The Helsinki Circle

Some Musings on Symmetry

Why are symmetries important in physics? Here’s a heuristic answer. We wish our physical theories to be such that nothing of importance depends on an arbitrary choice, say the choice of a coordinate system. Let me make this a bit more precise: Since trivially, if I place the origin in the centre of my apartment I will measure different velocities, distances, angles, and so on, than I would if I place the origin at the front-end of a train in uniform motion. But the actual physics of the situation should not be affected by such arbitrary decisions. In such (classical) inertial frames it appears that accelerations and masses, and thus forces are independent of the choice.

Let me flesh this out a bit more. In classical physics all ‘physical’ magnitudes should remain invariant under certain coordinate transformations. The choice of where to place the origin should be free, the orientation of the axes should be free, and the coordinate frame should be able to either be stationary (compared to some other system) or to move at a constant velocity. Also one should be free to choose which moment of time to mark as t = 0. From these considerations a lot follows. From translational invariance (by Noether’s theorem) both the conservation of momentum (translational invariance with respect to space) and the conservation of energy (translational invariance with respect to time) follow. From rotational invariance follows the conservation of angular momentum. So far so good.

There’s a caveat, though. It is an empirical discovery that we can do such reasoning from symmetries. Had something like Aristotelian physics been correct, all these symmetries would not have helped us in our physical reasoning. This brings out the following point: what if there are symmetries that we think that fundamental physical theories should obey, but have no empirical means of seeing whether such symmetries in fact lead to correct theories, conservation laws and so on? This, I submit, is the case with some of the more exotic symmetries the physics community has brought forward. Take the case of “supersymmetry”. Supersymmetry is, roughly, the idea that all the particles of the standard model of particle physics have “superpartners”. For fermions such superpartners would be bosons, and vice versa. However, at the moment the only reasons to assume supersymmetry are purely theoretical.

So, should we take supersymmetry seriously as physics? Simply put, I do not know. There is, however, a deep problem within theoretical physics: the ways to test theories at the cutting edge of physics seem to be missing. To see this more clearly, I direct the reader to Sabine Hossenfelder’s wonderful book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (2018). In it Hossenfelder, a professional physicist, takes a deep and at times uncomfortable look at her own field. Her verdict: something has gone wrong with theoretical physics – mathematics has blinded (some) practitioners of the field. But do not take my word for it; read the book!

References

Hossenfelder, Sabine (2018): Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, New York: Basic Books.

The Trouble With Counterfactuals

Ilkka Pättiniemi

An important type of statements are counterfactual statements, that is statements about what would be the case if a fact of the matter were different than it actually is. “If a massive meteor had not hit the Earth at around the KT-boundary, birds would not be the only extant dinosaurs” is a counterfactual statement, since the antecedent is false. Counterfactual statements are important, since they allow us to reason about causal relations and thus to make predictions and interventions. But there is, allegedly, a fly in the ointment: we cannot apply truth-functional logics to counterfactuals, and thus we will remain, as a point of logic, unable to evaluate whether any given counterfactual statement is true or false. If you are familiar with our other posts, you might already see where I will be going – I will claim that this is sheer nonsense.

So, what is the supposed problem? The problem, we are told, stems from the properties of material implication. To see this, let us take a look at a piece of counterfactual reasoning: “If instead of A, which is in fact the case, B would be the case THEN also C would be the case.” Even more formally:

A
A ⇔ ¬B
B ⇒ C

Here the problem rises: if the antecedent of a material implication is false, the implication will turn out true! So, all counterfactuals would turn out true. But clearly they all cannot be true, at least if causal explanations rely on getting our counterfactual reasoning right. William Starr pulls no punches in drawing a grim conclusion:

Truth-functional logic is inadequate for counterfactuals not just because the material conditional [⇒] does not capture the fact that some counterfactuals with false antecedents […] are false. It is inadequate because there is, by definition, no truth-functional connective whatsoever that simultaneously combines two false sentences to make a true one […] and combines two false ones to make a false one[.]
Starr 2019

Starr goes on to point out that this is presently taken to show the inadequacy of classical logic, or alternatively to show that one should not assign truth values to counterfactual statements (ibid.).

But what is really going on here? Why did we insist on the counterfactual nature of the antecedent? After all when formalising an argument, we usually pay no heed to whether our premises are true. We only care about the truth of premises when evaluating whether an argument is sound in addition to being valid. If one took the attitude taken above with regards to merely valid arguments, then (at least in those cases where a false premise is the antecedent of a material implication) one should reach an equally grim conclusion: truth-functional logic is inadequate for such purposes. We can only use truth-functional logics, it appears, when all the premises are true. This would be a curious result indeed.

Am I mixing syntactics and semantics here? Perhaps, but only insofar as they are inexorably mixed (at least) in all cases to do with scientific reasoning. If we cannot take provisional claims as our starting position and then apply deductive reasoning of a truth-functional type, most theoretical science will be lost. After all, all scientific facts are held only provisionally – they may end up having been false. Can we then not look at the (material) implications of such claims?

So, how to deal with counterfactuals? Simply by taking for the purpose of reasoning the (counterfactual) antecedent to be true! Just keep in mind for you meta-level considerations that it actually was false. (Also when dealing with several counterfactuals at a time, one must take care not to take as true a set of statements that would lead to a contradiction.) This simple trick allows us to do what we have already been doing: evaluate the truth-values of counterfactual statements. That is, after all, what most exercise problems in physics are…

Again, logic is a tool. Like all tools it can be used well or used poorly. It is not the fault of the tool, if it is used improperly. Of course one may take the problem more seriously and develop non-standard connectives and logics & other tools. But, the thing is, one need not.

References:

Starr, William (2019). Counterfactuals, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/counterfactuals/>.

Rorty on Truth: Truth, What is it Good For?

Ilkka Pättiniemi

Welcome, dear reader, to the third installment of Rorty on Truth. This time around I will take a look at what the concept of ‘truth’ can be good for, at least according to Rorty.

