Digressions&Impressions

On Borges, John Perry, Spinoza, and Identity

[I will phase out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at:  digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]

I once met John Perry for a few minutes in line at a hotel Starbucks at an Eastern APA when those were still the job-market. We didn't know each other, and we never met again (so far). But I knew his name because I owned his A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality; our chat was brief, but it was kind not the least because his eyes didn't wander to scan the room while we talked. I forgot what we talked about, but, as the kids say, sometimes the vibe is more important than the words and it was one of the few sweet moments during that otherwise dismal APA.

So, I'll forgive him that in his (2007) Amherst Lecture which offers a reading of “Borges and I,” Perry opts for "the more straightforward interpretation" in supposing that the implied author of "Borges and I" is Borges the (famous) actual author of the piece, and not some fictional counterpart or doppelgänger of the actual author. After all, we're dealing with Borges, the author of Pierre Menard!

"Borges and I' is, in fact, about the estranged relationship between the implied author of "Borges and I" and the famous author, Borges. So, it's not impossible that the implied author of "Borges and I" is the fictional counterpart.

Perry actually acknowledges this possibility on some level later in his argument when he concedes that "in following the writer’s thoughts, we must to a certain extent pretend that the writer is not Borges." But Perry thinks we can't sustain this perspective because "the interest of the story is the thoughts that the writer has about himself" (emphasis added) and not the implied fictional counterpart.

As an aside, the less straightforward interpretation that Perry rejects is that "Borges could have written a story like this about some other author." But that's compatible with the implied author being (not just a counterpart/doppelgänger of Borges, but) also (say) Eric Schliesser. And it's quite clear that the latter option is not really implied by the story. So, while I agree with Perry that this is less likely and should be rejected, I don't think, as I hinted in the previous two paragraphs, Perry has canvassed all the relevant options when he opts for what he takes to be the more straightforward interpretation.

Perry's interpretation of "Borges and I" actually goes off the rails, I think, shortly thereafter when he writes that "It would not only be odd, but quite impossible, for Borges to survive the writer. Even if all that is meant by “survival” is living on as a literary figure, if Borges lives on in that way, so will the writer."  This is not right if we reject the more straightforward interpretation.

But even on the straightforward interpretation there is a wrinkle that Perry does not confront. (I say this with some trepidation not just because I remember his kindness so fondly, but also because between the two of us, he is actually the expert on identity.) Before I get to that, for Perry, "Borges and I" is fundamentally about the expression of "a certain alienation [the actual Borges] feels about certain aspects of himself and certain achievements of his." The alienation thesis is quite plausible. But the reason for Perry's confidence here is that he is working with a theory of identity (let's call it a 'classical' one) in which "the relation that A and B have when there is just one thing that is both A and B. It is the relation that Tully has to Cicero, the evening star has to the morning star, Mark Twain has to Samuel Clemens, Bill Blythe has to Bill Clinton, and so on. Identity is the relation that each thing has to itself and no other." This is familiar enough for philosophical readers.

In order to hold on to this classical theory of identity and to handle the ways in which A and B (Borges and I or I and Borges) may seem to come apart in "Borges and I," Perry introduces the idea of "motivating cognitive complex." If you are interested in finding out what that is read Perry’s lecture. I'll stipulate here that it can do the job Perry wants it to do.

To be sure, I don't mean to deny that Perry may be playing an elaborate, Borgesian game with us, too. After all, along the way, while discussing a thought experiment of Hector-Neri Castañeda, Perry notes that "then I see on the web that the date when John Perry published his Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality was 1978, that information goes into the same mental file where information about what is in front of me, whether I am hungry or not, and the like, is kept. I get the information “John Perry published the dialogue in 1978” and this leads to the thought, “I published the dialogue in 1978.”" One may well wonder who this I really is supposed to be. 

Be that as it may, I don't think that Borges (in the straightforward interpretation) or the implied author, Borges's counterpart (in my preferred interpretation) is relying on the classical theory of identity in "Borges and I." And my reason for thinking that is two-fold: first, the story ends with an epistemic claim: "I don’t know which of the two writes this page." On Perry's reading this ought to be deeply puzzling. For, by stipulation (the straightforward interpretation), the persona who is writing the piece is Borges the famous author. So this doubt really can’t arise on Perry’s straightforward reading.

Second, Perry completely, and somewhat oddly (he is a professional philosopher, after all), skips the explicit invocation of Spinoza in "Borges and I" (which in the translations I am familiar with is shorter than a double-spaced page). 

It's pretty clear that Spinoza rejects the classical theory of identity. This is obvious in Spinoza's doctrine of eternality in which the X that becomes eternal loses all the particularity one naturally  (and also on the classical theory of identity) associates with X and becomes, in fact, in a certain sense co-extensive with the true or the truths (Y). But it’s not so that from the perspective of eternity, X=Y. (See here for an attempt to describe this.) In fact, Spinoza also rejects what Tarski calls the 'classical' conception of truth (and defends what one might call a metaphysical identity theory of truth (recall here)). Rather, like the Muslim philosophers' views of God’s knowledge (as Al-Ghazali infers, they deny that God knows individuals), from the perspective of eternity, Spinoza's individuals and individuality are ephemera (and so unknowable). My point here is not to defend Spinoza.

Now, it's possible, of course, that the implied author of "Borges and I" has a different interpretation of Spinoza than the one hinted at in the previous paragraph. Fair enough. In the story, the following is claimed: "Spinoza understood that all things want to be preserved in their being." This is an evocation of a feature of the so-called general 'Conatus doctrine' (EIIIp6). In fact, it echoes Ethics IIIp9 (and a whole series of propositions developed in parts IV/V of the Ethics): "The mind, both insofar as it has clear and distinct ideas and also insofar as it has confused ideas, strives to persevere in being." In "Borges and I" the doctrine gets glossed as follows (in the translation of Ilan Stavans): 

the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others and in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried freeing myself from him and went from the mythologies of the arrabal to the games with time and the infinite, but those games are Borges’ now and I shall come up with other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to the other.

Again, at first one may think it's pretty clear Perry is onto something when he suggests that this expresses alienation. Perhaps an alienation so extreme, that the conatus doctrine ends up in a kind of inversion: rather than tending toward eternity, it tends in the implied author toward oblivion or near-total loss of identity.

Before I close this digression, I should admit that I ended up returning to Borges' story because my friend Petra had bait-and-switched me into buying Amina Cain's fascinating essay, A Horse at Night. This essay mentions two of Borges' stories (including "Borges and I”.) I write ‘bait-and-switch,’ because Petra had sent me a picture of a paragraph from Cain, which I only later realized (while reading Cain's essay) was an excerpt from Annie Ernaux's The Possession.

A major theme of A Horse at Night, is how in "writing and life" two things can be imaginatively projected on top of each other without eclipsing each other and, thereby, generating something new. That is, Cain explores the complex nature of identity. To put this as a serious joke: I find Cain's implied author in A Horse at Night nearly insufferable and banal when she is engaged in autobiography and mesmerizingly evocative and interesting when discussing other artist’s works of art. For the record: Cain treats the implied author of "Borges and I" as sad.

Neither Perry nor Cain discusses Spinoza or the skeptical conclusion of "Borges and I:" "I don’t know which of the two writes this page." It's not obvious on Perry's reading why this occurs. It's a rather extreme form of skepticism; it denies knowledge of the self-identifying features of the Cartesian ego in the very act of affirming its existence. It is especially notable — alerted by Cain — that this occurs in the writer’s life that one forgets or losses oneself in a certain sense. (Cain touches on this from the perspective of the Soto Zen tradition, not Spinozism.)

If we glance at Spinoza's theory of identity the puzzle disappears if we imagine, as we are allowed in fiction, that the sentence, "I don’t know which of the two writes this page," is written from the perspective of eternity/oblivion. For from that perspective such individualizing marks are not known/knowable. Of course, the joke is knowing that one is Borges, or the implied author, or his very vain counterpart, wouldn't matter from that perspective either, or at least it shouldn't.

