21 February 2008

Res extensa

“...by a body I understand whatever has a determinable shape and a definable location and can occupy a space in such a way as to exclude any other body...”

I’m unclear whether extended things are extended in the three spatial dimensions essentially, and extended temporally (duration through time) only accidentally, or if temporal extension is also essential.

From this early definition of extension it appears that only spatial extension defines bodies, but earlier Descartes mentions duration through time as among the ‘primary qualities’ or elements of real objects.

More on the cogito

“So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind.”

I often ask students why Descartes didn’t just write the famous version of this argument: I think, therefore, I am. It’s actually kind of puzzling. The star of the argument in the version he actually presents here is a proposition, not a self, not a rational being, not a thinking thing, none of usual Cartesian suspects.

The argument is based on a modal property of an abstract object: that some proposition has some modal status such that it is necessarily true on the occasions of its uttering or entertaining in thought. And implicit in the claim is that that abstract object has a peculiar referential property: that it refers to its entertainer/utterer, and that without failure.

In an earlier post I wondered about the tensions between the semantic and the pragmatic in the argument. This other tension I’m noticing is between the content of a proposition, and the object that causes its reference to succeed.

A further wrinkle: the object that causes it to succeed does so categorically (that is, anything/anyone that utters ‘I am, I exist’ must exist, regardless of how the rest of the universe is configured). Referential success is thus a priori. But then how to square that with the contingent character of the cogito: namely, that it is necessarily true on this or that occasion, but not timelessly?

I need to untangle the notion of essence from reference, which I can’t do right now. But this anticipates meditation 5, and Kripke. More later.

More on elements

“For even when painters try to create sirens and satyrs with the most extraordinary bodies, they cannot give them natures which are new in all respects; they simply jumble up the limbs of different animals. Or if perhaps they manage to think up something so new that nothing remotely similar has ever been seen before—something which is therefore completely fictitious and unreal—at least the colours used in the composition must be real. By similar reasoning, although these general kinds of things—eyes, head, hands and so on—could be imaginary, it must at least be admitted that certain other even simpler and more universal things are real. These are as it were the real colours from which we form all the images of things, whether true or false, that occur in our thought.”

This includes, says Descartes, extension, shape, quantity, place, time of duration. Is this a first stab at primary qualities?

Does Descartes mean that one begins, even in imagination, with these elements that are the same throughout the natural world? Is it a prior constraint on our thought about the natural world? Or does he mean that nature itself has these constraints, that objects already have built into them these qualities? The first gloss is the Kantian, of course, the second, Lockean.

Or does such a distinction not make sense to ask of Descartes?

The puzzle gets trickier when, in the second meditation, Descartes supposes that, among other things, “[b]ody, shape, extension, movement and place are chimeras.” Why don’t those ‘chimeras’ resist doubt in the thought experiment, if they are universal, simple, and thus real?

I never realized this before: if Descartes maintains a distinction between primary and secondary qualities, or elements and arrangements of elements, does that undermine his solipsism? Wouldn’t the existence of primary qualities be assured, even if the secondaries were doubtful?

Maybe this is how Locke and Kant read him. I never thought about it in these terms before.

The dream argument

“...I see plainly that there are never any sure signs by means of which being awake can be distinguished from being asleep.”

How meta is this argument?

I always thought the argument was supposed to be that the information is the same in both cases—the waking state and the sleeping state—and thus we cannot tell from that information whether an inference to the corresponding reality of the objects represented by the information can be successfully made.

But if that is so, the objection can be pressed that if the information is sensory, then the inference is implied (if the senses work), and if it is not, the inference fails. And in the waking state the information is sensory, while in the dream state it is not—it is imaginary.

Descartes can forestall this objection by insisting that the distinction between imaginary information and sensory information cannot be detected by the conscious mind that is the subject of the mental states in question. But if that were so, then how could the mind ever tell the difference between imagination and the intellect? Wouldn’t it follow that we were always subject to illusions and imagined things all the time? That seems an extreme overreach.

If the argument is pitched at a more meta level, he can shimmy out of this. It is not that the nature of the information itself is opaque to us, but that we must rely on some other information (some meta-, secondary information) to sort out this otherwise opaque, primary information. So, if we have red patch information:

there is a red patch in my visual field right now

then we need information about that information to tell us whether it is imaginary or sensory.

Either:

there is a red patch in my visual field right now that is being delivered by my functioning, wide awake eyes

or else:

there is a red patch in my visual field right now that is being delivered by my overactive imagination.

If the dream argument is supposed to go that high up, Descartes avoids my earlier worry, but then it looks puzzling in a different way. The meta-information move makes it seem as though the higher-order thoughts are about the lower-order thoughts—perhaps that is right—but this seems at odds with Descartes’s view that the intellect, when it knows what is true, takes as its object ideas that are ‘clear and distinct’. In fact, that is how the intellect knows it is judging truly—the clear and distinct criteria are met. But it seems completely at odds with this to think that the clear and distinct things that the intellect knows are less-sure perceptual ideas about red patches and the like. Those are the very paradigm of non-clear and non-distinct ideas. Hence it seems strange to think that Descartes sees the intellect as piggy-backing on perception this way.

