The Representation of Stereotypes

Adam Kotsko has an interesting post up at An und für sich about what stereotypes "are". Kotsko argues that we run into difficulties if we try to treat beliefs about stereotypes as being "in the head", and so we should instead treat them as being in the environmental conditions which give rise to their instances (or something along those lines -- his post is clearer than my one-sentence summary of it). I think that this moves a bit fast; a more "traditional" way of accounting for racist beliefs seems to me to work perfectly well: they are (often unconscious) beliefs about what blacks or asians (etc.) are like, and are not different qua belief from beliefs about whether milk builds strong bones or dogs return to their own vomit.

"Indeed, when pressed even people who seem to be hardened racists will most often admit that of course not all black people are like that, etc. — calling into question whether racists, as stereotype-believers par excellence, really “believe” in stereotypes in some straightforward way."

Here I think the problem isn't with the idea that racists believe racist things, but with how those racist contents are conceived. I think this is best handled by treating statements about stereotypical Xs as what Michael Thompson calls "Aristotelian Categoricals" in "The Representation of Life". (Paper available at his webspace.)

Aristotelian Categoricals are not universally quantified statements ("If anything is an X, then it is like this"), so the fact that any given racist will admit that not all Xs ɸ (for some given class X and some stereotypical behavior ɸ) does not mean that the racist doesn't really believe the stereotypical claim "Xs ɸ" is true. They don't even have to believe that (as a statistical matter) if you took a pole of all currently existing Xs, it would turn out that a majority of them ɸ. They just have to believe that the Xs which ɸ are more typical of Xs generally (albeit maybe not at the moment), or are more authentically X-ish, or something like that. The stereotype has normative force for how (stereotypically) black a given racist thinks a given black person is.

Aristotelian Categoricals strike me as very useful for thinking about this sort of thing. Nothing else seems to get the logical contours of the stereotype-claims quite right, as Thompson argues in the parallel case of claims like "Bobcats mate for life". Some bobcats never mate, or are impotent etc., but that doesn't contradict the Aristotelian Categorical claim (think of it as something you hear in a National Geographic documentary). Healthy bobcats in bobcat-friendly environments mate for life. (Thompson has further arguments for why we can't treat this as a disguised universally quantified statement about "healthy bobcats in bobcat-friendly environments", namely that making sense of things like "health" and "bobcat-friendliness" is dependent on making sense of the Aristotelian Categoricals, and not vice-versa.)

I also don't think that the fact that stereotypes can be incoherent (Kotsko's example being that Mexicans are lazy and yet desperate to work) is problematic; it just shows that racists have weird beliefs about Mexicans. They think that both sloth and being a hard worker make one a "really Mexican" Mexican. There's not even an incoherence in this example, if you treat the beliefs as Aristotelian categoricals rather than universally quantified statements. The two extremes could both be typical of Mexicans, whereas the middle-ground would not be. There's no commitment on the part of the racists to thinking that there are some Mexicans who are both lazy and desperate to work. (Compare to "Pecans grow into pecan trees" and "Pecans are baked into pecan pies", and contrast to "Pecans grow into pecan trees" and "Pecans grow into rose bushes").

Given this, I don't see any problem with treating stereotypical beliefs as being "in the head" (which of course doesn't conflict with their showing themselves in our practices, or with being unconscious some of the time; those are both normal for things "in the head" -- the outer is inner as inner, as Hegel said).

"[This] points toward the idea that black people just naturally enjoy cheaper food (not beef, but chicken; not fruit juice, but Kool-Aid) and therefore that the dominance of fast food outlets and convenience stores (rather than good restaurants and grocery stores) in black neighborhoods simply reflects the way black people are and is therefore “okay” — and so you don’t see the mayor of Chicago trying to get more grocery stores into black neighborhoods, for instance."