• This first appeared at: <On Borges, John Perry, Spinoza, and Identity - by nescio13 (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

On Pynchon on 1984

By the time they have left the Ministry of Love, Winston and Julia have entered permanently the condition of doublethink, the anterooms of annihilation, no longer in love but able to hate and love Big Brother at the same time. It is as dark an ending as can be imagined. But strangely, it is not quite the end. We turn the page to find appended what seems to be some kind of critical essay, "The Principles of Newspeak". We remember that at the beginning, we were given the option, by way of a footnote, to turn to the back of the book and read it. Some readers do this, and some don't - we might see it nowadays as an early example of hypertext. Back in 1948, this final section apparently bothered the American Book-of-the-Month Club enough for them to demand that it be cut, along with the chapters quoted from Emmanuel Goldstein's book, as a condition of acceptance by the club. Though he stood to lose at least £40,000 in American sales, Orwell refused to make the changes, telling his agent, "A book is built up as a balanced structure and one cannot simply remove large chunks here and there unless one is ready to recast the whole thing . . . I really cannot allow my work to be mucked about beyond a
certain point, and I doubt whether it even pays in the long run." Three weeks later the BOMC relented, but the question remains, why end a novel as passionate, violent and dark as this one with what appears to be a scholarly appendix?
The answer may lie in simple grammar. From its first sentence, "The Principles of Newspeak" is written consistently in the past tense, as if to suggest some later piece of history, post- 1984 , in which Newspeak has become literally a thing of the past - as if in some way the anonymous author of this piece is by now free to discuss, critically and objectively, the political system of which Newspeak was, in its time, the essence. Moreover, it is our own pre-Newspeak English language that is being used to write the essay. Newspeak was supposed to have become general by 2050, and yet it appears that it did not last that long, let alone triumph, that the ancient humanistic ways of thinking inherent in standard English have persisted, survived, and ultimately prevailed, and that perhaps the social and moral order it speaks for has even, somehow, been restored.--Thomas Pynchon (2003) "Introduction" Nineteen Eighty-Four By George Orwell [HT: Victor Gijsbers]

We know that Pynchon is not the only major novelist that grappled with Orwell's Appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four; at the end The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood, who according to her own testimony about 1984, "read it again and again," pays homage to it in the "Historical Notes" themselves "Being a partial transcript of the proceedings of the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, held as part of the International Historical Association Convention held at the University of Denay, Nunavit, on June 25, 2195." In presenting these historical notes, Atwood, reassures the reader, who may have no taste for (recall) Socratic metaphysics --  "for everything that has come into being destruction is appointed, not even such a fabric as this will abide for all time, but it shall surely be dissolved" (Plato, Republic, 546a)" -- that the "Gilead period," too, will come to an end in some sense. 

Pynchon, who is not exactly known for his optimism, is right to pay attention to the Appendix to 1984, but I am not entirely sure that his hesitant ("perhaps") optimism about what the Appendix signals can withstand scrutiny. His interpretation assumes, first, that the (let's call it) authorial stance of the Appendix has to be taken at face value. That's decidedly odd because 1984 represents us with a world in which just about every text is a forgery of some sorts. (While it would be a mistake to treat them alike, Orwell and Borges were contemporaries, after all.) In fact, much of the action of 1984 consists in the production of forgeries (not just of texts of memories). The production of newspapers by the Ministry of Truth and the torture chambers of Ministry of love have this in common. So, why would the Appendix be any different?

As an aside, the apparent function of the forgeries in Oceania appear to be to produce a totalizing infallibility about everything, not the least the past, of the Party. (No Pope would dream of this!) And what it illustrates is that even if one were to grant (for the sake of amusement) the linguistic idealist, that all is text, what one may call the production values that inform or are exhibited by the production of texts make a huge difference. Linguistic idealism comes in many varieties. If one treats this focus on 'values' as bourgeois, feel free to replace 'production values' with 'means of production' in the previous sentence. In so far as Orwell is a true socialist (and an author), this attention to the conditions of textual production need not surprise. 

But let's stipulate that we need to take the Appendix at face value. You may say, 'What else can we do, after all?' It's true, as Pynchon emphasizes, that the Appendix treats Newspeak as a thing of the past. Given that Pynchon explicitly understands Newspeak as the essence of Oceania, and in his argument tacitly relies on the metaphysical principle, I'll paraphrase Spinoza (E2D2), that when its essence is taken away the entity ceases to be, Pynchon infers from the demise of Newspeak quite reasonably that Oceania must have ended.

Before I get to the merits of Pynchon's argument, a reader may suspect that I will object to Pynchon's metaphysics as an imposition on the world of 1984. Of course, I am assuming you are not the kind of reader who may find my parading of metaphysical jargon quite pedantic. Even so it's worth noting that the core torture scenes in Part III of 1984, emphasize that metaphysics is salient. The torturer, O'Brien, repeatedly, in fact, reminds his victim, Winston Smith, that metaphysics is not his "strong point." So I am not going to object to the form of Pynchon's argument.*

Newspeak is what the philosophers call a final language. In the text -- I have in mind both 1984 and its Appendix -- this is marked by the contrast between the provisional versions (as, I now quote the Appendix, "embodied in the Ninth and Tenth editions of the Newspeak Dictionary") -- and its definitive form "embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary."  As we learn from the Appendix and, earlier in the novel, from Syme, who, before he is presumably vaporized, is one of the developers of Newspeak, Newspeak is supposed to be an austere language: its vocabulary culled down, and, through some semantic tools the expressive power of particular words is greatly enhanced, the language's expressive power is curtailed. It's a final language designed to be spoken and used by the Party.**

Now, Syme indeed suggests that the "Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak." The narrator of 1984 adds that this is expressed with "a sort of mystical satisfaction." And indeed this idea, the perfection of language, is characteristic of what we may call Enlightenment mysticism (and satirized by Swift). Pynchon's interpretation of 1984 is rooted in Syme's understanding of Newspeak.

The Appendix, which follows Syme's interpretation of Newspeak sometimes literally, omits this mystical claim. I'll quote the Appendix (and then suggest an alternative to Pynchon's interpretation):

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought--that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc--should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.

Unlike Syme, the Appendix places greatest emphasis on the fact that the purpose of Newspeak was to make what in 1984 is called 'Thoughtcrime' impossible. Even a Quine-ean couldn't be heretical through indirect methods in Newspeak. We might say, then, that it is regimentation that is the fundamental function of Newspeak as a final language.

Interestingly enough, this is an aside, the author of the Appendix recognizes that once Newspeak is perfected, it would make translation of books and even complex fragments from older languages into Newspeak in a certain way impossible unless they either referred "to some technical processor some very simple everyday actions." (The Appendix offers the Declaration of Independence as an example of how "impossible" would be to render it into Newspeak.) One wishes (recall) our advocates of formal languages would keep this in mind.

Be that as it may, a more natural interpretation of the demise of Newspeak presents itself now.  For, from the point of view of the Party, the elimination of even possible Thoughtcrime would be self-defeating. For Thoughtcrime grounds the repressive apparatus of the Party. The possibility of Thoughtcrimes are -- as much as the conditions of permanent War -- central to the structure of self-discipline of the Party. The elimination of Thoughtcrime as a category would spell doom to the survival of the Party because it would lose its main means of self-control as a ruling, corporate spirit. It would then have to start codifying laws of some sort and bureaucratize, formalize these. This was not a problem in the world of 1984 because the perfection of Newspeak had been projected, as the Appendix notes in its closing sentence, into a more distant future (2050).

