Here it is, our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:
So, despite one of last week’s picks, it may be too early to declare the demise of Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar.
Using analogies properly: we need to go back to Aristotle and Wittgenstein.
The dangerous non-science of Freud and Jung, seen through the eyes of Jung’s wife.
“The world,” we read in the Gnostic Gospel of Philip, “came about through a mistake.”
If best options are panpsychism and consciousness-as-illusion, I fear philosophy of mind is stuck in a rut.
Are you smart or rational? (No, the two are not the same thing.)
Bad science is the result of importing the market model into academia.
Footnotes to Plato 
Hi Massimo,
I broadly agree with that article and its consciousness-as-illusion premise, so if that’s a rut then it’s because it’s the right answer. We don’t need to move on from it.
But I think we need to be careful about what this means. What it means is not that there is no consciousness, but that consciousness is a set of illusions we have about how our minds work. Those illusions are a real phenomenon, so consciousness is a real phenomenon.
I tried to explain this point of view in my article on Scientia Salon. Any intelligent agent (even a p-zombie) can be said to have beliefs in some sense, whether or not it has phenomenal consciousness. It represents things about the world and it acts on what it represents in order to achieve some goal. In this limited sense, a chess robot has beliefs about the state of the chess board.
But intelligent agents might also have beliefs about their own cognitive processes, and as with beliefs about the world, these can also be false. So even a p-zombie is potentially subject to illusion, such as the illusion that there really is something to be explained in the qualia of redness it believes itself to perceive — that even a complete functional account of how its brain works leaves something out, despite the fact that such an account would explain why it believes something is missing. But if we can explain satisfactorily why it holds such beliefs without assuming the beliefs to be true, then clearly (it seems to me) there is no need to assume the beliefs to be true and so nothing further to explain.
So there is little reason to believe that we are not p-zombies or that we have “real consciousness”. Equivalently, it is reasonable to conclude that real consciousness exists, but it is no more than having the kind of beliefs about internal cognitive functions that humans and p-zombies are supposed to have, such that a p-zombie which has these same beliefs and yet is unconscious is an incoherent concept.
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Re The Edmonds article “in defence of moral experts”.
He, like just about everybody, is being unfair to Gove by quoting only part of Gove’s sentence. He actually said:
“The people in this country have had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and consistently getting things wrong.”
Further, the context was economics and economic predictions about Brexit, so the sentence should be taken as being about economic experts who make predictions and often get them wrong, and was really a reference to the past record of such people. That is very different from rejecting any and all expertise. Further, it’s fair to point out that so far — and I accept that we haven’t actually had Brexit yet, only the vote — that the predictions of the pro-Brexiters such as Gove are being proved more right than those of the doom-and-gloom “experts from organisations with acronyms” who predicted all sorts of disasters as a result of Brexit. For example, the stock market is substantially up, in contrast to all the predictions from the people Gove was criticising.
Anyhow, rather more on-topic:
My problem with the “expertise” of most of those doing applied moral philosophy is that many of them haven’t yet realised that moral realism and moral cognitivism are false, and without settling those issues much of their applied ethics goes badly wrong. If there is no such thing as coherent, objective morality then much of the moral reasoning from such as Singer, for example, is unfounded.
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Hi Coel,
I don’t think so. Singer proceeds by pointing out inconsistencies in how we apply moral judgements. To be consistent, we can either let a drowning child die to save our expensive shoes, or we should forgo buying expensive shoes in the first place and send the money to charities which will save the lives of children. Either solution works and if you want to be consistent you get to choose which solution you find more attractive. So there’s no appeal to moral realism here, only an appeal to people’s desire to be consistent and to find these kinds of inconsistencies to be troubling.
Although it has to be said Singer does rather assume that people will prefer the more “moral” of the two solutions to the inconsistency, but that’s just because most people don’t want to let children die, not because of an appeal to moral realism.
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The concept of the Rationality Quotient seems to falter on the slightly suspect premise that the people devising the test are rational.
I guess it is no big surprise that we are not an entirely rational being.(religions, psychics, astrology might have been a bit of a hint in this respect).
