False Good Ideas

There should be a category of false good ideas: ideas that are clever and appealing but clearly false. These ideas will tend to catch on despite their obvious falsity, because they appear to solve problems. Most of philosophy is made up of these ideas; they might be said to constitute the subject. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing: it is good to see what the options are and what their faults may be. Discovering the truth is another matter. Science isn’t like this—it regularly comes up with true good ideas (though sometimes false ones). There ought to be a prize for the best false good idea in philosophy. Of course, they are not generally recognized as false at the time of their promulgation; in retrospect, however, it seems obvious and we wonder how people could have been taken in. I will make a list.

I don’t think there are any false good ideas in Plato and Aristotle (I’m not counting his physics), because I don’t think any of their ideas are obviously and demonstrably false, and many are good. But the category comes into its own in the modern period, beginning with Descartes. Surely, his substance dualism, though attractive and ingenious, is clearly false—today it is scarcely necessary to argue the point (the pineal gland says it all). Empiricism is manifestly false, though enormously appealing—simple, commonsensical, unmysterious, monolithic. Wouldn’t it be great if all knowledge were simply a carbon copy of the senses? We could all go home and play backgammon. Unfortunately, the problems are staring us in the face, particularly the problem posed by a priori knowledge. By contrast, rationalism is true but not so good—because it has no decent account of how innate knowledge arises and has an air of mystery about it (God gets wheeled in). Honorable mention goes to Berkeley for his theistic idealism: extremely clever, theoretically impressive, but not remotely credible. Almost magnificently false. For a while, these false but good ideas dominated the philosophical landscape, as they were absorbed, refined, and then steadily criticized (Thomas Reid was a dissenting voice). It wasn’t until the twentieth century that new brilliantly false ideas hit the airwaves. Frege was an early exponent of the brilliantly false, though his ideas were never mainstream (and many of his ideas are not clearly false). I am thinking of his ontology of functions and objects—concepts as unsaturated entities, truth-values as objects. Personally, I have been entranced by these theories and I recommend that everyone study them (even construction workers), but they are not exactly shining examples of indisputable truth. Is The False really an object like your kitchen table? Now consider Wittgenstein: the picture theory of meaning is a delightful theory, resolving many a vexing problem, but it is not exactly manifestly true. The tautology theory of necessary truth is also wide of the mark, though certainly appealing. The distinction between saying and showing has not worn well, though arresting enough. Russell’s theory of descriptions is extremely clever, but has been subject to serious criticism; it is no longer regarded as irrefutably true. Nor has Russell’s mathematical logicism stood the test of time, despite its prima facie appeal. Logical atomism withered long ago.

But it was logical positivism that specialized in palpable outright falsity. The reason this was not recognized is that it is an extremely good theory, judged by the standards of philosophy. It solves so many problems! It refutes traditional religion, demolishes troublesome metaphysics, offers a deflationary theory of a prioriknowledge, and for good measure puts ethics on a sound emotional footing (supposedly). What’s not to like? You just have to swallow the falsehoods and foolishness (is every unverifiable proposition really meaningless?). The positivist emperor had no clothes, but he sure talked a good game. Admit it, we have all been tempted by logical positivism at one time or another (I believed it in my youth for at least 24 hours). It’s a great theory, just not too hot in the truth department. Similarly for its descendants and fellow-travelers: pragmatism, instrumentalism, conventionalism, confirmational holism, and the like. The doctrine of phenomenalism was ingenious and exciting, but it collapsed like a house of cards in short order. Behaviorism suffered the same fate after an initial surge of enthusiasm. Now we wonder how these doctrines could have been believed so fervently, forgetting the lure of the novel and fashionable. And the doctrines had clear philosophical payoffs—it wasn’t just shiny objects and false hopes. More recently, we have had the causal theory of knowledge and reference, the token identity theory, Tarski-type truth theories, functionalism, possible worlds semantics, meaning externalism, experimental philosophy, panpsychism, supervenience, zombies, virtue ethics, epistemology and metaphysics naturalized (have I forgotten anything?). All these are goodtheories in that they purport to solve philosophical problems, or at least move the needle forward: they give us something to think about, to pin our hopes on. I see their appeal, I really do. But are they true? Do they seemtrue? Don’t we see a pattern of failure, of hopes dashed? There was a time when many people saw in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations a path to philosophical enlightenment, but those days are past. The initial excitement wore off, just as it has throughout philosophical history. Maybe we can find some truth in these ideas, but we don’t find complete and final truth. We don’t find philosophical closure. This is not a counsel of despair, but it is a warning against premature and rash optimism. The good is not the same as the true. Let’s by all means keep looking for good theories, but let’s not get too carried away by them. Curb your enthusiasm, as the philosopher once advised.[1]

