Digressions&Impressions

Dennett as Synthetic Philosopher.

There is much more to be explored in this evolution of cultural evolution and its role in creating our minds, but first we should look more closely at how it got started. Like the origin of life, this is an unsolved problem, and a very difficult one. Our minds are in some regards as different from other minds as living things are from nonliving things, and finding even one defensible path from our common ancestor with the chimpanzees is a challenging task. There is no shortage of competing hypotheses, and we will consider the best (by my lights). Which came first: language or cooperation or tool making or fire tending or stone throwing or confrontational scavenging or trade or . . .? We shouldn’t be surprised if there proves to be no single “magic bullet” answer, but rather a coevolutionary process with lots of contributing factors feeding on each other. The fact remains that we are the only species so far that has developed explosively cumulative culture—yet another replication bomb—and any speculative story that explains why (both how come and what for) we have culture must also explain why we alone have culture. Culture has obviously been a Good Trick for us, but eyesight and flight are also obvious Good Tricks, and they have each evolved several times in different species. What barriers have stood in the way of other evolutionary lineages developing the same Good Trick?--Daniel C. Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back; The Evolution of Minds, 149.

The evolutionary origin of language is an unsolved, but not insoluble, problem, and both experimental and theoretical work has made progress in formulating testable hypotheses about gradual, incremental evolutionary processes, both cultural and genetic, that could transform the more primitive talents of our ancestors into the verbal dexterity and prolixity of modern language users. The arrival of language then set the stage for yet another great moment in evolutionary history: the origin of comprehension.
In the next chapter we will see how, as linguistic competence grew, it not only accelerated cultural evolution; it permitted the process itself—the process of cultural evolution—to evolve into something less Darwinian, less bottom-up, paving the way for top-down comprehension, one of the most recent fruits on the Tree of Life, and the inauguration of the age of intelligent design. The creativity of individual human beings can be seen to echo, at high speed and in concentrated forms, the R&D processes that created it.--Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back; The Evolution of Minds, 281.

Despite Dennet's training in philosophy (at Oxford, no less, under Ryle), his appointment in a well-regarded philosophy department, and his continued self-identification as a philosopher ("Philosophers, like me" (407)), I suspect that many professional philosophers find Dennett's From Bacteria to Bach and Back, if they read it all with any care, barely philosophy. Dennett offers few structured arguments (with carefully numbered premises), no clear dilemmas/trillemas (etc.) nor the apparent paradoxes that are the staple of our profession nor does he deploy the conceptual distinctions that populate, say, recent philosophy of mind. With a few notable exceptions (Peter Godfrey Smith, Ruth Millikan, Dan Sperber, Bryce Huebner, Jody Azzouni, etc.) Dennett rarely mentions other living philosophers whose work he draws upon.

In some respects Dennett is a legacy philosopher, our intellectual celebrity in the world of public intellectuals, admired or reviled (due to his association with New Atheism). One can easily imagine that Dennett's latest work shares the fate of Rorty's late work: mainstream professional philosophers recognizing the name, and paying respectful lip-service to his importance while ceding engagement with his ideas to other disciplines and TED audiences. This would be a mistake. Dennett's late work is brimming with new ideas (developed in more scholarly publications for over a decade) and insightful changes of heart. (Some other time I offer examples; but recall here.) Along the way, Dennett has become an exemplar for an entirely different way of doing philosophy. I call this (recall here and here): synthetic philosophy.

Synthetic philosophy is the enterprise of bringing together insights, knowledge, and arguments from the special sciences with the aim to offer a theoretically (reasonably) unified, coherent account of complex systems and connect these to a wider culture or other philosophical projects (or both). It may, in turn, generate new research in the special sciences or a new science connected to the framework adopted in the synthetic philosophy. I am not going to define a complex system, but I operationalize it by suggesting it is, in turn, studied by multiple sciences. 

Synthetic philosophy, which shares kinship with what was once known as 'natural philosophy,' is made possible by, and a response to, the intellectual division of labor within and among the scientific disciplines.  It is, thus, a modern phenomenon of the last two centuries. I call it 'synthetic' in order to distinguish it from analytic philosophy.

In Dennett's case, Darwinisms provides the synthesizing glue. This is no coincidence because Darwin himself is the hard-to-classify (among the) last natural philosopher(s)/naturalists or (among) the first synthetic philosopher(s) (if Spencer had not jumped ahead of him). Darwin had brought together insights from a whole number of distinct sciences (geology, botany, paleontology, morphology, entomology, animal husbandry, climate science, etc.) and, in turn, self-consciously revolutionized them with his ideas and opening up new avenues for research. Dennett draws on some of Darwin's own examples or very cleverly recasts them. For example (of the latter), as I noted a few days ago (recall), Darwin deploys a trope from Mandeville and Hume in which the slowly evolved complexity of a ship stands for the unintended functionality of bottom up effectiveness of the division of labor; this example is recast by Dennett in an extended analysis of Leslie Groves top-down design of the Manhattan Project, which involved thousands of competent workers who had no comprehension of what they were contributing to.