But those who are pushing these “humans are not rational” studies don’t appear to have realised that this includes themselves.
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Hi Robin,
They do realise this and they generally admit to be prone to all the same biases they are pointing out.
These tests have something to say because once the mistakes are pointed out and explained, everyone generally agrees that the subjects were making irrational choices. So by the standard of what everyone agrees on discussion and reflection and careful thought, people make irrational choices without realising it all the time.
As mentioned before, we can’t prove that this standard is itself rational, but that’s a different problem and one we are obliged to dismiss because we have to assume some level of rationality to engage in any intellectual enterprise.
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With the “bank teller” question, for example, we are told that people fell prey to the “conjunction fallacy”.
I would suggest that there are other possibilities:
Just didn’t think it through
Didn’t read the question properly
Became confused by the misdirection in the question.
The misdirection is, of course, that it appears that the personality sketch is relevant information for answering the question, where of course it is not relevant to the question at all. So someone thinking that it is might consider that it means a) A bank teller who is not a feminist or b) a bank teller who is a feminist. In which case they would have given the best answer b)
It would have been interesting to have had another group which had the question without the misleading personality sketch and see what they answered. I am betting the percentages would have been just about reversed.
When my kids are doing practice NAPLAN tests, they sometimes come across a similar question, they ask “Dad, do they mean that literally, or did they make a mistake in the wording?”
I am unable to tell which it is, I have to go to the answer sheet. Sometimes they mean it literally and it was a trick question, sometimes they have just mucked up the wording. I am betting a “Rationality Quotient” test would easily fall prey to this sort of problem.
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Hi DM,
Agreed, but the presumption that moral attitudes should be consistent, and thus feeling perturbed by inconsistencies, comes from the presumption of moral realism.
Suppose on one occasion I choose chicken for my dinner, and then, two weeks later, in near-identical circumstances, I choose beef. Is anyone the slightest perturbed by my inconsistency? No, because everyone accepts that aesthetic choices are subjective and have no requirement for consistency.
Singer’s method (and that of many similar moral philosophers) is to observe people’s behaviour; distil that into moral axioms; then reason from the axioms and state: given those axioms, and if you want to be consistent, then you should do X.
That would be a valid method if morality formed a coherent rational system complete with axioms, internal consistency and truth values, in the same way that, say, mathematics does. But without that assumption none of his reasoning works and I can simply decline to go along with his reasoning if I feel like it.
It’s as if he were to argue: given that you enjoy eating chicken, beef, pork and lamb you should also — to be consistent — want to eat cat and dog and horse. I can simply reply: well tough, I don’t, and no I don’t have to justify that with any rational argument and nor need I demonstrate consistency.
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Hmm.. Interesting how WordPress strips off numbering. I noticed before that it strips off html numbering tags if you put them in explicitly.
I assume that when we post there is one routine which converts manually numbered lists to an html tagged list and then there is another routine which strips those tags off.
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Sebastian Faulks is certainly practicing his Harvard-approved life extension re Jung and Freud, eh, Massimo? That said, the piece is all factual.
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On Chomsky, actually, there’s a possible new indirect nail in his linguistic coffin. Per the latest research on the origins of Homo sapiens, if use of language goes back as far as 200K years, per the end of this piece, then language use almost surely evolved in a more piecemeal and less saltationist fashion than he envisions: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/22/science/ancient-dna-human-history.html?_r=0
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Oh, and Milway creates a false dilemma strawman in his piece. Just because scholars are still struggling to explain structures in many languages, that doesn’t mean Chomsky’s version is the correct one.
That’s not the only strawman in that piece. Tomasello and others have never claimed that Chomskyites have been living in isolated ivory towers, contra the author.
Finally, Tomasello and Ibbotson DO “know better.”
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Hi Robin,
I think they’re all basically the same thing and are what the experimenters are trying to show. If you read “Thinking Fast and Slow”, this is all explained. Basically people are too lazy to think things through or to read questions properly or to consider whether they have been misdirected, and so they fall prey to various fallacies present in their system for generating gut reactions, fallacies such as the conjunction fallacy. This leads to irrational behaviour.
