Debates about realism

Lately I'm thinking that debates about realism/anti-realism are most interesting in developing a theory of realism/anti-realism. Meaning, I'm no longer finding debates about meta-ethical realism or mathematical realism interesting on their own terms. At least, not in the same way.

CPR: Intuitions and Concepts

[I'll be taking notes here as I attempt to work through the Critique of Pure Reason. This is obviously me groping for understanding, not pontificating. If you can help me learn, please speak up.]

To start off the Aesthetic, Kant introduces a number of technical terms. Here's my list of them:
* intuition
* thought
* sensibility
* understanding
* given
* concept
* sensation
* empirical
* appearance
* matter [of an appearance]
* form [of an appearance]
* pure representations

As an exercise, I'm attempting to synthesize these terms into a coherent story, using a concrete example.

The Story: A man stands outside and sees a raven.

The Story, again: A man stands outside and a raven imposes itself on his senses -- in other words, he experiences an empirical sensation of the raven. This is the sort of thing that happens to human beings all the times, and to rocks none of the time. That's because humans have a sensibility, but rocks don't. Rocks suck.

This empirical sensation results in the man having an intuition of the raven. This is his experience of something that has certain sensible properties. His hands can feel the texture of the raven, his eyes can see its outline and colors, and he can hear sounds coming from the raven. All of the particular features of this experience are part of his intuition given by sensibility.

Right now this intuition has provided the fellow with the appearance of a particular object in his mind. There are limitations on what he knows about this appearance so far. He could tell you that it was black, that the raven was warm when he touched it, that it was firm and that it had a splash of orange, but he couldn't tell you that this was something called a raven, or even a bird. That's because "raven" and "bird" are concepts, and the sensibility does not provide concepts. Anything that is particular to this guy's sensation has to do with sensibility, but anything that tries to classify or categorize what it was that he experienced (e.g. "It was a bird," "It was really fast!") requires the understanding, a different human capacity than the sensibility.

Kant further distinguishes between the matter and the form of the appearance. The matter is all the stuff provided by the particular sensation. The form is the lens (thanks Jason!) through which sensibility always has to occur. What the form of the appearance is hasn't really been made clear yet, though it will be taken head on quite soon in the sections on Space and Time.

Just to summarize: this fellow has had an empirical sensation that results in an intuition. There's an object in this intuition, and that object is the appearance of some object, given by sensibility. This appearance has a matter and a form, and sensation provides the matter. So if we're just talking about intuitions and sensibility, all that appearances have is matter, not form.

Now, the experience of seeing a raven isn't of just seeing some thing. Rather, the experience is of seeing something familiar -- a raven. That which allows us to categorize this appearance as not just something particular, but as the experience of a raven -- something we've seen before, and will see again -- outstrips sensibility. Here ends sensibility's role in the story.

If the guy thinks, "Hey, that's a raven!" then he's having a thought, and the capacity for this sort of thing is called the understanding. People have understanding; I have no idea if canines do, but I can imagine that they don't. Concepts are ways of categorizing things, and they arise from thought. Not everybody has a concept of ravens -- others might just have a concept of black birds. But both folks are having a thought about ravens, an attempt to classify this appearance as a thing of some sort or another.

This guy has judgments (i.e. cognition) about ravens. He knows that ravens have distinct things, such as a head, wings and feet, that what it does is called "flying," that it is part of a family of things called "birds" are all provided by thought, by understanding. This is all general knowledge about ravens. This is all provided by the understanding.

There is cognition provided by the sensibility too, but it's all particular. "This thing is black," or "This thing pushes back on my hands." The truth is that both of these sentences are cheats, because, at the end of the day, every time we use a concept in speech we are leaning on the understanding. We really can't have much to say about that which is provided by sensibility, and that's why "thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind."

Questions:
* What does "all thought as a means is directed as an end" mean?
* Could a person have a sensation without having an intuition? The sensibility is a capacity for getting representations of objects, and every representation is either an intuition or a thought (I think?). So I think that every sensation does result in an intuition, though Kant's distinction does allow for other species having some other way of acquiring intuitions.
* Kant says that appearance is the undetermined object of an empirical intuition. But who says that there's an object at all? What capacity of the mind splits intuitions up into objects? This should be part of pure intuition, right?
* Is it wrong to separate sensibility and understanding as discrete steps? Is there a cost to this? How much work is really being done by this distinction, and is it warranted.

[This post was revised on 12/16/2011. I had made some really bad errors mixing up the role of the form of intuition and concepts, and JS was good enough to point that out to me.]

A random thought on philosophy

Here's a good way of getting at the difference between bad philosophy and good philosophy. Bad philosophy strips away the insight from fundamental questions and leaves behind a stack of uninteresting details. Good philosophy, on the other hand, is able to take a stack of seemingly uninteresting details and reveal how they determine matters of fundamental interest.

This is silly.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/a-science-of-morality_b_567185.html

Why is this debate happening between a pop intellectual figure and a physicist? Why is Sam Harris attempting to do moral philosophy without any training or background, and why is he engaging with the philosophical thought of a physicist (however cogent) instead of the experts in moral philosophy? Would he consider calling a really-smart philosopher to discuss the implications of physics or neuroscience?

I can think of a couple of explanations for this:

1) Sam Harris thinks that philosophy is easy. So he can do it.
2) Sam Harris thinks that philosophers are stupid.
3) Sam Harris is completely ignorant of philosophy.