[1] You might have wondered why that philosopher (Larry David) called his comedy series “Curb Your Enthusiasm”, given that this title seems to have nothing to do with the content of the shows. A more descriptive title might have been “Be Careful What You Say” or “Watch Your Step”. Larry never shows any enthusiasm for anything he does, yet he still gets into hot water all the time. I choose to believe that he is expressing his general philosophy of life: Don’t get too carried away, don’t believe everything you hear, don’t succumb to the latest dogma, don’t suspend your rational faculties. Philosophers, like everyone else, need to curb their enthusiasm.

Can I Prove that I Exist?

The Cogito purports to be a proof that I exist. It is supposed to establish the proposition that I exist. But this is a funny kind of proof for a simple reason: it only proves my existence to me. I cannot use it to prove my existence to you, or to any other person no matter how intelligent and receptive to rational argument. If I come up to you and announce “I can prove my existence” and offer “I think, therefore I am”, you will reply “But how do I know that you think?” My alleged proof fails at the first hurdle: I have not established its basic premise. The problem of other minds prevents the proof from working. I cannot prove to anyone else that I exist, only to myself. What kind of proof is that? Is it really a proof at all? The OED gives us “demonstrate by evidence or argument the truth or existence of” for “prove”, and goes on to link the concept to proof under the law. You can’t go into a court of law and propose to prove the existence of someone or something by establishing its existence for you—and you alone. That’s not a legal proof. The proof has to be public not private. Would there be any proofs of anything if all such proofs were irremediably private in this way? More fundamentally, does it even make sense to qualify “proof” by “to me”—doesn’t that take back with one hand what has been offered by the other? It’s like saying you have evidence for something and then adding that it’s only evidence for you. In the Cogito the putative evidence is necessarily available only to the proponent of the proof—in his acts of thinking. It is impossible to accept the proof for anyone but the individual giving it. The audience will retort, “But that’s no proof to me!” You can’t relativize proof in that way. A proof that only I can accept is no kind of proof at all.

It is the same in science and mathematics. You couldn’t go to a scientific conference claiming to have a proof of something and then turn around and say the proof is only available to yourself. You couldn’t base a science, say physics, on a proposition whose truth is ascertainable only by you. As Wittgenstein would say, the word “proof” has its meaning in a language game involving other people and what they can know; you can’t detach it from this language game and expect to retain sense. The idea of a “private proof” is a contradiction. You may be convinced of the truth of “I exist” by reflection on the Cogito, but you are misusing language if you say you have a proof of this proposition. And isn’t it very strange to describe yourself as having proved that you exist by means of the Cogito? Maybe you know it thereby, but you haven’t found a proof of it—not in any ordinary sense. But it sounds scientific and rigorous to speak of proof in this connection—as if we are talking about Euclidian geometry or Newtonian physics or Darwinian biology. In these subjects the proofs are all objective and public, but not in the case of the Cogito. For the “proof” is limited to a single individual, necessarily so. If my science requires that other people exist, the Cogito is no use in establishing this. The science becomes limited to me, which disqualifies it from being a science. Only I can have reason to believe this alleged science if it rests on my employment of the Cogito. This kind of certainty is no use to science—or law or everyday life. It is really a kind of category mistake to call the Cogito a proof, no matter cogent it otherwise may be. Nor is it right to characterize it as an argument or a presentation of evidence: these concepts presuppose a social context, i.e., interpersonal accessibility. The words in question have a meaning that derives from their use in social contexts; they are misused if detached from such a context. At the very least it should be signaled that the Cogito doesn’t work to prove one’s existence to other people, unlike other proofs of existence. Clarity is best served by withholding that term from discussions of the Cogito.[1]

[1] If someone seriously doubts that I exist as a thinking thing, it cuts absolutely no ice to reply, “But I can prove that I exist”, proceeding to offer the Cogito. The skeptic will simply say, “Your initial premise begs the question”. The Cogito is no use at all if other people question your existence.