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Hi Coel,
Fair point. But people feel that their moral choices should be more consistent. I’m relatively happy with inconsistency but most people are not. An appeal to consistency is not the same as an appeal to realism. It’s just an appeal to how people feel they should be making moral judgements.
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Great piece on analogies, and the distinction between their traditional role and the postmodern entertainment role.
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How much of Chomskyites’ reaction to criticism, to stand Milway on his head, is academic turf protection?
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Hi DM,
I don’t think that it is necessarily irrational to fall for some misdirection. We don’t normally think that it is irrational for us not to have seen how an illusionist does a particular trick.
This is pretty much the same, it is a perceptual matter, rather than one of rationality.
Kahneman has primed his subjects to expect a different kind of question. When somebody says “Read this personality sketch and answer this question” and you are not expecting them to be dishonest with you, you naturally expect the question is about the personality sketch.
Every day we make this sort of assumptions about what people say, normal social interaction would be impossible if we were to subject every single utterance to all possible alternate meanings. So they have been tricked by Kahneman and Tversky, rather in the same way that we are tricked by Penn and Teller.
As I said, if they had left out the personality sketch and straightforwardedly asked the questions without any trickery then probably most people would have chosen a)
But then that would not have been very useful to the experimenters.
I think that it is probably a case Kahneman and Tversky being irrational in this case, I am not sure why anyone thinks that unlikely, after all it accords with their hypothesis.
It is one of the more insidious ways we fool ourselves, when we suppose that the realisation that we are irrational will make us rational.
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Well, of course.
But I don’t think this is really “trickery”. It’s pretty mild misdirection if it can even be called that at all. The result of the experiment is interesting because people are so vulnerable to such mild misdirection, that it’s so easy to get them to pick an answer which, with even a moment’s inspection, is so obviously wrong.
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Things like misreading the question, misunderstanding the question and being tricked by linguistic misdirection are all processing errors and nothing to do with rationality.
Mix the two up and you just get entirely the wrong end of the stick. This is one of the major problems that special needs kids have in schools – teachers take processing errors for lack of intelligence or limited rationality.
So if one of these Rationality Quotient tests is really testing for processing errors and being interpreted as a test of rationality, then it might be useless.
On the other hand if they are helping people make fewer processing errors then that might be a good thing in itself.
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Hi Robin
In the language of the authors, processing errors = irrationality. They are the same thing. If you are drawing a distinction, that’s fair enough, but I’m not sure I see it.
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Well of course it is misdirection, what else would you call it.. What does the “personality sketch” have to do with the question? Nothing. But there is a clear implication that the question is about the personality sketch.
So people are primed to expect a particular kind of question and they interpret it that way. There answer was perfectly rational, given their interpretation of the question.
That is a processing issue, not a rationality issue. Even if you read the question carefully, how do you know, in that context, that the people did not really mean it the other way? They have to make that call : trick question, or poor wording? People do word these thing very poorly sometimes.
As I say I come across these all the time in my kids’ practice NAPLAN tests. I have to go to the answer key to check and half the time it is a trick question, half the time it is poor wording.
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Well if it is then he is an idiot.
Sorry to put it so strongly but this sort of confusion has real consequences.
Autistic kids, for example, are often more rational than other kids their age, but much more prone to processing errors. Confuse the two and they get left behind.
But it is the same, to a lesser degree with everybody.
Yes, I know he is a renowned psychology professor, but there are some terrible klutzes in the field. Not that I am saying he is a klutz, but if he is confusing processing issues with rationality issues then he is.
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The bottom-line duh of the “Why panpsychism fails to solve the mystery of consciousness” article:
“[Consciousness] appears to be a specific state of certain highly complex information-processing systems, not a basic feature of the Universe.”
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I know a kid who has a real talent for mathematics. When he learns something new he immediately sees why it is true and sees its implicaitons for a number of other areas in maths.
But he gets very simple maths questions wrong because of his processing problems. When he gets an easy question wrong, he is asked to read the question out loud. It then becomes obvious that he has simply skipped words and got an entirely different question, which he has answered correctly.