A reader, familiar with my fondness for coining fancy new memes, may well suspect that I am at odds with Dennett's self-understanding. This would be no objection to my purposes -- we all have a right to use Dennett's writings  for our own ends --, but as it happens while Dennett does not use the term 'synthetic philosopher,' his self-understanding (or the project's) fits the concept:

[One may object that:] genes can’t explain adaptations (structures, organs, instincts, etc.). That’s true; that’s why we need molecular biology, physiology, embryology, ethology, island biogeography, and all the other specializations of biology if we are going to explain how particular adaptations work and why they are adaptations. We also need these other fields to explain how parasites exploit their hosts, how spider webs are cost-effective food traps, how beavers build their dams, why whales vocalize, and all the rest. Similarly, [in memetics] we need psychology, anthropology, economics, political science, history, philosophy, and literary theory to explain how and why cultural features (good and bad) work the way they do.....Pre-Darwinian natural history at its best was well-developed, systematic science, with hypotheses to test and explanations galore, but Darwin enriched it with a host of questions that put all its generalizations in a new light. My overarching claim in this book is that the evolutionary perspective in general and the memetic perspective with regard to culture transform many of the apparently eternal puzzles of life, that is, meaning and consciousness, in ways inaccessible to those who never look beyond the manifest image that they grew up with and the disciplines they are trained in.-- From Bacteria to Bach and Back, 242-3 [additions in square brackets added by Schliesser].

That is to say, Dennett brings Darwinian theory to bear on and connects existing work in offering empirically informed, but still speculative accounts of the origins of mind, language, and life (most of which already deeply influenced by Darwinism) and to open up a new meta-science of culture, memetics, that can draw upon and re-orient existing cultural studies and human/social sciences. The focus on (hard to know) origins is not just the philosopher's sly tactic to avoid empirical refutation, but it is the application of Darwin's own claim that "all true classification is genealogical; that community of descent is the hidden bond which naturalists have been unconsciously seeking," (Chapter 13, The Origin of Species.)

 As Dennett himself admits (see the quoted passages at top of this post), his book is a list of as-of-yet unsolved problems. There is an irony lurking here; in the philosophy of mind, Dennett is known for being quite critical of the mysterians (373; Searle, Chomsky, etc.) and the folk who embrace variants of the explanatory gap (p. 20; e.g., Levine) or hard problem (p. 318, Chalmers, etc.). In a way, his main criticism is not that they give up too early or too easily (although surely he believes that as well as that they have underappreciated how much he has done toward explaining consciousness), but rather that the difficulty of the problem of consciousness is, in fact, under-appreciated because it involves not the characterization and location of some dividing line, but rather many multi-dimensional problems about how our embodied and (linguistically and materially) en-cultured competences -- many, but not all, without comprehension hang together in various not-so-seem-less (even if the gaps are often obscure to the first person) ways. And despite the famous title of Dennett 1991, at best Dennett has sketched the contours of a possible explanation (in part by telling a plausible origin story and by relating our kinds to other kinds of minds).

How, then, does one judge the merits of synthetic philosophy? Ye shall know them by their fruits, that is, not just by how synthetic philosophies instantiate various  theoretical virtues, but primarily by the new cognitive tools they supply for the special sciences and philosophical reflection, including (ahh) the development of useful new myths.*

Darwin's (meta)-Philosophy of Science In The Origin of Species (and a note on his subtle Spinozism and debts to Smith)

The belief that species were immutable productions was almost unavoidable as long as the history of the world was thought to be of short duration; and now that we have acquired some idea of the lapse of time, we are too apt to assume, without proof, that the geological record is so perfect that it would have afforded us plain evidence of the mutation of species, if they had undergone mutation.

But the chief cause of our natural unwillingness to admit that one species has given birth to other and distinct species, is that we are always slow in admitting any great change of which we do not see the intermediate steps. The difficulty is the same as that felt by so many geologists, when Lyell first insisted that long lines of inland cliffs had been formed, and great valleys excavated, by the slow action of the coast-waves. The mind cannot possibly grasp the full meaning of the term of a hundred million years; it cannot add up and perceive the full effects of many slight variations, accumulated during an almost infinite number of generations.

Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume under the form of an abstract, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the `plan of creation,' `unity of design,' &c., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject my theory. A few naturalists, endowed with much flexibility of mind, and who have already begun to doubt on the immutability of species, may be influenced by this volume; but I look with confidence to the future, to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impartiality. Whoever is led to believe that species are mutable will do good service by conscientiously expressing his conviction; for only thus can the load of prejudice by which this subject is overwhelmed be removed.--Charles Darwin The Origin of Species, Chapter 14.

Yesterday (recall), I remarked that Darwin likes to bookend/frame his arguments in terms of the ignorance of savages (recall also here). In later editions (from the third onward) of Origin this is accompanied by a further framing: in An Historical Sketch, Darwin gives an informed (albeit potted) history of the "progress of opinion on the origin of species" leading up to "the publication of the edition of the work." The book closes with a kind "prophetic glance into futurity"* in which Darwin sketches a trajectory for the reception of his book which I have quoted above. Of course, the rhetorical point of both (the historical sketch) and the quoted passage above is to promote and influence the uptake of Darwin's theory (and, perhaps, to reward him with  proper credit for the relevant bits of it).

Ever since the work of D.T. Campbell (on 'evolutionary epistemology' a term coined by him in Popper's (1974) Schilpp volume) and David Hull (with his evolutionary approach to development of Science) the idea of applying evolutionary ideas to knowledge has been thoroughly worked out and covers many different kinds of projects. The SEP article by Bradie and Harms suggests that Dewey and the pragmatists were the first to to do so. But I am convinced that evolutionary ideas about knowledge precede Darwin and may well have influenced the development of his views in biology (that's for another time). Even so, the purpose of the present post is to look at how Darwin conceptualizes the sociology of knowledge. 

