Digressions&Impressions

Guest post: Bill Wimsatt on Bennett's Rationality

[Bill Wimsatt responded to my post on Dennett's piece on Jonathan Bennett's (1964) Rationality in Ten Neglected Classics of Philosophy. I reprint his letter of September 4, 2016, after modest editing with permission. A copy of Wimsatt's notes  on Bennett's Rationality. These notes are of more than biographical interest, because they anticipate, in brief hints, several developments in later work in philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. -ES]

 

Eric--thanks for your lengthy and insightful blogpost, as well as getting Dan to reexamine Bennett's Rationality. I was really fortunate in seeing it early, it was referenced by Paul Grice in a seminar he gave during a semester visiting at Cornell in fall of 1964.*

 

I think that it did have a significant impact on me, although I never published a piece on it. It likely colored my views and approaches to many things. His "evolutionary analysis" paralleled for me the sequential development of more accurate and realistic models of gases that I saw in development of the kinetic theory of gases, and a plausible thing to do as one way of studying a "phylogeny of the metal realm." Given also that I was then writing on function (for my undergrad thesis), reading evolution, and concentrating both on philosophy of psychology and philosophy of biology it was  natural. I also read von Frisch at the time, quite possible inspired by Bennett, and was taking Rosenblatt's course on Brain Models and mechanisms only slightly later.  I initially taught both Phil Bio and phil psych at Chicago, but decided to concentrate my research in Bio, since i thought that phil mind was such a mess that even a correct and deep analysis would be lost in a welter of unproductive confusion. (Bennett was an exception).

 

I didn't respond earlier because i wanted to find stuff I had written on Bennett, Download here. I likely first taught Bennett when a TA for Nuel Belnap's course in Phil of Social Sciences at Pitt in fall of 1966 or 1967. (I did so both years, and Belnap let me teach one or two weeks of the course, which was designed for phil and sociology grad students). Download Wimsatt on Bennett's Rationality a mimeo (for class distribution) I did in january of 1970, when (while i was still a post-doc with Lewontin), I co-taught a course with Alan Donagan [at The University of Chicago]. I never thought it suitable for publication because it was largely a commented discussion of Bennett's analysis, though my recognition of some of Bennett's shortcomings (and clearly my appreciation of his many strengths) are found in footnotes there.  There were references in the handout to views of Phil Quinn (my roommate in 1967-68 and 1968-69) and Dick Lewontin (whom I post-doc-ed with starting in summer of 1969.)

 

I remember first reading Dan [Dennett] when his intentional systems paper came out in 1971--and thought--right on, although, as a Simon-inspired Satisfier, I disagreed with his strong separation between the intentional and design stances. I bought Content and Consciousness after that, but never finished it.

 

By the way, I may be a Pitt naturalist, but I brought naturalism to Pitt--I didn't get it there. And neither Paul nor Patty Churchland were naturalists--at least not strong ones, during the time we were together at Pitt. And in one strand, my analysis of levels of organization (put forward in my Reductionism, levels of Organization, and the Mind-Body Problem in 1976) was picked up by Cliff Hooker in his 3-part analysis of reduction in 1981 (as he confirmed for me a decade later).

 

In any case, thank you both (and also especially Jonathan) for stimulating and important reflections. For my money, Jonathan's work had greater impact than is generally realized, and it had at least 2 other admirers (Paul Grice and me).

 

Epistemic Peers don't always get it (a problem for contextualists historians of philosophy); Dennett on Bennett

Rationality (1964), Jonathan Bennett’s first book, was published when he was thirty-four years old, and it exhibits the intensity of a young philosopher who is quite sure he sees a way to cut through a forest of dubious, ideology-ridden, squishy philosophy of mind and set a few things straight. Since the terrain he was scouting and clarifying was the same terrain that I was then embarking on, with similar ambitions, I read his book when it first came out through the dust and smoke of my own earliest efforts to conquer these topics. The result, I confess, was that I simultaneously misread, underestimated, and covertly absorbed much of what he was on about and then proceeded to reinvent some of his wheels in my own work without realizing it until years later...I was not the only explorer of this territory who chose to find other paths to Bennett’s destination, but here we all are, and a review of his book may consolidate the gains.--Daniel Dennett, (2016) Jonathan Bennett's Rationality in Ten Neglected Classics of Philosophy [ed. E. Schliesser], 256.