Let’s start with a caricature. (I’m not sure that this in fact is a caricature, but am perfectly willing to accept it as such.) What makes Truth supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is that it excludes error, explains the success of science or epistemic success more generally, and it’s the thing (with some other ingredients) that turns mere belief, mere opinion, into knowledge. So, I have not made a mistake, since what I say is true. Science works, because it gets at the truth. I know that dogs are mammals, because my belief that this is the case, is true. Truth, then, is something our enquiries should aim at. Rorty – and I – will have none of this.

So, why is it that truth cannot be the goal of enquiry? First we must consider what the property ‘true’ or ‘truth’ applies to. Is it a property of things? Does it make sense to say, for instance, that “that rock over there is true”? Only in the sense of a paraphrase for something like “it is true that there is a rock over there”. Truth, then, is first and foremost a property of statements. This raises the question, what is the practical difference of the following two statements: (1) “There is a rock over there”, and (2) “It is true that there is a rock over there”? A certain tone of voice, perhaps. But how would one go about justifying (1) and (2). To justify (1) one could walk up to the rock, and check that it is indeed a rock, one could give an interlocutor with poorer eyesight a pair of binoculars with which to spy the rock, and so on. Is there an additional requirement for justifying (2)? Or would (2) need something other than justification to ground it? Or, to put the matter differently, given that (at least discursively) (1) implies (2), are there two distinct norms for making statements: the norm of justifying one’s statement, and the norm of getting at the truth?

Crispin Wright, for instance, argues that we do indeed have the two aforementioned norms in play (Wright 1992: 19). Rorty (1995) in turn gives an analogy to show that the second norm, truth, is an idle one. Consider two archers, one from ancient Rome and the other one of our contemporaries. Our ancient archer considers herself to have two goals, two norms, at play. She has the goal of hitting the bullseye and the goal of pleasing Diana, the goddess of hunting, and by extension, archery. Our contemporary, on the other hand, is an atheist archer – she has no interest in pleasing any gods, she has only the norm of hitting the bullseye. For our eyes, both archers either fail or succeed at hitting the bullseye, and we can see how this norm influences their behaviour. But our ancient archer’s second norm seems absent: after all the behaviour of the two archers, when it comes to honing their skill, concentrating before release etc. is identical. The norm of pleasing Diana makes no difference for archery, at least for the atheist, since success at archery is not predicated on other norms than hitting the bullseye. Similarly, if we aim to satisfy the norm of justifying our statements, the added norm of getting at the truth is not an added norm at all. One might, however, point out that a belief being justified is not a guarantee that it is true. This is indeed the case. However, as Rorty notes, this

does not entail that two norms are being invoked. Analogously, the fact that an action can be fully justified to a given audience and still not be the right thing to do does not show that we have two duties – one to justify our actions to each other, and another to do the right thing. It merely shows that what can be justified to some audiences cannot be justified to others.[1]
Rorty 1995: 288

Indeed as with the case of the archers’ success, “‘it is true’ is not a helpful explanation of why science works, or why you should share one of my beliefs” (ibid: 286).

So, if truth is not the goal of enquiry, is it still good for something? In his consideration of Donald Davidson’s views on truth Rorty (1991: 128) gives three roles that truth can still play:

An endorsing use, that is a recommendation to trust a claim, or a pat on the head of a claim that has done well by us.
A cautionary use – “what you say is well justified, but it might turn out not to be true”. A reminder of the fallibility of our claims.
A disquotational use, as in the old Tarskian way of making a metalinguistic move: ‘Snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white.

In his (1995: 286) Rorty explicates a further use (implicit already in his 1991):

‘True’ designates “what is preserved by valid inference”,

adding that he sees no significance in the fact that the same term is used for 1, 2, and 4. But these four uses are already a lot: they give us a way of distinguishing between casually held beliefs and well-supported statements (1), of reminding us that justification is an ongoing process (2), of helping us make a shift from talking about thing to talking about language and back (3), and finally, of making distinctions between valid and invalid inferences (4). Is this not enough? Our scientific project can keep going their merry way with this. The demand for Truth with a capital T does not get us any further than a demand for justification will.

[1] It is noteworthy that audiences are not static things. What is accepted by an audience today might not be accepted by them at a later time, since their norms and practices might have changed – in a sense it will be a different audience.

References:

Rorty, Richard (1991): Pragmatism, Davidson and Truth. In Objectivity, Relativism and Truth – Philosophical Papers vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 126–150.
Rorty, Richard (1995): Is Truth A Goal of Enquiry? Davidson vs. Wright. The philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 45, No 180, 281–300.
Wright, C. J. G. (1992): Truth and Objectivity. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

The Metaphysician’s Motte-and-Bailey

Ilmari Hirvonen

Philosophers often think quite highly of what they are doing, and those engaged in metaphysics are no exception. Indeed, metaphysicians offer perhaps the clearest example of this attitude, for they frequently insist that their work is not only important but, in fact, necessary. After all, who could deny the self-evident truth that everyone has ontological commitments in the sense that everyone takes something to exist. All of us – or practically all of us – believe that there are chairs, people, money, atoms, and so on. This, it is claimed, already suffices to make metaphysics inevitable.

Now, of course it is obvious that the scientist and the layperson both make ontological commitments in this very general way. But from that alone one cannot directly infer that theories of tropes, grounding, essences, composition relations, gunk, real definitions, and the like are by the same token indispensable. Since it is equally obvious that most of us don’t in our everyday lives or even within academia take any part in speculating about such things.

In order to make this clearer, let’s distinguish two types of ontology: first-order ontology and second-order ontology.

First-order ontology consists of scientific and everyday ontology, that is, of those ontological commitments that are made in the natural and human sciences, and in our mundane life. In science, first-order ontology simply consists of the scientific theories.

Naturally it goes without saying that the scientific and manifest image of the world can be very different, to use Sellarsian terms. Come to think of it, they’re frequently incompatible with one another. Our everyday beliefs don’t many a time correspond with what science tells us about the world. But, then again, many scientific theories aren’t fully compatible either (think of quantum mechanics and general relativity) and the same goes with ordinary worldviews (think of theism and atheism). Thus, first-order ontology should be considered as an umbrella term which does not refer to some kind of a unified whole.