1. The first sentence above suggests that ideas in biology are influenced by ideas about or dependent on cosmogony/cosmology. That's no surprise because as Darwin is at pains to emphasize, his theory requires an almost unimaginable lengthening of the age of the Earth. For those steeped in Christianity that's a problem; but even among christian deists there was a steady increase in the possible age of the Earth from the seventeenth century onward. Spinozists, of course, had no trouble allowing that the age of the Earth extended backward into infinity (as space was infinite).  That is to say, Darwin is acutely aware that the uptake of his ideas about the living world are influenced by what is taken to be possible and reasonable in other domains of inquiry.

2. The second sentence, which restates an important evidential objection against Darwin's theory, reinforces that first point and recalls his ninth chapter which was devoted to refuting the objection. His response there is really three-fold: the geological record has not been exhausted yet; the geological record will always be incomplete (due to constraints on fossilization, and the submersion of previous lands into oceans, etc.); the study of the geological record is itself influenced by the recent "the revolution in our palaeontological ideas." That is, while Darwin is a gradualist about the evolution of species, Darwin conceives of development of disciplinary knowledge as capable of revolutions in thought. I am convinced this idea is indebted to Smith's History of Astronomy.+ Despite the existence of such revolutions, his own 'historical sketch' suggests that there is progress in knowledge. So Darwin is using 'revolution' not in the old-fashioned sense of a circular understanding of knowledge (time, orbits, etc.) but more in the modern sense of a dramatic change, which can (but need not) be an important advance,

Incidentally, as an aside, my mention of Spinozism is not innocent; in that ninth chapter he also writes, "During each of these years, over the whole world, the land and the water has been peopled by hosts of living forms. What an infinite number of generations, which the mind cannot grasp, must have succeeded each other in the long roll of years!" While I am happy to concede to a skeptic that all Darwin needs to be saying here is that there has been a very huge number of generations beyond the mind's possible conception, his use of 'infinite' is politically dangerous--because that implies there need not have been a start at all.** This infinity is repeated in the passage quoted above. 

3. In the second quoted paragraph Darwin then offers a non-epistemic, but psychological error-theory for why a community of enquirers, may be resistant to the uptake of his theory. He claims it is a psychological fact that we require to see intermediate steps before we grant the existence of a great change. And if those steps are not easily visible, we are "always slow" in admitting any "great change." The psychology here is indebted to Smith's psychological-epistemic account (see my book) of how gaps prevent the mind to go along with any claim (and even generate the  painful emotion of wonder--which prompts us to further inquiry). We recoil from such gaps. 

4. This is related to a further psychological point which closes the second paragraph: from the vantage point of the minds of individual epistemic agents, the claims made in geology and in Darwin's theory are fundamentally hard if not impossible to grasp. The point is a quirky one, but can be understood if we take the idea of gaps seriously. It is impossible to inspect visually or manually, as it were, each step in an (unfolding) infinite series. Even if we avoid Zeno style paradoxes here, there is simply no time or resources to do so. The would be knower here, has to allow a form of abstraction that jumps over any would be gaps.++

5. Darwin then closes with a now familiar thought (often attributed to Planck -- "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it --) that scientists who grew up with different conceptual framework are likely to resist to come around to his theory. The epistemic significant point is that Darwin again expresses the idea that background ideas influence the uptake of new theories. In this case the background ideas are deeply entrenched in alternative paradigm. 

6. In addition, Darwin points out that there are really two main kinds of stances toward a theory: (i) one can have a disposition" to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties; (ii) and a disposition that attaches more weight "to the explanation of a certain number of facts." The first (i) is a skeptical disposition; the second (ii) is a confirmatory disposition. The interesting point here is that Darwin recognizes that (i) is a legitimate position and that he does not try to argue against it. But it's clear he thinks that this is nonthreatening because such characters may well find even more problems with other theories.

7. Darwin assumes that the community of knowers is populated with epistemic agents that have different epistemic characters. For in addition to (i-ii), it turns out that (iii) flexibility of mind, and (iv) young age (which he claims is correlated with impartiality) may also impact the uptake of new theories. (I don't mean to suggest there can't be hybrids of i-iv for Darwin.) That is, not unlike his theory of plants and animals, Darwin assumes natural variability within epistemic communities. 

8. Okay, this is a long-ish blog post now. So, one closing observation. The selection mechanism here, which is a kind of bottleneck, is the mind and its  disposition of the epistemic agent. So, it strikes me that Darwin is edging close to a theory of cultural evolution of which his meta-philosophy of science is an example.

Darwin on Savages (II); the Posidonian Argument, revisited

If an architect were to rear a noble and commodious edifice, without the use of cut stone, by selecting from the fragments at the base of a precipice, wedge-formed stones for his arches, elongated stones for his lintels, and flat stones for his roof, we should admire his skill and regard him as the paramount power. Now, the fragments of stone, though indispensable to the architect, bear to the edifice built by him the same relation which the fluctuating variations of organic beings bear to the varied and admirable structures ultimately acquired by their modified descendants.

    Some authors have declared that natural selection explains nothing, unless the precise cause of each slight individual difference be made clear. If it were explained to a savage utterly ignorant of the art of building, how the edifice had been raised stone upon stone … it would be unreasonable if he declared that nothing had been made clear to him, because the precise cause of the shape of each fragment could not be told. But this is a nearly parallel case with the objection that selection explains nothing, because we know not the cause of each individual difference in the structure of each being." Charles Darwin (1868) The Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication, [page 426] [HT David Haig.]