So, a more natural political possibility is that the Party abandoned the project of Newspeak because it saw that its perfection would be self-undermining and incompatible with the ideological needs of Ingsoc in power.*** (By contrast, a socialist language planner like Carnap recognizes that Esperanto, for example, is great for a world of public Enlightenment.) And the Appendix reflects the writings of someone who is intimately familiar with the abandonment of Newspeak (not the demise of Oceania).  Admittedly, there are some passages in the Appendix that exhibit a rather free-thinking attitude: the use of the Declaration of Independence as an example, in particular, is rather cheeky. And it forms the best evidence for Pynchon's interpretation. But the more literal reading of the Appendix understands it as a fragment from a reconstruction of the rise and fall of Newspeak as a social enterprise. That is compatible with the survival of Oceania once the Party realized that the mystical attitude toward Newspeak threatened to make it the essence of Oceania.+

 

 

Climate Change: Central Bankers are Worried about Insurance

More frequent or severe extreme weather events and/or a late and abrupt transition to a low-carbon economy could have significant impacts on the financial system, with potential systemic consequences. Extreme weather events could lead to damage of physical assets, including real estate, productive capital and infrastructure, and loss of life with consequent property and casualty insurance losses, damage to balance sheets of households and firms, increases in defaults, and potential financial sector distress. A late and abrupt transition to a low-carbon economy could lead to a sudden repricing of climate-related risks and stranded assets, which could negatively impact the balance sheets of financial institutions....

Real estate and agriculture suggest themselves as sectors that are both particularly important and more immediately exposed to physical impacts of climate change, which could affect banks and insurers exposed to these sectors on both the asset and liability sides of their balance sheet. Furthermore, as physical risks rise or become more unpredictable, insurers will most likely increase premiums or stop insuring some risks. The implied decrease in coverage leads to increased uninsured losses (‘protection gap’) in case of a catastrophic event which could negatively impact the collateral value of properties, leaving banks exposed to credit risk. Understanding the trends in insurability, the cost of insurance, the protection gap, and their spillovers to the banking sector and the economy more broadly is an important direction of research. This requires an analysis of insurers’ role and behaviour, including the effectiveness of the catastrophic risk market. (p. 4)  "The Macroeconomic and Financial Stability Impacts of Climate Change Research Priorities," June 2020  NGFS: Central Banks and Supervisors Network for Greening the Financial System[HT Anne Kervers]

The "NGFS Technical document" quoted above is worth reading because, while it names no names, it is a forthright exploration of the limitations of existing scientific approaches to understanding the impact of climate change on the financial system and it contains several calls for more research in lots of areas that have become politically and morally salient. Here I am interested in using it as a granular, but useful window into what we may call the central bankers' consensus view about how to think about the significance of climate change to their jobs. So, before I get to insurance and reinsurance, let me just provide a two paragraph summary of that.

What is immediately noticeable is that the central bankers view their job as handling, that is anticipating and mitigating, the impact of "shocks" to the economy. And it is quite clear that they view the economy as a kind of autonomous system with a trendline, and their role is to mitigate and ameliorate the deviations to that trend line  caused by shocks external to the trend line. Behind the fancy language we can still discern the  idea that ordinary "fluctuations in economic activity are seen as the result of small, white noise shocks-impulses-that affect the economy through a complex dynamic propagation system," (127) and that major fluctuations have to be understood in terms of large demand or supply shocks.*

Crucially, in the central bankers' perspective, "demand shocks are typically manageable from a monetary policy perspective, [while] supply shocks are generally more challenging as they generate a trade-off for central banks between stabilising inflation and stabilising output fluctuations." (6)  The significance of climate change is viewed through the lense of a destabilising series of supply shocks that potentially overwhelm monetary policy. Strikingly, in the report this is viewed as a danger to the central banks' ability to fight inflation (6-9). Somehow, and this is remarkable in light of recent experience, the risks to deflation are apparently not worth noting at all.** 

There is, of course, plenty be said about the utility and normative significance of treating the economy in terms of deviations from a trendline, but let's turn to quoted passage(s). The first thing to notice is that the 2020 report highlights insurance and reinsurance. I noticed it before looking at last year's report, which is longer (and more detailed engagement with scientific literature); there insurance and reinsurance are entirely absent. Second, central bankers admit that from their perspective, at the moment, some of the best research on the effects of climate change on the economy is taking place in the insurance world, especially, I gather, integrating climate modelling with economic and geographic analysis. ("To this end macroeconomic modellers could borrow well-advanced methodologies used by (re-)insurance firms to quantify the economic impact of physical risks from extreme weather events, including spatial analysis.") I know nothing of this research, but will try to learn about it before long.

Third, the central bankers explicitly worry that in light of climate change insurance and reinsurance (henceforth when I use 'insurance'  and its cognates I mean both insurance and reinsurance) will become more expensive and, subsequently, cover less of economic activity. I think they are identifying a number of distinct concerns. And it may be useful to list them. [I] If insurers misjudge the underwriting risks because they are now in the realm of true uncertainty ["unpredictable"], they may go bankrupt. Since historical data are becoming less useful, underwriting is becoming more art than science reliant on the sensitivity to assumptions in complex modeling. If major insurers cannot pay out, or are perceived not to be able to pay out, then significant bits of the financial and real economy are exposed to serious damage [" financial sector distress."], if not collapse. Since AIG this is not just science fictions.

In fact, [II] the central bankers are worried about the future of insurance as a profitable enterprise ["longer-term climate change implications for the profitability/viability" (6)] What they do not say is that most risk modeling and portfolio management in finance presupposes that profitable insurance is possible. So, the significance of this concern is much wider.

[III] As premiums increase the central bankers assume that ordinary firms and individuals will be exposed to inflationary pressures and the decision to forego coverage. Strikingly the central bankers do not assume (a) that these will stop economic activity in the exposed areas; or (b) that governments will step in to provide insurance or to mandate/subsidize insurance. On (a) this means the central bankers assume that say due to path dependencies economic agents will persist in their activity without insurance and will tolerate considerable more uncertainty in their lives. And this will percolate through the system because a lack of insurance in one sector will impact its interactions with others. On (b) this strikes me as unrealistic. Governments will be lobbied extensively. Of course, at some point governments will have to make tough decisions about which parts of the economy to cover or not.

[IV] Central bankers are still very worried about bank balance sheets. Here the main concern is that the collateral that itself becomes worthless and is under-uninsured. It's one thing if the waves topple a hotel tower in Southern Florida and makes a loan non-performing; another if there is no insurance to pay back the principle of the underwriter. That leads to write-downs and deleveraging, etc. ["the collateral value of properties, leaving banks exposed to credit risk. Understanding the trends in insurability, the cost of insurance, the protection gap, and their spillovers to the banking sector and the economy more broadly "]

[V] The central bankers assume that the effects of climate change are not felt uniformly ["climate change could impact geographical/economic areas differently within a country or currency area." (7)] In particular, throughout the document they show awareness of the significance of  (what is known as) spatial economics; and that their existing models and policy instruments sit uneasily with a spatial or geographic approach to the financial system.

Finally, [VI] it is noticeable that whole areas of insurance that impact the vast majority of consumers and citizens directly (medical, car, travel, home-owner/renters, etc.) are either discussed obliquely or not mentioned at all. And while in many cases this will not matter much, it is important that somebody alerts the central bankers to the risks of cognitive capture by various industries. In the end they must be servants of the wider public, too. 

To sum up. Catastrophic risk insurance is a part of the financial system that generally is ignored by the public. Given the centrality of insurance in modern political economy, it is a good thing that central bankers are starting to reflect on what happens when agents start to wonder if they cannot count on insurance in a crisis.  The danger is, of course, this will very thought accelerates the possibility.