Dennett graciously and generously admits here, with the benefit of a half century's worth of hindsight, that he did not fully grasp the content ("misread") and significance ("underestimated") of a work written by a contemporary who shared, in many ways, his intellectual outlook. Bennett went on to have a distinguished career, both as a philosophical historian and philosopher of language as well as as a metaphysician. At Syracuse he helped nourish and steer the revival of analytical metaphysics (less noticed because it does not fall easily in Kripke-Lewis centered narratives we tell ourselves). While this is not a tragic story of gross injustice, it's fair to say that Dennet's reaction to Rationality is not unique; the little book, while not ignored (it has about 250 citations in google.scholar) did not have a huge, recognized impact on the profession. (The impact of Dennett's own Content and Consciousness, which appeared half decade later, is a useful contrast.) This despite the fact that the book is written in accessible, lively language; it appeared in paperback in a then "unduly prestigious series of books" (Dennett, 257), and it avoids unexplained jargon. It also anticipates, as Dennett notes throughout his piece, quite a few insights later developed by others.

The failure of impact is especially notable because Bennett announces, as Dennett notes in his article, that he is doing something significant (and as Dennett notes, original): he describes the work as “extremely ambitious conceptual inquiry”? on p. 1 of Rationality. Before I get to the significance (and further characterization) of the phenomenon that this is an instance of, Dennett offers a few useful suggestions on the lack of impact. For example, the series in which Rationality appeared was associated with ordinary language philosophy, already in decline by the mid 1960s (258). (Dennett also indicts ordinary language philosophy for its comical lack of ambition--a judgment worth reconsidering some time.) By contrast, Bennett's kind of conceptual analysis was more ambitious (and Dennett recognizes that in a sense Bennett is trying to displace Kant's synthetic a priori.) Dennett notes in passing that, "Philosophers get largely ignored by Bennett, aside from brief passing acknowledgments of Kant, Wittgenstein, Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Popper, but it is clear that he is deliberately avoiding tussles with a host of contemporary philosophers, indirectly criticizing their positions." (261) So one may suspect that other philosophers ignored Bennett because he ignored them and was, then, not in a position to get away with it.

One could read Dennett as implying (it's not his main point in context) that part of the problem for Bennett is not sociological, but philosophical:

Here I think the main strength of Bennett’s method is also its weakness. As a piece of conceptual analysis it is hard to fault the claim that conventionality presupposes reasons had by reasoners, but this blinds him to the prospect of an intermediate position which is not readily articulated without a helping of initially counterintuitive innovation— a “move” that I have only recently perfected (to my satisfaction): drawing a quite sharp distinction between doing things for reasons and having reasons for doing things. There are reasons aplenty in nature (I call them free- floating rationales): trees do things for reasons, fungi do things for reasons...but they do not (usually) have reasons for doing these things. (262)

My interest here is not Dennett's philosophical point (important as it is! -- the distinction between doing things for reasons and having reasons for doing things will be very useful in the (philosophy of) social science(s) because it will remove the stranglehold of methodological individualism and renew interest in a species of functional explanation). The point is rather that even if one grants that Bennett missed a step, everybody else did too.

There is, however, a more subtle version of the point in Dennett: "By not quite nailing the distinction between there being reasons and an agent’s having reasons, Bennett misses the intermediate cases that naturalism requires, in order to account for the gradual emergence of function by the march of evolution and by the development of the individual." (264) This suggests a more historical explanation of the lack of uptake for Bennett: he is not easily slotted into the rising wave of philosophical naturalism (associated with Quine and, of course, Dennett). There is something to this point; the non-naturalists that gained distinction (e.g., Nagel, Searle) situated themselves against it. That gave them a place as the opposition. Bennett is much harder to slot into simplifying narratives teachers tell their students. (He was not obscure in the period, because Dennet himself includes Bennett in his "Mid-Term Examination" included in the Intentional Stance, and in that piece Dennett had explicitly recognized the "parallel paths" (348) between himself and Bennett, and their lack of mutual citation (349, where Davidson is included.))