Earlier in the week (recall), I noted that in Origin of Species (right at the start, in fact) one of Darwin's argumentative strategies, relying on was indebted to Hume and Adam Smith, is to rely on the ignorance of savages for heuristic purposes. This strategy entails that i) one is not allowed to attribute knowledge of (to use eighteenth century terminology) remote consequences to the intentions of ancient savages and that (ii) even in domestication and artificial selection there are unintended consequences. But this is not the only methodological use of the ignorant savage. (Again, I ignore the racial issues lurking in the corner here.) He famously closes the Origin, with a related use: "when we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, nearly in the same way as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting, I speak from experience, will the study of natural history become!" So, the lack of knowledge of savages frames Origin.

The origin and function of this savage-ship trope in ideas on the division of labor and the slow development of technology (illustrated by ships) in Mandeville and Hume has been articulated by Stephen Alter in a very nice essay (HT Catherine Kemp an her important essay). However in Mandeville and Hume the ignorant savage is absent in this particular ship trope!

As Alter notes,  a very similar trope (about savages) ends Descent of Man (1871) "He who is not content to look, like a savage, at the phenomena of nature as disconnected, cannot any longer believe that man is the work of a separate act of creation." The target is the theory of separate creation. Such an idea (of special creation) is made possible or conditioned -- historically one may say -- by the inability to see nature as connected (and presumably) law-governed. Here Darwin also echoes Hume (The Natural History of Religion) and Smith (The History of Astronomy and the History of Ancient Physics), where science is first made possible, in the context of the political escape of the state state of nature, by the achievement of treating nature as connected and regular (see my book for details).

So, much for set-up.  

At the top of this post, I quoted the closing lines of Variation. The underlying conceit is that natural selection can explain the machinery behind the origin and variety of domestic and non-domesticated species. As Darwin acknowledges it can't explain everything, and the point of the savage being explained the role of an architect and his tools in a a building, is that it is not an objection to Darwin's theory that it can't do so (in particular explain the reason why in nature small differences -- the raw materials for selection -- spontaneously seem occur). Let's grant Darwin his claims. Darwin's use of an architect example is not innocent, of course, because God is often likened to a divine architect (the house/divine architect analogy is a prominent target in Hume's Dialogues).

One may well wonder why our distance from the savage's understanding of the hidden machinery of nature is such a recurring trope in Darwin. While I don't deny the autobiographical significance of his encounter with 'non-civilized' peoples in his travels, and the more general sense of cultural superiority of Victorian England, I think there is also an explanation rooted in the history of ideas and what I have  been calling the Posidonian argument. Recall Cicero's argument:

But if all the parts of the universe have been so ordered that they could not have been better adapted for use, or more beautiful as regards appearance, let us see whether they are the work of chance, or whether their arrangement is one in which they could not possibly have been combined except by the guidance of consciousness and the divine providence. If, then, the things achieved by nature are more excellent than those achieved by art, and if art produces nothing without making use of intelligence, nature also ought not to be considered destitute of intelligence. If at the sight of a statue or painted picture you know that art has been employed, and from the distant view of the course of a ship feel sure that it is made to move by art and intelligence, and if you understand on looking at a horologe, whether one marked out with lines, or working by means of water, that the hours are indicated by art and not by chance, with what possible consistency can you suppose that the universe which contains these same products of art, and their constructors, and all things, is destitute of forethought and intelligence? Why, if any one were to carry into Scythia or Britain the globe which our friend Posidonius has lately constructed, each one of the revolutions of which brings about the same movement in the sun and moon and five wandering stars as is brought about each day and night in the heavens, no one in those barbarous countries would doubt that that globe was the work of intelligence.--Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods.

In Cicero's argument, when confronted by an intricate, successful representation of the movements of nature, a savage/barbarian will immediate grant that the representation is the product of artificial design. If one then grants the premise that artifice "produces nothing without making use of intelligence, nature also ought not to be considered destitute of intelligence" in virtue of the fact that nature is superior (in some sense) to artifice, some cleaned up version of the argument goes through (see this reconstruction by Hunter). That nature is superior to artifice, I dub nature's superiority premise. As regular readers know, I have been interested in a particular version(s) of this so-called Posidonian argument, revived and articulated in the early modern period (see here on Dennett and Descartes, here on Boyle's plagiarism, here on Locke/Newton, here on Voltaire, and Voltaire and Spinoza, etc.). My particular interest in the argument is made clear by the following (rational) reconstruction:

(I) A necessary condition of the possibility of (an (intended)) successful scientific representation or concrete model of (a region of) nature is that (a region of) nature is orderly;

(II) (A region of) Nature’s hidden order could not be the product of chance [as suggested by Epicureanism] or necessity [as suggested by Spinozism], but only by an Ordering God/Very powerful/infinite mind;

(III) [It’s possible that] Science produces successful representations and successful concrete models of (a region of) nature.

(IV) ∴ There is a God (of order).

In my reconstruction, Cicero''s nature's superiority premise is suppressed, but it lurks behinds (I) and (III). The savage's assent that surely the machine is (intelligently) man-made is suppressed in (III). [I leave it as an exercise to the reader to reinstate them into a longer rational reconstruction.] Even so, the savage/barbarian gazing at the machine shows up throughout the sources.

Let me, in closing, return to Darwin. I think the framing of his arguments by way of a savage is explained by the known pull of the Posidonian argument on his readers (and perhaps himself). It should come as no surprise, then, that Darwin explicitly endorses  a version of nature's superiority premise in Origin:  "But Natural Selection, as we shall hereafter see, is a power incessantly ready for action, and is as immeasurably superior to man's feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are to those of Art."--(Chapter 3.) The echoes to Cicero's Posidonian argument are unmistakably. (As noted, Cicero's argument known in various guises throughout the eighteenth century. (In my view Paley does not present the strongest version of it, but that's for another time.) Darwin's innovation is that rather than speaking of nature as such, he speaks of natural selection. And the effect of that substitution is to make transparent that premise (II) misses at least alternative. So, it needs needs to be rewritten.

