Digressions&Impressions

On Extinction, Big Bones, Deep Time, a Great Book by Adrienne Mayor, and Plato

Athenian

Do you consider that there is any truth in the ancient tales?...That the world of men has often been destroyed by floods, plagues, and many other things, in such a way that only a small portion of the human race has survived...Come now, let us picture to ourselves one of the many catastrophes,—namely, that which occurred once upon a time through the Deluge.  [677b]...That the men who then escaped destruction must have been mostly herdsmen of the hills, scanty embers of the human race preserved somewhere on the mountain-tops...Moreover, men of this kind must necessarily have been unskilled in the arts generally, and especially in such contrivances as men use against one another in cities for purposes of greed and rivalry and all the other villainies which they devise one against another. [677c]...Shall we assume that the cities situated in the plains and near the sea were totally destroyed at the time?

...And shall we say that all implements were lost, and that everything in the way of important arts or inventions that they may have had,—whether concerned with politics or other sciences,— perished at that time? For, supposing that things had remained all that time ordered just as they are now, how, my good sir, could anything new have ever been invented? [677d]

Clinias
Do you mean that these things were unknown to the men of those days for thousands upon thousands of years, and that one or two thousand years ago some of them were revealed to Daedalus, some to Orpheus, some to Palamedes, musical arts to Marsyas and Olympus, lyric to Amphion, and, in short, a vast number of others to other persons—all dating, so to say, from yesterday or the day before?

...

Athenian
Shall we, then, state that, at the time when the destruction took place, human affairs were in this position: there was fearful and widespread desolation over a vast tract of land; most of the animals were destroyed, and the few herds of oxen and flocks of goats that happened to survive afforded at the first but scanty sustenance [678a] to their herdsmen?...And as to the matters with which our present discourse is concerned—States and statecraft and legislation,—do we think they could have retained any memory whatsoever, broadly speaking, of such matters?...So from those men, in that situation, there has sprung the whole of our present order—States and constitutions, arts and laws, with a great amount both of evil and of good?--Plato's Laws, Book 3, 677a-678a, translated by R.G. Bury. 

The return to Plato was prompted by reading an amazing book (2000) The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times by Adrienne Mayor. (Yeah, what took my so long!) She points out, correctly, that (fossilized) giant bones were a familiar feature of (Mediterranean) antiquity and that this is reflected in the art, religious practices, even museums (musea?), and myths of the period. In addition, she notes that there was widespread recognition these bones reflect pre-human life, and entail that geographic and topographic conditions had vastly changed. These two sentences vastly understate the interest of the book; it also has impressive treatment of ancient (and modern) hoaxes, ancient travel, and philosophy of science, etc.

Alongside awareness of 'giant bones,' this created a popular sense of what we may call deep time. By this I mean (in light of what Moyar says) recognition of (i) the existence of a distant past where (ii) the were now lost/extinguished species that (iii) (perhaps) predated humans and (iv) who may have lived in radically different landscapes. What is a bit less clear is if this sense of deep time implied a running down of the earth (in the past things were bigger and better) [an option she mentions twice, 149/272] or a cyclical conception of nature.

One fascinating claim that Mayor makes is that despite the overwhelming evidence of common knowledge about the existence of 'giant bones,' ancient philosophers have systematically avoided discussing them (with interesting exceptions, including Claudian).* Why this is so is unclear (although she offers useful suggestions). And worth further reflection (in addition to the hypotheses she offers). I think, perhaps, more than she does, that the effect of the existence of 'giant bones' is visible in ancient philosophy. In particular, I would claim that (a) the sense of deep time is visible in some of them, and (b) that this made plausible a cyclical conception of nature, which (c) was not committed to gradual change, but foreshadows something akin to punctuated equilibrium theories. Moyar would agree with parts of (a); is silent on (b); and thinks the philosophers embraced gradualism (on which she cites Plato's Laws [782] as evidence). Here I just focus on Plato.+

Above I quoted a passage from Plato that Mayor mentions, but not really discusses. In context, Plato's Athenian stranger is primarily interested in discussing the origin of political communities from (what we would call) a state of nature (discussed here). The Athenian stranger admits [677a] that what I'll call the manifest image of people involves a regular destruction of the "world of men" by "floods, plagues, and many other catastrophic natural causes. Strikingly, this involves a population reduction of people. [In the Laws, The Athenian does not mention the manifest conception of the gods and gigantomachy. But Plato is aware of the genre, because ironically, in the Sophist a Stranger does introduce agigantomachy (in order to refer to philosophical dispute about non-being.)] 

