Speaking precisely about justice

In Republic I, Thrasymachos introduces the idea that when we are speaking precisely, the practitioner of a craft, insofar as he is a true craftsman, never errs. This idea of the craftsman as such is familiar from Gorgias, but is more starkly developed here. Thrasymachos needs this distinction to save his definition of justice ("the advantage of the stronger") from the obvious fact that those in power often order, by accident, what is actually to their disadvantage. Polemarchos and Cleitophon had suggested that he change his statement to say that justice is what the stronger thinks is to his advantage, but he rejects this escape route (it would be interesting to imagine what the consequences of taking this alternative might have been).

His position is a standard sophist's relativist/conventionalist one, holding that it is only by custom (not by nature, which he conceives inHobbesian terms) that we call justice a good thing; it is the moral rhetoric of the weak (what Nietzsche later called "slave morality"). I suspect this critique of conventional moral language is the core of why he thinks he can reject Socrates' view, even though he can't defeat his argument -- the pull of conventional usage is just too strong, he might protest -- plus, if he leaves against the will of the young men present, he loses face with them (and thus the chance to command their fees as a sophist). By staying and acquiesing to Socrates, he holds out the promise of this brave new worldview, to which the young men are clearly drawn (they don't want him to leave, and Glaucon and Adeimantos later pose their thought experiment, in Book II, in defense of it).

Knowingly doing wrong

In his conversation with Polus in Gorgias, as elsewhere, Plato's Socrates argues that no-one ever knowingly does wrong. We always act for what we perceive to be the good, and if our actions are not good, this is because we ignorantly take too narrow a view of the good (perhaps it seemed good for ourselves, but we overemphasized this to the exclusion of the bad it would create for others).

The question comes up in the context of a tyrant, who Socrates concedes has the power to do as he sees fit, but denies that this is the same as doing what he wants (by which Socrates seems to mean what he really, really wants -- i.e. that which is genuinely beneficial).

Do you think this Socratic view is at all defensible, or does our more sophisticated modern understanding of the complexity of human motivation make Polus' more common-sense view more plausible?

Meno and Recollection

The famous slave-boy demonstration in the Meno purports to show that learning is possible because we already in some sense know everything. We can raise legitimate questions about whether it convincingly shows anything of the sort. Doesn't Socrates more-or-less feed the boy the answers? Doesn't calling learning recollection (anamnesis) simply beg the question of how we learned it in the first place?

Setting these interesting questions aside, however, I think we should take Socrates very seriously when he says: "I do not insist that my argument is right in all other respects, but I would contend at all costs in both word and deed as far as I could that we will be better men, braver and less idle, if we believe that one must search for the things one does not know, rather than if we believe that it is not possible to find out what we do not know and that we must not look for it."

Whether these particular arguments work or not, then, Socrates is committed to this search. Perhaps his reasoning here is analogous to that in the end of the Phaedo, where he insists on the importance of living as though we were immortal (though we can't prove it), and attending to our characters accordingly. We found some danger in this reasoning on that occasion; is there analogous danger here?

Elites and Elitism

The accusation of elitism has a mind-numbing effect on any conversation. Perhaps this is because we use the term ‘elite’ with two distinct senses, one as a mere description with a mild hint of approval (“Usain Bolt is an elite athlete”), and the other heavily tinged with evaluative emotions: resentment, envy, anger, and fear of our own inadequacy. In this mode the term indicates all our uneasy and contradictory responses to the experience of class.

We might think a charge of elitism would stem only from a specific accusation that a person with talents or accomplishments above the norm has expressed, in words or demonstrative actions, arrogance toward those purportedly beneath her. It suggests a lack of graciousness and humility particularly unseemly in a person of such accomplishment (from whom we expect, whether fairly or not, a well-developed moral character sensitive to others’ feelings and limitations).

Such a charge is slippery, however; it is difficult not to slide between the two senses of ‘elite’. Many people, wrapped up in unexamined fears and resentments, can easily be brought (by a careless journalist or a calculating demagogue) to think that a person who is elite in the purely descriptive sense must automatically be an elitist – that is, someone who puts on superior airs and thinks and behaves condescendingly toward others – whether she is or not. And once leveled, the charge is virtually unanswerable, because any discussion of it sophisticated enough to tease apart the muddled senses will look, well, elitist, at least to those already immersed in the emotional stew of the accusation itself, which plays on any underlying anti-intellectualism it can find.

Accusations of elitism are, for these reasons, perennially fraught and difficult to debunk. It’s a bit like trying to show that you’re not in denial; once the accusation has been leveled, you’re trapped, whether you’re Socrates or Obama.