I have to admit, I'm a little bit confused by the fact that people take him seriously. Sam Harris seems like a fool, as far as I can tell, and it makes me wonder whether I'm just wrong in my evaluation of him. But if I'm not wrong, then some philosophers should put him in his place. Korsgaard, please?

Outlne of the main argument of "Self-Constitution"

As far as I can tell, this is Korsgaard's picture of things

1. "Every object and activity is defined by certain standards that are both constitutive of it and normative for it." (32) For activities, a standard is called a constitutive principle in the case that "if you are not guided by the principle, you are not performing the activity at all." (28)
2. "The function of an action is to constitute an agent." (82)
3. "The function of an action is to render one efficacious and autonomous" (83). This is because being efficacious and autonomous are constitutive standards for being an agent.
4. In addition, "It is essential [/constitutive] to the concept of agency that the agent be unified" (18) This is because "in order to be autonomous, it is essential that your movements be caused by you." (213)
5. In the case of humans, unifying one's agency (through deliberation) is work that needs to be done before any self-conscious action is possible.
6. Justice is how we unify our own agency, and so "Platonic justice is a constitutive principle of action." This is identical to the categorical imperative (213).
7. All of this assures that one will be inwardly just. But one who is inwardly just will be outwardly just as well, since reasons the kind of unity you need is a unity not just of your person, but a kind of unity that counts the reasons of everyone, ala Nagel.

Is epistemic anti-realism really the same thing as losing the authority of a system of norms? I know that this isn't obvious, and I haven't accepted it naively. The worry is that it isn't. That you can still accept a norm while independently questioning its metaphysical status--that these are just entirely different things.

I don't think that they are, though. As usual, I start with Epistemic Nihilism. If you think that there are no epistemic norms then it's hard to see why you should believe an argument for epistemic nihilism--that's my main argument. I think that nihilism can't help but make practical recommendations--you lose epistemology as a source of authority if there really are no epistemic norms. It's similar to saying that the teacher isn't a fount of reasons. It's the same with epistemic nihilism--epistemology isn't a fount of reasons. You don't actually have reason to believe anything. I take this case to be fairly strong.

And what about other forms of anti-realism? I think that this is a somewhat controversial claim, but that from the realist's perspective this isn't what epistemology means. Hmm...now that I write that I realize that there's something unclear there. Am I resting on the normativity of the meaning of epistemology? Am I saying that for the realist "epistemology" means something different than it does for the expressivist? A little bit. But if so this is kinda weird. The expressivist and the realist aren't even talking about the same domain? That doesn't sound right. Anyway, metaphysical status of norms should be independent of the identification of those norms, in the same way realists about numbers are talking about the same numbers as fictionalists.

So let me try that again. It's not about what epistemology means. It's rather about the reasons that the realist accepts. The realist doesn't accept the expressivist's reasons. Now, this isn't quite right either, because it's the same reasons for both--it's just the metaphysical status of those reasons that is in question.

OK, so let me try this one more time. The issue is whether the expressivist (or any other anti-realist) can give the realist reasons that the realist will respect. On the one hand, yes, they can. They can offer reasons to believe various things, and the realist will interpret them in a certain way, and they will interpret what they are doing in a different way. But all of this is only helpful to the extent that the realist is able to interpret the reason in a realist way. If she can't, then how can we expect her to respect it? It's not the sort of thing she recognizes as having force. Oy, this is problematic too because reasons aren't the sort of thing you choose to respect. I'm not sure. OK.

Parsimony and Burden of Proof

As I reread my thesis in preparation for my oral exam tomorrow, I'm particularly struck by a poorly thought out argument in the second chapter.

In short, the argument was that the burden of proof could be shifted away from the moral realist by noting there is an unavoidable arbitrariness in epistemology. The problem with this argument is that it doesn't really respond to the parsimony requirement, as provide a route for avoiding it. That wasn't the clearest sentence I've written in my life, so let me try again.

The problem for the Moral Realist is that parsimony requires that we don't believe that which we have no good reason to believe. And the response I offer, essentially, says that there are some cases in which parsimony isn't required. There's actually no parsimony requirement for our most basic beliefs.

Here are a couple concerns with this argument:

1) Does this mean that ANYTHING can avoid the parsimony requirement? Why only things like moral realism, treating our moral intuitions as ways of getting at moral facts?

Well, not anything. It's just that some epistemic beliefs/principles are prior to the parsimony requirement. They just happen to avoid it.

2) That's not going to cut it as a response. What if we took the parsimony requirement to be our first, most basic epistemic principle?

Then there's no room for epistemology, and you can't get going. You need to take some things on without having epistemic reason to if you're going to get anything at all.

3) What happens once we have the parsimony requirement? Don't we reflect on our prior principles and conclude that they turn out, in retrospect, to be problematic since we ought not believe them due to parsimony?

This is a pretty tough challenge, I think. One way to respond to it is to tweak the parsimony requirement so that it doesn't kill epistemology, and I actually think that this is pretty reasonable. It's overly simple to say that the parsimony requirement is that we simply never believe anything without having an epistemic reason. A fine way of putting it is that we don't believe extra things, and "extra" is glossed in the following way: non-elemental beliefs that we have no epistemic reason to believe.