This Is Not News

Continuing our discussion of the theoretical questions a democratic reformer in the Deweyan tradition would need to answer:

While reformers will find it a challenge to construct a sound logical case for their program, they may well deem it the least of their problems once they face the task of persuading a skeptical public. A strong argument will help, of course, but the plight of the ‘undiscovered public’ is that its members are ruled by ignorance and passions more than by rationality, so thus will often fail to recognize the wisdom of even the best-argued position. The reformer might be able to sidestep this problem with a rational appeal to a ruling elite, one which would hopefully be more receptive to such tactics and be willing to enforce the reform upon the reluctant public. Unfortunately for the Deweyan reformer, ruling elites enforcing policies from above is exactly what he is trying to prevent. Direct persuasion of the public is the goal, so that the public might create for itself the most beneficial social structure possible. Reformers have no alternative but to confront the would-be public’s resistance to change, especially when such change challenges popularly held beliefs about the justice, morality, and validity of the current society.
The reformers’ best tool in this effort may well be the very social image that is the target of reform. Society forms its beliefs about itself in haphazard, piecemeal fashion, and is often unable or unwilling to develop its new ideas through to a conclusion.
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One of Not News’ central tenets is that by providing a forum for discussion of current social problems, we can help build a truly democratic society. In that discussion, however, it’s sometimes easy to ignore the question of what a ‘truly democratic society’ is, or how we should go about building it. I’d like to use the next few Philosophy slots in the article rotation to discuss some of these issues, starting this time out with the question of how far into the future reformers can look in good conscience.

Even when a group of people agree that a system or society must change, the question of how fast it should change can be extremely divisive – as is the related but often overlooked question of how fast it can change. Some of this division can be traced to conflicting agendas, a lack of clearly articulated ideals, or a poor decision-making structure within a reform movement, but in and of itself the timing issue is contentious. Reformers often target those elements of the social order that pose an immediate threat to the physical and mental well-being of large segments of the population, many of which are rooted in longstanding traditions such that any delay in addressing them only compounds the injustice. However, while ‘When do we want it? Now!’ might be an effective rallying cry, and an expression of the optimal turn of events, a truly pragmatic reformer must inevitably accept compromise and look to the future, setting timeframes not in terms of months or even years, but in generations.
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While John Dewey is considered one of the classical pragmatists, ‘pragmatism’ is not a word he often used to describe his way of thinking. Rather, the term was popularized in the early 1900s by Harvard philosopher William James, who credited the term to an old friend of his named Charles Sanders Peirce. For a number of reasons, Peirce never attained the academic successes of Dewey and James, and he gradually developed a complex philosophical system that is beyond the scope of both my expertise and this article. However, in a series of articles published in popular magazines in the late 1800s, Peirce set forth in rather clear terms a number of the principles that James and Dewey later adopted and developed.

Peirce was deeply interested in what he called the fixation of belief. Belief by Peirce’s definition is the opposite of doubt – when we have a belief, we know how we should respond to a given situation, but when we are in doubt, we are momentarily unable to act. The doubt acts as an irritant, provoking us to do something to establish a belief and therefore regain our ability to act. Let’s take a somewhat trivial example to illustrate the point. If I want to go somewhere, I might have to decide whether to take the bus or walk. If I already have some established belief about which method of travel is better, I’ll choose that method without much of a thought, and go about my business. But let’s say I can’t decide. I am in doubt over the preferred method of travel, and so I neither walk nor take the bus. Instead I need to take some kind of action to resolve the doubt. I might check my pocket and realize I don’t have exact fare, at which point I believe that walking is the best course of action. Doubt resolved, course of action chosen, I can proceed.

According to Peirce, the human being doesn’t really care how the doubt gets resolved. It just wants the doubt gone. However, human history has revealed that some methods are ultimately more effective than others. Peirce defines ‘more effective’ according to the original goal of eliminating doubt – if a method generates a belief that generates a new doubt almost immediately, it’s not a very good method. Peirce identified four commonly used methods, and he wasn’t shy about pointing out his favorite.
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The linguists and scientists among you will hopefully find this of interest and/or amusement.