Philosophy and Death

One central theme of Phaedo is death, and we here see some of the roots of later Stoic antisomatism (distain for the body) in Socrates' argument that since philosophy cares primarily about and for the mind/soul, it should welcome death as entailing the happy completion of that separation. This raises many questions about how literally we should take such proto-dualist talk, and the overlay of moral evaluation accompanying it (soul good, body bad). Yet the conversation does seem to have the salutary effect of reconciling Socrates' friends (two of whom, Simmias and Cebes, are Pythagoreans for whom such mystical, otherworldly talk is like mother's milk) to his impending death, and it seems to console Socrates himself, his many qualifications (I don't insist on this, if what we say is true...) notwithstanding.

What are the dangers and downsides, if any, of adopting such a provisional, contestable view about life and death and living as though it, or something like it, were literally true?

The Conceptual Frame

We have discussed some of the historical events leading up to Socrates' death, and touched on the quasi-oral poetic history underneath which gives us some insight into his work (and Plato's choice of literary form). One remaining piece is the conceptual, philosophical or scientific background, leading to the so-called "Socratic turn" away from speculation about the natural world, and inward, so to speak, to the investigation of oneself and one's place in a human community.

Here's a question about that "turn" on which you might perhaps all weigh in: Why do you suppose it seemed to Socrates as though he had to choose between these inquiries?

Greek Politics and the Philosopher

Having gotten a sense from Thucydides of how eloquent political speechifying could be in Athens, as well as how incredibly volatile the participatory political system was, we can get some sense of why Socrates steered clear of the Assembly and the law courts (and also why he was not necessarily a fan of the old democracy -- though it certainly doesn't follow that he was a supporter of the thirty tyrants!). Nonetheless, in Crito we see him as a devoted citizen of Athens, prepared to uphold its laws (nomoi in Greek -- we'll discuss the difference) to the death even when they make a mistake. This is an apotheosis of patriotism, but with some interesting twists -- Socrates is never uncritical, even of the gods themselve, much less the mortal laws of his city.

Background to Plato

As I intimated on Thursday, we will discuss several key factors that I take to be essential to making sense of Plato. One is the history of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, which unfolded thoughout Plato's youth. You are reading excerpts from Thucydides' comprehensive history of that conflict, and I will give you a thumbnail overview on Tuesday of the events surrounding it as they relate directly to the execution of Plato's friend Socrates in 399 b.c.e. by the restored Athenian democracy.

Another piece of the puzzle, as I began to suggest on Thursday, is the complex relationship of Greek societies in the Fifth and early Fourth centuries b.c.e. to spoken and written language. Alphabetic writing was a relatively recent innovation (introduced probably sometime between 750 and 700 b.c.e.), and even in the late Fifth century Athens was still overwhelmingly an oral society, both in its commercial and its political dealings. Literacy was confined to a small elite, and the written word (and number) was largely a mnemonic and accounting device serving to support and reinforce memory, rather than a primary means of communication. This was changing of course, but slowly, and not without creating difficulties. As we shall see, Plato was both an advocate of new ways of doing things made possible in part by growing literacy, and at the same time deeply suspicious of writing as a substitute for interpersonal discourse (much as intellectuals today are often wary of electronics as a wholesale replacement for books, or for seminars).

Thirdly, in due course we will discuss the philosophical/scientific background to Plato's thought, beginning with Parmenides and Heraclitus in particular, and with the so-called Socratic Turn away from cosmological specuation and toward committed moral (and hence social) inquiry. Some of you have a strong background in earlier Ancient Greek thought, and you can be of service to us in helping to clarify these relationships.

A note on retaining the heading "Skeptiblog," which originally referred to a course last spring on ancient and contemporary Skepticism. In part because of Plato's artful use of the dialogue form (in which he himself never speaks), I concur with Alfred North Whitehead's assessment that in every utterance as to Plato we speak under correction. We needn't throw up our hands -- Plato's surviving writings are rich with possible conclusions -- but it is wise to be alert to our fallibility in attributing them wholesale to Plato himself.
Posted by Matt Silliman at 1:49 PM 0 comments

Background to Plato

As I intimated on Thursday, we will discuss several key factors that I take to be essential to making sense of Plato. One is the history of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, which unfolded thoughout Plato's youth. You are reading excerpts from Thucydides' comprehensive history of that conflict, and I will give you a thumbnail overview on Tuesday of the events surrounding it as they relate directly to the execution of Plato's friend Socrates in 399 b.c.e. by the restored Athenian democracy.