The more scientific/philosophic conception accepts the manifest image to some degree, but adds level of detail to it. In particular, I read the Stranger as embracing an account in which the Earth has experienced frequent catastrophic events that have wiped populations and (memory) their way of living/technology/culture ("all implements were lost, and that everything in the way of important arts or inventions that they may have had...perished") for thousands of years. In addition, while mankind held on, many species were destroyed "most...animals were destroyed"--admittedly the text is ambiguous between there was demographic decline of all existing species, but, as it happens, none of the species were destroyed or most species were destroyed. But it seems pretty clear that Plato here implies that in a deluge land species that were unable to survive on the hills would have been wiped out. (If 'species' is thought anachronistic for Plato, you can insert 'groups'.) So, I would argue that Plato embraces a cyclical conception of history, with not infrequent catastrophic events forcing the clock (of population and civilization growth) to be restarted. (I think this also fits the evidence from other works by him.)

The Stranger does leave open, explicitly so in the later passage [781-2] that refers back to the material I quoted, that humans are eternal (without beginning or end) or that they have existed "an incalculable length of time."** Either way, it is an embrace of deep time. And he goes on to claim that many plants and animals did not exist at various moments in time. He uses that to explain why cannibalism may have originated:

Well then, do we not suppose that all the world over and in all sorts of ways...all sorts of variations in the seasons, during which it is probable that the animals underwent [782b] innumerable changes?...Are we to believe, then, that vines, not previously existing, appeared at a certain stage; and olives, likewise, and the gifts of Demeter and Kore?...And during the period that these fruits were as yet non-existent, must we not suppose that the animals turned, as they do now, to feeding on one another....[782c] The custom of men sacrificing one another is, in fact, one that survives even now among many peoples;

I am unsure why Moyar sees in this a gradualist claim (since the Stranger introduces it with explicit nod back to the material quoted above). The Stranger clearly contemplates not just species change and extinction, but also climate change. That climate change causes changes among the animals does not entail gradualism.

In addition, and I close with this, the Stranger also assumes ecological effects of species extinction on the practices (and demography) of other specie. If a plant or animal disappears this will have effects on the population and (cultural) practices of other animal groups. Species extinction may cause cannibalism in the surviving (predator) groups. 

 

 

Omelas, Dotson, and Revealing the Souls of Readers

Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all. For instance, how about technology? I think that there would be no cars or helicopters in and above the streets; this follows from the fact that the people of Omelas are happy people. Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however--that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc.--they could perfectly well have central heating, subway trains, washing machines, and all kinds of marvelous devices not yet invented here, floating light-sources, fuelless power, a cure for the common cold. Or they could have none of that; it doesn't matter. As you like it....I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don't hesitate. Let us not, however, have temples from which issue beautiful nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy and ready to copulate with any man or woman, lover or stranger, who desires union with the deep godhead of the blood, although that was my first idea. But really it would be better not to have any temples in Omelas--at least, not manned temples. Religion yes, clergy no. Surely the beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering themselves like divine soufflés to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the flesh. Let them join the processions. Let tambourines be struck above the copulations, and the glory of desire be proclaimed upon the gongs, and (a not unimportant point) let the offspring of these delightful rituals be beloved and looked after by all.--Ursula Le Guin, Walking Away from Omelas.

Before the quoted passage, the narration starts with a description of the Festival of Summer, the physical geography and architecture of Omelas, some of its political and religious institutions (although the narrator suggests lack of familiarity on both), and the happiness of (nearly all) its inhabitants. The narrator also calls attention to the fact how difficult it is aesthetically and rhetorically to convey happiness in light of (as the narrator notes just below the passage I have quoted) "modern tastes." In fact, in addition to an (incomeplete) characterization of Omelas, the main pre-occupation of the narration op to this point is (recall this post) the nature of (modern) narrative itself (and the characterization of genre).

In the quote, the narrator explicitly calls attention to (a point much emphasized by Socrates in Plato's Phaedrus and, if it is authentic, the seventh letter) the fact that a written text must accommodate itself somehow to a diversity of souls (who may be unknown, but anticipated by the author) or (if you prefer less metaphysics) to human heterogeneity in aesthetic and other engaged responses.+ The narrator doesn't merely explicitly admit she (why not!) may not be able to satisfy all her readers, but she also invites, no challenges ("rise to the occasion") her readers to use their own imagination to constitute a version of Omelas that will satisfy their image of a happy place. These are souls that assume a happy place must have technology (trained on, say, Bacon's New Atlantis) and lots of freely available sex (trained on, say, Brave New World). Of course, the narrator isn't just inviting readers to develop their own version of Omelas with accidental properties inessential to the true nature of Omelas, while simultaneously revealing that these properties may be essential to the kind of readers they are. The narrator is also calling attention to the fact that she is aware that she may disappoint some of our expectations; may, in fact, disapprove of our expectations (e.g., we want to be able to blame organized religion for the cruelty at the heart of Omelias; we want a narrative of technological progress or out of control desire and so blame these, etc.).   

