common sense philosophy

Lately, I’ve been doing some reading on Thomas Reid and his attack on the “way of ideas,” and I stumbled upon an interesting argument of his for the justification of our belief in world of mind-independent bodies on the basis of the “original principles of our constitution.”

According to Reid, we are just set up in such a way that sensations give rise to the conception of and belief in the existence of mind-independent bodies. But how are these beliefs justified? After all, as you will recall, even Hume seems to have suggested something of this sort—that is, that a certain “natural instinct” in us leads us in an irresistible manner from the one to the other—but he went on to conclude that these beliefs of ours are in fact not justified. How, then, might Reid account for the justifiability of our belief in the existence of the external world?

First, Reid divides those skeptics that might ask such a question into two sorts: “thorough and consistent sceptic[s]” and “semi-sceptics” [1]. Thorough and consistent skeptics will not count anything as knowledge until the faculty responsible for the formation of the belief is proven reliable. “Of course, nothing can be proven or shown until some belief is accepted, so a thorough skeptic . . . will end up not believing anything” [2]. Reid is quite uninterested in thorough and consistent skeptics, saying of such a person, “he must even be left to enjoy his scepticism” [3].

His reply to semi-skeptics is a bit more substantial and innovative. According to Reid, semi-skeptics choose to accept one or more sources of belief before they have been proven reliable, and hold the other sources up to that standard. For instance, “Hume has assumed that the deliverances of consciousness and reasoning are trustworthy” [4]. But, Reid points out, the semi-skeptic’s choice of which faculty to favor (and which to be skeptical of) is entirely arbitrary. Reid, in dialogue with such a skeptic:

Reason, says the skeptic, is the only judge of truth, and you ought to throw off every opinion and every belief that is not grounded on reason. Why, Sir, should I believe the faculty of reason more than that of perception; they came both out of the same shop, and were made by the same artist; and if he puts one piece of false ware into my hands, what should hinder him from putting another [5].

As he seems to have figured, we’re faced with three options: either (a) trust out faculties from the start until we’re given sufficient reason for withdrawing this trust [6]; (b) distrust our faculties from the start (i.e., thorough and consistent skepticism); or (c) begin with an unjustified and entirely arbitrary partiality toward some faculties. And obviously, Reid considered the first to be the only sensible option. So Reid’s account of the justifiability of our belief in an external world rests upon the claim that we’ve no greater reason to trust (or doubt) the beliefs formed by reason than we do the beliefs formed by perception. Or, as Lehrer puts it, the justification of such beliefs “is their birthright” [7].