I might not figure this out until meditation 6.

12 February 2008

Can science be science without its math?

I have to say that I've always been a little confused by Descartes' distinction between the 'composite' sciences (physics, astronomy, medicine) and the 'simplest and most general' sciences (arithmetic, geometry, and 'other subjects of this kind').

He clearly wants to make the point that the composite sciences assemble elements of truth and fact--that is, small things that are true, I guess--while the simple-general sciences furnish the list of those elements in the first place. An inelegant paraphrase on my part, I realize, but good enough for now.

But that seems to come apart to the extent that the composite sciences include within them, as proper parts, the simple-general sciences. For instance, what is physics, if you 'remove' the calculus? For that matter, what is biology (surely a composite science) without the systematic description of rates of change of physical factors inherent in ions and all the rest, etc., that characterize the conduction of a nerve signal along an axon? Can science be science without its math?

11 February 2008

The free mind

The idea of a free mind motivates much of the Meditations, but in a way that's hard to spell out exactly.
One can say (as I have explained it to students) that freedom of mind can only be possible if the mind is metaphysically independent of the body, thus ensuring that it's undetermined by physical laws. But I'm starting to think it's more profound than that. The cogito argument urges that the proposition I am I exist is necessarily true when it is spoken/thought. It's not that the proposition is true, but that it is necessarily true, implying that the freedom of the mind is not just a causal freedom (the opposite of being determined), but a kind of modal freedom. Perhaps: the mind has a different modal status than the body.
Hmm. I'm not sure how to spell this out either.

08 February 2008

The rationalist’s pronoun

The first-person pronoun is especially important to the rationalist, of course, since it’s the tag in the language that tracks with the locus of the reasoning faculty. It’s a code that marks the existence of a code-maker, a symbol that symbolizes the symbolizer. (Okay, enough of that.)

It is often remarked upon that Descartes writes in the first-person, and this would presumably be the reason. (How else could the cogito be expressed?) But there are two interesting consequences of this. The first is due to the kind of reason I hinted at in the previous post. If the cogito stands at the interface between the pragmatic and the semantic, then the linguistic puzzle it presents is directly due to the occurrence of the first-person pronoun. (I suppose that’s often pointed out.) The second lends weight to my interpretive hypothesis that the Discourse reads like a slave narrative: not only does the work establish, through the conventions of narrative, the authenticity of the author, but it does so non-detachably. Its pivotal moment occurs right here, at the cogito argument, an argument that cannot (without loss of meaning) be rendered in anything but the first person—precisely what one would expect of a slave narrative.

Cogito 1.0

One of the recent controversies about Descartes’ cogito argument centers on the extent to which the argument is an inference accomplished in the pragmatic performance one carries out in uttering it—Hintikka started this, I think, maybe in the ‘60s.

Descartes’ statement of the argument in part 4 of the Discourse (as distinct from the version in Meditation 2) comes tantalizing close to supporting this pragmatic interpretation: “But immediately I noticed that while I was trying thus to think everything false, it was necessary that I, who was thinking this, was something.” It’s clear that this version relies on a psychological (timed) process. Just imagine restating it in a timeless way: it seems to alter its meaning to say that “whenever I think such-and-such” instead of the way Descartes put it.

So, two questions.

One: does a psychological process unfolding in time have a pragmatic form, such that to describe its logic, one must describe the effect owing to its use on this or that occasion? (That sounded less theoretical in my head than it looks now that I’ve typed it—of course I can’t get to the bottom of that here.)

And two: So what if it does? That is, even if it has a pragmatic restatement, must it have that restatement? (Is its pragmatic form essential?) After all, couldn’t we just as easily go from a psychological fact about some sequence of thinking to a semantic fact about the proposition being entertained, rather than a pragmatic fact about the proposition being uttered?

In this way the cogito argument stands precisely on the pragmatic/semantic interface.

Descartes’ conclusion does just enough to kick the ambiguity along without deciding the matter: “And observing that this truth ‘I am thinking, therefore I exist' was so firm and sure that all the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were incapable of shaking it, I decided that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking.” All the key terms in his report of his reasoning are ambiguous in just the same way: ‘observing’, ‘firm and sure’, ‘suppositions’, and ‘shaking’, any or all of which could be construed as either occasion-sensitive features of an uttered proposition or else occasion-insensitive features of an entertained proposition.

The mystical Descartes

Part 3 is such a strange section of the Discourse. Some of it is just commonsensical—it’s useful to emulate those wiser than you—but some of it has to simply be irrelevant—why does it matter if one “hold[s] constantly to the religion in which by God’s grace I had been instructed”? This raises the point one (it seems) can always raise with Descartes. Why isn’t believe in God subject to the same scrutiny as the rest of his beliefs? Why isn’t theism the first thing the rationalist rejects, rather than the last?

I can’t help but think that the fear of Galileo’s fate plays a role.