The issue of the politics of readership (see this very important paper by Julie Klein) raised in the previous paragraph is not just a matter of aesthetic and intertextuality (or meta-fiction); it also bears on the nature of how to understand the psychomyth (HT John Holbo's very fine piece) that Omelas is. (Psychomyth is Le Guin's own term.) A psychomyth is a certain kind of thought experiment, which is the occasion for (to quote Williams James) “a specifical and independent sort of emotion.” For, Walking Away From Omelas, shows two kinds of characteristic responses to the cruelty at the core of Omelas. Two natures are revealed: (i) those that stay and embrace the misery of the innocent child as a necessary feature, "the terrible justice of reality;" and those that (ii) quietly leave town (that's the closing "incredible" paragraph of the story) keeping their hands clean.* 

As an aside, both (i) and (ii) do not violate the terms of the social compact that gives Omelas its social structure. (The only difference is that the group of folk that belong to (ii) refuse to go on to benefit personally from the contract.) This social compact (which almost certainly precedes the narrated time) is grounded in the opinion of all. (In this sense the social compact mimics Hobbes's unanimity requirement.)

Even so, and to return to the main argument, and as it happens, (iii) anyone could bring "the child...up into the sunlight out of that vile place"** and so destroy the social compact which is thought to bring happiness to all. Such a noble soul would have to be willing to reform society's institutions against the common understanding of happiness. That is, as the Cave analogy emphasizes (in Kristie Dotson's felicitous summary) worldviews are resilient against change.and very difficult to disrupt (especially if they characterize the truth of the phenomena). Even those that recognize the abhorrent truth have incentives to exit rather than to change the social status quo. If they are humane they may well wonder if acting on their perception of wrong isn't reckless given that the downside risk is carried by all of society and there is always a possibility that their perception is wrong. (This is why revolutionaries often seem like fanatics.)*** 

By treating the structure of the story as a reverse Utility Monster (and so the standard case), we may miss the third character as a live option. It's not a live option in the sense that one should expect to live in times when they naturally pop up. Le Guin's narrator is more plausible by effacing the very possibility. But by insisting that how we respond to the narrative says something about how we might be, we are also encouraged to cultivate in ourselves habits of thought, and, perhaps shared systems of thought, that make possible efforts to resist resigning ourselves to given options.++

 

On the Significance of Dennett's Free-Floating Rationales for Social Science (I)

One of Dennett’s most important claims is that most of what we and our fellow organisms do to stay alive, cope with the world and one another, and reproduce is not understood by us or them. It is competence without comprehension. This is obviously true of organisms like bacteria and trees that have no comprehension at all, but it is equally true of creatures like us who comprehend a good deal. Most of what we do, and what our bodies do—digest a meal, move certain muscles to grasp a doorknob, or convert the impact of sound waves on our eardrums into meaningful sentences—is done for reasons that are not our reasons. Rather, they are what Dennett calls free-floating reasons, grounded in the pressures of natural selection that caused these behaviors and processes to become part of our repertoire. There are reasons why these patterns have emerged and survived, but we don’t know those reasons, and we don’t have to know them to display the competencies to allow us to function.

Nor do we have to understand the mechanisms that underlie those competencies. In an illuminating metaphor, Dennett asserts that the manifest image that depicts the world in which we live our everyday lives is composed of a set of user-illusions,

like the ingenious user-illusion of click-and-drag icons, little tan folders into which files may be dropped, and the rest of the ever more familiar items on your computer’s desktop. What is actually going on behind the desktop is mind-numbingly complicated, but users don’t need to know about it, so intelligent interface designers have simplified the affordances, making them particularly salient for human eyes, and adding sound effects to help direct attention. Nothing compact and salient inside the computer corresponds to that little tan file-folder on the desktop screen.

