A weird idea about reductionism

What is reductionism? Here's an example of a reductionist approach--a reductionist approach to metaphor. You start with a sentence that seems kinda weird: "The city is a jungle; you've got to take care of yourself." So, on the surface this sentence seems to be quite similar to sentences where you identify two things, or at least apply some property to some subject, EX: "Michael is that guy" or "The eagle is a giant bird." If you classify "The city is a jungle" with those sorts of sentences you get really screwed up results. What I mean is, if you take "The city is a jungle" literally you'll either think that I'm classifying the city in the category of jungles--cities are jungles--which is just stupid. Obviously, that's not how you're supposed to read "The city is a jungle."

Quite clearly, what we need is to analyze what "The city is a jungle" means. What it really means is "The city is similar to the jungle in certain ways [e.g. it's dangerous and complex]." The point is that you start with some weird way of speaking that we don't think that we should take literally, and we reduce it to a level of discourse that we're more comfortable taking literally. This is what I just did with metaphor.

A more philosophical example: We start with the notion of causation, and we think that it's mysterious and confusing (Hume thought this). He doesn't think that a literal understanding of causation makes much sense, so he reduces it to a more down-to-Earth notion. So he takes a sentence "A causes B" and translates it as "Whenever B happens, A happens too." He's reduced discussion of causation to a discussion of correlation, the occurrence of two events at the same moment.

People do this to ethics too (Harman recommends that one has to do this in order to maintain ethical realism). "Saving lives is good" sounds a bit spooky, and it's not clear what things in the universe ethics is talking about, and if it's anything it would seem that it would have to be abstract objects or properties that you can't see, smell, touch, etc.... There's a bunch of problems. So people say, "Well, let's take a reductionist approach to ethics; we'll translate ethical statements into normal ones that we feel more comfortable with." So this, for example, can mean that ethics gets translated into the language of emotions--after all, we all agree that people's emotional reactions exist, and so everyone should feel comfortable talking about that. For example, you might reduce/translate "X is good" or "Y is bad" into "I like X" or "I don't approve of Y." (That would be called "emotivism", and it's a reductionist approach to ethics). If you're willing to translate everything into the language of emotional responses, then you no longer have to say that there's anything special about the language of ethics; truth in ethics is just truth about evaluating the way you feel. There are no ethical facts, only physical facts, and in particular, physical facts about emotional responses to situations and actions.

I wonder, though, what if we were to try to reduce physical facts into ethical ones? That's a bit of a loony idea. But suppose that we felt comfortable with ethical facts and uncomfortable with physical ones. What's stopping us from trying to reduce physical facts to ethical ones? If it works in one direction, it should be possible to do it in the other.

How would that project go, though? We would need to find an ethical translation of all statements that refer to physical objects of properties! Let's take an example, "There is a zebra eating grass behind the barn." Now, could we simply translate this as "It's good that zebras eat grass behind barns"? Of course not, for a bunch of reasons. First, because it's not really a translation--we're still referring to zebras, grass, and barns, and this means that I'm still committed to the truth of some physical facts. Second, because a reductionist approach works when you can capture what is meant by the original sentence (for the most part) in the translation. There will be lots of situations when we would want to say, intuitively, that there is a zebra is eating grass, but we wouldn't always want to say that that's a good thing. Come to think of it, while the second is true, the first problem I mentioned is the real problem.

So, what's the reason behind this failure? Part of the problem is that there aren't any particular ethical objects that we can employ. The language of physical objects is very rich, and the language of ethical objects is quite poor. So what could we do to correct this? Maybe expand our circle out from ethics, and let's employ all talk of values (this will include discussions of beauty, simplicity, etc.). It's still no good, I think, and I'm willing to diagnose the problem in the following way: value language has a lot of predicates, concepts, properties, but very few objects.

(So there's a few complications to what I wrote. First, for naturalists there are only scientific facts, so to ask whether I can translate physical facts into ethical ones is a question that wouldn't make sufficient sense. Also, I'd have to show how this argument works in math. Could we begin to talk about reducing physical concepts to mathematical ones? Probably not, but why? Is it because the language is so sparse. So then what's my point here?)

The absence of ethical objects in our everday ethical manner of speaking is a complication that I run into in my research. The indispensability argument in math concludes that mathematical entities exist; it's not clear that anybody really wants such an argument to work in ethics. We want the objectivity of ethics, but ethics-talk usually involves applying predicates/concepts/properties to physical things--acts, deeds, states of the world, rules, whatever.

I think that this is a more precise way of saying Harman's argument. The reason why ethics seems to be dispensable, the reason why our best explanation of the world doesn't need it, is because it doesn't make reference to any ethical objects, just ethical concepts/predicates. And part of the reason why math seems indispensable is because we're making reference to mathematical entities.

Earlier I posted about why existence--ontology--should matter to us. After all, even if we have an argument that concludes that numbers exist we won't start suddenly bumping into numbers on our way to the library, work or school. Our lives will be the same; it's our perspective on the world that is liable to change. And I put out the following idea: the reason why existence is interesting is because ontology seems to secure semantics. We know that some sentence can be true or false if it refers to objects that actually exist--if it's actually talking ABOUT something in the world. So ontology becomes a handmaiden of semantics. Some philosophers disagree with this; they think that it's interesting to investigate the world to settle the question of what exists and what doesn't. I'm not sympathetic to that view. We know what it's like to live in the world, and if we're positing the existence of acausal, abstract objects that shouldn't really change my life. But it still seems to matter whether stuff exists or not, and I argued that the only reason that I knew of was because if X exists it seems that it could be true or false to say stuff about X.

If what I've posted is right, then there might be very different problems facing philosophers of math and metaethicists. Philosophers of math need to secure the objectivity of math by saying that mathematical objects exist. But ethics doesn't really make reference, in general, to ethical objects. They just apply ethical predicates to regular, normal physical objects. So the question of objectivity in ethics might be the kind that our form of the indispensability argument can't really touch.