“...I chose only the most moderate [opinion]”, says Descartes, when given a choice: he reasons these are usually superior since excess is “usually bad”, and, if he chose wrong, at least he wouldn’t have to come back very far to right things. Kooky. I think these are bad arguments, the sort of thing one comes up with because an editor or a referee (or a professor) insisted on such-and-such a discussion. His heart’s not in it. Or maybe mine isn’t.

The rules, then: follow local custom, have conviction, master oneself rather than the “order of the world”, and choose the best vocation.

Descartes does offer something to the reader who senses in him a mystical streak. He admires the one who has “mastery over their thoughts” that is “so absolute” that they are led to think of themselves as “richer, more powerful, freer and happier” than others. It has always been a curiosity that a philosopher whose reputation is so intertwined with the doctrine that we are ultimately mental (as distinct from the physical) so shamelessly flirts with the non-dualism of the Buddhist.

Is philosophy of language obsolete?

I'm preparing my notes for a seminar I'm teaching this fall on philosophy of language--which I've taught a number of times in the past, and which I very much enjoy. But I realize I have little idea of what someone aspiring to contribute to the field needs to know.

There's the central-papers-by-central-figures approach (Martinich's volume, say). But what do you know when you know all of that? Could you have a productive conversation with a working linguist? Try it--not easy. They'll think you're a quaint relic, still worrying about whether the present King of France is bald.

Forget the two-or-three-books-by-famous-philosophers (Searle, Grice, Quine, Kripke--anything like that) approach--same as the central-papers approach. Fine for the history of philosophy, not so useful to the working language scientist.

There's the review-of-recent-work approach (Ostertag's MIT volume on descriptions, or Reimer and Bezuidenhout's collection, for instance). Good, I think, but now the conversation-with-the-linguist test depends on whether that linguist works in a field related to the problem delved into (most likely semantics or pragmatics). Syntacticians won't have much to talk about with you.

I think the litmus test for what a philosopher needs to know (and do) is the same one we philosophers always ought to take: is what we know general (so that any working scientist in the relevant field can find a way to use it) and is it data-driven (so that any working scientist in the relevant field can find a way to use it)?

Philosophers of language have got to start doing work that linguists across the board (especially syntacticians, I think) can get interested in and use. Otherwise we run the risk of generating a lot of work that doesn't advance the science of language.

04 February 2008

Still more on meaning and referring

“Let us then look back...”

No, I was wrong. Quine wants to talk about synonyms. Let’s see how this goes.

More on meaning and referring

“An object referred to...”

I stepped right in it:

“Meanings...purport to be entities of a special sort: the meaning of an expression is the idea expressed.”

So let’s proceed as if this is the notion of meaning that vexes linguists—what may be thought of as Cartesian, frankly—and the synonymy problems may be put to one side for now.

Meaning and referring

“Confusion with meaning...”

“...we can acknowledge a worldful of objects, and let our singular and general terms refer to those objects...without ever taking up the topic of meaning.”

Hmm. I’m curious how he sees that happening. It’s kind of a throw-away line, but maybe it’s instructive. Assuming he means by ‘refer’ the standard denotation of some object, does he think that meaning doesn’t come up because he thinks of it as psychological, and reference as denotational (objective, semantic)? Okay, but isn’t that just verbal? I mean, the interesting meaning problem for the Quine of the two dogmas is synonymy criteria being circular—that isn’t psychological, is it? Isn’t that semantic in a similar sense as reference is? And if so, then how could we have enough language to have referential terms, both singular and general, and yet not have meaning?

Not vital, but I’m a little worried.

Language change

“Lexicography is concerned...”

“...the investigation of semantic change is concerned with change of meaning.”

I hadn’t noticed this before, that Quine is positioning his arguments toward the diachronic linguist. I’ve thought recently (since DIGS in Trieste (that’s ‘Diachronic something and Generative Syntax,’ the 2006 meeting), and my reading of 19th-c theory of ‘black English’ before that) that a lot of important action in the philosophy of language ought to occur in the theory of language change, but I hadn’t seen any philosophers take that up directly. Go Quine. I’m cheered.

Actually, that’s long been a sore spot of mine. Philosophers are severely handicapped because we don’t know syntax, and the syntax theory people are clumsy at generating the theory of their subject (the way a lot of scientists are) because they don’t know logic. Insofar as syntax is a kind of applied logic, this gulf between linguists and philosophers is a little bit scandalous. (Barbara Partee traces the gulf to the uber-presence of the combative winner-take-all Chomskyans in syntax, as opposed to the give-and-take semanticists and logicians, especially the Montague crowd, who had to depend on each other after his untimely death—for better or worse, no uber-presence. Interesting idea. I’ll post a link to her comments if I can find them—they’re here somewhere...)

Unfortunately, there’s much linguists will be unhappy about in this essay of Quine’s, so maybe this isn’t the place to begin the dialogue. In the first place, Quine is writing pre-Aspects and pre-Chomsky’s review of Skinner’s Verbal behavior. Rough. Worse, in his general philosophy of language he sides with the losers—the behaviorists—though I can’t remember whether that shows up in this paper. There’s a little Trent Lott waxing nostalgic about Strom Thurmond in that.