This strikes me as a paradigm case of unconscious stereotypical beliefs at work. The mayor of Chicago would surely deny that black people liked cheap food as such, if you asked him; he does not consciously believe that. But he probably does (at least unconsciously) believe that black people are poorer than non-blacks. And he probably believes (likely consciously) that poor people have less money to spend on food, and so prefer purchasing cheaper food. So it seems appropriate to the mayor that black neighborhoods mostly have cheap places to buy food, since black[/poor] people prefer shopping at those sorts of places. So it's easy to explain the mayor's behavior as issuing from a combination of conscious and unconscious beliefs on his part; there's no need to posit beliefs in city blocks or anything like that. Surely the fact that many black people are poor helps to reinforce the unconscious belief, but the belief isn't anywhere special.

A Very Bad Argument for Skepticism

This post irritated me. Ignore the following if you don't think Jon Cogburn's thoughts are worth your time; continue reading if you do think they're worthwhile. (There is no big payoff at the end.)

The bit in the post that I think is most egregiously confused is what Cogburgn labels "2b", which is supposed to be one horn of a constructive dilemma.

Here we are assuming that the kind of sense dependency Brandom describes (between mind and world) holds. And, by the law of excluded middle, either the relevant reference dependency claim is true, or it is false.

A preliminary clarification: Sense-dependency is a relation between concepts; mind and world cannot be sense-dependent on one another, though MIND and WORLD can (to adopt the convention of using capslock to indicate concepts). Brandom is clear on this in the quote Cogburn cites before his argument:"The determinateness of the objective world and the structured process of grasping it are reciprocally sense dependent concepts, each intelligible only in terms of the other"; Brandom regularly underlines terms for concepts in "Tales of the Mighty Dead", and I will follow him in quotation). Cogburn on the other hand does nothing to distinguish mind and MIND. Also, I'm assuming that the sense-dependency Cogburn mentions is the one he just cited, between "the determinateness of the objective world" and "the structured process of grasping it".

I don't think the disjunction has any problems; I don't think McDowell would hesitate to endorse the sense-dependency claim Brandom makes, or to assert one of the disjuncts Cogburn mentions: The "determinateness of the objective world" is not referentially dependent on "the structured process of grasping it". The world could have a determinate structure even if there were no structured processes capable of grasping it. For instance, this was the case before the dawn of life (if not before the dawn of sentience or sapience), McDowell would surely say. (And probably does say somewhere or other; he's been asked some silly questions about "idealism" before -- I would check "Reading McDowell" and "Experience, Norm, and Nature" if I felt like hunting for a reference. Dinosaurs may've been mentioned in this context.)

Cogburn:

If the world is not reference dependent upon the mind, then the determinateness of the objective world could exist without the structured process of grasping it existing. And remember (crucially) that this denial is a denial of pantheism! The world could exist without possessing the mental properties that we are forced (by sense dependency, which we are assuming to be true) to attribute to it. But this is just to say that we have no idea what the world is really like, because we are forced to understand it in such a way that we have no idea if it really is. This is skepticism.

Cogburn's argument seems to be this:
Assume (A) The world could have a determinate structure without a mind which grasps that structure -- i.e., the world could exist without anything bearing mental properties.
(B) Given the sense-dependency of MIND and WORLD, we are forced to attribute mental properties to the world.
Assume (C) MIND and WORLD are mutually sense-dependent.
ergo (D) We are forced to attribute mental properties to the world. (from B and C)
(E) The world could exist without anything bearing mental properties, but we are forced to attribute mental properties to it (from A and D).
(F) Skepticism (supposed to somehow follow from E, I suppose because E shows there is a possibility we can't rule out. This step strikes me as a non sequitur, confusing epistemic and metaphysical possibilities, but I don't need to touch it to dissolve this argument so I'll just ignore it.)

Let's substitute in for some variables to see what the dependencies in question here amount to. Brandom defines "reference dependence" thusly:

Concept P is reference dependent on concept Q just in case P cannot apply to something unless Q applies to something

So the claim that Cogburn says leads to skepticism is "It is not the case that "determinateness of the objective world" cannot apply to something unless "the structured process of grasping it" applies to something".

Brandom defines "sense-dependency" thus:

Concept P is sense dependent on concept Q just in case one cannot count as having grasped P unless one counts as grasping Q

Substituting in, we get "One cannot count as having grasped "determinateness of the objective world" unless one counts as grasping "the structured process of grasping it", which gives (C) with trivial steps.