A central theme of Dennett's chapter is that he is not alone in having missed Bennett's point (even when they directly confronted each other's views in print), and he calls attention to the fact that Quine, Millikan, and the Pittsburgh school all did so, too. While there is some self-interest in not fully crediting another with one's own insights, it remains remarkable that such excellent peers missed the point. This is significant because both epistemologists and contextual historians of philosophy put great faith in the discern-ability of such peers. But the fact is, as is recognized in principle, but often not in practice, is that their judgment is fallible. The market in ideas is imperfect, after all. That is to say, sometimes not being a peer or an outsider or being later in time allows one to see with greater clarity (than previously) what is at stake than an active participant. It is an obvious point, but it is dis-allowed by those that privilege peers in epistemology and historical context in history (of philosophy). This is why (a) in epistemology we should also find a place to canvass non-peers, and (b) in history of philosophy make space for anachronism to ensure historical accuracy.

I encouraged Dennett to write about Bennett because I was curious what he would say. For, (a) I had noticed that Dennett (who is one of my undergraduate teachers) notes Rationality in passing in the Intentional Stance; I did so only after (b) I had been a course assistant in a class by Bill Wimsatt on "Philosophy of Mind and Science Fiction" in the mid-90s at Chicago. Wimsatt, a contemporary of Bennett and Dennett, trained at Pittsburgh (and represents the naturalistic wing also associated with the Churchlands), who is primarily known as a philosopher of biology. Wimsatt assigned Rationality and taught it with gusto to his undergraduates. Wimsatt also taught Dennett (in his philosophy of biology graduate seminar), but (to the best of my fragile memory) did not compare Bennett with Dennett.

Somebody eager to defend the judgments of peers may suggest that Wimsatt ought to count as a peer. I fully grant the point. But while it's true that Wimsatt grasped some of the significance of Rationality he did not (I think) really use Bennett in his own work and so his judgment is not reflected in the profession's conversation. This points the way toward a distinction between formal (public) and informal (private) peer judgments, but about that some other time.

 

 

On History of Ideas vs Philosophy

Another and more satisfying answer to the problem has been the assumption that the opposing schools of philosophy do not merely have a common share in error but that they rather share in a common truth. This assumption was held in antiquity by the so-called eclectics and by the Neo-Platonists; it was reasserted on different grounds by Hegel; and it still underlies the better part of the studies devoted to the "history of ideas."--Paul Oskar Kristeller, Pico: An Introduction.

In reading these lines, I had to think of Bill Wimsatt, the philosopher of biology and metaphysician of life, who was one of my teachers in graduate school. Unlike most professional philosophers (who tend to delight in criticism and critical acumen) that I know, Bill's intellectual reflex is to look for common ground when confronted with new material. (This is not to deny that there are positions that Bill dislikes intensely.) Bill's approach is not my intellectual reflex, but these Digressions are, in part, my attempt at self-re-fashioning in light of his example (while not foregoing polemic).

Prior to reading Kristeller's claim, I was familiar with three not necessarily mutually exclusive ways of understanding the nature of history of ideas. First, it is exhibited in the practice of tracing influence(s) within the history of philosophy. Among European (mainland) historians of philosophy, the following practice is a kind of second-nature: X said Y, now let's search for anticipations of Y. The practice is nicely captured by Wikipedia's definition: "The history of ideas is a field of research in historythat deals with the expression, preservation, and change of human ideas over time." Second, there is Lovejoy's more technical focus on tracing the fate of what he calls 'unit-ideas:'

By the history of ideas I mean something at once more specific and less restricted than the history of philosophy. It is differentiated primarily by the character of the units with which it concerns itself. Though it deals in great part with the same material as the other branches of the history of thought and depends greatly upon their prior labors, it divides that material in a special way, brings the parts of it into new groupings and relations, views it from the standpoint of a distinctive purpose. Its initial procedure may be said—though the parallel has its dangers—to be somewhat analogous to that of analytic chemistry. In dealing with the history of philosophical doctrines, for example, it cuts into the hard-and-fast individual systems and, for its own purposes, breaks them up into their component elements, into what may be called their unit-ideas.--Arthur Lovejoy The Great Chain of Being, 3.