Second-order ontology, on the other hand, could also be called metaphysical ontology. It encompasses the sort of stuff that metaphysicians do when they philosophise. Second-order ontology is likewise a blanket term. Anyone who has read an introductory textbook on metaphysics knows that the theories of second-order ontology often contradict and compete with each other.

As a side note, this division of the two kinds of ontology is not without predecessors. Similar ideas can be found, for instance, in the works of James Woodward, Paul Humphreys, and Penelope Maddy.

So, the worry here is that metaphysicians are endorsing a motte-and-bailey tactic when they declare the necessity of their discipline. A motte-and-bailey is an argumentative strategy based on equivocation. It is employed when a proponent of some position conflates her doctrine, which is difficult to uphold, with another one that is considerably easier to defend, such as a trivial truth. In our case, the metaphysician claims that doing second-order ontology is unavoidable by pointing out that first-order metaphysics is inescapable. Thus, she equivocates first- and second-order ontology simply because the terms “ontology” and “metaphysics” can be applied to both of them, even though it is clear that they are two very different things.

But maybe I’m being a bit uncharitable here. Occasionally, there is clear evidence that metaphysicians do respect the differences between the two ontologies. And instead of conflating them, the philosophers maintain that first-order ontology already contains hidden second-order assumptions. Alternatively, the metaphysician might argue that first-order ontology requires second-order ontology to back it up, even if it wasn’t concealed in first-order ontology from the very beginning.

Such claims, however, are considerably more difficult to sustain. Remember that ordinary folk, scientists, and other members of academia usually don’t bother themselves with second-order ontology. Moreover, the question arises: which second-order theory, or which set of second-order theories, is included in or required by our first-order ontology? There are a number of metaphysical creeds, after all. Many of them are inconsistent with each other and most of them consistent with our first-order ontology. (And if a theory of second-order ontology conflicts with first-order commitments, then evidently the first-order ontology didn’t contain it or require it.)

Now, usually the same first-order commitment is compatible with several mutually incompatible second-order theories. Therefore, all of the theories are clearly not contained in our first-order ontology. And yet, there seems to be agreement on how first-order commitments should be made. In order to convince someone of the existence of chairs, you can simply show her a few of them. In a similar fashion, physicists and chemists can agree on what basis we should accept the atomic theory. The same is true about sociologists and anthropologists when they state that a medium of exchange, in other words money, is used within a community. Sometimes, of course, determining such things is not easy. But even in those situations, second-order ontology seems to be of little help.

Our first-order commitments are based on some, more or less, shared standards. These criteria aren’t apparently used to make second-order commitments, since there is no agreement about what those commitments should be. In addition, second-order ontology doesn’t seem to lay down the standards of choice, because there is agreement of the criteria but not of second-order ontology. Moreover, we know that all second-order theories cannot be right, as they are irreconcilable. And at the same time, we don’t know which, if any, of them are correct. Hence, it is rather easy to see that one can do first-order ontology without second-order ontology.

To be fair, I must admit that it is important to find out how our first-order commitments are made. In what way do we justify them? What are they based on? Why do we end up accepting the existence of something instead of something else? But to answer these questions it is perhaps more sensible to consult the epistemologist, the philosopher of science, or better still, the sociologist and the psychologist. And yes, we can still call the study of such topics “ontology”.

However, scientists on their own appear to be doing a pretty decent job in making their first-order commitments. Like Arthur Fine has stated, science doesn’t need “to rely on metaphysical or epistemological hearing aids” (Fine 1984: 63). In this sense, the physicist is the best metaphysicist, and here the term “physicist” should be taken as a synecdoche of all practitioners of human and natural sciences. If the metaphysician disagrees and insists on the use of hearing aids, the burden of proof lies on her shoulders.

References

Fine, Arthur (1984): “And Not Anti-Realism Either” Noûs, Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 51–65.

Humphreys, Paul (2013): “Scientific Ontology and Speculative Ontology” in Scientific Metaphysics, Don Ross, James Ladyman, and Harold Kincaid (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 51–78.

Maddy, Penelope (2007): Second Philosophy: A Naturalistic Method, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sellars, Wilfrid (1991): “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” in Science, Perception and Reality, 1963, Atascadero: Ridgeview Publishing Company, pp. 1–40.

Shackel, Nicholas (2005): “The Vacuity of Postmodernist Methodology” Metaphilosophy, Vol. 36, No. 3, pp. 295–320.

Woodward, James (2015): “Methodology, Ontology, and Interventionism” Synthese 192, 3577–3599.

Are You Serious?! Zeno’s Paradox and the Impossibility of Movement

Ilkka Pättiniemi

In a recent piece on Starts With a Bang, Ethan Siegel takes up Zeno’s paradox and argues that it takes physics to solve it. Here I will not so much look at Siegel’s piece as take it as an opportunity to look at the absurdity of Zeno’s paradox seriously. Again this will take us to roads metaphilosophical and metalogical. Such is our lot.

Zeno of Elea was a Greek philosopher who argued for a Parmenidean view of reality with a series of paradoxes that aimed to show the impossibility of his opponents’ metaphysical views. Here following Siegel I will only take up one of Zeno’s paradoxes concerning motion – the paradox known as ‘dichotomy’. The idea behind ‘dichotomy’ is simple: in order for a runner, say the mythical Atalanta, to reach her goal, she will first have to reach the half-way point. But, to reach the half-way point, she will have to reach a point half-way between the start and the half-way point i.e. run quarter of the way. Yet, again she must reach the half-way spot to the quarter-of-the-way spot, and so on. Such a division will go on infinitely. Now, if each step along the way takes a finite amount of time (how could it not?) it will take poor Atalanta an infinite time to reach her goal. Moreover, we can make the track she is running arbitrarily short, and still this conclusion will follow. From this we can clearly see that movement is impossible. This is Zeno’s paradox.