Black Genocide

The president was on a roll. He had this immigration thing down. He was righting wrongs. He had been doing some research, i.e., talking to cronies and hangers-on (“great people”). He had never heard of apartheid before and the word baffled him (something to do with not letting blacks live in your neighborhood, he gathered). He had the president of South Africa in his office in front of the cameras and was determined to let the truth be told at last. They had been killing the farmers, the white farmers, the black people had, many of them, some said thousands. It’s what they call a genocide—an old-fashioned word meaning “very unfair killing of good people who love their country, and are probably white, though there were good people on both sides”. The president of South Africa, as the president had learned, was part of this genocide thing (the word kept reminding him of pesticide). His government was probably behind it. It was a terrorist government, just so you understand, many terrorists in it, many. The white farmers had to leave the country the genocide was so bad. We were accepting them with open arms, no background check (not necessary). It wasn’t the whiteness, as the evil fake media said, but the farming—these were farmers, just so you understand, good people, we love the farmers. We want to bring back farming, like coal, asbestos, other rare earth minerals, and make America great again. Anyway, the president had the other president at his mercy—the base was going to love it. He was going to stop all the racist genocide going on in that country.

He started strong, announcing that there used to be slavery in South Africa, as well as gangs doing it. But the fake media had it all wrong: the slave owners were the black people and the whites were the slaves. In history, the president explained, there was a lot of this—like the Jews in Egypt. The Jews were white and the Egyptians were black or nearly black. In South Africa hundreds of years ago the blacks enslaved the whites—took them from Dutchland or somewhere nice. This is why later the white freedom fighters didn’t like living near the black slave owners and wanted to live apart from them (hence “apart-ite”). So now the blacks were killing all the whites who farmed, the president explained. He was thinking of invading South Africa to put a stop to this genocide. The president of South Africa smiled tolerantly as the president rehearsed this history and said simply “None of that is true”. At this insult the president brandished a handful of articles culled from the internet attesting to the widespread murder of white farmers. The other president shook his head and said, “The internet is not a reliable source of information”. This angered the first president considerably and he started shouting hoarsely: “They did it, it’s all here, everyone knows it! They are killing the farmers and eating their dogs! They are raping the farmers’ wives and possibly their daughters!” His face went from orange to red. The other president said, as if to calm the first one, “I wish I had a plane to give you” and smiled warmly, as if the president was making a joke. “I don’t need another plane, but if you have one, we can consider it”, replied the president.

It was a beautiful meeting, he summarized later. We had excellent talks about trade and I made clear that no terrorist genocide against white farmers would be tolerated. According to the president, the other president had promised to crack down on farmer genocide, especially when white. He had saved all white South Africans from mass murder—only he could do it. He reported that the other president had said, with tears in his eyes, “Thank you, sir, for saving my country from black gangs killing white farmers”. Of course, he had said no such thing, but the president was convinced that this was the upshot of the meeting. No one else could have done it, because of the respect and strength he showed. All in all, a good day in the White House (so aptly named).

On Not Knowing What It’s Like

How much do I not know about what it’s like? How extensive is my ignorance of the different forms of consciousness? I do know what it’s like to be me now—about my current conscious states. They act as input to my knowledge faculty and that faculty produces knowledge of them as output. We can also safely say that I know what it’s like to be a molecular duplicate of me now, because it has precisely the same conscious states as I do now. On the other hand, I don’t know everything about what it’s like to be a bat: I do know a bit about some of the bat’s experiences, because I have similar experiences, but not about its echolocation experiences, which I don’t have. Phenomenal similarity determines what I know and don’t know. Between these two extremes, however, opinions may differ. I will argue that we have a spectrum of ignorance here, with some cases hard to decide, not a sharp binary distinction. On balance, I think our ignorance is far more extensive than is commonly recognized—we know precious little about what it’s like for subjects of consciousness. At the same time, we know more about it in certain cases than has sometimes been supposed. The operative notion is incomplete knowledge: we have varying degrees of knowledge, more or less complete, with incompleteness as the rule. The bat is more known than some people seem to think and the human less known. There is actually a vast range of cases to consider and much epistemic complexity. Complete knowledge of what it’s like is actually sharply limited, as it turns out. In some cases, we might not know (or be able to know) whether we can know another subject’s consciousness, because we cannot gauge the degree of similarity between us. Maybe I know what it’s like to be him (or it) and maybe I don’t know—it’s difficult to tell. And this kind of ignorance can have practical and ethical significance—such knowledge can be useful.

