Friday, November 28, 2014


174. Moral realism?

 Moral realism claims that there are foundations for morality beyond subjective opinion and social convention.[i] In a strong form it proposes that moral precepts are independent from our thought, beliefs or opinions. In a weaker form, it proposes that they are not ‘up to us’.

 Where do I stand in this, with the ‘debatable ethics’ proposed and discussed in this blog? My stand is realist in the weak but not the strong sense. I believe that morality is not independent from our thought but that it is not (entirely) ‘up to us’ either. The possibility remains that its source lies partly in our thought and social convention and partly in some ‘outside’, more objective conditions.

A key question concerning claims of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, is ‘good or bad for what or whom?’ That in itself already entails that they are not ‘independent from us’. 

Morality is constructed in interaction between people. In Wittgenstein’s terminology: they are part of language games. In that they are not purely subjective and are largely social. The self needs debate with others, with different views, to test its own moral views. But realism requires that morality is not up to us even ‘if we all agree’. What, then, lies beyond language games, beyond tacit or explicit social consensus? Is there any more ‘objective’ warrant?

I think morality is also subject to an evolutionary selection mechanism as an external cause. I am confident, but cannot be sure and cannot prove, that moral systems that go against the flourishing of life and society will sooner or later fail to survive, and will succumb in revolution or disintegration.

But what, then, does flourishing of life and society entail, and how ‘given’ or ‘objective’ is that? Much more than in nature, in society the conditions that constitute the evolutionary selection environment that determines the survival or failure of morality are not fixed or given and are to a greater or lesser extent affected by the morality they select. In other words, to some extent there is co-evolution between society and its selection conditions. To some extent societies create the survival conditions conducive to them.

The flourishing of life and society may come to mean submission to some authoritarian regime. As I argued earlier in this blog, Fukuyama’s claim that ‘history has ended’ in the definitive victory of the liberal capitalist democracy is not valid.

All this makes my moral stance realist only in a limited sense. It is not the strong realism that most moral realists like claim. My moral realism is also weaker than my realism of knowledge of the natural world. There, the evolutionary pressure of the laws of nature that constitute the selection environment of our thought is more rigorous and more independent from our thought than in morality.      


[i] For a recent discussion, see Kevin DeLapp, Moral realism, London: Bloomsbury, 2013.

Monday, November 24, 2014


173. Where does argumentation stop?

Earlier in this blog I endorsed the idea (attributed to Wittgenstein and Heidegger)[1] of social action in the world, or language games, as the cradle of meaning, but I objected to the all too easy acceptance that judgement of adequacy or ‘truth’ is simply up to consensus, established practice. That would yield an unacceptable, horrendous surrender of personality, creativity and responsibility.

Personality would be sacrificed to the collective. There would be no room to deviate and create something new, a new game with new rules.

Such radical social, cultural relativism would entail surrender to prejudice and discrimination. It would entail submission to the rule of powers that be. Large-scale aberration from justice, like the recent financial crisis, would be taken for granted (as indeed it seems to be, in view of the limited rebellion against it).

Yet, argumentation does indeed have to stop somewhere, and some basic conventions, terms of discussion, have to be taken for granted, to avoid infinite regress.

So, how far should argumentation go, and how can it escape from prejudice? How can individuality and sociality, self and other, be combined? How can unity and variety, and stability and change be combined? Those questions constitute perhaps the biggest theme in this blog.

While I accept pragmatic, temporary stops to argument, I cannot accept permanent ones. Indeed, that would be against the spirit of pragmatism that I employ in this blog, because it would raise temporary truth to the level of an absolute. One should not too easily assume incommensurability between language games (or paradigms) and accept differences of view as irreconcilable.

Earlier in this blog (item 21) I criticized some basic elements of the Enlightenment, but here I maintain its basic value of commitment to discourse, debate and attempts at mutual understanding.     

I discussed cognitive distance, as a source of variety for creation, and the need to ‘cross it’ in order to realize its potential.

How does that work? One central tool to trigger understanding between views (or paradigms, or language games) is metaphor: describing one thing in terms of another. This can be elucidated in terms of the scripts discussed earlier in this blog. In those terms, metaphor would entail the attempt to substitute items from one script into another, or to import a node from one script to another. Or in linguistic terms, to exchange connotations.