A lot of ink has been spilled in attempts to solve this paradox. I think this is a mistake. There is nothing to solve here. After all, experience shows that movement happens. What we have here is a case where a model for movement (‘dichotomy’) is simply inadequate for the job at hand. Why the model fails doesn’t have to concern us[1]. We can simply go our merry way and produce models more adequate for the job, say the kinematics of Galileo – or those of Einstein. We side-step the paradox rather than address it.

Should ‘dichotomy’ be seen as a reductio ad absurdum? It certainly can be thought as such: after all if at least one the premises (or the logic used) is not mistaken, then movement would be impossible. However, on this view any bad model should be taken as a reductio, which I suppose they technically are, but do they warrant such seriousness?

Still, one might argue, the paradox is forced upon us. But how is it so forced? The world does not force it upon us, as the world points the exact other way – movement is after all empirically possible. Perhaps we are then logically forced to accept the paradox. Now problems multiply. Which logic forces it upon us? Can (any) logic force anything upon us? Regarding the first question, if not all of possible logics[2] support ‘dichotomy’, then we can simply choose a logic which does not, and be done with the paradox. Recall that logic is a tool used for a purpose, and as such we should always choose the best logic for the job. If, by some miracle, all possible logics do in fact support ‘dichotomy’ then we are still left with the second question.

So, can logic force a claim about the world upon us? Simply put, no. A central failure of philosophy has been an attitude that takes all kinds of ‘ontological proofs’ and other logical deductions as showing this or that to be true (or false) about the world or its parts. Logic is simply about valid deductions. Logic can tell us things about (suitably formalized) concepts and their relations to each other, but the question of whether such concepts are applicable to anything is not a question of logic. It is an empirical or a pragmatic question. Further, one should recall what the Tortoise told Achilles after their race: declining to use logic is not a logical mistake (Carroll 1985). Compare this to a carpenter deciding to drive nails with a screwdriver instead of a hammer. She is not guilty of using a hammer wrong – after all she is not using a hammer at all. Similarly the Tortoise is not using logic wrong in declining to accept a sound conclusion, he simply declines to use logic.

So finally, Atalanta reaches her goal, and wins the race. To see this, one need not take heed of differential calculus, refined logics or, pace Siegel, physics. One simply needs to remember to use the right tools for the job. If your tools are lacking, find some others. And in cases like ‘dichotomy’ one can simply refrain from modelling and just go with the empirical evidence.

[1] Studying such a failure might of course help us avoid pitfalls in further attempts at modelling.
[2] Which may, or may not, be a well-defined set.

Reference

Carroll, Lewis (1895): What the Tortoise Said to Achilles. Mind 104 (416): 691–693.

Vat-Knowledge Is Knowledge Enough

Ilmari Hirvonen

Among the mighty tasks that analytic epistemologists have taken upon themselves is to give an answer to the philosophical sceptic. Simplifying a little, one could summarise scepticism as the denial of knowledge. In other words, the sceptic claims that we don’t know anything or, alternatively, some specific thing – like whether the past exists or whether there are objectively true moral values.

Although there have been ancient and modern thinkers who have called themselves sceptics, in reality the philosophical sceptic is all but a mythical creature that can at best be found on the pages of epistemological articles and books. In practice, the sceptic is more like a fictive sparring partner that the epistemologists have conjured up in order for there to be an adversary to fight against, a challenger to whom one can demonstrate that we truly possess knowledge.

One of the main weapons that the (imaginary) sceptic has in her arsenal is appealing to sceptical hypotheses. A sceptical hypothesis is a hypothetical scenario which is incompatible with some piece of knowledge that we ascribe to ourselves. Moreover, we are unable to distinguish in practise the sceptical scenario and the scenario where our knowledge is actually correct.

Perhaps the most well-known modern sceptical hypothesis is the brain in a vat scenario. In this theoretical situation an evil scientist has removed your brain and put it in a vat containing some life-sustaining liquid. In addition, the scientist has connected your nerves to a supercomputer which creates for you the illusion that everything is perfectly normal.

According to the argument, since your brain would in this scenario receive physically identical impulses as it would if it still were in your body, you cannot tell from your perspective that you’re not a brain in a vat. Therefore, you don’t know a number of mundane things, such as whether you actually have internal organs or not. The argument can be formulated as follows:

(1) You don’t know that you’re not a brain in a vat.
(2) If you don’t know that you’re not a brain in a vat, then you don’t know that you have internal organs.
(C) You don’t know that you have internal organs.

Now, even though the conclusion of the sceptical argument seems ridiculous, the logic behind it is flawless. If the premises of the argument are true, then so is the conclusion. Thus, assuming that you want to avoid scepticism, you need to show that there is something wrong with the premises.

And here problems arise. For it is painstakingly difficult – if not impossible – to give good reasons against something that you cannot, by definition, access in any way. From your current point of view or, as a matter of fact, from our current point of view, we cannot really say for sure that we’re not merely bodiless brains trapped in a computer simulation.

Of course, there’s something you could say against the possibility of being nothing more than a brain in a vat. Daniel Dennett, for instance, has pointed out that we aren’t able to produce so credible a virtual reality with our current or future science. Likewise, Evan Thompson and Diego Cosmelli have argued that consciousness requires a body and, thus, we cannot be merely bodiless brains.

These are good points, but they share a common weakness: they assume that the real world, which we cannot access, is similar to the world that we can access. However, the sceptic can modify her account so that we have been trapped in the simulation already from birth. If this were the case, then we wouldn’t know what technology – and perhaps even the laws of nature – would be like in the real world. And, therefore, we couldn’t make reliable inferences about the actual world on the basis of our virtual world.

Despite all this, there seems to be something fundamentally off with the sceptical argument. Think about it. If the argument were sound, then I wouldn’t know whether my refrigerator contains orange juice. But I appear to have really good reasons for claiming that I do know this. I just checked (and it doesn’t). Furthermore, it seems to me that I know this even if the sceptical hypothesis were true.

When I open my refrigerator door, look inside there, and utter the sentence: “I don’t have juice,” I’m making a true statement. My utterance is a correct description of some state of affairs, albeit it might be an incorrect statement of how the metaphysically underlying world is. But, at the very least, my sentence gives a right report of the epistemically accessible world.