He says that the manifest image of each species is “a user-illusion brilliantly designed by evolution to fit the needs of its users.” In spite of the word “illusion” he doesn’t wish simply to deny the reality of the things that compose the manifest image; the things we see and hear and interact with are “not mere fictions but different versions of what actually exists: real patterns.” The underlying reality, however, what exists in itself and not just for us or for other creatures, is accurately represented only by the scientific image—ultimately in the language of physics, chemistry, molecular biology, and neurophysiology. Thomas Nagel "Is Consciousness an Illusion?" reviewing Daniel C. Dennet From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds, in the The New York Review of Books, March 9, 2017 Issue

Nagel's generous review introduces two key conceptual innovations in Dennett's thought early in the review, first that there is "competence without comprehension" and, second, that there are "free-floating reasons, grounded in the pressures of natural selection that" can cause "behaviors and processes to become part of our repertoire." But while Nagel nicely draws out the significance of this for Dennett's familiar view on consciousness (although he misses that for Dennett the the scientific image is also of real patterns (see 222)), Nagel misses the wider implications of these two innovations: that they pave the way for a version of functional explanation in social science.

Before I get to that, first a terminological point: in his review, Nagel attributes to Dennett commitment to free-floating reasons (see above). But in Dennett's terminology these are free-floating rationales. Nagel is not subsantively wrong, however, free-floating rationales are a species of reasons, which are "tracked" by "evolution" (50). In context Dennett is describing "the accumulation of function by a process that blindly tracks reasons, creating things that have purposes but don’t need to know them." (49) So, free-floating rationales are reasons that do not require being represented for their existence: in particular, they are functions that are a consequence of natural selection. (One way to understand a free-floating rationale is that it is the answer to the why question of reverse engineering. (92))

Okay, with that in place, we can turn to the significance of Dennett's move, once we recognize (or recall) that for Dennett free-floating rationales are not merely a biological phenomenon; he also treats cultural evolution as the cause of particular types of free-floating rationales: "memes, informational viruses that govern infectious habits," (173, emphasis in origina.)  Now, in so doing Dennett is especially interested in explaining consciousness and the origins and the nature of language,* but he also wants to show that "Free-floating rationales have been as ubiquitous in cultural evolution as in genetic evolution," (231). This has obvious implications for social science.

In particular, Dennett's free-floating rationales are also a means to revive respectability of discussion of functions in social science (211-212). Social functions simply are flee-floating rationales that are caused by cultural evolution. (Obviously, they may also be represented by agents in society.) That is to say, on Dennett's approach to cultural or memetic evolution provides the mechanism that secures the existence of free-floating rationales. Of course, showing that an attributed social function is the consequence of such cultural selection is not always easy, but that's for another time.

Dennett on Normativity

[The post below is a response by Daniel C. Dennett to one of my recent posts; it is published with his permission.--ES]           

In my long lapsed career as a sculptor I once devoted considerable time and energy to conceiving of (but not executing) a series of conceptual art objects that were exemplary Fs or Gs or Hs except for one feature, which made them useless.

• Needle:  a 3-inch-long cylinder of stainless steel, sharpened to a fine point at one end, and pierced with an eye at the other.  Only problem: its diameter is not, say, 1/16 of an inch but 1 inch.  Rather too blunt for use.
• Dice: two pieces of white plastic with all the pips from 1 to 6 properly arranged in opposition: Only problem: instead of being cubes, they’re spheres.
• a length of rope ten feet long and 2 feet in diameter.
• individual Kleenex sealed in plastic sleeves.
• a porcelain hammer
• a soluble anchor

The giant paperclip on my desk is the only concrete result of that bout of fantasy.

Why do I mention this?  Because sometimes the most interesting and important fact about something is that it is almost an F. Norms are ubiquitous; there are good and bad toenails, good and bad skipping stones, good and bad heaps, good and bad stool samples, . . . . Is one optimizing when one sees the faint but improvable resemblance of a piece of driftwood to a horse’s mane? 

When I was teaching at UC Irvine almost fifty years ago,  a rather posh restaurant opened in Corona del Mar, California, called The Five Crowns. It presented itself as an authentic English pub, with dozens of polished horse brasses hanging on the walls,  serving wenches with frilly white décolletage blouses and caps to match, and a red pillar box (post box) and canonical red telephone booth outside. (It still thrives, according to its website.)  When a rather crusty British philosopher came to town to give a few talks in our department I decided it would be a lark to take him to the Five Crowns for dinner. It was not lost on the maître d’ that he had a genuine English pub-frequenter dining that evening, and at the end of the meal he wafted by to ask if the distinguished guest from across  the pond had noted any jarring details that the restaurant might repair. Authenticity was their goal. “Yes, there is one dead giveaway,” said the Brit, and the maître d’s face fell: “The urinals don’t stink.”  A proper English pub would have a loo with an aroma that made one dizzy.