The argument of his I like best in this paper—the one about a language being a nesting of infinite sets—I would think would be a big hit among linguists. But it went over like a brick when I gave it over drinks with linguists (B and M) and philosophers (S) recently. S, the philosopher, was fine—he knew the argument already, of course—but I suspect he’s a bit weary of philosophy of language, and I’m not sure he was on the same page as me. M and B were the two linguists—both syntacticians—and they thought it was a perfect illustration of how philosophers worry about exactly the wrong thing once they set out on theorizing about language.

More when I get there. Maybe I can persuade them to weigh in.

Method and order

“...since there is only one truth concerning any matter, whoever discovers this truth knows as much about it as can be known.”

Knowledge depends on the method followed and its soundness or integrity (hence, discourse of the method of the title...).

“...the method which instructs us to follow the correct order, and to enumerate exactly all the relevant factors, contains everything that gives certainty to the rules of arithmetic.”

So the method is only as reliable as the reliability of the foundational assumptions: that of the ‘correctness’ of the order of ideas in an inquiry, and that of the ‘relevance’ of the factors considered in that inquiry; if those are sound, then the method ‘contains’ ‘certainty’—quotes around everything that needs explaining. It all seems impossible to me: correctness understood in the abstract, relevance understood over and above the factors at issue—both standards (again) about which a meta-judgment must be made.

How can any of this work?

But if you push the account out (as Peirce does) toward the practical, so that the standard is that which ‘makes a practical difference’ of some sort, isn’t that hopeless in a different way? What, after all, could anything practical do for sorting out standards like correctness? (Anthony Appiah in his new book on experimental ethics says as much, quoted in the New York Times Book Review yesterday (I think): even if the neuroscientists figure out which part of your brain lights up when you reason about moral dilemmas like the infamous trolley case, there’ll still be philosophical ethics to do—after all, we don’t decide what is correct by a show of hands.)

I’m less hopeful than I was when I started this part.

Peirce is Descartes plus wiki's

“...all the things which can fall under human knowledge are interconnected in the same way...”

First thing to point out is that D warns that his third rule above “suppos[es] some order even among objects that have no natural order of precedence”—though (presumably) we ought to suppose such order as we follow that rule. Fine. But the question has to be asked: if there is no natural order, then what guides us in our supposing of an order of thought? This is much like the earlier blog where I wondered about the coherence of a standard we are supposed to apply—first we have to evaluate the standard itself to see whether we ought to apply it, much as a carpenter examines his/her tools, or a football analyst decides what should have happened in the Super Bowl before considering what to make of what actually did happen.

The more I think about D’s rationalism the more I am impressed by the importance of a fully functional and autonomous reason—a central rational faculty. I guess I didn’t realize how meta it is.

“...there can be nothing too remote to be reached in the end or too well hidden to be discovered.”

Peirce is optimistic this same way about the progress of inquiry, yet he builds his idea around a ‘community’ of inquirers. I’m not sure the two are all that far apart—Peirce is Descartes, plus wiki’s, more or less.

How to make Descartes' ideas clear

“...to include nothing more in my judgements than what presented itself to my mind so clearly and so distinctly that I had no occasion to doubt it.”

D gets a lot of mileage out of insisting on ‘clear-and-distinct’ ideas, of course—it’s one of the anchoring ideas of his theory of knowledge. But I always find it hard to explain what this really means to newcomers to his philosophy. I think most people think they have clear and distinct ideas, and in order to persuade them that their ideas are less than clear it seems necessary to invoke visual metaphors, which seem entirely out of place (isn’t it the ideas that make the vision possible? So how could the ideas be ‘visually’ clear?), or else to point out the ‘un-clear-ness’ of imagined objects like unicorns or whatever (but the problem with those is not their un-clear-ness but their imaginariness, no?).

The best I can usually get started is the precision (is that the same as clear-and-distinctness?) of, say, mathematical propositions like ‘2+3=5’ or whatever. Everyone can easily perform mathematical operations like that, and do them with great precision (easily telling the difference between ‘2+3=5’ and ‘2+4=6’ or whatever).

But then has D captured the right feature that makes these ideas reliable in judgments of what is true? Isn’t the relevant feature precision, or maybe calculability? Care needs to be taken to avoid circularity: the goal is to give a criterion for demonstrability, and calculability might be the same thing. Hmm, but how different is precision from calculability? Does ‘precise’ mean the same thing as ‘can be separated out from nearby elements’? If so, is that not the same thing as saying ‘playing a different role in some comparison’, which seems a lot like a calculation to me, no?

If we avoid the circle by sticking with clear-and-distinct-ness as a property of a mode of presentation of an object of thought, we are left with some sort of non-sensory presentation that, frankly, is tough to get a handle on. Hmm.

Descartes' logic

“When I was younger, my philosophical studies had included some logic...”