Hence, even a mere brain in a vat can still know what kind of a simulation has been fed to it. It is able to have knowledge about the structure and invariances of the simulation. And if this is true, then being a brain in a vat and having internal organs aren’t necessarily incompatible alternatives. You can be a brain in a vat in some metaphysically fundamental sense and nevertheless have internal organs in the epistemically accessible reality. Based on this, the sceptical argument needs to be reformulated as follows:

(1) You don’t know that you’re not a brain in a vat in some metaphysically underlying world.
(2) If you don’t know that you’re not a brain in a vat in some metaphysically underlying world, then you don’t know that you have internal organs in the epistemically accessible world.
(C) You don’t know that you have internal organs in the epistemically accessible world.

It is easy to see that the second premise in the argument is false. The fact that you happen to lack this kind of metaphysical knowledge doesn’t deprive you of all sorts of knowledge. You can know what the epistemically accessible world is like and, amongst other things, that you have internal organs in it. In a word, brains in a vat can possess vat-knowledge. This is the kind of knowledge that you can have irrespectively of whether you are a brain in a vat or not. And besides having vat-knowledge, they can also do vat-science in order to examine what the accessible reality is like.

To be quite honest, I must admit that I haven’t really given an answer to the sceptical hypothesis. For I don’t claim to have shown it to be false. Now, I dislike scepticism just as much as the next person, but I also think we should give the devil his due. Scepticism does indeed show that some types of knowledge are out of our reach. But it only demonstrates that we cannot possess a certain kind of metaphysical knowledge. Knowledge concerning the accessible reality, the only reality that is of practical importance, is still up for grabs.

Understand that I’m not trying to solve scepticism here but rather to dissolve it. This is a plea for not taking it seriously. My claim is that the metaphysical knowledge which is destroyed by scepticism wasn’t that important to begin with. Note – and this is very, very important – that if the brain-in-a-vat scenario is true, then all of our current knowledge actually is vat-knowledge. And we haven’t been doing so bad thus far, have we now? In fact, I personally am quite satisfied with vat-knowledge. What more do you really need to know?

References

Dennett, Daniel C. (1991): Consciousness Explained, New York: Little, Brown and Company.

DeRose, Keith (1999): “Introduction: Responding to Skepticism” in Keith DeRose and Ted A. Warfield (eds.) Skepticism: A Contemporary Reader, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–24.

Pritchard, Duncan: “Contemporary Skepticism” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, URL = https://www.iep.utm.edu/skepcont/

Putnam, Hilary (1998): “Brains in a Vat” in Reason, Truth and History, 1981, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thompson, Evan & Cosmelli, Diego (2011): “Brain in a Vat or Body in a World? Brainbound versus Enactive Views of Experience” Philosophical Topics, vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 163–180.

Rorty on Truth: Putnam and Relativism

Ilkka Pättiniemi

Recall, dear reader, last week’s installment, and Rorty’s thoroughly sociological view of justification. I will take this view for granted for present purposes. That said, it’s time to get on with our story.

Hilary Putnam was one of the great pragmatists of the late 20th and the early 21st Centuries, and as such he shared a lot of his commitments with Rorty. He was also highly suspicious of some of Rorty’s views. Here I will concentrate on his accusations that Rorty is (gasp! shock! horror!) a Relativist. So I will consider whether (i) given their shared commitments, Putnam can paint Rorty as a relativist without tarring himself with the same brush, and (ii) whether such commitments lead to relativism in any case.

So, what commitments do Rorty and Putnam share? In his paper “Putnam and the Relativist Menace” (1993) Rorty helpfully quotes bits from Putnam’s Realism with a Human Face (1990) (RHF in the following quote) that spell out their points of agreement:

(I) … elements of what we call ‘language’ or ‘mind’ penetrate so deeply into what we call “reality” that the very project of representing ourselves as being ‘mapper’s of something ‘language-independent’ is fatally compromised from the start. Like Relativism, but in a different way, Realism is an impossible attempt to view the world from nowhere (RHF 28).
(II) [We should] accept the position we are fated to occupy in any case, the position of beings who cannot have a view of the world that does not reflect our interests and values, but who are, for all that, committed to regarding some views of the world-and, for that matter, some interests and values-as better than others (RHF 178).
(III) What Quine called ‘the indeterminacy of translation’ should rather be viewed as the ‘interest relativity of translation’ ….. ‘[I]nterest relativity’ contrasts with absoluteness, not with objectivity. It can be objective that an interpretation or an explanation is the correct one, given the interests which are relevant in the context (RHF 210).
(IV) The heart of pragmatism, it seems to me – of James’ and Dewey’s pragmatism, if not of Peirce’s – was the insistence on the supremacy of the agent point of view. If we find that we must take a certain point of view, use a certain ‘conceptual system’, when we are engaged in practical activity, in the widest sense of ‘practical activity’, then we must not simultaneously advance the claim that it is not really ‘the way things are in themselves’.
(V) To say, as [Bernard] Williams sometimes does, that convergence to one big picture is required by the very concept of knowledge is sheer dogmatism. … It is, indeed, the case that ethical knowledge cannot claim absoluteness; but that is because the notion of absoluteness is incoherent (RHF 171). (Rorty 1993: 443–444, roman numerals added by Rorty, a footnote is omitted.)

From this shared basis, Putnam thinks he can emerge a non-relativist, while Rorty will be seen as a cultural relativist. How does Putnam get there? The crux of the issue is indeed Rorty’s insistence that justification (or ‘warrant’) is a social matter. Justification is justification for an audience, so justification becomes a matter of what our audience lets us get away with. Progress, then, becomes a matter of reforming our standards in a way that (hopefully) will be seen as better by later, better versions of ourselves. ‘Better’ here will simply mean: such future versions of ourselves that we would accept as better. Better for “us educated, sophisticated, tolerant, wet liberals, the people who are always willing to hear the other side, to think out all the implications, etc.” (Rorty 1993: 541–452) – what we in our best moments hope to be.