 

 

On The Origin of Capitalism: Meiksins Wood, The Ordos, and Walter Lippmann on Productivity of Property

In fact, capitalism, in some ways more than any other social form, needs politically organized and legally defined stability, regularity, and predictability in its social arrangements. Yet these are conditions of capital's existence and self-reproduction that it cannot provide for itself and that its own inherently anarchic laws of motion constantly subvert. To stabilize its constitutive social relations - between capital and labour or capital and other capitals - capitalism is especially reliant on legally defined and politically authorized regularities. Business transactions at every level require consistency and reliable enforcement, in contractual relations, monetary standards, exchanges of property. The coercions that sustain these regularities must exist apart from capital's own powers of appropriation if it is to preserve its capacity for self-expansion. (178-179)

England's particular process of feudal centralization produced a legal and political order more unified than was the European norm. So...England had long had a unitary national parliament; ...England had a more nationally unified legal system, especially its 'common law' adjudicated by royal courts, which had become the preferred and dominant legal system very early in the development of the English state.....Instead, state formation took the form of a cooperative project, a kind of division of labour between political and economic power, between the monarchical state and the aristocratic ruling class, between a central political power that enjoyed a virtual monopoly of coercive force much earlier than others in Europe and an economic power based on private property in land more concentrated than elsewhere in Europe. (172)

Here, then, was the separation between the moment of coercion and the moment of appropriation, allocated between two distinct but complementary 'spheres', that uniquely characterizes capitalist exploitation. English landlords increasingly depended on purely 'economic' forms of exploitation, while the state maintained order and enforced the whole system of property. Instead of enhancing their own coercive powers to squeeze more out of peasants, landlords relied on the coercive power of the state to sustain the whole system of property, while they exercised their purely economic power, their concentrated landholdings, to increase the productivity of labour, in conditions where appropriators and producers were both becoming increasingly market-dependent. Ellen Meiksins Wood [1999/2017] The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer view,  172-3

Yesterday, I noted that according to Meiksins Wood and Adam Smith, the origin of agricultural capitalism can be found in a change in the character of land-leases (which became fixed-term, but lengthy) such that tenants and landlords submitted, mediated by the estimations of surveyors, to the discipline of the market-place which internalized a practice of unceasing improvement. As Smith noted this system was made possible, in part, by a change in legal practice in which the state provided legal remedies to  tenants.

This last point also fits a key strain in Meiksins Wood's argument: that agricultural capitalism is made possible by the state's capacity and willingness to maintain "order" and enforce "the whole system of property." In particular, on her view it also meant a willingness to give preference to a notion of property right that itself both encouraged improvement and, in part, is ground in or justified by such improvement. While she claims the account of property precedes Locke, she treats Locke (and by ignoring Grotius) as its greatest spokesman of a view she calls the "productivity of property" (111).

While her view skips the intrinsic defense of property rights (beloved by libertarians), that is, what Locke has to say about natural rights, I am not unsympathetic (recall) to her more instrumentalist and consequentialist reading of Locke's account of property (as an interpretation of Locke). This latter, more instrumentalist account is also (recall) visible in Toland's argument for Jewish naturalization and emancipation. Meiksins Wood is not inclined to see the productivity of property approach as emancipatory. Rather, she sees it rooted in the original sin of enclosure and the violation even "extinction of the customary rights of English commoners" (159) on which "many people depended for their livelihood" (108). 

My  interest today is not to debate the merits of the charge. Rather, I assume the 'productivity of property' is a doctrine that has entered and become entrenched in aspects of legal practice and statecraft; we see it, for example, in the practice of eminent domain (even though Locke has historically been associated with the natural law inspired criticism of eminent domain). This 'productivity of property' two important characteristics the first familiar, the second less so to liberal thought. First, as Meiksins Wood notes, the productivity of property presupposes independent state capacity to create a stable system of property rights that can shape expectations. And she is right to note that capitalism itself may create the institutional conditions -- rent-seeking, state capture, etc. -- that also create the incentives under which the impartial rule of law is undermined. One need not be a marxist to recognize she is onto something; the past two sentences describe the central obsession of the Ordoliberals (ORDOS), who worried that without both independent judiciary and independent civil service with esprit des corps, democracy provided a fast-track to the mechanisms by which the productivity of property was undermined. 

This is all familiar enough. But there is also a second feature, which she notes in the following paragraph:

We need to be reminded that the definition of property was in Locke's day not just a philosophical issue but a very immediate practical one. As we have seen, a new, capitalist definition of property was in the process of establishing itself, challenging traditional forms not just in theory but also in practice. The idea of overlapping use rights to the same piece of land was giving way in England to exclusive ownership. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, there were constant disputes over common and customary rights. Increasingly, the principle of improvement for profitable exchange was taking precedence over other principles and other claims to property, whether those claims were based on custom or on some fundamental right of subsistence. Enhancing productivity itself became a reason for excluding other rights. (114-115)

Now, Meiksins Wood's rhetorical point is to give a reader a sense of the unfairness or suffering that accompanies the exclusion of other rights. But lurking in it is the seminal point that to embrace the 'productivity of property' also means embracing unseizing conflict over property rights. That is, it is not just accepting the friction that accompanies a change in legal regime (from, say, common and customary rights to the productivity of property). But once the productivity of property is hegemonic even more legal friction is to be expected.*

To the best of my knowledge, writing in the midst of the Great Depressions (1937), Walter Lippmann (no Marxist) was the first to really grasp this point (although surely elements of it are in Marx); entrenched technological change would help drive open ended possible improvements in productivity, and, thus, constant relative changes in productivity of different factors of and property in production, but technological change would also drive a constant reconceptualization of what counts as property (and commodity), as witnessed by recent debates inspired by changes in artificial intelligence, financial innovation, and the status of genetic code of (say) plants and animals.

The elements of the second features give rise to the need for what (echoing Lippmann) one might call the 'spirit of adaptation' in government and law. The legal and political system can't merely stand back, but must "adapt itself successfully to the intensely dynamic character of the new technology.” (Lippmann's The Great Society: 16) Drawing in part on Adam Smith, Lippmann notes that this dynamic character of technology and property involves showing “how law and public policy may best be adapted to this mode of production which specializes men's work, and thereby establishes an increasingly elaborate interdependence among individuals and their communities throughout the world.” (174)

That is to say, Meiksins Wood is right that the productivity of property generates innumerable sites and constantly new forms of legal conflict. The rise of capitalism puts great, perhaps too great, demands on state capacity. It must provide a legal and tax framework that can generate reliable expectations, and simultaneously the governing elites must be willing, despite great temptations to profit from or steer it to partial ends, to adapt that framework in light of the friction generated by the practices shaped by it in open ended fashion. And it must do so while pursuing other political goals (connected to defense, public health, public goods, etc.)

Meiksins Wood closes her book with the observation that "as capitalism spreads more widely and penetrates more deeply into every aspect of social life and the natural environment, its contradictions are increasingly escaping all our efforts to control them." (198)  As should be clear, I agree that the contradictions are real; they are features not bugs. This suggests, in fact, that the marxists are right in thinking that political and economic crises are intrinsic to capitalism, despite their shape and content being often wholly new or genuinely uncertain. Writing in the pandemic, with living memory of the financial meltdown of 2007-9, this fits the lived experience of adult life under capitalism. But despite repeated and entirely justified collapses of confidence in the liberal project (broadly defined), it has also shown enormous resilience under adversity. And this resilience is also ground in lived experience. What's needed is a firmer grasp and critical evaluation of the spirit of adaptation that is itself shaped by the forces unleashed by the productivity of property, and that shapes these in turn. 

Ón Callard's Aspiration (I)

On an aspirational account of self-creation, the creator does not determine, choose or shape the created self; rather, she looks up to, imitates and seeks to become the created self. The source of normativity lies at the end of the process, rather than at the beginning.(p.13)....

skeptics may worry that an account such as mine succumbs to the basic error Nietzsche is describing: in positing the normatively prior self as temporally posterior, I am presenting a teleological account of (a species of) self-directed agency. Is such teleology naturalistically suspect—does it rest on some notion of backwards causation, or causeless effects? I argue that these suspicions are themselves predicated on a conceptual error: a confusion between two kinds of grounding relation...

The primary task...is that of giving an account of how one set of norms—the norms governing S1—is related to another set of norms—the norms governing S2. ... If we want to know whether those very desires and representations succeed or fail, we must assess them with reference to the as-yet nonexistent S2.
In aspiration, it is the created self who, through the creator’s imperfect but gradually improving understanding of her, makes intelligible the path the person’s life takes. Aspiration is that form of agency in which one acts upon oneself to create a self with substantively new values. One does this by allowing oneself to be guided by the very self one is bringing into being.--Agnes Callard Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming, (p. 182-3)

I read Callard's Aspiration with a reading group at Chapman. The members of it (let me know if you want to be named) are to be blamed for my mistakes.:)* On my interpretation, aspiring in Callard's sense is a species of acting under Knightian uncertainty (which goes unmentioned in the book) closely analogous to L.A. Paul's transformative experience (which is discussed carefully; recall here and here). I agree with Callard that aspiring is a real phenomenon, and that it invites further reflection. In a series of posts, I want to diagnose at least three conceptual issues (and make aspirational, baby steps toward resolving them). 