I have to confess this is my biggest disappointment with D and many of his contemporaries. For such a tremendous period in philosophy, there is little of value achieved in logic. So much of what is thought of as logic is really advice for being reasonable, or rules for argument and debate. It’s the most barren period in the history of logic I can think of, given the extraordinary work going on in metaphysics and epistemology. And its even more striking given the explosion in maths (Leibniz and Newton and their weird competition over the calculus, most notably).

Now that I mention it, I wonder how unusual that moment was for logic. It’s the strangest thing, frankly.

Contrast this with the recent denial of the logic/rhetoric distinction (say, by Derrida and others). That denial is surely unsound, but it can only be made with any force in a context where the distinction is well-understood, or at least widely held, as it is in mainstream logic and philosophy in the twentieth century. D and his contemporaries, at least if the Port-Royal Logic is typical, did not widely believe in the (strong) distinction. The Stoics, the Aristotelians, the Platonists, by contrast, did make the distinction, and had to fend off the deconstructivists of their day, the Sophists, who denied it. With the distinction comes the denial, I guess. (Hmm—I’ll have to fact-check this more.)

“...I had to seek some other method comprising the advantages of [logic, geometry, and algebra] but free from their defects.”

Of course, by ‘defects’ here D means something like uselessness, or else that they do little to cultivate the mind. Here is more evidence for my reading of D’s theory of logic as guidance for good thinking.

Human nature

“...are not on that account barbarians or savages...”

D’s is a peculiar sort of egalitarian rationalism [clumsy term]. It sounds Humean in places (“...it is custom and example that persuade us, rather than any certain knowledge”) in its appeal to custom and habit as shaping our use of reason. This goes right down to the national differences he presumes:

“I thought, too, how the same man, with the same mind, if brought up from infancy among the French or Germans, develops otherwise than he would if he had always lived among the Chinese or cannibals...”

Of course this is offensive, but part of what I find interesting is the theory of mind he is beginning to sketch. What would it mean to speak of “the same mind” in radically different environments? What makes a mind what it is? D is so fascinating to read, I think, because he wanders fearlessly into such classic debates as that between nature and nurture. And if we bring in the offensive anthropology about the Chinese being cannibalistic, the civilized and the barbarian, we can ask the (now-dated) question: is a barbarian a barbarian because by their nature, or by how they were nurtured? How about a civilized person? The non-offensive version: to what extent are the commonly recognized ethnic and quasi-ethnic groups (Latin, black, white, Asian, etc.) determined by anything natural, and to what extent are they shaped by environmental factors?

Most generally: is there any human nature?

Clever minds

“...two types of minds for whom it is quite unsuitable.”

This startled me. I had forgotten that D said this. If I remember right, D in the Meditations, certainly, thinks everyone should run through the 6 for themselves, and even in the preamble to the Discourse says as much—doesn’t he think that all minds can and should go through the stripping of beliefs through rigorous doubt? Maybe he’s trying to make a (negative) comment about those whose minds are closed, or overly clever, or whatever the problems are supposed to be. Actually, it sounds a little political in that way.

Proper standards

“...we never see people pulling down all the houses of a city...”

How obvious is the Katrina reference here? Had to point it out.

“...[square] them with the standards of reason...”

This is the fundamental obstacle for any project like D’s. It’s not the question, what is true? Or, what do/can I know? It’s the question of squaring what you know with standards.

(Continuing the building metaphor, by the way, as a carpenter who squares a piece of wood against a straight edge. The Wittgenstein comparisons—his house, the notion of language as a city, even slab language itself—come right back to mind. I didn’t appreciate that before.)

But this problem is harder, in a way, the same way that it’s easier to be a cabinetmaker if you have good tools than if not, but how can we tell which are the good tools? And if the good tools are machined, then how do we tell which are the good machines—that is, the ones that make the good tools?

There’s no way around it: the good tool, or the machine that makes it (a plane, say) is one that produces a good edge on the wood, read by another good tool (the measuring device—a T-square, say)—all of which is fed to a single processor: the mind of the carpenter, or perhaps an architect. The mind that judges whether the standard has been met has to be able to judge the standard and judge the particular case (the planed edge) and then judge them in comparison to one another. How do we explain this sort of meta-judgment?

Another metaphor: the Patriots offense got solved by the Giants’ defensive line, which kept the Giants never more than one play away from winning, setting up the Manning-Tyree circus play. That is more or less the Carton-Boomer analysis this morning on the FAN, or maybe it was Mike and the Mad Dog last night on Mike’d Up—I forget. Anyway, one question is whether the Giants ultimately succeeded—of course they did, if my tv box was working last night, and I can believe the images I saw on it. A second question (which is like the carpenter’s meta-judgment question) is how do we know that that is the right analysis of what happened?

What’s the relevant standard to apply? Is it mere winning? (But there’s more than one way to win—maybe Brady just had a bad ankle after all, and played sloppy because of it, allowing Strahan and Tuck to get through more often.) Is it that this potent Patriot offense should have put more points up against this over-achieving Giant team? Is it that the Giants, in Manning, have a stumbling and uncertain quarterback, who cannot reasonably be expected to outperform Brady, though obviously he did—and thus the right analysis has to explain Brady’s performing below expectations?