Let’s start with our old pal, the bat. We know quite a bit about what it’s like to be a bat, as much as we know for any mammal: the bat sees, hears, smells, tastes, feels fear, etc. He isn’t all that mysterious. It is only when the bat gets to echolocating that our knowledge encounters an obstacle, because we don’t echolocate—there is nothing internal we can consult. But even here all is not ignorance, since the bat is using its ears to process the echoes—and we have ears too. So, we know a little about what it’s like to echolocate like a bat—we have heard echoes. Also, we are familiar with judging distance and movement by means of the visual sense, so we can use this knowledge to get an idea of the bat’s sensory state. What we don’t know is what it’s like to use sounds to judge spatial properties—though even that might be surmountable by learning. Let’s say the bat’s experience overall is 95% knowable, as things stand. The bat is thus (only) a partial mystery to us. But what about the cat? Cats are nocturnal, so they have no qualms about the spending the night outside alone. My cat has no problem lying down on a concrete driveway all night when he could just as easily sleep on a comfy bed inside (he prefers this during the day). I find this incomprehensible; presumably, he feels the “call of the wild” when night falls, whereas I feel the “call of the bed”. He must have an experience at night that I don’t have; I don’t know what it’s like to have this experience. Is it anything like my experience of enjoying natural scenery or the starry sky? Not much. To that extent, my cat is a mystery to me. He also likes to bite the tails off living lizards and eat them; I don’t have this preference. I can’t really compare his experience to my own, except to say it’s a sort of eating. I don’t know what it’s like to eat a lizard’s still-writhing tail; it’s a bit like eating asparagus, perhaps, but not completely. Ditto for holding a live rat in my mouth—I have never done anything close to that. Do I know what it’s like to fly like a bird? Not really; I can only guess and imagine. Do I know what it’s like to have the body of a whale? Er, no. And so on and so on. I don’t know much about what it’s like to be any other species, because my experience is limited to being of the human species. I don’t even know what it’s like to brachiate like a bonobo, and we are close genetically. This is an area of deep (though partial) ignorance.

But the point also applies within the human species. Do I know what it’s like to be a woman? Up to a point, but no further. I don’t know what it’s like to be pregnant and give birth, or feed a baby at my nipple. I don’t know what it’s like to menstruate. These are all mysteries to me, more or less deep. I can try to imagine, but I can’t really know—fully, completely. Maybe my imaginative efforts are woefully wide of the mark. How much do I know about what it’s like to be a man of another race, of another size, in a different place, at a different time? I can guess, but how accurately I can’t say. I know a certain amount about what it’s like to be another man, but not everything. Come to think of it, how much do I know about what it’s like to be me in the past, or the future, or in a counterfactual situation? I don’t know what it was like for me as a baby or even as a teenager (though I have faint recollections), and I don’t know what it will be like to be me when I am old and feeble and losing my mind. Still less do I know what it would be like to be me in the field of battle or paralyzed or super-rich. It took having a serious operation to teach me what it is like to have a serious operation (not great). So it goes with illnesses and the like. We don’t know a lot about ourselves outside of our actual present experience; we may think we do, but we don’t, not fully. You don’t know what it is like to be consumed with anger until you are consumed with anger (again, not great). States of consciousness are hard to know unless you have experienced them directly (and can recall them accurately). We really know only a tiny island in a vast sea (which includes our own experience outside the here and now). The bat lies within the gates. The human hangs upside down in a cave and uses echolocation, an alien to himself. Can I really know what it is like to be you—with your body, your background, your desires, your personality? Aren’t you something of a mystery to me, though I have partial knowledge of your form of consciousness. Aren’t we all like bats to each other? I think I know what it’s like to be you, roughly, but maybe I am mistaken—maybe you are not as similar to me internally as I naively suppose. Consciousness is supremely knowable from the inside, but from the outside it is frustratingly elusive. We know it when we see it, but we often don’t see it. Consciousness has an egocentric epistemology.[1]

[1] The physical world, by contrast, has an allocentric epistemology: that is, knowledge of it is focused on the other rather than the self. Physical objects are objects of sensory knowledge, especially visual; we do not know our own body better than other bodies, as a matter of principle. I can know a bat’s body as well as I know a human body. There is no restriction of physical knowledge to one’s own body and anything similar to it. But knowledge of consciousness in general is restricted to knowledge of one’s own consciousness and anything similar to it. Alien minds defeat our cognitive capacities; not so alien bodies. We can then put the point of Nagel’s “Bat?” paper by saying that physicalism cannot be true of consciousness because consciousness has an egocentric epistemology while the body and brain have an allocentric epistemology.