First, the distinctive proleptic normativity of an aspirational action cannot be grounded in the prior intentions of the agent. For, some (of a Kantian bent) this is just bat-shit crazy. But I think normativity can be ungrounded in such intentions.  As Callard notes the agent that grounds the normativity is a future self. That is to say, to explain the problem of aspirational normativity one must solve (a) the teleological way such a (b) posited future self can ground the normativity of proleptic actions toward it. Once (a) and (b) are solved, one can make progress on the problem of aspirational normativity. I take these in turn, in reverse order. 

Second, accounting for the normatively grounding, posited aspirational self is more difficult than it may seem at first. For, on Callard's account -- and I endorse this feature -- genuine aspiring can fail and some purported aspiring can turn out to be wrongheaded. In the first case (of failed aspiration) the posited aspirational self (who is supposed to ground the normativity of one's proleptic reasons toward it) never materializes. Whatever the identity of this imagined self, there is a sense in which it is merely an ideal version of a possible you.  In the second sense (the wrongheaded aspiration) the posited self could never be you. So, how can counterfactual selves -- one tangentially related to your identity, the other unrelated to you -- ground the normativity of your activity?

In fact, the problem also is generated in circumstances where the aspiration was warranted and turned out a success (by whatever criteria internal to aspirational tasks). For, even if we leave aside questions of teleology, wne may well wonder how successful aspiration can ground one's present action when the future (post aspirational completed) self is in-non-trivial ways a different identity from the present, aspiring self. It still looks as if a counterfactual identity distinct from one's identity is grounding the normativity of your agency. So, to put the problem starkly, aspirational created selves are, in non-trivial ways, counterfactual selves with which one shares (prospectively) only partial identity.  (As Callard notes repeatedly, one cannot claim identity with this future self because prospectively one has little ground for such identity claiming.) While teleology is part of the problem, the real problem is how counterfactual or created selves can proleptically generate normativity to agents that are, in non-trivial ways, (partial) strangers. Let's call this the problem of counterfactual strangers.

Third, I do not mean to suggest that teleology is no problem at all. As Callard puts it, "it is the end that provides the normative standards for assessing what comes before it" (209); and the end is unknown, unknowable to the agent until the end is reached.  In fact, working through Callard's book in the company of decision theorists, it is notable how much of the standard machinery of rational choice agency presupposes a kind of billiard ball model of agency in which efficient causes of push and pull (beliefs, credences, intentions, expectations, etc.) do all the work. The question is how can one insert proleptic reasons, which are distinctly teleological into a standard  decision-theoretic picture that plays by naturalistic rules. Let's call this the problem of teleology. Luckily, I know how to make progress on the problem of teleology because (recall here and here) I just read the ms of David Haig's brilliant book, From Darwin to Derrida: Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life which vindicates a naturalistic version of echt-teleology.

I don't think any of the problems I have identified are truly articulated in Aspiration. But I think Callard has identified, or (to do justice of her treatment of Plato) recovered, a genuine feature of our existence. And that she has offered us enough of a mountain to climb, to make it worth it to reach higher vistas.  

Stay tuned.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster, Byzantium, and the PSR

One interesting feature of recent debates about God’s existence is the use of the Flying Spaghetti Monster to deride the rationality of theistic belief (a colorful spin on Russell’s teapot case). What I’m interested in is why anyone was ever impressed with it.

Lately I’ve been studying the history of the Byzantine Empire: its military history, its religion and theology, its philosophy, art, and architecture. It’s amazing to me that there’s an entire empire, lasting one thousand years, that is wholly absent from popular Western culture. When was the last time you saw the Byzantine Empire mentioned in a movie, a television show, or a recent novel? And so what happened? Why did one thousand years of Greek Christian history go down the memory hole?

....

For many neoplatonic thinkers (Christian or no), the existence of some sort of deity is philosophically obvious. God/master deity often served as the explanatory ground of almost everything: concepts, knowledge, morality, human purpose, the soul, freedom, and the basis of political order. This isn’t a coincidence. They believed they had arguments beginning from their philosophical commitments and extending to the existence of some kind of chief deity. Some kind of God served a central explanatory role in these philosophical and theological systems.

For neoplatonists, the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) would have seemed a ridiculous analogy with the divine. The power of the FSM is to generate the intuition that God’s existence is random, unnecessary, and absurd. And just as no one should believe in FSM, no one should believe in God. But, again, the finest minds for over a thousand years, and really fifteen hundred years, would have been utterly unmoved because God’s existence was in no way random. In fact, God’s existence was the least random thing imaginable.

The truth is that a single, original deity isn’t going to seem random on any view that prioritizes the conceptual and the mental as ontologically fundamental. Deity just doesn’t look weird on such views. And, importantly, these views aren’t insane, since it is hard to see how the conceptual and the mental as we know them could even in principle originate in the material world. So there must be some mental point of origin or explanation, and that suggests at least one deity, and perhaps only one master deity. I take no stand here on whether those systems must lead to some kind of theism, just that it is entirely reasonable for these philosophical systems to yield arguments for some kind of theism.

So when did FSM start seeming like an interesting analogy? Not the 19th century, since idealism was dominant in many places, and idealists frequently affirmed the existence of either an immanent deity or a transcendent one.

No, it is the dominance of physicalism that gives the FSM its rhetorical power. But this suggests that all the FSM can do is convince people with tacit physicalist commitments that God’s existence is as random and unexplained as the FSM. For again, for centuries upon centuries, almost no reflective person with philosophical training would have been impressed. Instead, the only people who are impressed are those who have absorbed physicalist assumptions. And, while physicalism is influential, it is not only reasonably contestable, but it is probably in some trouble in the philosophy of mind and metaethics. It’s just hard to jam mental and moral properties into the physical world.

...

So that’s why I think the FSM impresses some people. It impresses express or tacit physicalists, but other reasonable philosophical systems won’t see a single God as an arbitrary and laughably random postulate. And the philosophical systems that do see God in this way are subject to various difficulties. Now, the Christian God may indeed seem random as a specification of the master deity, but even Christians admit that we only know about God’s Trinitarian structure through revelation. So if you want to impugn the Christian God with the FSM, you have to already think you have a good argument against the idea that the master deity can and has revealed itself as having a Trinitarian form. And that requires a bit more than ridicule, if the existence of a master deity is already on the table.--Kevin Vallier "Why Was Anyone Ever Impressed by the Flying Spaghetti Monster?"

Let me start by saying that I love Kevin Vallier's attempt to think seriously about the historically conditioned conceptual pre-conditions of shifts in the apparent plausibility of a thought experiment, argument, or intuition. (He is also right to note the oddness of the near invisibility of Byzantine culture.) Contemporary philosophers tend to dislike doing this because it smacks of relativism (of the historicist kind) and it creates a pathway toward systemic methodological doubt about the evidential status of a lot of our techniques. 

As an aside, Vallier does not emphasize that for much of its natural history the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) was intended and understood  as satire (this is exceptionally clear in the Wikipedia article describing its history). It's pretty clear that even if satire is a human universal (I don't know), the content of satire is (ahh) necessarily historically conditioned. But FSM has found its way into philosophical discussion (see for example here).

Now, Vallier suggests that it's the twentieth century rise of physicalism that helps explain the tacit cultural/rhetorical power of FSM. Because it is the embrace of physicalism that allows one to see God’s existence "as random and unexplained as the FSM." But Vallier does not explain why this is so. By this I do not mean that Vallier needs to offer a mechanism that takes us from the philosophy presupposed in the zeitgeist to the cognitive effectiveness of ridicule; although it would be swell. But rather what the conceptual connection is between physicalism and the purported randomness and explanatory vacuity of of God. It can't be because of the commitment to law-governedness in physicalism because God is in no worse position (conceptually) than various (let's say, other) arbitrary initial conditions. It can't be because God can't be explained within physicalism because physicalists can't explain the origin and nature of laws and constants.  And it can't be because God is inconsistent with physicalism. This list is not meant to be exhaustive.