Another piece of the puzzle, as I began to suggest on Thursday, is the complex relationship of Greek societies in the Fifth and early Fourth centuries b.c.e. to spoken and written language. Alphabetic writing was a relatively recent innovation (introduced probably sometime between 750 and 700 b.c.e.), and even in the late Fifth century Athens was still overwhelmingly an oral society, both in its commercial and its political dealings. Literacy was confined to a small elite, and the written word (and number) was largely a mnemonic and accounting device serving to support and reinforce memory, rather than a primary means of communication. This was changing of course, but slowly, and not without creating difficulties. As we shall see, Plato was both an advocate of new ways of doing things made possible in part by growing literacy, and at the same time deeply suspicious of writing as a substitute for interpersonal discourse (much as intellectuals today are often wary of electronics as a wholesale replacement for books, or for seminars).

Thirdly, in due course we will discuss the philosophical/scientific background to Plato's thought, beginning with Parmenides and Heraclitus in particular, and with the so-called Socratic Turn away from cosmological specuation and toward committed moral (and hence social) inquiry. Some of you have a strong background in earlier Ancient Greek thought, and you can be of service to us in helping to clarify these relationships.

A note on retaining the heading "Skeptiblog," which originally referred to a course last spring on ancient and contemporary Skepticism. In part because of Plato's artful use of the dialogue form (in which he himself never speaks), I concur with Alfred North Whitehead's assessment that in every utterance as to Plato we speak under correction. We needn't throw up our hands -- Plato's surviving writings are rich with possible conclusions -- but it is wise to be alert to our fallibility in attributing them wholesale to Plato himself.

Descartes, skepticism, and Bouwsma

Our reading of the Meditations suggests that Descartes's intellectually courageous strategy for refuting skepticsm ultimately fails. He begins by giving skepticism everything it could ask for, up to and including an evil genius, and then attempts to refute it through the application of clear and distinct reasoning to the cogito, the necessary existence of God, and the consequent knowability of the material world. The cogito is his Archimedean point, and God serves as lever by means of which he thinks he can, with care and difficulty, know the world. As we have seen, however, clarity and distinctness are slipperier than they appear, the arguments for God are dubious at best, and the skeptic is far from vanquished. Moreover, along the way Descartes's method yields an invidious and unsustainable metaphysical distinction between mind and body, of which we are justly skeptical.

So has the skeptic won the day? It seems that if like Descartes we grant the skeptic the most extreme hypothetical possibilities for being misled, including an evil genius, we forfeit the possibility of knowledge (whether apodictically certain or even probable). But is such an evil genius actually conceivable? Bouwsma tells a compelling story about why it is not, that the skeptic is not entitled to worry about global deception by an all-powerful deceiver, even as an abstract possibility. If Bouwsma is correct, then Descartes need not have yielded so much ground to the skeptic in the first place.

The Tortoise and Achilles

Here is a link to a famous dialogue by Lewis Caroll (aka E.R. Dodson, Cambridge logician and mathematician). I read it as a comic but graphic example of the ultimate undefeatability of a certain sort of skepticism.

http://www.ditext.com/carroll/tortoise.html

Landesman's twelfth chapter nicely poses the impasse between Moore and the Skeptic. It becomes clear that the difficulty of adjudicating the dispute turns on the ambiguity of the ground-rules: On whom should the burden of proof fall? Must Moore prove that he knows his premise, here are two hands, or must the Skeptic prove that he does not know it?

By analogy, consider a court of law. A criminal defendant is not required to prove her innocence; rather the prosecution must show, beyond reasonable doubt, that the defendant is guilty, otherwise she goes free. But our problem is compounded. Not only must we determine in advance (and in some principled way) whether Moore or the Skeptic plays the role of prosecutor or defendant, we must determine whether this is a criminal, a civil, or some other kind of trial, and who precisely is qualified to sit on the jury. In a civil trial the prosecutor (or more properly plaintiff) must merely convince the jury that a preponderance of evidence, more than half of it, is against the defendant. The criminal standard is beyond reasonable doubt, meaning all but completely certain. Perhaps what we could call an epistemic trial demands a still higher standard, that of no possible doubt.

Perhaps we can stretch this metaphor, considering the alternative burdens and standards of proof, and find some clarity about the matter.

G.E. Moore's Hands

There seems to be one thought about Moore's proof that Landesman does not explictly articulate, but that I have always taken to be at the heart of the argument. When Moore claims, in appropriate contexts, that "here are two hands," the reason he thinks both he and the rest of us know this to be true beyond reasonable doubt is that it is an evident fact which is already more certain than than any arguments for or against it could possibly be. That is, if I needed a further argument to convince you that these are in fact two hands, or appealed to a different argument to call it into question somehow, in order to do so I would have to appeal to other matters of fact and inference which are themselves less evident, certain, and known than the fact that these are two hands. On this account Moore does not need to establish "here are two hands" to an absolute certainty, but merely to a greater degree of certainty than any competitors.