One recurring topic in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, especially the analytic branches of those fields, is the question of what determines the meaning of the words a speaker uses. It should be a pretty uncontroversial assumption that a speaker can’t make words mean just anything. Otherwise we wouldn’t get to have fun correcting people on their use of ‘it’s’ and ‘its,’ ‘affect’ and ‘effect,’ and so on. So what’s the piece of linguistic magic that connects a particular utterance to a particular set of things or phenomena? Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam argued in the 1970s that what the speaker intends or thinks the word means has no bearing on the actual meaning, and came up with a thought experiment designed to prove his case. It goes something like this:

Imagine a world somewhere that is exactly identical to Earth, right down to the population and languages spoken; call it Twin Earth. The only difference is that the colorless, tasteless liquid that fills rivers and oceans, boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, freezes at 32 degrees, makes up the majority of the human body, and is called ‘water’ by the Twin Earth equivalent of English-speakers, does not have a chemical composition of two atoms of hydrogen plus one of oxygen. Instead it has some bizarrely complex structure that we will abbreviate as XYZ. There is a substance with a chemical composition of two atoms of hydrogen plus one of oxygen on Twin Earth, but it’s an incredibly rare substance that has a black color and a tar-like consistency.

Now imagine that you somehow manage to take a trip to Twin Earth, and you’re pretty thirsty from the long journey. You ask your host for a glass of water. What are you really asking for? According to Putnam, you’re asking for the tarry stuff. You come from the community of Earth-English speakers, and the words you say still mean what they would on Earth, not what they would on Twin Earth.

OK, you may say, fair enough, but how does that make me ask for the tarry stuff instead of the clear stuff? Especially since my hosts will give me a glass of the clear stuff and think nothing of it? According to Putnam, what ‘water’ really means is not ‘the colorless, tasteless liquid that fills rivers and oceans, boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, freezes at 32 degrees, makes up the majority of the human body, and so on.’ ‘Water’ means ‘the substance with a chemical composition of two atoms of hydrogen plus one of oxygen,’ and that’s all there is to it. The former definition is a colloquial, secondhand kind of thing, one that’s vague and somewhat problematic at the edges. Add salt and food coloring to a glass of water, and it’s not colorless and tasteless anymore – is it still water? What about heavy water? Mineral water? We need something more precise.

What’s the essence of water, then, the thing that makes it what it is? According to our current scientific understanding, that would be its chemical structure. Relatively few of us have extensively studied the chemical composition of the stuff that comes out of our tap, so we defer to the experts who have, and when they tell us that water is made up of two atoms of hydrogen for every atom of oxygen, we defer to their knowledge and let it determine the extension of the word. (The extension of a word is the set of all the things and phenomena in the world that can be correctly referred to by that word.) Now, even before we knew the chemical composition of water, it had that chemical composition – its essence was always fixed, and so according to Putnam the meaning of the word ‘water’ was always fixed, and it was the job of our experts to determine what that essence was, not decide it for themselves.

The net result is that if our experts were to analyze the glass of liquid your Twin Earth hosts gave to you, they would discover that it was XYZ and not H2O, and they would tell you that, in fact, it wasn’t water. You were speaking a different language from your hosts, and it was a happy accident that the resulting error in translation resulted in you getting the kind of beverage you wanted. The funny thing is, since there are not in fact any experts analyzing the glass, both you and your hosts are unaware that you were really asking for the tarry stuff. Whatever was going on in your head – images of a glass of clear liquid, swimming pools, whatever – had absolutely nothing to do with the actual meaning of what you actually said. What mattered was the external conditions – the structure of the natural world, and the judgment of the experts who analyze that world. Putnam’s position, therefore, came to be known as externalism, and folks are still arguing about it today, even as it’s been refined and expanded through subsequent thought experiments. It all starts on Twin Earth with that glass of liquid, though, so that’s where I figured we’d kick off the conversation.

So what do you think?

“Who do you trust? And who do you serve?”

— Crusade opening credits, written by J. Michael Straczynski

One of the things I like about Straczynski, he asks good questions. In a perceived time of crisis, when our leaders make demands and requests of us, these are particularly apt. To whom do we give the moral authority to guide or dictate our actions? How much authority are we prepared to give to them? To answer these questions accurately, we need to understand ourselves and the nature of our relationship to those in authority. Unfortunately, based on a significant psychological experiment, that understanding is often lacking.