Vallier himself suggests that one some interpretations physicalists leave no room for mental and moral properties at all. But as Vallier hints that version of pysicalism generates much mystery about many of our social practices and the nature of experience. So, the case is by no means straightforward. (I am no property dualist, for the record.)

Rather, the rise of physicalism happens to coincide with the demise of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR; see here). That the PSR was taken to have lost its salience in the twentieth century is taken for granted in, and perhaps best expressed by, Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being. I think it's the lack of cultural purchase of the PSR that accounts for the historical shift Vallier is trying to put his finger on. For the PSR has no tolerance for (i) arbitrary events; (ii) no tolerance for un-caused events/entities (that is a natural way to interpret the idea that “Nothing comes from nothing”); and (iii) no tolerance for unexplained events/entities (etc.). 

The connection between the rise of phsyicalism and the demise of the PSR is culturally conditioned, but not intrinsic. For, at the start of the twentieth century, for various reasons, and I hasten to add not all of them good reasons, scientific developments (the Big Bang, quantum mechanics, etc.) were interpreted as suggesting that science entails that the cosmos has arbitrary elements ineliminably woven into it (and so incompatible with the PSR).

Ine may think there is now a deeper mystery. If the demise of the PSR created a physicalism wonderfully at ease with randomness, then implying God is really random can't really figure into an argument against the existence of God.

The mystery dissolves if we remember the FSM is not an argument against the existence of God (understood as a designing mind). Rather, it is a demand for "equal time" for other wonderful ideas.

RIP: André Norman Gallois (1945-2019)

Last week I learned through Mark Steen and Paul W Prescott that my former colleague, André Gallois, has died. We were colleagues for a brief period. But I encountered him, at Syracuse, in my first tenure track position, after I spent two relatively miserable years (in an otherwise cushy post-doc) at a place where -- with notable exceptions --  for a non-trivial number of senior faculty, snark and intellectual hierarchy defined the way they did philosophy, at least in public (recall). And I owe in no small part to André (and several others at Syracuse) a return to a love of philosophy. And I would like to mark this today.

My narrative starts with an apparent vice. In Q&A's André asked the longest questions I have ever seen. I will be frank: this could be quite annoying if one was in the queue after him. Even so, anybody that would follow André's train of thought, pausing for a distinction, backtracking to insert a qualification, adding a careful aside to avoid misunderstanding, could discern that the expanding length of the question did not originate from a sense of entitlement or self-importance, except perhaps insofar that to take philosophy genuinely seriously one must have a sense that one is walking a tightrope hovering between madness and profundity, nor from a desire to showboat or a misplaced sense of vanity, nor from a lack of clarity of thought, but from generosity, a true generosity, and scrupulousness -- stating a speaker's position as fairly and as carefully and clearly as possible--, and from a general sense that philosophy required care, clarity, and precision. And while some of us possess the art of seeming to be able to, laser like focus on the core problem at hand and, thereby, dominate a philosophical conversation, following the winding, retrograde motions of André's thought process was always instructive: distinctions useful to the speaker's argument were quietly inserted, and unexpected implications made visible.   

I met André during my on-campus visit. At the time (perhaps to this day), the department had a habit of asking candidates not just to give a job talk, but also to lead a department seminar on one of their writing samples. That's a very cool institute, although a bit terrifying, too, of course. I had checked the specializations of the members of the department and so I knew that Gallois did metaphysics. My paper was on Berkeley and involved my first truly post-dissertation (recall) research. I was a bit puzzled that he asked me a series of penetrating (and, of course, rather slowly articulated) questions about Berkeley that really revealed some of the shaky presuppositions in my argument. I could sense that in some respects I was out of my depth. I didn't reveal the full extent of my ignorance, and I tried to hide behind (what I assumed to be) my superior knowledge of 18th century natural philosophy.

At some point during my visit I ask him if he was so familiar with Berkeley because it was taught in graduate school (he went to Oxford). And as he starts speaking, it suddenly dawns upon me (fuck!) "you are Gallois 1974." The master argument! And this generates a warm giggle and a bemused assent. Given that André's was one of the world's most serious thinkers about the nature of identity, especially contingent identity, I am sure the mirth also philosophical. But at no point does he make me feel like an idiot.

I would not describe myself as an especially close colleague of André. But I enjoyed our trips out to the lakes. I have a distinct, but fallible memory that he lived out in Cazenovia. I loved having lunch with him; we often talked about music--one of his abiding passions. After I left Syracuse, our contact faded. We mostly exchanged pleasantries on facebook.  Earlier in the year Kris McDaniel alerted me that his health was declining. I reached out to him, and André told me that he had moved to Gainesville (where had worked decades ago and also, more recently, had found true love when he did not expect that anymore) because of his pulmonary fibrosis. 

André published many works that I hope will be rediscovered by future philosophers. He was attracted to paradoxes and often defended unfashionable positions. When I met him André's great abiding philosophical obsession was Moore's paradox (see here). Much to my amazement he could make me feel the grip of it. And we could spend days talking about ''it's raining"; his linguistic intuitions sometimes eluded me, but that there could be many shades of "it's raining" was self-evident to me as a Dutchman. It says something about the anti-metaphysical culture in which I was trained, and which thankfully is gone, that it never occurred to me that Moore's paradox could be the fertile lawn on which lengthy and rich philosophical voyages into the nature of belief, propositions, identity, coherence, first person authority, etc. could be launched. 

André had firm views about what counts as philosophy that I sometimes thought too traditional. But once an issue was being analyzed, one could not imagine a gentler and more encouraging companion in shared, all-absorbing philosophical inquiry. 'To spark joy' has become a joke; but when a philosophical activity sparks joy, all exposed get furnished with a beacon that radiates hope in our broken world. [He would hate that sentence on so many levels.] 

Regular readers know that one of the metaphysical commitments that fuels these impressions is that identity, even (especially) self-identity is, against the authority of our greatest philosophical minds, neither simple nor obvious. And while I have grown fond of nodding at Deleuze, when I do so, André (see also this paper) started the train of thought that is, as of yet, partial.

On Arrow, Hurwicz, and Maskin...Another strategy to displace Knightian Uncertainy

The papers by Arrow and Hurwicz (1972)...Maskin (1979).... all deal with this approach to the problem. The complete ignorance approach retains the states - consequences framework of Savage (1954) but starts with the assumption that a decision-maker has no beliefs about the relative likelihood of the states. An important distinction between these papers and the Savage framework is that they assume that the state space is finite. This means that subjective probabilities cannot be derived by repeatedly sub-dividing events, as in Savage (1954). The decision-maker is assumed to have a utility function over the consequences which may be ordinal or cardinal.--David Kelsey & John Quiggin (1992) Journal of Economic Surveys, "Theories of Choice under Ignorance and Uncertainty" p. 139

For a few years now, I have been blogging about and giving papers on the displacement of Knightian uncertainty in professional economics (and decision-sciences more generally). My argument always boils down to the claim that underneath the increasingly fancy math some structure is imposed on the world when economists and decision theorists model decision under conditions uncertainty. I claim that structure (or probability distribution) is illicit or unearned because that structure rules out unnoticed, albeit genuine physical possibilities. This is especially so when economists treat a decision as a random walk (recall; and here), but it also shows up in other techniques.

But in these approaches, I have followed (recall) Knight and Malinvaud and operationalized uncertainty as circumstances when no grounds for assigning probabilities exist or when, speaking to hard-nosed economists, no long-term profitable insurance is possible. In response, sometimes sophisticated audiences challenge me to consider the treatment of so-called decision under 'complete ignorance.' This was first formulated by Arrow and Hurwicz (both Nobel laureates eventually in a paper they wrote in the mid 1950s, but only published in the 1972s. Arrow's role is significant, because he developed many of the other strategies economist's rely on to model (or as I claim displace) Knightian uncertainty, and he was (recall) polemically opposed to Knight. This work on complete ignorance has made me realize that I have been thinking about true uncertainty in too limited fashion.