How do we judge what is the proper standard?

02 February 2008

10 November 1619

“...I stayed all day shut up alone in a stove-heated room, where I was completely free to converse with myself about my own thoughts.”

10 November 1619 is the date of this most famous of philosophical visions. It gives the scientific Descartes a mystical dimension I’ve always found intriguing. The rationalist moved to think by an irrational dream.

From it comes his analogy of the thinker to an architect, which includes the observation that architecture is best done by a single designer rather than a committee; so too for thinking. It’s a funny idea he’s carrying out: that a single thinker, alone with his/her thoughts, possibly ‘conversing with the ancients’ through reading, but otherwise alone in a stove-heated room, might pursue the truth that way. It runs completely counter to the contemporary preference for collaborators and teamwork. But it’s especially apt for a method of philosophizing from methodological doubt: after all, if you have a collaborator, you’d have to suspend doubt regarding them, which would mean you’ve let all sorts of things into the story.

Oddly, D doesn’t appeal to anything like this to defend the lone-thinker approach. Instead, he appeals to the idea that architects acting alone make more perfect buildings. That’s not what I would have expected him to say, and it’s not at all obvious that it’s true.

“...peoples who have grown gradually from a half-savage to a civilized state, and have made their laws only in so far as they were forced to by the inconvenience of crimes and quarrels, could not be so well governed as those who from the beginning of their society have observed the basic laws laid down by some wise law-giver.”

The architect takes the wild sprawl of a haphazard city and brings order to one bit of it, like the thinker who tames wild reality. The ‘half-savage’ lives in such a place, presumably, and only in fits and starts can they tame their wildness and establish some order. Recall that to ‘civilize’ is to order many discordant elements, a root shared by the word ‘city’, suggesting the project of modern reason is largely a project of taming the ‘savage’ and bringing order as cities bring order.

But then Wittgenstein’s city comes back to mind. W suggests that a language is like a city, cobbled into this shape and that over many generations of speakers, complete with an old quarter, various ethnic quarters, and so on. D’s architect seems at odds with W’s city with its crooked streets and all. But before anyone draws the hasty conclusion that D is about modern, rational order over confusing disorder, remember that D is reporting the contents of his dream, the wild edges of thought and reason. And he’s reporting this as part of a fable. I think he’s being mischievous, and I think he fully realizes it.

“...the sciences...compounded and amassed little by little from the opinions of many different persons, it never comes so close to the truth as the simple reasoning which a man of good sense naturally makes...”

So here’s the risk of overplaying D’s methodical approach to truth. I would think you could wiki out the method, as long as everything was suitably transparent, but it doesn’t sound like D’s theory is a wiki-theory. Perfection and single mind are the model. Hmm. But I still don’t fully believe that that’s his real view. D likes the piecemeal discovery, he likes the gradual accumulation of knowledge, he likes the six-part investigation. I’m still holding out for him to have a notion of partial discovery, and hence partial knowledge—which would serve as the underwriting for partial states of mind.

(And the ‘savage’ is the one thought unable to stitch together the parts, on my interpretation, but in fact becomes a kind of model for what it is to have the parts. I’m way ahead of myself here.)

“...I thought it virtually impossible that our judgements should be as unclouded and firm as they would have been if we had had the full use of our reason...and if we had always been guided by it alone.”

D sharpens the singleton thing: it’s not that there’s a single thinker, but that a single thing guides that thinker (or perhaps all thinkers). I got ahead of myself, thinking of a committee model of inquirers. Really, what D is suggesting is a model for the light of reason, the idea foreshadowed earlier that I puzzled over briefly.

But then I’m confused in a different way. What interferes with the ‘savage’ in his/her reasoning, if the ‘natural light of reason’ is a meta-resource like that? If it’s no one’s property, then ought we not all to simply have access to it?

Okay, so this is the egalitarianism I opened my reading of the Discourse with, fine. But then those ambiguities come right back. Here’s what I said in my post on part 1 para. 1:

ST: “One question I always have when I read Descartes is in the meaning of ‘nature’ and ‘natural’, especially when it comes to ‘reason’. It would seem on a straightforward notion of ‘nature’ that it consists of that which humans did not make; its complement class is thus ‘society’ and ‘technology’—something like that. But then how is reason natural? Whatever else humans do when they make things like societies or technologies, they employ reason, and they do so essentially. If you clarify things by making reason itself a natural (biological) process, something that only in the application to things produces society and technology, that seems a nice fix. But problems will surface for Descartes later in the story, given his view that the mental and the physical have substantially variant properties.”

If there is any difference between the ‘savage’ and the ‘civilized’, what does that difference consist in? It cannot be in the rational endowment of humans, by D’s own reasoning. (That’s good; we like that.) But that means then that either it’s in the access to the natural light of reason (but that’s no one’s property—we can all access that), or else it’s in the distinctly cultural resources of ‘savages’ and ‘civilized’ people (but that runs counter to the naturalness condition: that reason is part of nature, and thus not part of society or technology—it’s about us, not about what we make). If the difference is none of these, then it would seem to collapse.