(II*) (A region of) Nature’s hidden order could not be the product of mere chance [as suggested by Epicureanism]* or mere necessity [as suggested by Spinozism],+ but only by an Ordering God/Very powerful/infinite mind or Natural Selection.

The relationship between (a) natural selection and an ordering god  and between (b) natural selection as an alternative to Epicureanism and/or Spinozism is not transparent. The significance of this point is not, primarily, that the conclusion of the Posidonian argument is now undermined (after all a Deist will be untroubled by the existence of natural selection), but rather that the functionality of the Posidonian argument as such is destabilized. It's fruitfulness as a thinking device comes to an end with Darwin.

 

On (non) Retractions in Professional Philosophy, again.

Your second charge, that we have printed an article containing multiple empirical falsehoods, also deserves serious consideration.  It is the position of the editors that empirical falsity of claims in an article published in PPR cannot be a condition of retraction, correction, or apology. And while we appreciate why you interpret the evidence that you have provided as showing that the author’s claim is empirically false, we are not persuaded that it is inconsistent with the letter of the author’s carefully worded claim, and whether it is turns again on an academic issue – namely, who is to qualify as ‘trans’.  Again, when something turns on an academic issue under dispute, it is not the role of the editors to decide this issue pre-emptively.--Ernest Sosa, For the Editors of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. [Anil Gupta, Maria Lasonen-Aarnio, Ram Neta, Carolina Sartorio, Mark Schroeder, Ernest Sosa, Daniel Stoljar]@Dailynous.

First, in this post I do not address the merits of the underlying dispute whether 'TERF' is a slur -- except to express skepticism that any term can be a "neutral counterpart"*  -- nor the more substantial dispute over the relationships of trans-rights and the critique of these by some feminists. I am, however, struck by what seems to be a lack of mutual recognition in the debate. And I wonder if well-meaning bystanders can't promote some such recognition and, thereby, help facilitate mutual dialogue. In an age where (various intersections of) feminist and trans agenda's are in retreat and threatened with worse, it seems likely that this dispute will leave all parties to it worse off. In what follows I focus primarily on the editors' response.

Second, the editors of PPR are to be congratulated for responding in a timely, direct, and carefully worded manner to concerns over their publication standards.  I am, especially, pleased that they did not resort to an empty, proceduralist stance.+ I hope they, thereby, set a standard for other philosophy journal editors. These controversies are (perhaps awful to the participants and those with an interest or identity at stake) useful to the profession because they allow us to look under the hood of editorial practices and ask probing questions. I hope they receive the following comments in the spirit of friendship with  which they are written. 

Third, I understand the temptation of the editors to assert that "empirical falsity of claims in an article published in PPR cannot be a condition of retraction, correction, or apology." Philosophy papers are full of empirically ludicrous toy examples, thought experiments, fictional circumstances, and mythic histories (and worse). In many cases these are mere bugs of the argument, facilitating focus on the relevant conceptual (etc.) issues. The empirical falsity is non-intrinsic to the underlying insight or argument. More important, quite a few normative philosophy papers wish to change the world or explore normative standards in a nearby possible world--empirical falsity is not a bug, but a feature. So, empirical falsity is never sufficient grounds for correction or retraction (etc.) 

But I wish to raise four concerns with the editors's stance: as stated, [I] the editors' assertion is too strong, and is too strong especially in cases like the ones under dispute. Quite a bit of philosophy draws on empirical sciences or empirical facts to advance the argument. There are sufficiently many cases where getting the empirical facts right is, in fact, central to some feature of the argument. For philosophers who grew up with the idea that philosophy is fundamentally conceptual analysis this is, perhaps, a discomfiting idea. (And, no, I don't want to rule out from my blogchair papers on zombies, unicorns, etc.) But in cases where empirical adequacy matters to the spirit and argument of the article, there are good -- including enlightened self-interest -- reasons to prevent philosophy journals from knowingly allowing empirically false claims to be legitimated by publication in philosophy journals. Philosophers have a collective interest as not being hospitable to, say, medical quackery (fill in your favorite example), young earth creationists, phlogiston chemists, or racial eugenicists. 

To be sure, philosophers need not farm out evaluation of empirical falsity, say, to the sciences. (I resist the division of labor in which philosophers are, say experts of the normative and social sciences of the factive.) Part of our role may well be to challenge status quo bias within and foundational assumptions of or (yes) conceptual confusions within the sciences. But in such cases the controversial nature of what empirical falsity is, is not disguised. But we should not assume  that the empirical effects of philosophy are neglible and shrug our collective shoulders about the infiltration of (relevant) empirical falsity in philosophy papers. 

I don't mean to suggest that good faith mistakes are -- even when central to the argument -- grounds for retraction. But [II] the editors unnecessarily conflate retraction, correction, and apology. Especially now that publication and readership is primarily electronic, correction is, where appropriate, something we should encourage. Where a normative argument, say, relies for its feasibility on appeal to (what turns out to be) a badly designed empirical study, or for its intuitiveness on discredited science, it would be quite useful, especially if you care about the advance and progress of philosophical positions, to have modest corrections attached to papers. Because non of us can be expert on everything, we should aim to prevent the infiltration of empirical falsity into the bits of philosophy that may crucially rely on it.