On the Carnap-Strawson debate and the soul of Analytical Philosophy during the Cold War

If the reader is shocked or offended by the two last-mentioned procedures, I hasten to assure him that they, occur, of course, only in the more barbarous regions, like America, where the sacrilege of tampering with the holy tradition of language is sometimes connived at.--Carnap "P.F. Strawson on Linguistic Naturalism" (937)

The distinction I used above between the way things happen in the world, and our own natures, is here, though vague, important. For it is a part of our nature that, things other than ourselves being as they are, it is natural for us to have the conceptual apparatus that we do have. But human nature is diverse enough to allow of another, though related, use of philosophical imagination. This consists in imagining ways in which, without things other than ourselves being different from what they are, we might view them through the medium of a different conceptual apparatus; Some metaphysics is best, or most charitably, seen as consisting in part in exercises of this sort...Of course, even when it can be so interpreted, it is not presented as a conceptual or structural revision by means of which we might see things differently; it is presented as a picture of thing as they really are, instead of as they delusively seem. This presentation with its contrast between esoteric-reality and daily delusion, involves, and is the consequence of, the unconscious distortion of ordinary concepts, i.e. of the ordinary use of linguistic expressions. So metaphysics though it can sometimes be charitably interpreted in the way I suggest, in fact always involves paradox and perplexities of the kind I first mentioned; and sometimes embodies no rudimentary vision, but merely rudimentary mistakes. Strawson (1963) "Carnap's Views on Constructed Systems Versus Natural Languages in Analytic Philosophy," (516; [emphases in original--ES])

Branden Fitelson wrote me a lovely, critical letter in response to viewing my lecture, "Anti-Mathematicism and Formal Philosophy" at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy available online. In it he reminded me of an exchange by Strawson and Carnap that he uses in teaching. The papers represent philosophical fireworks of the highest order--they are, as Strawson's title indicates, a debate over the very soul of analytical philosophy. The papers repay repeated re-readings, and both sides make many  insightful observations on the philosophical merits of formal philosophy (a topic I regularly post about, see here and here). In particular, one is reminded -- and this is especially noteworthy in a philosophical age in which the guide to graduate education provided by the PGR does not even consider expertise in philosophy of education as worthy of note -- that one of the central philosophical issues is the nature of philosophical education.*

As a speculative aside, prompted by some remarks by Jason Stanley, the displacement of philosophical education as worthy of any attention was, in part, due to the success of Strawson's and Carnap's students and their intellectual allies in discrediting the non-scientific wing of Pragmatism associated, say, with Dewey. Subsequently, even Plato scholarship was reconstituted as unrelated to philosophical education. (The Meno and Theaetetus are then taught as obviously belonging primarily to the history of epistemology, etc.)

To return to my main point, in his response to Strawson, Carnap construes the debate as one between (linguistic) "naturalists" (that is Strawson, although this is not Strawson's term) and "constructionists" (Carnap). This construction allows Carnap to recycle some of his anti-Quine-ean moves against an opponent that has fewer resources to respond. He then offers effective responses to most of Strawson's charges, showing that they rely on unreliable distinctions/assumptions, misrepresentations of Carnap's program, and, crucially, that even where Strawson's positive program has merit, the two programs can be mutually supportive. Now, due to Strawson's title and the way the dialectic is construed it seems that what is at stake is ultimately the respective roles of natural language (and empirical observations on use), and the role of formal languages (and the merits of explication).+ Because Carnap has the last word in the Schilpp volume, he also gets away ignoring a feature of Strawson's argument (the passage quoted above) that Strawson admittedly qualifies as not being "central," (515), but does characterize as "inportant" and "a wide field open to philosophical imagination." (516)

I have quoted Strawson's defense of the role of "imagining ways in which, without things other than ourselves being different from what they are, we might view them through the medium of a different conceptual apparatus." Now the first thing to note is that this is presented as an extremely modest enterprise. There is no sense that an alternative conception of reality might be a guide to action or generate a vision of reality worth attaining (see philosophical prophecy). Given that Strawson makes disparaging remarks ("grandiose plan of logical atomism") of Carnapian "planners," the conservative implications are deliberate here. Strawson's version of descriptive analysis and descriptive metaphysics, self-consciously leaves things alone (recall yesterday's post). No doubt there will be howls of derision from Oxford -- if they pretended to care about my digressions -- but this is (further) evidence of the ignoble effects of the cold war on philosophy's self-image.

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.