But for Putnam this seems unacceptable. He sees Rorty as a relativist,

because I [Rorty] can appeal to no “fact of the matter” to ajudicate [sic] between the possible world in which the Nazis won, inhabited by people for whom the Nazis’ racism seems common sense and our egalitarian tolerance crazy, and the world in which we won and the Nazis’ racism seems crazy.
Rorty 1993: 451.

What could such a “fact of the matter” be? It cannot be anything strongly realist, something taken from a ‘view from nowhere’, since both Rorty and Putnam disregard such fantasies (see I, II and IV above). Perhaps Putnam could play a Peircean move, and talk of ‘idealized communities at the end of inquiry’. But of what help would those be, if they are not seen in the Rortyan way? Given their mutual commitments “all ‘a fact of the matter about whether p is a warranted assertion’ can mean is ‘a fact of the matter about our ability to feel solidarity with a community that views p as warranted’” (Rorty 1993: 452–453). Insofar as Rorty is a relativist, so is Putnam. So much for (i).

So, the question then becomes: are Rorty and Putnam relativists? Simply put, no! At least not in any interesting way. What, after all, is problematic about relativism is that it leaves us without any standards for ‘better’ and ‘worse’ – we are left without norms. But both Putnam and Rorty explicitly deny that we have no standards or norms:

Our norms and standards of anything – including warranted assertibility – are capable of reform. There are better and worse norms and standards.
Putnam 1990: 21, emphasis in the original.

So, neither philosopher will have any truck with normative relativism. Rorty simply seems more honest of the two – he cheerfully accepts that his view is ethnocentrist[1]. This is enough to grant us not only norms and standards, but a way of revising such norms and standards, as our culture works to give us such norms (in the way the world, or God, were supposed to). Then given a penchant for solidarity, a willingness “to hear the other side, to think out all the implications, etc.” (Rorty 1993: 451–452), we are able to expand our audience ever larger – making an ever larger group our ethnos (or better, our demos). Thus the demand for objectivity will be replaced by a demand for more solidarity – the willingness to expand the circle of people we take as our peers, of the points-of-view we take seriously. Will this be enough to stave off the “relativist menace”? If not, I find it hard to see what can.

[1] Here ‘ethnocentrism’ actually plays a double role. The first is almost a platitude: we are products of a culture, an ethnos, and though we might acculturate to a different culture, we cannot go outside of social practices – we can only have different ones. The second role is the particular ethnos of “us educated, sophisticated, tolerant, wet liberals” (Rorty 1993: 451).

References

Putnam, Hilary (1990): Realism with a Human Face. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Rorty, Richard (1993): Putnam and the Relativist Menace. The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 90, no. 9, pp. 443–461.

Rorty on Truth: Conant, Orwell, and the Facts

Ilkka Pättiniemi

Richard Rorty is infamous for his views on truth. Indeed, his insistence that truth is not, nor can it be, the goal of enquiry, and that truth is not an explanatory term (e.g. Rorty 1998), has caused some to call him a relativist, to say that he is anti-science, and so on. I wish to correct these views and alleviate some of the fears that stem from Rortyan ideas about truth. To that end, I am starting a series of posts dealing with Rorty and truth. First I will look at a dispute between Rorty and one of his fellow Pragmatists, James Conant.

In his contribution to Rorty and his Critics, Conant (2000) challenges Rorty’s views on truth, and argues that “the facts” are an indispensable part of any worthwhile epistemology. To do this, Conant takes up Wilson – the protagonist of George Orwell’s 1984. Winston has memories of events that the rest of his society, under the influence of Big Brother’s ruthless totalitarian regime, disagrees with. For Conant “Winston’s memories are the best evidence as to the facts” (Rorty 2000: 343). Here Conant has a view of evidence that is compatible with the standard epistemological one. But how does one compare one’s memories with “the facts”?

That Winston’s memories are a guide to the facts is evident to Orwell, and to us his readers, but this is simply because we have a better access to the facts about Orwell’s fictional world than any of its denizens do, or indeed can, have. So, Winston’s situation is far worse than ours. As Rorty puts it: “Winston’s memories [do not] bear an intrinsic mark of veridicality” (Rorty 2000: 343), and how could they? Our memories do not bear markers “reliable”, “true”, “unreliable”, “false”, and so on.

Furthermore “Winston’s tragedy is that he is in a position in which he will probably be led away, either by force or persuasion, from what we know to be true” (ibid.). A person in our society is usually better off: our society, unlike Winston’s, has a tendency to lead her away from what we know to be false. “But the difference between tragedy and good fortune is only recognizable from the outside – from where we are” (ibid.). But we cannot “rise above ourselves” to view things from “a view from nowhere”, such is our tragedy. We simply have to try to find better vantage points from which to view the world, and hope that our surroundings are not such that they lead us into systematic error.

For Rorty evidence and reasons need to be publically accessible (Rorty 1998). Here I think he is right in taking that anything, say memory, divorced of all intersubjectivity, cannot function as good evidence or persuasive reasons. Without such external marks from which to take our bearings how can we know that our memories, senses, and so on are reliable or not? That a claim is true, is of no help, if we have no way of checking that it is. And insofar as “truth” or “the facts” are not accessible to us, they cannot function as guiding norms for our pursuit of knowledge. The role we might naively think that such veridic concepts play is then taken up by a through and through epistemic concept: justification. But that is a story for another day.

References

Conant, James (2000): “Freedom, Cruelty and Truth: Rorty versus Orwell” in Robert B Brandom (ed.) Rorty and His Critics, Malden MA: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 268–341.

Rorty, Richard (1998): “Is Truth a Goal of Enquiry? Donald Davidson versus Crispin Wright” in Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 19–42.

― (2000): “Response to James Conant” in Robert B Brandom (ed.) Rorty and His Critics, Malden MA: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 342–350.

A Brief Remark on Thought Experiments, or Did Galileo Refute Aristotle?

Ilkka Pättiniemi

The use of a specific a priori method in philosophy is often justified by remarking that the same method is also used to good effect in physics. The method in question is, of course, the use of thought experiments to refute, or to support, claims or theories. A thought experiment can be characterized as stipulating a scenario and then ‘playing it through’ in one’s head. There is much to say about thought experiments, their epistemic status, and the role they play in science, but here I will settle with making some observations about one of the most celebrated thought experiments in physics and philosophy: Galileo’s two falling bodies.