In effect, the editors kind of agree with the spirit behind my [I&II] because they go on to say "we are not persuaded that it is inconsistent with the letter of the author’s carefully worded claim, and whether it is turns again on an academic issue – namely, who is to qualify as ‘trans’." This is, in fact,  [III] the right kind of response to folk demanding retraction here. (Whether it is the correct response depends on the judgments about the underlying issue that I promised not to engage in.) Here the editors take the kind of responsibility the community expects from them. Further scrutiny and time will tell if it was the right decision, but their grounds are at least explicit and clear. 

There is, however, one other dissonant in the editor's letter. In response to the first criticism, they say, we "consulted with  several senior distinguished scholars in the relevant field, whose consensus view was..." There is nothing wrong with consulting other experts -- that's one intrinsic reason why editors have referees--, and the editors of PPR are to be congratulated for due diligence and (politically savvy for) being alert to the problem in advance, but this is a classic case of buck-passing. Problem is the experts are unnamed and there reasons unreported. More important, [IV] unintentionally perhaps, the editors of PPR promote the philosophy and sociologically pernicious (yes, sorry) view that expert consensus is, in philosophical debate, authoritative grounds to settle disputes.1 (Long time readers are familiar with my arguments against the importation of Kuhnian normal science standards into philosophy.) The expert consensus model may at times be useful in some policy areas, and in philosophy it may be informative to learn when there is such a consensus, but the predictable and usual function of the model is to silence opponents without having to answer their substantive arguments.**    

Let me sum up, regular readers know (recall) that I use our professional controversies to advocate for and encourage editors to engage in more experimentation among philosophical publication strategies. That's because I think philosophy can make enormously important contributions to public life, and I think our present, rather static and  risk averse and non-transparent publication models are liable to inductive risk. Developing standards such that correction can become an ordinary part of publication is one way to take our public and mutual responsibilities seriously. ++

On Darwin and the Savage (in The Origin of Species); and Hume's Treatise.

It has often been assumed that man has chosen for domestication animals and plants having an extraordinary inherent tendency to vary, and likewise to withstand diverse climates. I do not dispute that these capacities have added largely to the value of most of our domesticated productions; but how could a savage possibly know, when he first tamed an animal, whether it would vary in succeeding generations, and whether it would endure other climates? Has the little variability of the ass or guinea-fowl, or the small power of endurance of warmth by the reindeer, or of cold by the common camel, prevented their domestication? I cannot doubt that if other animals and plants, equal in number to our domesticated productions, and belonging to equally diverse classes and countries, were taken from a state of nature, and could be made to breed for an equal number of generations under domestication, they would vary on an average as largely as the parent species of our existing domesticated productions have varied.--Charles Darwin The Origin of Species (quoting from the first edition), chapter 1.

I start with a disclaimer. In this post, I ignore what Darwin's views of savages entail about his racial views (in part because I want to resist the temptation here to read his claims about civilizations (for example) in Descent back into The Origin of Species.) I do so primarily because here I want to focus on a methodological move in his argument, which I think is indebted to Hume and Adam Smith (both of whom he read).* To the best of my knowledge the point has not been noticed before, but as always I welcome readers' suggestions.

I don't mean to ignore political theory entirely. In the eighteenth century, and one finds this use, too, in Mill, it is common to use 'savages' as referring to folk who do not live under the rule of law (the contrast is with those that do--these are 'civilized'). Obviously the contrast between savage and civilized is normative (it's generally better to be civilized according to such theorists), but in some contexts 'savages' (and 'civilized') is used descriptively. Darwin kind of leaves ambiguous whether the savages he is discussing are themselves in the "state of nature" -- so that he is also claiming that domestication of animals and artificial selection temporally precedes the founding of political society (I think this is compatible with his views) --  or if he is only treating animal and plant domestication as a departure from the state of nature.  But if he does claim this, it's natural to think (and may say that Nietzsche and Foucault explicitly think it) that on the Darwinian account the escape of the state of nature by humans is itself a form of domestication and artificial selection of humans.+ 

Okay, with that in place, let's turn to the methodological point lurking here. The quoted passage is from Darwin's treatment of artificial selection by humans. In the paragraph, Darwin main claim is that (i) one is not allowed to attribute knowledge of (to use eighteenth century terminology) remote consequences to the intentions of ancient savages. When animals are first domesticated they serve particular local ends for humans. It's possible that domestication precedes utility, that it happens quite accidentally at first (in the same chapter Darwin calls this "unconscious selection"), but the domesticated/ing animals and plans are kept around because they serve human ends.** I return to (i) below, but strikingly in Darwin's hands it follows from (i) that (ii) even in domestication and artificial selection there are unintended consequences. The explanation for (ii) is that such consequences are simply unforeseeable for folk without knowledge of the effects of selection.

Darwin thinks that in the course of time, breeders start developing know how about and even studying the effects of artificial selection and so develop quite a bit of knowledge about remote consequences of their efforts. This is clear because the whole point of chapter 1 is showcase (part of) Darwin's rhetorical (and perhaps epistemic) strategy is to build his own theory of natural selection on top of such knowledge of artificial selection. I don't mean to deny that Darwin's theory natural selection is all about outcomes intended by nobody (natural selection is blind), but it is the case that certain structural elements of such outcomes are foreseeable by theory (later in the book Darwin gives some striking examples of that, but that's for another time).

Hume (himself a theorist of unintended consequences) uses versions of (i) at a key point in his account of the origins of justice:

The idea of justice can never serve to this purpose, or be taken for a natural principle, capable of inspiring men with an equitable conduct towards each other. That virtue, as it is now understood, wou'd never have been dream'd of among rude and savage men. (Treatise 3.2.2.8) [I describe this in my book here.]