There is an evolutionary argument, from evolutionary psychology, why gaps between rival language games or paradigms should not, in principle, be unbridgeable. The human species developed ways of cognition that contributed to survival in the world, and that, I propose, has somehow become part of our shared genetic make-up. Perhaps that will sometime show up in brain science.

As a result there is a fundamental similarity between people in how they see the world. That similarity is greatest where it concerns interaction with nature, with its stable laws, in what I would call ‘first order similarity’.

In this blog I argued that this has also led to what I called the object bias, whereby we try to make sense of abstract notions on the basis of metaphors taken from experience with physical objects in time and space.

As a result, socially, culturally and morally cognitive distance is greater. Nevertheless some common basis remains, if only in the basic, primary, natural, physical experience that supply those metaphors used to make sense of abstract notions. I would call that ‘second order similarity’.


[1] See Lee Braver, 2012, Groundless grounds; A study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, MIT Press.

Monday, November 17, 2014


172. What do you have in mind?

 In thought and language, we treat abstractions as if they were objects in time and space. That is what in this blog I called the object bias (in item 29). One major instance is the container metaphor: people are ‘in love’, ‘in the mood’, ‘in error’, ‘in panic’, and so on. Also, we have things ‘in mind’.

As if thoughts were entities contained in our brain, as stowed away in a drawer, which we can ‘look at’ from within that brain. In fact, ideas are as much outside the brain, in practices, habits and institutions, as in it. There is no private language, as argued by Wittgenstein. To make sense we need corrections from others. Making sense is playing a ‘language game’. One cannot have an idea and ‘look’ at it from outside the idea. Some things are not selected but happen to us. There are things we do not believe but ‘have’. It is odd to say ‘I believe I have a pain’.

So what, if anything, do we have ‘in mind’? As I discussed earlier in this blog, I propose that we do have ‘representations’ in the mind, of a sort, in the form of neural pathways that are constructed from our interaction with things and people in the world. But one cannot step out of a representation and ‘look at it’ ‘from outside’. One dwells in it. One cannot have the cognitive cake and eat it too.

Also, I proposed that much of our thought is based on scripts, structures of connected nodes, which represent structures of logic, causality and action. The classic example is a restaurant script of entering, seating, food selection, eating, paying and leaving. The order and precise content of nodes was upset with the invention of the self-service restaurant. There, selection of food is not from a menu but from a display. If you do not play the game and sit to be served, you get no food.

Scripts are triggered in the mind by circumstance, and perception is unconscious assimilation into scripts, attempting to find a fit into a node of a script.

I imagine that in the brain such scripts are embodied in patterns of connection between neurons. That, I propose, is the embodiment of Wittgenstein’s language games. The scripts emerge as a function of perceived success or failure, with corresponding emotions, with neural connections strengthening or weakening (in adaptation of synaptic thresholds) or arising anew. Neural networks that occur simultaneously, or under similar conditions, more or less often, are tentatively connected. This is the embodiment of association.

The triggering of a script by circumstance embodies what in social psychology is known as framing. Scripts entail prejudice, stereotyping. If observations cannot be fitted into scripts they are ignored, not even registered. If something does fit into a node or several nodes of some script, the rest of the script is attributed to it, in ‘pattern recognition’. People ‘see’ things that are not there.

This prejudice limits substantive rationality, but in evolution it probably was adaptive, in speedy recognition and action, conducive to survival and procreation.

All this, I propose, is how the formation of ideas and meanings from practice, discussed in foregoing items in this blog, is embodied. In terms of the theory of meaning: a script represents what is identified in reference, or denotation, and the ‘slots’ of nodes and features fitted into them constitute the sense or connotation that produces reference.  

Monday, November 10, 2014


171. Realism and empathy

 If thought arises from action and interaction in the world, as argued in earlier in this blog, then it would be odd to doubt the existence of reality.[1] To renounce belief in it would be to renounce the origins of oneself. Here, Descartes gets turned around: not ‘I think therefore I am’ but ‘I am, therefore I think’. I, the world and others exist, and as a result I think.

However, the assumption of the existence of reality, taking it for granted, the absurdity of denying it, does not imply that we know it as it is, independently of our thought, or even what such knowledge would be, or what ‘independence of our thought’ would mean. We cannot simply step out of our conceptualizations of the world.