Of course, in 2008 especially, we want this distinction to collapse. But throughout the modern period of Western thought it was a hugely important idea. Again, D isn’t the chief offender (as we might now put it) but he doesn’t seem bothered enough to put the ‘savagery’ stuff to one side.

Wow, longer post than I thought, lots of questions. I need to figure this out.

The natural light of reason

“...I learned not to believe too firmly anything of which I had been persuaded only by example and custom. Thus I gradually freed myself from many errors which may obscure our natural light and make us less capable of heeding reason.”

D returns to ‘custom’, but winds up—fortunately for his narrative of redemption—doubting what custom teaches him. (Whew, that was close.)

And now the crisis of doubt and error can be gradually resolved, but in order to do that, D introduces a new figure in the scene: that of the ‘natural light’ of reason. This is a hugely important notion for him, and I’m not sure how it fits in to the theory of mind he wants to endorse. It sounds kind of detached from the individual mind, as if it were a meta-resource (maybe God is guided by it too?), but again this baffling notion of nature. Surely the creator (if you believe in God) of nature isn’t guided by the creation; surely the controller (if you are merely a humanist) of nature isn’t guided by it. It seems to have things backwards.

Suppose the probable is false

“...considering how many diverse opinions learned men may maintain on a single question—even though it is impossible for more than one to be true—I held as well-nigh false everything that was merely probable.”

This is so familiar to readers of D, but it remains absolutely stunning, in my opinion: why suppose everything that’s merely probable as false, until shown otherwise? Sure, if the goal of the theory of knowledge is to accumulate true things, then there ought to be a presumption against truth until some particular proposition has paid its way and been established. But D is such a method-based thinker—the book is called a discourse on method, after all—the focus should be on the soundness of the method. One could just be agnostic about truths (in the ordinary way we are agnostic about many things we don’t have definitive evidence for or against in our everyday lives) and then be strict about the application of the method (again, like the way in our ordinary lives we might insist on reading the paper or watching the news to get the story on some unbelievable event, rather than simply trusting hearsay). True, this is an appeal to authority rather than the application of a method, but the authority is established in virtue of the reporter having a method.

This is what bothered Peirce, for instance—it seems fake to suppose that everything is false, while it seems more genuine to suppose proof to consist of a gradual, methodical testing of claims to truth. Besides, D himself clearly advocates such a method-based approach in the book; why not carry it all the way through?

All I can think is that D is thinking about the problem like a geometer, whose proof might begin with the assumption of the falsehood of the premise. If a contradiction can be derived from that assumption, then the falsehood of the premise must itself be false, implying that the premise is true.

Proof

Mathematics is easy to imagine satisfying D’s worries about doubt and (eventually) firmness of foundation, but his appeal to self-evidence is noteworthy. One might expect (especially since I went on about innateness in an earlier post) that mathematical foundations would be settled because of some innate installation of mathematical propositions, or perhaps through an (innate) ability to grasp geometric relations—something of the sort Kant later urged. But D here appeals to self-evidence, which is really a claim about the nature of the demonstration rather than the nature of that which is demonstrated. It’s a claim about proof rather than mind. I think that suggests a way that logical problems of mental architecture start to pull away from psychological problems. They are starting to insist on some badly needed attention.

On the contrast of mathematics with the virtues, D complains that though the ancients extol the virtues, they fail to tell us how to recognize them. Frankly I was surprised that this was his complaint, since he is clearly worried about foundational problems (“magnificent palaces built only on sand and mud”). Hmm.

Reading as traveling

“...conversing with those of past centuries is much the same as travelling.”

D’s is an obvious observation I guess, but he reminds me of Hume in the Essays, commenting endlessly and subtly about the ‘moral character’ of various people in various places. I think the subject of traveling is always fraught with the tension I noticed at the beginning of part 1 of the Discourse: how can you tell if someone strange to you is rational? Should you conclude that they must be rational, because all humans are rational? Or should you conclude they are rational by examining what they do and why they do it, the same way you’d conduct any empirical study? Traveling raises this more acutely because a tourist always has to solve the rationality-of-strangers problem. No less for we intellectual tourists.

“It is good to know something of the customs of various peoples, so that we may judge our own more soundly, and not think that everything contrary to our own ways is ridiculous and irrational, as those who have seen nothing of the world ordinarily do.”

So how do we unpack this metaphor? What does D mean by the ‘customs’ of various peoples? What’s the analogy to reading here? Does he mean something like what the author we are reading thinks as a matter of his/her habits? What could intellectual customs mean here? And how can that help the ‘traveler’ reflect on their own ‘customs’? The analogy seems to invite lots of Wittgensteinian mischief.

Descartes on various subjects

D’s list of the various subjects he studied and their merits is really quirky. They strike me as being the sort of thing someone who barely studied those subjects might say about them, in a sparknotes kind of way. Weird.