If this analysis of what Moore is doing is correct, Moore does not after all defeat the skeptic in open battle, as it were, but rather covertly. By engaging the skeptic in a conversation using a shared language in which ordinary terms for objects (such as hands) are understood, and thus are understood as having the ontological and epistemic significance that they do in ordinary discourse, he lures the skeptic into using such words in the ordinary, commonsense manner. When the skeptic demures at the ontological or epistemological conclusions Moore draws, Moore can justly cry foul, since the skeptic, in agreeing to have the conversation, had agreed to the ordinary sense of its terms. The skeptic is free to quit the conversation, but at the expense of abandoning the use of words to mean what humans ordinarily take them to mean, which would condemn the skeptic, if not to all-out solipsism, at least to an extremely lonely "existence" (scare quotes to indicate that the skeptic gives a special, non-ontological or -epistemic, meaning to this and most other words).

Such a strategy seems better calculated than Descartes' actually to defeat the skeptic. Descartes, by giving the skeptic as much leeway to doubt as possible (with the dream and evil genius arguments), seems to give away the store, since the only remedy for such radical doubt Descartes can then muster is an a priori (and modal) proof for the necessary existence of an all-good and non-deceiving god. If that argument fails, as it seems to do, Descartes is left stranded on his tiny island of certainty (the cogito), not only a confirmed skeptic about everything else, but a solipsist to boot.

On an unrelated topic...

I recently read a good article about single-payer healthcare at http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/020508HA.shtml, and it prompted me to imagine one reason more Americans aren't actively seeking such a system here.

In British Columbia, which the author cites from her own experience, income taxes are about 10% higher than in the U.S. to cover health care for everyone. It is not perfect, but it is a very economical, and equitable, system. Here in the U.S., 47 million people have no coverage at all, and even those who do have to argue constantly with their insurance carriers, in whose interest it is to deny coverage whenever possible. This is a highly inefficient, and inequitable, system. These facts are not really in dispute.

However, in the U.S., those of us whose employers currently pay the lion's share of our health insurance premiums would probably pay more out of pocket for health care if our income taxes went up 10% to cover it, even if our co-payments and the fraction of the premiums we now pay disappeared. In principle, of course, our employers could then pay us some of the difference (but no guarantees!), and there would be other benefits -- everyone would be covered, healthcare professionals could practice medicine instead of insurance triage, and so forth. But I suspect the general lack of enthusiasm for change in much of the comfortably employed and insured population (which includes most of those who vote) stems from a vague fear, perhaps not unfounded, that it will cost them.

Criteria of knowledge and wimpy skeptics

Sextus Empiricus seems to argue that there can be no rationally defensible criterion for what counts as knowledge, since any criterion would need a demonstration of its authoritative standing as a criterion, and such a demonstration would have to presuppose another criterion as its basis of justification.

Thus he comes to the uncomfortable position of claiming, as something known, that there can be no rationally defensible criterion of knowledge. In some passages he tries to weasel out of this consequence by describing skepticism as a mere attitude of non-commitment, rather than a judgement about something known. This wimpy version of skepticism wouldn't get him very far, however, for if skepticism is nothing more than an attitude, why should anyone else care?

Other passages suggest that Sextus wants to claim something stronger, that the skeptic doubts everything that is not evident. This leaves him free to assent to knowledge of appearances (that things appear as they appear we need not doubt), and to (deductive) inferences from those evident things by means of logically evident rules (like the excluded middle). On this view of skepticsm, the argument against the criterion yields evident knowledge -- that there is no criterion for non-evident knowledge.

If this reading is right, Sextus begins to look like the image of Hume that emerged from the Enquiry -- rejecting all induction, and restricting reason to the a priori. Perhaps this clarifies what seemed mystifying about Hume's view.

The Sun Also Rises

Landesman surveys the possibilities for what color is (color skepticism, color nihilism [or extreme skepticism], and color realism), and finds himself torn between good Humean habits for realism and compelling arguments for nihilism. He concludes chapter two with a kind of delicate suspension between these two

Perhaps his balancing act is unnecessary. A half millenium ago, the phrase "the sun rises" would have been a straightforward, literal description of an experienced event. It finally dawned on us, and today it is a metaphor, among educated people, for the rotation of the earth bringing the sun into view. There is a meaningful sense in which these descriptions contradict each other, but a deeper sense in which they are simply the same phenomenon described from different perspectives -- and neither is false. In Aristotelian logic they are infact subcontraries, not contradictories, so there is no problem with them both being true.