Yale professor Stanley Milgram conducted his initial experiment in the 1960s, using newspaper ads and mail solicitations to collect a group of volunteers for what he claimed was an experiment to test the effect of pain and negative reinforcement on memory. The researcher administering the test told each volunteer that there would be two subjects for each test, one ‘teacher’ and one ‘learner.’ The learner would try to memorize a set of word pairs, then attempt to match a word with its correspondent. Each time the learner got an answer wrong, the teacher would administer an electric shock, with each shock 15 volts stronger than the previous one. The two roles would be randomly assigned to the two subjects by a drawing, after which the learner was strapped into a chair to receive the shocks, and the teacher was brought into a control room with the researcher. Read the remainder of this entry »

There are a couple of interesting threads in our Philosophy forums right now on the nature of an individual’s relationship to society and on the nature of language; while the technicalities of these topics may make them seem like two separate issues, many philosophers have tried to show that they are, in fact, vitally connected. One such philosopher is George Herbert Mead, a colleague of John Dewey in the late nineteenth century. Mead refers to his philosophy as ‘social behaviorism,’ and emphasizes the importance of gestures and actions, not just for human beings but for other creatures in the natural world. (In this discussion, I’m drawing from http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226516687/thisisnotnews, an edited version of Mead’s lectures.)
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One of the things that drew me to philosophy was the discipline’s attempt to answer questions that seemed impossible to answer conclusively. I hope the last few articles, which have surveyed some (but by no means all) of the most significant authors in Western philosophy, have shown how this can be a satisfying and useful discipline. Now it’s time to tackle some of those questions ourselves. I’m confident that some — like “Who on Earth thought a sitcom starring Emeril Lagasse would have any artistic merit?” — will never be answered. But even that unanswered question does suggest a more fundamental, and probably more interesting, set of questions — how the devil do we determine what it means for something to have artistic merit in the first place? And what is art, anyway?
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For all their differences, Descartes, Locke and Berkeley share one trait: they believe that it is possible to develop an argument that defeats skepticism and gives human knowledge a foundation of certainty. That optimism is not universal among philosophers, as David Hume makes clear in Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Hume is probably the most noted of the British empiricists, philosophers who (like Locke and Berkeley) believe that our knowledge comes primarily through our observation of the world around us and not from any inherent set of ideas or rational arguments. Where Hume differs from his fellows is in the amount of faith he’s willing to put into those empirical observations.
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In our last exciting epistemological adventure, John Locke tried to split the difference between objectivity and subjectivity by claiming that objective, primary qualities of objects gave rise to our subjective perceptions or interpretations of secondary qualities in those same objects — so that, for example, the exact shape and size of the particles that make up an apple (and which are always in the apple) interact with our sense organs to make us perceive the color, taste, texture, and so on of the apple. It was a fairly decent compromise, with only one major problem: it doesn’t work. Anglican clergyman/theologian/philosopher George Berkeley wrote a number of texts in the early 1700s that aimed to silence the skeptics who challenged the authority of humanity’s knowledge (and by extension, humanity’s knowledge of God’s authority), and his route went straight through Locke’s system.

Berkeley’s problem with Locke was that in order to maintain a division between objectivity and subjectivity, Locke held onto the distinction between matter — an unthinking, unsensing “stuff” — and ideas — the stuff that goes inside our heads, including our own perceptions. But once you create the distinction, you also create a gap, and it’s that gap that skeptics usually attack. How do we know that the idea that we have in our head really matches up with the matter that’s “out there” causing the idea? (Remember the Matrix scenario.) In terms of Locke’s division into qualities, the questions can be put this way: Locke assumes that the primary qualities give rise to the secondary qualities. But the only way we can know anything about the primary qualities is through the secondary qualities! If I want to know how long something is, for example, I have to rely on my perceptions of color and shading and texture to know where the object ends and where it begins. So the whole process is reliant on what’s going on inside my mind — there’s no totally objective object “out there” in the world that I understand directly. Read the remainder of this entry »

I’ve always been fascinated with the uniqueness of our own experience — how the way things smell, feel, taste, and look to us is something that can’t help but be private. I can’t look through your eyes, you can’t hear through my ears . . . we have to use words and concepts that assume some common frame of reference. And the fact that we get our point across more often than not is a good sign that we do have some kind of common reference. But — as this month’s Humor piece points out in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way — there’s something unavoidably subjective and personal in the whole affair.

It should be no surprise that this revelation has sent many philosophers, focused on classifying and explaining everything, into fits and intellectual contortions. During the modern period, where the search was on for an indubitable and universal truth, something had to be done about this subjectivity. We’ve seen Descartes’ attempts to deal with the problem, and how they were not wholly satisfying. Next up the plate: John Locke, who is probably better known as a political theorist than an epistemologist, but who nonetheless introduced a couple of vital concepts to the dialogue.
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