Hume's savages are in some sense slightly more hypothetical than Darwin's, but in other respects the strategy is the same.  (Darwin also describes existing savages in the same chapter; in the Treatise, at least, but not elsewhere, Hume has little interest in really existing savages.) Part of the explanatory point is that there are forced moves, I call them social conceptual necessitation relations, that constrain any adequate genealogical explanation. 

Darwin's debt to 18th century political economy (Malthus) is familiar enough, but I hope to have indicated here that there are further methodological roots of Darwinism to be explored in the writings of Hume and smith. Finally, I don't mean to suggest I have  exhausted Darwin's views on savages in origins. At one point (in chapter 11), he writes, "The various beings thus left stranded may be compared with savage races of man, driven up and surviving in the mountain-fastnesses of almost every land, which serve as a record, full of interest to us, of the former inhabitants of the surrounding lowlands." This echoes Plato's Laws, but that's for another time.

Three bodies on a bed.

[This is the last Digression before my annual Summer break. I thank you, loyal reader, for your continued interest. I hope to be back later around the end of August, or early September.--ES]

Gute Nacht, Freunde, es wird Zeit für mich zu gehen.

Was ich noch zu sagen hätte, dauert eine Zigarette und ein letztes Glas im Stehen.--Reinhard Mey

My dad's least breath was a loud snore. I was holding his hand, while stealing a glance at my sister and his face. Before I could grasp it, his hand stopped resisting my grip. Then, we were three bodies on a bed.

Yesterday, I wrote that my post was "prompted by a chance encounter with Rachel Carson's (1962) Silent Spring, which was sold as a cheap paperback, 'modern classic' in a general bookstore." That was factually correct. But it felt untrue; I had omitted that I had seen her book mentioned in Cixin Liu's The Three Body Problem (see here) a science fiction novel I read earlier in the Summer.

In Letter 36, Seneca says that fortune has no right over our conduct [in mores fortuna ius non habet]. The underlying point is that we should so cultivate our dispositions that we can react to bad fortune with equanimity, and that when we have the good fortune of riches we can let our good characters shine. 

Seneca, anticipating my objection, recognizes that fortune shapes our conduct.  Our starting points matter, "if you had been born in Parthia [si in Parthia natus esset], you would have begun, when a child, to bend the bow, etc."

In the 1961 version of "Two Dogmas," Quine inserts the claim that "asking which points in Ohio are starting points" is meaningless.* In context, Quine omits to mention he was born in Ohio.** The point is, perhaps, irrelevant in the debate with Carnap over the status of postulates, but once made aware of it, it changes the meaning of the text (if you are a semantic holist). It's an oblique, even existential joke.

Seneca urges to meditate, so we learn to scorn death (Quid ergo huic meditandum est?...mortem contemnere). Seneca is easily misunderstood here, but his point is familiar enough: we should overcome the fear of death. What's less familiar is that Seneca grounds this advice on the claim that nobody doubts that death has some element which inspires terror in everybody [quae quin habeat aliquid in se terribile... nemo dubitat]. (In fact, this has the character of a political postulate.) 

Seneca's postulate consists of a claim about what nobody doubts about the opinions of anybody else. (Does the absence of  such doubt count as knowledge?) I feel a recalcitrance toward Seneca--with what authority is he speaking on behalf of us? But a few lines down, he goes on to qualify the claim; infants, kids+ and the mad are untouched by the property of death that gives rise to terror in everybody else. Strikingly, he urges reason to emulate their folly (stultitia).++ It's too easily overlooked that he also implies that what nobody doubts about others' views is itself constituted by patterns of omitting those whose voices don't count.  

Seneca's version of eternal return, that everything which seems to die merely mutates (omnia quae videntur perire mutari), leaves me indifferent today.  

Before my dad died, he smoked a last cigarette. In German he quoted Mey. I marveled at his performance. Mey's tune had been the theme song of a Dutch late-night radio program which has been going strong for more than forty years.

As I grasped the significance of that snore, I intuited that we must have often listened to the same radio program lying in bed, without realizing it, before sleep.

 

 

Rachel Carson as Synthetic Philosopher (and public thinker, environmentalist, citizen-activist, etc.)

The whole process spraying seems caught up in an endless spiral. Since DDT was released for civilian use, a process of escalation has been going on in which ever more toxic materials must be found. This has happened because insects, in a triumphant vindication of Darwin’s principle of the survival of the fittest, have evolved super races immune to the particular insecticide used, hence a deadlier one has always had to be developed—and then a deadlier one than that. It has happened also because...destructive insects often undergo a “flareback,” or resurgence, after spraying, in numbers greater than before. Thus the chemical war is never won, and all life is caught in its violent crossfire.

Along with the possibility of the extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man’s total environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm—substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals, and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the future depends.--Rachel Carson (1962) Silent Spring. [A version of this material also appeared in the June 16, 1962, issue of the New Yorker.]

Synthetic philosophy is the enterprise of bringing together insights, knowledge, and arguments from the special sciences with the aim to offer a coherent account of complex systems and connect these to a wider culture or other philosophical projects (or both). It may, in turn, generate  new research in the special sciences or a new science connected to the framework adopted in the synthetic philosophy. I am not going to define a complex system, but I operationalize it by suggesting it is, in turn, studied by multiple sciences. (One can also have a science of complex systems.) 