Moreover, the sun rising (likelemons looking yellow) is in a category of appearances that I'm inclined to call durable appearance (as contrasted with mere appearance) in the sense that the literal explanation of their fine structure or underlying causes does not diminish at all the robustness of them appearing the way they do. Call this non-reductive explanation. Mere appearances, like hallucinations, typically vanish when you see through them; durable appearances go right on looking the way they do from the perspective of a normal procedure, creating no real contradiction.

Matt

Hume's Critique of Reason

In the section of the Enquiry called "Of the Academical or Skeptical Philosophy," Hume says again that only the sciences of quantity and number (presumably mathematics) are the proper objects of knowledge and demonstration, and that matters of fact, existence, and experience thus fall outside the sphere of knowledge and reason. Yet he does not seem to think this commits him to any invidious form of skepticism. On the contrary, he thinks we can live our lives just fine on the basis of our unargued presuppositions -- such as that there is an external world behind our perceptions -- and make our judgments of probability without claiming more for them than that they seem to work for us now.

Pete has suggested all along that Hume has made the simple error of confusing reason as such with deduction, and that even his challenge to inductive reason itself rests on induction (as David Stove suggests). Is this right, or does Hume have a point that we would be better simply stop trying to dignify mere lucky guesswork with the honorific title of reason?

Taking on Hume

I have yet to hear from most of you about the projects you are working on vis-a-vis Hume. This blog might be a good place to toss out ideas and questions for all of us to play with.

Turn Off Verification!

Please go to dashboard/settings/comments, and turn off the "word verification" option in your blogs. This will make it much easier for others to post comments. Thanks.

The Problem of Induction

Here is a link (thanks to Dave Johnson) to a review of a book by the late Australian philosopher David Stove on the problem of induction. Stove is a controversial thinker, but his arguments here seem pretty compelling:
http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:F6YfrVW9o7AJ:www.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/irvinerationalityofinduction.doc+stove+on+rationality+of+induction&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=11&gl=us

Hume concludes bluntly (p. 28) that "All inferences from experience ... are effects of custom, not of reasoning." Thus we are justified in expecting the sun to rise tomorrow, though only by habit or custom -- it is not a proposition supported by reason. This seems a very strange claim.

Has he simply defined reason too narrowly, to include only deductive inference? We are tempted to say that it is an inductive inference, which we believe to the degree of certainty that the evidence (our past experience, reports of others) warrants -- and that the weight of probability is very heavy in this case. Given our individual and collective experience and known history (including geologic history), the sun will rise tomorrow to a near certainty, we want to say, and inductive reason strongly warrants our belief that it will.

But Hume might reply that we have only made the proposition seem highly probable by artificially excluding myriad other possibilities of which we have no knowledge. We don't know what we don't know, so we cannot accurately factor in all possibilities to calculate the genuine liklihood of its occurring. Thus the probability calculation we used to justify the belief is not meaningful data after all.

Hume's Enquiry poses a very radical skeptical problem: We are inclined to accept his premise that all our simple ideas come from impressions (feelings, perceptions), and that all other thoughts are memories or recombinations of these. It also seems fair to say that our understanding of matters of fact depends crucially on relations of cause and effect. However, we cannot discover causal relationships in our impressions -- no matter how hard we try, the best we can get is a constant conjunction of events that we infer (rather than perceive) to be causally related. It seems to follow that we have no direct perception of causality, and hence no knowledge of it as such. But if we never know about causal relationships, can we really be said to know much of anything about the world of our experience (other than the bare fact that we experience it)?

Hume on Moral Philosophy

As the editor (Eric Steinberg) notes on page 1, Hume uses the term 'moral' in the Enquiry in three senses. The first and broadest, pertaining to human nature, he shares with most philosophical usage of his own and the previous century. The second and more specific, the study of obligations, ethics, rights, right and wrong behavior and the like, is our most common sense of the term today. The third is interesting because it suggests something specific about Hume's own philosophical view: In this usage he contrasts "moral" in the sense of something based on experience or matters of fact with things that are "demonstrative" (by which I take it he means logically inferential) or "intuitive" (the way, for example, he thinks we intuit causal relationships rather than perceiving them).

It is worth wondering a little, I suspect, about this third usage.

Welcome

Welcome to Skeptiblog, a discussion space for my philosophy/honors seminar on Hume and the Skeptics. Others are welcome to read and comment as well, of course, while observing basic netiquette.