However, occasionally, and with great effort and trouble, fundamental concepts of the world can be shifted. One example is the radically counter-intuitive notions in modern physics and cosmology, which work only because they are formulated in mathematics, not ordinary language. My efforts to see through what I call an ‘object bias’ in thought and language, earlier in this blog, are another example.

Another argument for the existence of reality is that without it one cannot make sense of evolution. Evolution requires a selection environment that exists more or less independently from the forms of life that are selected for fitness, indeed the notion of ‘fitness’ would not make sense without it.

As noted by Braver, for similar reasons it does not make sense to doubt the existence of other people or empathy, the possibility of some understanding of what others feel and think. However, the very word ‘empathy’ misleadingly suggests that selves pre-exist before they interact.

We develop a sense of identity by inference from what we see other people do or say, and by trying to look at ourselves from their perspective. Without empathy we could hardly develop ourselves. It is precarious to be an autist.

In sum, reality and empathy are to be taken for granted. David Hume already recognized that humanity is based on custom, habit and empathy.

In this blog I have paid much attention to the notion of trust: what it means, its viability, its basis, and its limits (items 68-73). I argued that empathy is crucial for it: the ability to view one’s actions from the perspective of the other.

Rational self-interest of the autonomous individual, as assumed in economic theory, is self-defeating. For life, to be a self, one needs socialization and that requires empathy, with a non-rational foundation in feelings and perceptions (Braver, p. 170). Wittgenstein saw that trust must come before suspicion (Braver, p. 166).

How would the economy look from this perspective? Soon in this blog I will start a long series on that: on economics and on markets.


[1] Here, as before, I employ Lee Braver, 2012, Groundless grounds; A study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, MIT Press.
 

Monday, November 3, 2014


170. Wittgenstein and Heidegger as ethical opposites

 Wittgenstein and Heidegger had strikingly similar ideas concerning knowledge and meaning, as based on habit and practice, discussed in preceding items in this blog. David Hume had similar ideas. So did Aristotle, with his notion of practical wisdom. Here also, the meaning of a concept varies across contexts, in practical conduct, is not fixed, exact and universal. Knowledge is mainly unreflected know-how, acquired in learning-by-doing.

The criterion of adequacy of action and speech lies in legitimacy in established language games. Meanings arise within games and are diffuse, varying across different games for different practices.

In ethics, on the other hand, Wittgenstein and Heidegger are opposites.[1] Wittgenstein took the path of Schopenhauer, and Buddhism, in wanting to subdue the will and lose the self, in ataraxia. Heidegger, by contrast, similarly to Kierkegaard, and to Nietzsche, celebrated the will, commitment to existence, and thriving of the self, taking ownership of life, choosing to choose. They gave rise to existentialism.

Braver (2012, p. 50) put it as follows: ‘What Heidegger seeks to ignite, Wittgenstein stamps out’. I side with Heidegger on this.

But how can Heidegger reconcile this individual, voluntaristic choice with his earlier recognition of submission to community judgement (‘Das Man’) of adequacy and legitimacy? How to move from ‘das Man’ to individual authenticity?

The source of this problem lies in the view that social practice precedes meaning and knowledge, and that therefore the human being is ‘thrown’ into the collective of ‘das Man’.

I propose the following. People indeed develop thought from action in the world, in interaction with other people. But they do so along individual life paths, and as a result the cognition they develop varies, yielding what earlier I called cognitive distance.

How, then, can people get away with differences of view and cognition, given the discipline of social practice? Because meanings are diffuse. They may vary not only between language games but also between people.

More precisely, the logic of this derives from the analysis of meaning that I gave, at several places in this blog, as having two faces: reference and sense. Social practice is viable as long as people categorise, identify things as something, with the same result, in a given context or language game. But underlying that common reference is a variety of sense between people, a variety of connotations attached to a shared concept, on the basis of different experience along different life paths. They identify the same things differently.

One can deviate in thought, interpretation, intention and skill while sufficiently conforming to the rules of a game. A game can be played in different styles.

Tapping from different individual repertoires of connotations, people take part in different language games, and this difference in patterns of practice develops, confirms, and consolidates their differences in sense.

If this were not the case, if there were not this variety between people, how could new practices and language games arise or spin off from existing ones?


[1] Here, as before, I employ Lee Braver, 2012, Groundless grounds; A study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, MIT Press.