Synthetic philosophy, which shares kinship with what was once known as 'natural philosophy,' is made possible by, and a response to, the intellectual division of labor within and among the scientific disciplines.  It is, thus, a modern phenomenon of the last two centuries. Not unlike other Enlightenment thinkers, Adam Smith saw the need for such a philosophy in light of the increasing division of labor in the sciences; but the demarcation between philosophy and science and the disciplining of sciences are nineteenth century phenomena. (I believe Spencer coined the term.)

I call it 'synthetic' in order to distinguish it from so-called analytic philosophy. This is not to deny that there have been analytic philosophers -- Neurath, in particular, springs to mind -- that saw the need for a philosophical response and task (i.e., orchestration, or a unified common language) to increasing scientific specialization. But analytic philosophy tends to favor decomposition. Of course, today analytic philosophers are primarily focused on argument, the resolution of apparent dilemma's (tri-lemmas, paradoxes) which can be represented by argument, or conceptual clarification (by offering distinctions, necessary/sufficient conditions), or the analysis of language, a special special science, etc. (The previous two sentences are not meant to be  exhaustive.) Some synthetic philosophers -- Daniel C. Dennett [recall the posts [here and here] on his From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds], Peter Godfrey Smith [recall this post on his Other Minds: The Octopus and The Evolution of Intelligent Life. [Emphasis in original--ES], etc. -- are trained in and admired by analytic philosophy, and may contribute to philosophical sub-fields (e.g., philosophy of mind, philosophy of biology, philosophy of science, etc.).

The previous three paragraphs were prompted by a chance encounter with Rachel Carson's (1962) Silent Spring, which was sold as a cheap paperback, 'modern classic' in a general bookstore. I had somehow managed to ignore the book during the half-century festivities a few years ago. My ignorance reveals a personal imperfection: a lack of serious engagement with environmental thought (and so passing over environmental ethics courses), something I hope to rectify. But it is also an institutional defect: in my training as philosopher of science I did not encounter Carson's work, which -- as is well known helped found the modern environmental movement -- on each page draws on amazing number of different sciences (not just physics, chemistry, biochemistry, genetics, and medicine, but also entomology, botany, ecology, zoology, crop-management, forestry, fisheries, oceanography, etc.) and integrates these with issues in public health and public policy. She also anticipates discussions of inductive risk, the use of precautionary principles, the (statistical) interaction of what are taken to be isolated effects/phenomena, the use of natural experiments, the problem of scaling up results obtained in the laboratory, the problems of bias (in sponsored research), etc.

I suspect the absence of Carson in my education can be explained on sociological grounds: generalist philosophers of science were busy with analyzing the practice of science (looking for quasi-topic neutral accounts  of explanation, unification, understanding, models, evidence, mechanisms, etc.), while philosophers of the special sciences were busy looking at distinctive features of particular sciences. (In recent times, philosophers of science also run simulations, do experiments, etc.) Obviously, this is a bit caricature and there were important synthetic philosophers that were read widely (e.g., Marjorie Grene, David Hull, Bill Wimsatt, etc.). There are, of course, philosophers of science that engage with Carson's work (notably Susan Sterrett); I am not claiming originality here.

Among many other clear-sighted insights, it is especially notable that half a decade before the public choice theorist, Gordon Tullock, works out the idea of rent-seeking, Carson has firm grip on the concept and practice. Her pages are filled with governmental agencies recklessly and expensively promoting practices that will profit private interests at the expense of the public's. In fact, she has excellent grasp of the mechanisms by which tackling externalities from the top down tends to create worse externalities (see the 'resurgence' in the quote above). Even today, her work is refreshing because it cuts across the endless debate among proponents of state vs market. (She was a trained aquatic biologist, but had worked in the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries), and some of the best passages in the book are about bureaucratic functioning. 

The passage  quoted above comes from near the start of the book.+ It hints at the riches contained in the book. Carson uses Darwinian style reasoning throughout the argument and an ecological interpretation of Darwin's theory integrates the many strands of the argument. The historian in me also enjoyed how she develops and applies a (rather ancient and now dated) 'balance of nature' theory. (Our age prefers more dynamic, chaotic, and punctuated equilibria systems.)

The key point, and this runs through all her arguments, is that many well-intended large-scale interventions generate unintended and often counterproductive consequences. She thinks these consequences are often foreseeable to informed bystanders if one were willing to leave one's intellectual silo or think through the ecological situation. (This is exactly how, on my interpretation, Adam Smith understands his invisible hand.) That is, a certain kind of generalist -- the synthetic philosopher -- may well foresee outcomes that the specialist is trained to ignore.* The synthetic philosopher can call attention to a wider array of strategies that cross specializations. More important, she can draw attention to the wider salience of a phenomenon that a specialist may miss. That is, while speculation and informed guesses cannot be avoided in synthetic philosophy, it can also produce a species of understanding, if not knowledge, distinct, as it were, from the parts from which it is composed. 

I do not mean to suggest that Carson is only or best understood as a synthetic philosopher (her work makes no effort to insert itself in the history of philosophy). Her book is also a species of activist science, public philosophy, a call to arms, etc. But Silent Spring very nicely instantiates the kind. It's also filled with arguments so it's not like the philosophy boundary police should be on its guard. But in virtue of engaging in synthetic philosophy, and integrating the details of diverse scientific insights, she also demands the reader to widen her scope and confront fundamental issues for mankind as a whole:

For mankind as a whole, a possession infinitely more valuable than individual life is our genetic heritage, our link with past and future. Shaped through aeons of evolution, our genes not only make us what we are, but hold in their minute beings  the future--be it one of promise of threat. Yet genetic deterioration through man-made agents  is the menace of our time, 'the last and greatest danger to our civilization.'