Nothing wrong with his rational process. Processing a sentences is kind of like a precompiler. All of us hear or read something and we immediately have it in our own words. You can try this – get someone to say something to someone else. Wait a minute or two and get them to repeat it back. Usually they will have a paraphrase. Unfortunately sometimes in the process the paraphrase will slightly change the meaning. They are not being irrational – their mind has just set up the sentence wrong, they weren’t even aware of it happening.
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The problem of consciousness — and also of qualia — in good part is the problem of how subjective properties can be understood, other than by way of introspection. We have no problem giving accounts of our conscious and qualitative states, in first-person terms. The trouble is that when one characterizes them in the language of science, this dimension of the phenomena is not — and cannot — be captured. And it is the core dimension of the phenomena. Without it, the thing isn’t the thing.
Panpsychism doesn’t help with this at all. It doesn’t explain what it is for matter to have subjective properties. It simply says that it does. And at a level of description at which it clearly, obviously doesn’t.
That philosophers of mind are turning to this ludicrous theory is itself an indication of what a sorry state the discipline is in and has been in, since its attempts to scientize itself. It would be much better off returning to a mode of investigation that is primarily phenomenological and linguistic in nature, rather than the rubbish it’s been engaged in since, roughly the 1960’s.
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“Are you smart or rational? ”
I know some Mensa-level IQ people who are Trump supporters.
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The essay on the moral expertise of philosophers struck me as really lightweight, unconvincing stuff. Apparently it’s not very hard to get published on OUP’s blog.
And no, my “prima facie position” is not that Peter Singer has a good case. Why on earth would it be? He’s wrong about everything he writes on.
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Also, DM has mischaracterized Singer. Of course he thinks you are wrong if you choose the consistent position of saving your shoes and letting the child drown. He is a utilitarian and believes the general welfare is the intrinsic good. And yes, Coel is right: you cannot be a Utilitarian or a Kantian, for that matter, without being a moral realist.
Massimo and I did a dialogue on this some time ago.
http://meaningoflife.tv/videos/31668
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I’d have to agree with Robin on this one. Psychologists often do define rationality in a way that is either conflating it with processing errors or simply the process of a trick. It would be more accurate to say that the research shows that we are often lazy, unwilling to engage in rational/careful discourse, and can be tricked.
All of which doesn’t mean we are irrational. It just means we don’t make rational choices in some context (when we are not lazy, careful, paying attention, looking to check our answers, etc) and irrational ones in other. I just find it annoying that this research is presented as some type of grand insight. I feel like this is an older insight that most people are aware of from their everyday experience and certainly one that has been expressed in scholarship in other fields for many many years. Heck, most of science is premised on it. We make errors, we need to correct them and have mechanisms to correct them and promote ways to be more rational.
For moral realism, Singer actually is a moral realists so I would suggest actually reading his views before just dismissing them out of hand.
But asides from that, I don’t see the problem of expertise for the moral anti-realists or moral pluralists, etc. Having been an anti-realist about morality for many years myself (I’m not anymore), it was always annoying for people to say that oh that must mean you think everything is okay and anything goes or I have no deep opinion on moral matters. Of course not, one can come with plausible and coherent views about one’s morality and make decisions based on those views. In fact, even the works of moral realists are open to moral anti-realists as long as they don’t see it as an objective fact but a system they prefer.
And as long as you have these systems and people that spend time learning and studying them, I don’t see why expertise could not exists for the anti-realists as well as the realists.
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Hi Dan,
Of course he thinks you are morally wrong (according to utilitarianism, which he advocates). But I don’t think he can (or does) claim that you are making some sort of error or mistake in rationality as long as you are willing to knowingly behave in a way many would regard as evil. But I think he does think there’s something irrational about treating these questions inconsistently, at least if you aim to be consistent (which most people do).
My point is only that I don’t think he is appealing to moral realism in support of his arguments. He is appealing to people’s desire to be consistent and to behave according to what they believe they think is right.
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Hi Imad,
OK, just to be clear, I don’t mean to say he isn’t. I’m not really familiar with his views on moral realism per se. But I don’t think his arguments depend explicitly on moral realism for their justification.
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