 in the present topic. I myself have always agreed with Aristotle on this question, though I note that it may not apply at the margins of physics and metaphysics—for example, if quantum mechanics is ontologically correct. Even in the case of quantum mechanics, however, I think it is unlikely that there are ultimate contradictions: we just don’t understand (and in all likelihood will never understand) the ultimate realities.
I also think that the existence of free will is axiomatic, but there is a large quantity of academic literature denying free will. See, for example my review of Ted Honderich’s How Free Are You: The Determinism Problem here and my review of Sam Harris’s Free Will here.
Finally (for now), I don’t think induction is limited to intuitive axiomatic principles. I think there are many fallacies (for example, the fallacy of false analogy: see my posts 211–12 in this topic) that relate to induction. But this is a long inquiry in which I do not have time right now to engage. And I do really need right now to attend to the matters to which I alluded in my preceding email.
Good grief. I picked up this news-item in a war-lit reader's group here on GR. Fresh evidence that too-much-media turns weak minds into shapeless mush. That's the conclusion I'm drawing, anyway.Youngsters today labor under myriads of mis-impressions concerning WWI. Great Britain fought France (for example), Thatcher was prime minister at the time; JFK's assassination provoked it, and "the Battle of "Helm's Deep" (Tolkien) was a real-life event.
https://tinyurl.com/sdpg9n4
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Y..."
I note that this is a British website and apparently is a report of a British survey. I don't know anything about the reliability of either. Although I would expect many American young people to be relatively ignorant about the First World War (given the lack of history education these days), I don't know whether they would have the same confusions as are reported in this article.
Political Philosophy and Ethics
Books mentioned in this topic
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Volume 4: The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms (other topics)Mythical Thought (other topics)
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms 3: The Phenomenology of Knowledge (other topics)
Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture (other topics)
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 1: Language (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Arthur Koestler (other topics)Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (other topics)
Edward R. Tufte (other topics)
Richard Saul Wurman (other topics)