Before I get to that just a note. After reading Arrow/Hurwicz and Maskin  (who also won a Nobel), and while writing this post, I encountered the survey article by Kelsey & Quiggin quoted above. This survey article is especially useful to those who try to understand what the mathematical results amount to in their intended applications to decisions. The quoted passage above mentions the key two issues for present purposes: (i) complete ignorance really does not impute probabilities to modeled world; (ii) it assumes "an exhaustive list of possible states of nature." (Maskin 1979: 320)*

On (i), there seem, thus, technical ways around Knight's version of Knightian uncertainty. These are going to be circumstances where the outcomes have clear utilities (or some other reward) attached to them, but the probabilities are unknown. This are going to be contexts with decision procedures that "rely primarily on the maximum and the minimum of an action" (Kelsey & Quiggin, 140.) I think what's key about such circumstances that possible choices are really constrained and known in advance (that's what (ii) also says). Kelsey and Quigging comment that ""it must be admitted that many practical problems do not satisfy the assumptions of the complete ignorance models. Most of the researchers in this area would agree that complete ignorance is a special case and a rather extreme one." (140) I am unsure if it is extreme (in all relevant senses); I rather suspect it is quite common in closed environments with limited options (like games), or in environments where the options are deliberately perhaps artificially limited, but one has no grounds for prior probabilities about outcomes, say because it is an one-off decision.**  

Yet, and this gets me to (ii); the knowledge that one can list all (genuinely) possible outcomes seems to violate the spirit of Knightian uncertainty. I had noted this before (recall), in fact, because Arrow uses the same trick in his effort to displace Knightian uncertainty via so-called contingent commodities (or Arrow commodities/securities), which are used in the context of general equilibrium modeling. In the context of GE modeling this approach really begs the question (against the Knightian critic) because one really does not know either what the possible states of the economy may be nor that these are (ahh) finite.+ 

The main problem is primarily epistemological; economies are not like that (Hayek is, for the time being, right about that.)++ But there is also a sense in which this is a problem about possibility (or in what I like to call modal economics). Why think it is (ordinarily) even possible to list all the possible consequences of a decision (as the Good Place is noting this week, the combinatoric explosion of even ordinary decisions is huge)? That is, this reinforces my thought what most of the mathematically sophisticated ways of displacing Knightian uncertainty have in common is a tendency to assume that possibility is easy and so to impose a modal structure on the world (without this structure being grounded in any pre-existing or robust knowledge of the world's modal properties). 

Anyway, I have said enough. Except that I need to find a definition or operationalization of Knightian uncertainty that also rules out the tendency to assume what the states of the world may be. 

 

 

RIP: Stanley Cavell 1926-2018 (Guest Post by Abraham Stone)

[This is an invited guest post by Abe Stone (Santa Cruz, Philosophy)--ES]

I remember distinctly the moment I learned that David Lewis had died. It was during my years as a postdoctoral fellow, when I was more than a little isolated, and so it turned out to have been some time — months, maybe — since the event. I recall thinking: the world in which I thought I was living, during those months, turned out not to be the actual world, and so I turned out not to be the person I thought I was, but merely a counterpart of that person. And thus arose the half-formed thought (still only half-formed now, alas) that therein lay some insight into what is actually at stake in the conflict between counterpart theory and transworld identity.

There are very many different ways in which philosophical writing can be difficult. In Lewis’s case (as in Hume’s), the obscurity derives most of all from irony: philosophical theses are argued for, urgently, fluently, and with elaborate and ambitious systematicity, but there are only scattered and sometimes conflicting hints about whence the urgency derives. In Cavell’s case (as in Emerson’s, or Thoreau’s, or Wittgenstein’s) the difficulty lies largely in a different direction. There are a series of statements or short passages, each clear enough in itself, and some, at least, dealing with matters of obvious importance;[1] but the rule of the series, the reason one follows another in just this order, is thoroughly opaque. Hence Cavell’s death leaves me with different thoughts: about the continuation and breaking of series, about whether we can carry on, and whether we should.

Moreover, although I met Lewis only once, I was Cavell’s student for many years, and in fact he is the one person I regularly refer to (in talking to my students, for example) as “my teacher.” But I was not one of his closest students. Our relationship was always difficult, no doubt in large part because of my deafness to so much of what he heard. And what he heard that I did not was not limited to such minor items as poetry, jazz, opera, and what to me are just some mildly amusing and/or disquieting old movies. It often extended rather farther, to the words coming out of my own mouth: I might realize too late, after leaving the room, that he had been responding to what I, without knowing it, had literally said. And yet this was a good way to be his student, because, beyond the many listable insights, methods, approaches, even simple facts that I learned from him, the biggest lesson of all, and the one most central to his thought, was about the philosophically essential and impossible nature of that relationship between teacher and student. The teacher, so to speak, at some point, breaks off and says: now continue as I would; and what happens next, if it is not just complete failure, may well involve violence or the threat of violence, or flattery and slavish imitation, or treachery and betrayal, or (as in King Lear) all of those combined.[2]

Cavell’s death comes at a time when, though some think that Western philosophy has entered a golden age, others of us fear that it may have ended, that there is and will be no next member of the series after Cavell, after Lewis, after Derrida. But then, on the other hand: it also comes at a time when, having tried (but: fairly tried?) doing good, we find, strange as it may seem, that it does not agree with our Constitution. It comes, in other words, at a time when we may ask: why attempt to follow such teachers? Why not reject them and begin anew? The option of rejection — I mean, the option of rejecting our teachers, rejecting the whole tradition of philosophy from which we have emerged, rejecting America, rejecting Europe, rejecting Athens — seems eminently reasonable, more the voice of conscience than of inclination. This is hardly the first such time, of course, but it would be a poor exercise in induction to conclude that it won’t or shouldn’t be the last: that what Justinian or Descartes or Carnap tried and failed can’t and shouldn’t now finally be accomplished.

Cavell’s response to this, as I understand it, is that the apparent option of rejection is really an option of repression. I can’t say how essential it is that this be taken as a reception of Freud: Freud’s thought is yet another of the things important to Cavell which I feel unable to appreciate, or to which, perhaps, I am resistant. But it explains why Cavell, though he never followed Heidegger into, as he would put it, “the myth of having read everything,” also never followed Wittgenstein and Emerson into “the myth of having read nothing.” He worried constantly over the canonical figures of Western philosophy — not in a scholarly, originalist way, but beginning with them as he had received them, stare decisis (which meant, in some respects: beginning with a mere caricature of them). It explains, too, why lack of recognition, for himself or for his teachers, could so anger him: the story in which “American philosophy” means principally James and Dewey offended him, not as ignorant and inaccurate, but as a deliberate (though unconscious) suppression of Emerson and Thoreau. It explains his anger on one occasion when, responding to his description of the logical positivists as “self-stultifying,” I said that what he took as self-stultification is actually self-control. “How can you make that distinction after Freud?” was his reply. For me, the time now was (and is) after Avicenna, after Descartes, after Kant, certainly, after Nietzsche, maybe even after Wittgenstein, but not after Freud (or after Marx). That was an excuse (elaborative) that he would not accept. But then why isn’t this time also after Carnap (or after Neurath, or after Popper)? Cavell knew he could not, so to speak, point to a set of invisible, strong-as-logic (or even: strong-as-sociology) rails that would send me through one set of stops but not through the other. That he might say, in such a case, “Here my spade is turned,” was to him not a reassurance but a tragedy.