I don’t know if it’s just me, or if D meant it to sound that way, and if he did, what point he was trying to make.

More on the Discourse as narrative

Narrative arc: childhood search for truth (really?) leading to a crisis of doubt and error, compelling D to “think there was no knowledge in the world such as I had previously been led to hope for.” How curious that D’s crisis comes from doubt and error, leading him to his awareness of how little he knew—but that this becomes a virtue by part 4—and certainly, in a very high profile way, by the Meditations. Theoretically, methodological doubt serves to generate counterfactual criteria for determining the truth of a proposition (if I were hallucinating, would p still be true), but autobiographically, that same doubt is a personal crisis that he does not know anything. It reminds the reader how much D is like Socrates. I’m betting that he intended that....

Fables

“...not to teach the method...but only to reveal [it]....I am presenting this work only as a history or, if you prefer, a fable...”

But if this is a fable, then what do we make of its conclusions? Is it that this ‘fable’ is meant to merely illustrate a sequence of reasoning that might be taken to support those conclusions? Or is it that, like all autobiography, it purports to tell the truth about its subject—its author—but that the reader should only take it a certain way, not as a lesson, but as a useful way to look at the world—worthy of imitation among ‘many others’? Or maybe it’s meant to establish authenticity: that its author traveled, and considered, and thought, and blah blah blah, and as such is warranted to weigh in on the intellectual matters at hand.

Discourse like a slave narrative

“...reveal in this discourse what paths I have followed, and to represent my life as if in a picture...”

I think the Discourse reads like a slave narrative: early greatness and privilege, followed by life as a lost soul, adrift in confusion and sin, in captivity. Then all at once, perhaps through an intervention by a helpful benefactor, or the wily plan of a fellow slave, or whatever—and that heralded by a supernatural vision or dream—freedom, truth, enlightenment.

An interesting read: D’s Discourse and Douglass’s Narrative.

Geometric method

“...a method whereby...I can increase my knowledge gradually...”

This is one of the greatest virtues of D’s thought, I think: he never claims to have a grand system of truths, but only tries to methodically string together the bits he’s discovered. It really makes him one of the most disciplined of the A-list modern thinkers. (Compare Hume and Kant, for instance.) His work is what philosophy would look like if it were modeled on geometry.

The mind is complete

“...for, as regards reason or sense, since [the mind] is the only thing that makes us men and distinguishes us from the beasts, I am inclined to believe it exists whole and complete in each of us.”

Some more dialectic: reason is natural (iffy naturalism, let’s call it for now); rationality is part of the human endowment (egalitarianism based on universalism, I’ll clumsily label it for now). But there’s a new piece: that minds exist ‘whole and complete’ in everyone. D’s philosophy of mind now has a significant constraint, that any developmental account of the mind will have to explain wholeness and completeness. The right theory will thus have to have the entire mind appear as such, perhaps achieving functionality only in stages.

Hence the theoretical pressure away from the acquisition of the mental architecture, and toward its innateness. Ditto for grammar.

D’s gloss: “...there are differences of degree only between the accidents, and not between the forms (or natures) of individuals of the same species.”

If we take form to be something vaguely Aristotelian—that which makes a thing the kind of thing it is—then D’s iffy naturalism has our natural character—the thing we are by our nature—as essentially formal. Too early to tell where he’ll go with this, but the tension with Aristotle on form and nature is more front and center than I initially expected.

(Wildly speculative question: does D have any notion of partial reason (whatever that is)? Doesn’t look like it.)

01 February 2008

Differences in reason

“...the power of judging well and of distinguishing the true from the false—which is what we properly call ‘good sense’ or ‘reason’—is naturally equal in all men.”

A rationalist has to be egalitarian in some really obvious sense, but that stance wrinkles a little if one asks whether we really are all the same in this respect. There’s some pressure to root for the negative answer (in our diversity-celebrating age) since we tend to dislike the idea that a single model of reason and reasonableness applies to us all. Yet we also want the answer to be positive, since we appreciate more than most generations the harm that comes from the idea that some are not fully rational. (Descartes actually broaches this late in the Discourse in his discussion of the ‘half-savage’ becoming ‘civilized’; as well as his famous distinction between humans and animals given their differential possession of reason and language. Descartes does not do it (I don’t think), but others have applied a non-universalness of reason argument to describe ‘Negroes’, ‘savages’, ‘barbarians’, and women. It’s tricky territory.)

One question I always have when I read Descartes is in the meaning of ‘nature’ and ‘natural’, especially when it comes to ‘reason’. It would seem on a straightforward notion of ‘nature’ that it consists of that which humans did not make; its complement class is thus ‘society’ and ‘technology’—something like that. But then how is reason natural? Whatever else humans do when they make things like societies or technologies, they employ reason, and they do so essentially. If you clarify things by making reason itself a natural (biological) process, something that only in the application to things produces society and technology, that seems a nice fix. But problems will surface for Descartes later in the story, given his view that the mental and the physical have substantially variant properties.