I think it works.

~~~

[1] Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, Derek Brookes, ed. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), V, vii, 71.

[2] Keith DeRose, “Reid’s Anti-sensationalism and His Realism,” The Philosophical Review, Vol. 98, No. 3 (July 1989), 328.

[3] Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, reprinted in Thomas Reid, The Works of Thomas Reid, William Hamilton, ed., 5th Ed. (Edinburgh: Maclachlan and Stewart, 1958), VI, v, 447.

[4] Keith Lehrer, “Conception without Representation—Justification without Inference: Reid’s Theory,” Nous, Vol. 23, No. 2, 1989 APA Central Division Meetings (April 1989), 149.

[5] Reid, Inquiry, VI, xx, 168-169.

[6] And, as Reid takes great pains to prove, the possibility of error and phenomena such as perceptual relativity are hardly sufficient reasons.

[7] Lehrer, 149.

Hang on Notre Dame, hang on!

Edit: Damn

A couple days ago I had a conversation (argument) with a friend about whether gender is the same thing as sex. I began by arguing that they were the same thing, being male or female simply means having the correct anatomical equipment. This, he vehemently denied claiming that gender refers to social roles while sex is a biological distinction. Now, it is always hard for me to admit that I am wrong, but according to the New Oxford English Dictionary, gender is:

the state of being male or female (typically used with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones) : traditional concepts of gender | [as adj. ] gender roles. • the members of one or other sex : differences between the genders are encouraged from an early age.

So, I am admitting that gender and sex are not the same thing. However, my friend was using this distinction to say that sex in no way determines gender. He believes that a person can be biologically a male and genderlarity (genderly?) a female because of this distinction. And it is not just him, but many people in our culture have taken this distinction to mean we are given carte blanche on what gender we are. But is this right? Sex and gender are distinct but does that mean that they have no more relation than my having a Bassett Hound named Smokey (as in Okey Dokey Smokey) and my being a member of the American Philosophical Society? I think that this is a totally untenable view. It seems clear to me that sex may not be the same as gender but it sure as hell is important to it making some combinations of sex and gender wrong (maybe even impossible, i.e. if some is biologically a man, and thinks that his gender is female, he is simply wrong in that assupmtion).

But I could be wrong.

A few decades ago, Peter Singer argued that our moral intuitions often contradict each other, rendering them an unreliable guide for the evaluating of ethical theories [2]. After all, if our moral intuitions are contradictory, then the claim that such-and-such about Utilitarianism is “counterintuitive” certainly loses much, if not all, of its force. Recently, Singer’s argument has been picked up by Peter Unger in his Living High and Letting Die. According to Nahmias and Ernst,

They [Singer and Unger] charge that when we introspect on our moral intuitions, we find a conflicted mess - cases differing only in what seem to be morally irrelevant ways elicit dramatically different moral intuitions. Ethical principles that cohere with our intuitions about some cases inevitably conflict with our intuitions about relevantly similar cases [1].

So consider two of Singer’s cases.

The Shallow Pond scenario. You see a small child drowning in a shallow pond. You could wade out and save the child’s life, but doing so would ruin your $200 suit. Since you don’t want to ruin your suit, you walk on, and the child dies.

The Envelope scenario. You get a letter from UNICEF in the mail, telling you that a donation of $200 will save a dozen innocent third-world children. Without even considering donating, you throw the envelope away.

Most people have the intuition that walking away from the drowning child would be wrong of you to do; but throwing the envelope away, people often feel, is not nearly as wrong, if at all.

Not only am I having a difficult time understanding just what the salient difficulty really is for those considering making an appeal to our intuitions (or, perhaps more controversially, ethical intuitionists), but I also wonder whether or not the problem, whatever it turns out to be, must be an empirical matter, as Nahmias and Ernst suggest. Consider Singer’s point about the circumstantial similarities shared by the Shallow Pond and Envelope scenarios. He suggests that the action-guiding principle one might derive from our intuitive response to the former is

Principle 1: If one can save the life of an innocent person at relatively little cost to oneself, then it is wrong to let the person die.

The rub, Singer supposes, lies in the fact that Principle 1 would be violated by our throwing the UNICEF letter away. And this, both Singer and Unger suggest, is evidence not only that our ethical intuitions are “incoherent,” but also that appeals to such confused intuitions, something often done in ethical theorizing, turn out to be unhelpful in the evaluation of different ethical theories.

This conclusion seems a bit hasty to me. Why suppose that the conflict in this circumstance lies in the intuitions rather than the principles we are supposed to derive from those intuitions? For instance, suppose, based upon my intuitive response to the Shallow Pond scenario, I form the following ethical principle instead of Principle 1:

Principle 1*: If the saving of S’s life depends upon my doing X, then I ought to do X.

I would guess that sensible people would be just as willing to agree that Principle 1* is an appropriate reflection of our intuitive sense of the wrongness of walking away from the drowning girl as is Principle 1. Clearly, in the Shallow Pond example, the saving of the girl’s life depends upon me wading into the pond and rescuing her. However, whether or not the saving of an unidentified dozen of innocent third-world children depends upon me sending UNICEF a check for $200 is not nearly as clear. While throwing away the UNICEF envelope would seem to violate Principle 1, indicating conflicting intuitions, it is not clear that it violates Principle 1* at all, for the dependence condition so clear in the Shallow Pond example is arguably absent in the Envelope example.

To make this point about what I’m calling “the dependence condition” even clearer, consider a revision of the Envelope scenario.

The Envelope/Hostage scenario. You get another letter from UNICEF in the mail. This time, however, you read that UNICEF is holding your neighbors hostage in their home, and that unless you reply with a $200 donation by a certain deadline, they’ll kill your neighbors.

I would argue that our intuitive response to the Envelope/Hostage scenario would be that throwing away this envelope would be just as wrong as walking away from the drowning child. For it is much clearer in this case that the saving of your neighbors’ lives depends upon your $200 donation.

All this would suggest that the real problem lies not in the allegedly contradictory intuitions, but rather in the derivation of an appropriate action-guiding principle. But this is something for which even intuitionists allow - that is, that in theorizing, we might be mistaken in the formulation of a particular principle based upon our intuitions. After all, doing ethics is hard work.

Furthermore, the Shallow Pond and Envelope scenarios are supposed to be “differ[ent] only in what seem to be morally irrelevant ways.” According to my analysis, however, it seems there is a morally relevant difference between the two - namely, that the lives of others depends upon my doing something.

And finally, since it remains to be seen whether or not this problem has anything to do with apparently inconsistent intuitions, it certainly is not yet clear that resolving the problem is an empirical undertaking, unable to “be settled by philosophers’ armchair speculations,” as Nahmias and Ernst put it. After all, I was able to resolve the conflict between our intuitive responses to Singer’s two examples from the comforts of my armchair.