In his Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences (Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche intorno a Due Nuove Scienze, 1638 [1954]) Galileo Galilei’s stand-in, Salviati, tries to convince his interlocutors Sagredo and Simplicio of the inconsistency of Aristotelian physics. Salviati states that even without performing any experiments it is possible to show that Aristotle is wrong in his claim that heavier bodies fall faster than lighter ones. To wit:

If […] we take two bodies whose natural speeds are different, it is clear that on uniting the two, the more rapid one will be partly retarded by the slower, and the slower will be somewhat hastened by the swifter.
Galileo 1954: 63 [107]

After Simplicio agrees with him Salviati continues:

But if this is true, and if a large stone moves with a speed of, say, eight while a smaller moves with a speed of four, then when they are united, the system will move with a speed less than eight; but the two stones when tied together make a stone larger than that which before moved with a speed of eight. Hence the heavier body moves with less speed than the lighter; an effect which is contrary to your supposition. Thus you see how, from your assumption that the heavier body moves more rapidly than the lighter one, I infer that the heavier body moves more slowly.
Galileo 1954: 63 [107–108]

Here Simplicio fails to follow Salviati, and I will soon argue, is not wrong in doing so. Salviati does go on to solidify his reasoning, but the crucial trick has already been played. In any case the above is the way Galileo’s thought experiment is usually presented (Brown 2010: 1–2, Brown & Fehige 2019).

It occasionally behooves one to formalize an argument, just to see what the requisite premises are. This is one of those occasions. The form of Galileo’s argument is as follows:

P1: Heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones. (From Aristotle)
P2: Uniting a light object (mass m₁) to a heavy one (mass m₂) will slow down the heavy object.
P3: Uniting a heavy object (mass m₂) to a light one (mass m₁) will speed up the light object. (Included for completeness.)
C: So an object with mass m₁ + m₂ will fall slower than one with mass m₂. (From P2)
But from P1 m₁ + m₂ will fall faster than m₂. A contradiction!

The Aristotelian is committed to P1, so in order to evade the contradiction, he will have to deny P2 and P3. Is this move available to him? It indeed is, for there is a hidden assumption at play here, one that does all the heavy lifting. In order to justify P2 and P3, one needs to argue that one can consider parts of composite objects as if they were separate. Let us look at this more closely.

Consider two cannon balls of masses m₁ and m₂ (m₁ < m₂). Now tie these together with a piece of string (of negligible mass). Then we will have a composite object of mass m₁ + m₂. Can cannon ball 1 (of mass m₁) act as a drag for cannon ball 2? Intuitively it seems that it can, since it has the smaller mass and thus in Aristotelian physics it will fall slower and so attaching it to the heavier ball will slow the heavier ball down. I will argue that this intuition is mistaken. I will borrow a leaf from Daniel Dennett’s book (2013: 7) and turn the knobs of this intuition.

Now it seems that if the cannon balls are tied together with a piece of string, we can, in some important respect, consider their kinematic properties separately from the whole composite object. What then is the case if we glue the cannon balls together? Can we still consider their kinematic properties separately? If not, why not? Is glue different from string in some (metaphysically?) special way? If glue works the same way as string, then why not consider all objects that have parts as refuting Aristetelian physics? But of course the Aristotelian will not agree with this! If, on the other hand glue is taken to be different from string in combining objects, then surely this requires further arguments, and in lieu of them the Aristotelian can rest content.

To be explicit: the move the Aristotelian should resist (as should all of us) is the one where one willy nilly considers parts of a composite object occasionally as separate objects and occasionally as a singular object. Resisting this move removes support from P2 and P3, and at the same token the contradiction. So Simplicio made a mistake in agreeing with Salviati’s claim that “it is clear that on uniting the two, the more rapid one will be partly retarded by the slower (Galileo 1954: 63 [107]).” As we can see this was far from clear. So, at least on this occasion, Galileo did not refute Aristotle by sheer force of reason.

Now, am I saying that Aristotelian physics was in good standing after Galileo’s treatment of it? Of course not. I am merely pointing out that, unlike some over ambitious defenders of thought experiments claim (Brown 2010: 2, Brown & Fehige 2019), this particular thought experiment is far from devastating. Galileo’s greatness is in his impeccable experimentation and rigorous mathematization of physics. These, not some clever thought experiments, rang the death knell of Aristotelian physics.

So what then of thought experiments in general? It is clear that they have played a major role in the development of physics and philosophy. However I believe that their (especially epistemic) importance has been overplayed, as my analysis above shows. By all means feel free to explore your intuitions about imagined scenarios to your hearts’ content – such exploration might give rise to new hypotheses and arguments, and admittedly it can be great fun. But do not think that such methods suffice to show such hypotheses and arguments to be true. If only it were so easy!

References:

Brown, James Robert (2010). The Laboratory of the Mind, 2nd edition, New York: Routledge.

Brown, James Robert and Yiftach Fehige (2019). Thought Experiments, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entries/thought-experiment/

Dennett, Daniel C. (2013). Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Galileo (1954). Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences (trans. Henry Crew & Alfonso de Salvio), Norwich NY: William Andrew Publishing. (Also published in Hawking, Stephen (ed.) On the Shoulders of Giants, London: Penguin Books, 2003, 399–626.)

Non-Realism Is Not Anti-Realism

Johan Hietanen

Recently, I’ve had the pleasure of discussing with philosophers of science about the virus behind COVID-19. Among other topics, I’ve heard an argument along the following lines: “If you’re not, at your core, a realist about the virus, then it would make no sense for you to support any prevention or management of the virus either.” This argument seems to follow from quite an uncontroversial initial assumption: you have to believe something exists before any action pertaining to it becomes sensical. Yet, the statement above is inaccurate. How so?