I like to think of Lovejoy's focus on unit-ideas as an anticipation of contemporary memetics in some respects. Unit-ideas are kind of "mental habits" (15) that are instantiated in different intellectual and conceptual contexts, but that also by their presence generate forced moves (what I call 'conceptual-necessitation relations') or creative innovations.  As others have noted, Lovejoy does not really deploy the term outside the introduction to the book, so it is not entirely clear what he really means by it. (Incidentally, Bill Wimsatt has penetrating contribution to memetics while developing his account of cultural evolution.)

Third, in the works of Isaiah Berlin we find a kind of soft-Hegelian tracing of ideas. Berlin was acutely sensitive to the phenomenon that certain groups of ideas (e.g., ones associated with the Enlightenment) generated critical responses (ones we understand by, e.g., Romanticism, or Anti-Enlightenment Conservativism) that, in turn, would generate responses, and so on. In Berlin this does not become a dynamics of reason or an unfolding of rational history (because Berlin is too tragic to have much faith in progress).

In the quoted passage at the top of this post, Kristeller sees Pico as a contributor to the history of ideas understood in the fourth sense as the search for a common truth among different competing systems. Kristeller emphasizes this is not a search for a hidden esoteric doctrine: rather, it "consists in a number of true statements" shared by different outlooks. Given that it is a search for truth as such -- and not, as in the other three approach to the history ideas, a truth about or of history -- Pico's history of ideas is not opposed to philosophy but, rather, philosophical in a non-trivial sense. It is also receptive to learning from others and, thus, instantiates genuine philosophical virtue.

On Normativity and Reflexivity in Analysis (and Dennett)

It is also fair to say, I think, that the conception of free will I defend in Elbow Room is less an evenhanded analysis, and more a reform, of our everyday conception than I was willing to admit at the time. In the 1980s, Ordinary Language Philosophy had already plummeted from its dominant position in the 1960s, but I, an appreciative student of Ryle, was still engaged in the enterprise of trying to make sense of what we ordinarily say before dismissing it as mythic nonsense. Indeed I am still engaged in that project, an essential component, I believe, of the philosopher’s task as pronounced by Wilfrid Sellars in  “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” (1962)

The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.

The tacit assumptions built into ordinary language do not provide a bulwark against the imperialist encroachments of science—as some zealots supposed fifty years ago—but they are in force, setting the terms, at the outset of any investigation, scientific or otherwise.  “What are things made of?” is not couched in scientific language, but expresses a curiosity that science must attempt to satisfy directly or indirectly.  So you need to understand the things (in that broadest possible sense) we ordinarily take to be real if you aspire to show how they hang together with the things science postulates.   Understanding always invokes the principle of charity (to cite my other mentor, Quine), so there is never a bright line between pure analysis and reform. Making sense of something is making the best sense of it you can find, and that may often—even typically—lead you to clean up an everyday conception, removing its excess baggage, the scars of its history, in the course of analyzing it.

That is what I took myself to be doing in Elbow Room, saving everything that mattered about the everyday concept of free will, while jettisoning the impediments. If many folk were unpersuaded by my housecleaning efforts, one could with some justice conclude that I had been trying to salvage the unsalvageable, and should give it up as a lost cause.--Daniel C. Dennett (forthcoming) "Introduction to the new edition of Elbow Room (in German)." [Quoted with permission]

While my college writing sample included an extended reflection on Isaac Asimov and robot consciousness, I didn't go to Tufts to study with Dennett--I intended to be an international diplomat for the Worldbank. I had, however, heard of Dennett because he had co-edited a volume with Douglas Hofstadter, whose Gödel, Escher, Bach I had devoured as a teenager (and I am pretty sure I had encountered Dennett's name on the back of one of Hofstadter's books). So, I enrolled in an intro to philosophy course with Dennett. I left the first class bewildered - I didn't understand anything Dennett talked about -- and so dropped the class.