~~~

[1] Eddy Nahmias and Zachary Ernst, “The (Un)Reliability of Moral Intuitions: Evidence from Neuroeconomics,” (under review).

[2] Peter Singer, “Famine, affluence, and morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs (1, 1972) 229-243.

[3] Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

The deadline for submissions to the Georgia Philosophical Society’s November 12th meeting at Emory University has been extended from October 14 to October 21. Submissions should be sent electronically to rwertheim-at-juno-dot-com.

I hate when something like this happens. Makes procrastination and subsequent self-loathing all the harder. I guess this means I’ll have to submit something.

So we are reading this article The Neural Basis of Economic Decision-Making in the Ultimatum Game by Alan Sanfey et al. for our Philosophy of Mind class. The idea is, to get a better understanding of how decision-making processes in the brain work, these guys did an experiment where they had test subjects hooked up to some sort of brain scanning machine (functional magnetic resonances imaging; fMRI) and had them play what is called the Ultimatum Game. The Ultimatum Game is where:

“Two players are given the opportunity to split a sum of money. One player is deemed the proposer and the other, the responder. the proposer makes an offer as to how this money should be split between the two. The second player (the responder) can either accept or reject this offer. If it is accepted, the money is split as proposed, but if the responder rejects the offer, then neither player receives anything” (2003).

Now it seems to me that, although the results are interesting and worthy of discussion, there is a problem with this kind of method in that they are trying to deduce from this game being played in a lab, how our minds are working in every day life. But the problem is that being in a lab and especially being hooked up to all kinds of weird machines is nothing close to most environments in which we find ourselves making decisions. Could it not be the case that at least some of the brain activity showing up in the fMRIs is reflecting some of the nervousness or anxiety involved with being a part of some scientific experiment? Perhaps the test subject is worried that he is going to play the game wrong and waste everyone’s time, or that the brain scans will somehow reveal some dark secret that he has been hiding from friends and family for years (what does he know about what scientist can gather from a brain scan).

Maybe I’m missing the point or perhaps this difficulty has been dealt with already but it just seemed to me to be something that, if it is a problem, seriously skews the results for all research of this type.

In his “Concepts of Supervenience,” Jaegwon Kim strengthens the definition of strong supervenience, giving us the following:

If A strongly supervenes on B, then for each property F in A there is a property G in B such that necessarily (∀x)[G(x) ↔ F(x)], that is, every A-property has a necessary coextension in B. [PPR 45 (December 1984) 170]

So, for instance, for each mental property F in the set of all mental properties A, there is a physical property G in the set of all properties of the brain B such that necessarily (∀x)[G(x) ↔ F(x)]. So mental properties and their corresponding physical properties are materially equivalent? If so, isn’t this just a fancy way of characterizing type-type identity?

Perhaps I’m reading him wrongly.

UPDATE: Yup. As it turns out, I was reading him wrongly. Ah well.

. . . the 20th Philosophers’ Carnival can be found here.

Welcome to common sense philosophy, a weblog devoted (primarily) to matters of philosophy in the analytic tradition. Contributions will be made by Jim Sias and Sean Martin, fellow beer aficionados and graduate students of philosophy at Georgia State University (see the “About us” page for more). So check back from time to time and feel free to leave a comment whenever the impulse strikes you. (Do note that comments will not appear until approved by one of us.)

Thanks for stoppin’ by.