Scientific realism, however defined by any given author, is a general positive attitude towards the statements made in science. Anti-realism is defined by Chakravartty (2017) to mean “any position that is opposed to realism along one or more of the [following] dimensions[:] […] the metaphysical commitment to the existence of a mind-independent reality; the semantic commitment to interpret theories literally or at face value; and the epistemological commitment to regard theories as furnishing knowledge of both observables and unobservables.”

This categorization might work for many purposes, but as is often the case with two-valued divisions, important detail is lost. The categorization is not a slight of Chakravartty, however, as this is more or less how stances against scientific realism are generally understood. As well as contention to binary divisions, this may have to do with the anti-realistic counterparts to realism’s “truth”, that is, concepts such as “empirical adequacy”, “warranted assertability”, and the like. The carousel then goes around: if you deny that theories, models, et cetera produced by scientific endeavour are true and state that they are only empirically adequate or something similar, you’re not taking science itself seriously and the success of science will be left as a mystery.

Variations of anti-realism differ, some being more and some less sensical than others. Be that as it may, it is important (as in many other contexts) to differentiate between non-commitment and denial. Anti-realism is best understood as a collection of stances that give a positive argument against the possibility or the confirmation of truth in science. This is to be contrasted with a position that simply refuses to commit to truth in science – such a position is not defined by a positive argument but a negative one. This is to say, if there is reason to doubt the soundness of scientific realism, that is reason enough to not commit to its statements – but that alone does not lead to anti-realism. We can call such positions non-realism.

It is important to stress that adopting non-realism does not require any positive argument against scientific truth (such as the pessimistic metainduction), but a simply an undercutting defeater of the realist argument. Thus one does not have to argue against truth in science, but rather against realism about science, which espouses the former.

Before going further, there is need to clarify what we are talking about when discussing realism. To return to the very general characterization given in the beginning of the text, a very weak version of scientific realism could be understood to just be the belief that science gets things right as an epistemic endeavour. To argue against this would be futile, as the position is obviously correct. However, this form is so weak that it can be questioned whether the noble title of “realism” can be attached to it at all. What is really being discussed in the context of scientific realism is the two-fold commitment with a metaphysical and epistemological branch. The metaphysical branch states that there exists a mind-independent reality and the epistemological branch states that knowledge of this reality is attained (by the means of science, at the very least). It’s this definition that we’ll apply our non-realism to.

What sort of undercutting defeaters are there for scientific realism, then? The most recognized argument for scientific realism is undoubtedly the no-miracles argument by Putnam (1975). The argument goes like this: if one does not accept scientific realism, then the success of science becomes a miracle. The crux of the argument is that, if no miracles are allowed, the overwhelming success of science necessitates that science is right about the mind-independent reality.

One counter-argument to this is to appeal to underdetermination, but a shorter path is available. One can simply ask whether or not the results of science could be exactly the same even if there were no ontological connection of the aforementioned kind. If such a possibility exists, then the success of science does not necessitate realism. Indeed, such a possibility can be sketched quite easily – just imagine observations about, say, A and B, and observations about their relationships, R, and you can start doing science with these observations. There really is nothing outside of the intuitions of some necessitating the miraculousness of this endeavour. (The no-miracles argument is actually, in regard to its epistemological content, just the track record argument for science. That, in turn, is actually quite sound when applied to educate people why scientific methods should be trusted above other forms of enquiry.)

Another common argument for realism is the corroboration argument, which goes roughly as follows: if two or more separate detection mechanisms observe the same entity in a crucially similar way, it would be very extraordinary if the entity did not exist. The corroboration argument is actually just a mirror image of the principle of triangulation, which is central to improving the reliability of scientific knowledge in countless fields of science. Yet, it does nothing to ascertain an ontological connection: as long as we agree that we are able to observe the same set of phenomena, then it should not be so extraordinary that we are able to observe the same phenomena in various ways; the fact that I can both see and feel the calluses in the palms of my hands is hardly a winner argument for scientific realism. (It is to be noted, though, that the corroboration argument is a very sound one when applied against naïve empiricism which takes all phenomena to be separate.)

Other arguments for realism and their defeaters could be considered, but that would soon enough start to repeat a pattern. The core of non-realism, as defined here, is the fact that scientific realism does not bring to science anything that wasn’t already there without it. This would, of course, be alright if realism was a necessary consequence of science – but it’s not. Non-realism is not a new idea: along these lines were, among others, Fine (1984) and Rorty (1993). It is central to understand that scientific realism (or anti-realism, for that matter) is not science – and not really fruitful philosophy of science either since it adds nothing of value.

To return to the statement presented in the beginning of this text, it is now easy enough to clarify where it errs. It states that supporting actions against the spread of the coronavirus requires one to accept, in terms of scientific realism, the mind-independent existence of the virus as described by the relevant scientific fields examining it. The problem here is that what we are able to infer about the virus is done in terms of observation of phenomena: we have contracted people with some symptoms, which are linked to some observations about biology, which in turn are observed to react to different environments and interventions in some ways, and so forth. To deflate realism here requires absolutely no rephrasing of how the virus is understood: it actually just requires phrasing the scientific understanding of the virus exactly as it is.

This still leaves us to answer the question: so what? If one is uncomfortable without the notion of ontological connection, why shouldn’t they pursue a philosophy that provides that to them? This theme could, of course, escalate into ruminations about the nature and purpose of philosophy itself, but I’ll try to steer clear of that topic this time around. However, I offer you this: if there is nothing to be gained from pursuing a field of study, that should at least prompt a consideration of moving on to other topics. Further, insisting on something that cannot be found runs the risk of building a house on top of an imaginary plinth. And that might, in the worst-case scenario, become a health hazard.

References

Chakravartty, Anjan (2017): “Scientific Realism”. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford.

Putnam, Hilary (1975): “What is Mathematical Truth?”. Mathematics, Matter and Method: 60—78. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Fine, Arthur (1984): “The Natural Ontological Attitude”. Scientific Realism: 83—107. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Rorty, Richard (1993): “Holism, Intrinsicality, and the Ambition of Transcendence”. Dennett and his critics: demystifying mind: 184—202. Blackwell, Oxford and Massachusetts.