What time is now? What world is actual? The questions are almost the same, maybe, after all. Indexicals show most starkly the irruption of the pragmatic (and the transcendental?) into semantics. If what is salient to me is not, or not often enough, what is salient to you, we can’t speak to one another, even if we speak “the same language.” If a lion could speak, how could we understand it? A lion or other non-human animal — but how do we know which animals are humans? What about drills and children and idiots and Aristotelian or Derridean philosophers? If Locke associates the name “human,” in the phrase “human(e) understanding,” with a complex idea that includes whiteness and maleness (not to mention mechanism, traces of alchemy, Euclidean spatiality …), and if we understand him, must we not make the same association? (Locke, if I do understand him, would say that we must. “I know not, how Men [!], who have the same Idea, under different Names, or different Ideas under the same Name, can, in that case, talk with one another.”) What if our salient points of reference — the chessboard, the well-known beacons and headlands, the orbis magnus — turn out to be non-actual, or no longer actual, already dead? What if the rock on which we hoped to found a wall or a state (or a church), which we had hoped to reach at last by clearing up the ground, removing some of the rubbish (even if that should require a sort of moral bog hoe), turns out to be a myth? If the concepts origin and series (or: permanence, progression and reversion) are mythical, how can we continue any series? How can we fail to?

What I learned from Cavell — what we have all learned from him, if, as I think, the time now is after Cavell — is not solutions, but problems. We may not be able to continue. We may have no choice but to continue.

On Creativity and Philosophical Trade-Offs (Musings inspired by Michaela McSweeney)

    What topic do you think is under explored in philosophy? 

Let me answer a different question, which is what I don’t want us to lose sight of while nobly pursuing underexplored areas of philosophy. I think that recent pushes towards public and social philosophy are so, so important: we really need to be engaging with the public, and we really need to be addressing the (incredibly depressing) social and political issues that we are faced with.

At the same time, though, I think of philosophy as partly a creative process and discipline, and I think it would be a tremendous shame if we lost sight of that part of things. I love metaphysics in part because it is one of the parts of philosophy that allows for some of the most creativity; there are fewer rules (or at least, there should be fewer rules—turns out that sadly there are lots of rules for what kinds of things will get published), for the very same reason that many people think metaphysics is worthless: it’s unclear what “the data” are, or whether there are any data, that we are theorizing about, and also unclear what the correct methodology is. I don’t think these kinds of worries are actually particular to metaphysics, because I think they carry over to basically all of human inquiry; and I don’t think they de-value human inquiry. When I think about what I value about human inquiry, an awful lot of that is about what it tells us about our relationship to our world, and what it tells us about us, and also that it is often really beautiful and fascinating and incredibly complex. In the end, I think that super abstract, theoretical philosophy can and does help inform the more obviously applicable-to-real-life parts of philosophy, but I also think it is valuable for its own sake, in the same way that other arts are. "APA Member Interview: Michaela McSweeney"by Skye Cleary

The interview with McSweeney is worth reading because it is full of wisdom about graduate school and (also) a rare occasion for somebody 'successful' in the profession acknowledging how awful graduate school can be. In addition the interview expresses succinctly one of my core commitments: "my sense is that people who think that longstanding, or oft-discussed, philosophical problems have clear answers probably need to do more philosophy." (This is especially true of our overconfident peers who insist they have solved them. Nearly always they have just moved the problem around.) Finally, I think she is right to call attention to the fact that we need to "figure out how to allow (and encourage) people to be decent, good, authentic people instead of making it seem like the only way to succeed in philosophy is to give up certain core values (often, the right values, and ones which we need more of in the philosophical community) that we might have" (emphasis in original). Go read the whole thing!

Even so, I would like to invite more from McSweeney about the nature of philosophical creativity. (Given that she is being interviewed any lack of clarity is due to the format.) At first she implies a contrast between the 'most' creativity of (pure) metaphysics and the lesser creativity of ('applied') social and political philosophy. I say 'at first' because a few lines down she seems to imply that all "human inquiry" is pretty much in the same boat.  In what follows I want to reinforce this last/latter point by using her comments as a starting point of a digression on the nature of creativity as well as the nature of 'applied' philosophy (and the role of 'pure' in it). 

Now McSweeney understands creativity in terms of the lack of rules and and lack of clarity about methodology and the content of the subject matter. Let's call this a romantic conception of creativity. It is worth noting it's not the only kind of creativity: a more classical conception of creativity (associated with the name Goethe) is that creativity is a consequence of working within and with constraints.* The previous two sentences are rather coarse-grained because in philosophical practice (and McSweeney knows this better than I do) we can (if we adopt the classical conception) be constrained in very different ways: if one is addressing the nature of (say) space, there is a big difference if one is constrained by some image of naturalism (or physicalism) or the actual findings of recent science; and there is a big further difference if one is constrained by other elements of one's system or (let's be go back to the future) some version of the principle of sufficient reason, etc.

There is a very different kind of creativity, again, if one feels one must answer to the history of a problem or (say) somehow feels the pull of continuing one's philosophical tradition. On this last point, to understand oneself as the next step in a pre-existing series (Y) about (X), while simultaneously re-ordering the nature of that series (Y*) about (X*) is yet another form of creativity. Sometimes it's very hard to see X from the vantage point of Y*. This sounds very abstract, but I have described how after Tarski certain explications of truth were naturally thought classical, and others (say, Spinoza's) became barely intelligible. I call this historical creativity. 

I don't think social and political philosophy are less creative in the romantic, the classical or the historical sense. If one designs, say, a utopia there is a sense in which the rules of the genre are laid down by Plato (what I call Socratic political theory). But, of course, the rules are not explicit in Plato, and they may only be partially stabilized by the time Ibn Tufayl, More, Bacon, Godwin, or Le Guin come around.  Part of the creative joy of the genre is that there is both historical creativity and an  'answering to' new existing social and technological relations/developments as well as a creative projection into an impossible, yet (apologies for the appearance of paradox) possible non-present. I don't mean to suggest utopias are only about imagining the future; one of my best students, Hannah  Lingier, taught me that many have a non-trivial function (by way of idealization) in isolating and revealing (in image and speech) how non-trivial existing social mechanisms work. Either way, the rules of the genre are not immutable. 

Obviously, most professional philosophers who work in public philosophy or in social and political philosophy do not aim to write the next New Atlantis.  But there are some non-trivial features that complicate (ahh) our** lives, even if one is only interested in getting a publication in a decent journal. For, it is actually very challenging to work with normative concepts that (a) are purportedly descriptively accurate in some sense  or another; (b) do not reinforce or contribute to bad status quo; (c) do not privilege the perspective of the theorist at the expense of folk who do not attend our seminars; (d) that accommodate the reality of social change; and (e) that are coherent with other commitments, and (f) are not silly in light of recent social science, nor (f) cause embarrassment when a hostile media get hold of them. 

I need to close. But I want to comment on the hint of anxiety that I detect in McSweeney's "it would be a tremendous shame if we lost sight of that part of things." I don't think that McSweeney is expressing concern over (the possible) reality in which metaphysicians can't get jobs because political and social philosophers are getting all of them. I think the anxiety is rather -- and again I may be wrong about this -- that topics she loves will not be of interest to our (future) peers. I recognize this concern; every time somebody (like me, alas) pushes for the significance of comparative philosophy, I reflect on the possibility that poor Berkeley will be unknown in the 23rd century. (Since he is a eugenic racialist, I am not too bummed.) 

As it happens, I think 'we' need a lot more metaphysics in social and  political life in order to do such work 'better'!  The previous sentence is not meant to be radical now that Sally Haslanger and L.A. Paul and their students are already revolutionizing (in very different ways) social and political philosophy.  The point is social and political life are suffused with very complicated issues of modality (and probability, non-determinate and overlapping boundaries, etc.). The reason I am confident of that claim is that continental metaphysics (Deleuze, Foucault, etc.) has enormous uptake in empirical social science. Those of us working in social and  political philosophy would welcome more attention by analytic metaphysicians if (and perhaps only if) the metaphysicians didn't think of the topics as merely applied (and, again, I don't think McSweeney thinks that); for, I bet we could also improve metaphysics if more time was spent thinking about the very hard problems of social and political life and then feed that experience back into our most general reflections about the nature of (ahh) reality.