Despite this false start at academic philosophy, I returned to philosophy a few years later by way of puzzlement about the nature of science and, especially, social science; these puzzles have stayed with me. Dennett had his own 'Center for Cognitive Studies,' but even as an undergraduate, I did not experience him as the dominating figure in the department (despite his large, very real presence in person): too many of his colleagues (some of them more charismatic teachers) disagreed with him in the philosophy of mind and ontology. Armed with a lot more philosophy, I took Dennett's wonderful seminar on the manuscript that became Darwin's Dangerous Idea, which influenced my decision to go to graduate school. After college, and in preparation of graduate school, I read and adored Elbow Room, which I still consider one of the very best works in analytical philosophy because while drawing on relevant sciences, it beautifully blends conceptual analysis, a literary sensibility, and subtle-enough* moral psychology. I was so thoroughly influenced that my first graduate school papers were about Dennett in Wimsatt's philosophy of biology courses.+ Dennett got me to read the manuscript of Freedom Evolving with John Haugeland (about which some other time), and this cured me from the excesses of scientific naturalism.

In reading Dennett's introduction to the German edition of Elbow Room, I was struck by the (quoted) claim that "Making sense of something is making the best sense of it you can find, and that may often—even typically—lead you to clean up an everyday conception, removing its excess baggage, the scars of its history, in the course of analyzing it." It's an important corrective to the image of Dennett's hardnosed scientific naturalism -- often prompted by Dennett's writings -- which tends to evoke a normative-free conception of philosophy that describes without really intervening (the Quine-eanism without regimentation).

One might have thought -- say because of familiarity with history of sentimentalist tradition in  ethics -- that the issue here is that if one genuinely understands a person, then one might end up approving of their action. Dennett's writings on the intentional stance help explain why one might think this; for the intentional stance involves reflecting on what a person (who is stipulated to be a rational agent)** ought to do and thereby predict their behavior. The intentional stance is a genuine form of explanation. So, despite the fact that one might think that one can distance oneself as a spectator from approving another person's action while explaining this action, it is not so easy to do given that one has explained their actions in terms of what they ought to do--so one cuts oneself of from the natural distinction between explaining and excusing/approving action. I think this result can be avoided by some strategies (relativism about rationality; methodological distinction between spectators and agents, etc.), but none of these strategies are -- as Adam Smith discerned - as parsimonious as the slide from explanation to approval.    

What's it like to have a mini-stroke?

Last Summer on a warm, but not balmy, evening without wind, I was cycling along the stately Keizersgracht on my way to the 24hrs pharmacy on the Leidsestraat in order to buy aspirin. The Prinsengracht would have been a more direct route, of course, but the Keizersgracht attracts less tourists. I was enjoying the Sun, when I recalled a hotter Summer's day at Tufts, Medford, MA. It must have been 1995, or 1996.[+]  The philosophy department had already moved to Miner Hall. I had come to work on a paper with George Smith, but first I went to see Dan Dennett, of course, on the ground floor. European friends have expressed regret to me that Dan sails, because they would otherwise insist he is Santa Claus (the beard, the jolly demeanor, his height, etc.).

To my surprise, Dan was visibly shaken. (I associate Dan with can-do-American-optimism-with-unbounded-faith-in-truth-and-technology.*) He had just learned about his heart condition--we had a brief conversation; I came away with a sense of the fragility of life, and I was touched he would allow me to see his anxiety. Later, after his procedure, he had regained his optimistic, ebullient self, and he excitedly shared with me insights on all the marvelous technology used during the procedure. While paying attention to traffic, I wondered if I seemed frazzled.