Where does (B) come from? Brandom's claim is that we cannot think thoughts involving MIND or WORLD unless we can think thoughts involving both. This doesn't mean we have to be able to think true thoughts involving both -- that would be to confuse sense and reference at the level of sentences (thoughts vs. truth-values). Nor does it entail that we have to endorse thoughts involving both concepts; one of the reasons Frege introduced the sense-reference distinction in the first place was to handle cases where a thought was entertained without being endorsed (in quotational contexts), and this is a central case in his later papers "Thought" and "Negation". Nothing about the mutual sense-dependence of MIND and WORLD commits Brandom to the existence of minds or worlds. (B) is simply false, and so the rest of the argument falls apart. Cogburn's argument "2" fails; the reciprocal sense-dependence of MIND and WORLD entails none of the weird consequences Cogburn thinks we need to choose between.

And now for a short bit about "quietism". Cogburn:

This is precisely where McDowell backs into Wittgensteinian quietism (according to my somewhat impoverished understanding of Mind and World). His denial of "bald naturalism" seems to return us to a kind of enchanted/pantheistic world, but it's not clear if it really does.

It is apparently quite an impoverished understanding indeed; McDowell wouldn't think that the sense-dependence of MIND and WORLD entails anything bizarre, so there's nothing to "back away from". This is genuine quietism: The supposed philosophical problem is seen to be nothing, so there's nothing to say about it.

Also, McDowell's "partial re-enchantment of the world" has nothing to do with pantheism; the only things McDowell ever considers as minded are humans. (Non-human animals are minded in a derivative sense. Non-animals are never said to be minded in any sense at all.) This is what makes it "partial": the only things in nature that are "special" are humans, not stars or rivers or clouds. Humans can do things meaningfully; stars just do whatever they do with no significance (contra the "enchanted world" where the movement of the stars mean something, i.e. astrology is supposed to not be a load of hokum). McDowell never gives any comfort to astrology or shamanism or any such superstition, and his "Hegelianism" does not include anything about a Weltgeist or Hegel's "Lectures on World History". (Incidentally, the best thing I've read on McDowell and "bald naturalism" is this paper.)

A Kuhn Quote

From "Dubbing and Redubbing":

Clearly, however, only a certain number of examples [used to introduce Newtonian mechanics to students] may be altered piecemeal in this way. If too many require adjustment, then it is no longer individual laws or generalizations that are at stake, but the very vocabulary in which they are stated. A threat to that vocabulary is, however, a threat also to the theory or laws essential to its acquisition and use. Could Newtonian mechanics withstand revision of the second law, of the third law, of Hooke's law, or the law of gravity? Could it withstand the revision of any two of these, of three, or of all four? These are not questions that individually have yes or no answers. Rather, like Wittgenstein's "Could one play chess without the queen?", they suggest the strains placed on a lexicon confronted by questions that its designer, whether God or cognitive evolution, did not anticipate its being required to answer. What should one have said when confronted by an egg-laying creature that suckles its young? Is it a mammal or is it not? These are the circumstances in which, as Austin put it, "We don't know what to say. Words literally fail us." Such circumstances, if they endure for long, call forth a locally different lexicon, one that permits an answer, but to a slightly altered question: "Yes, the creature is a mammal" (but to be a mammal is not what it was before). The new lexicon opens new possibilities, ones that could not have been stipulated by the use of the old.

And a footnote about that Wittgenstein quote, in case it didn't seem familiar:

Twenty-five years ago the quotation was a standard part of what I now discover was a merely oral tradition. Though clearly "Wittgensteinian," it is not to be found in any of Wittgenstein's published writings. I preserve it here because of its recurrent role in my own philosophical development and becuase I've found no published substitute that so clearly prohibits the reponse that the question might be answerable if only there were more information.

This amuses me in particular because of Haugeland's fondness for chess examples. He seems pretty firmly committed to answering Witt with a "No!" -- which makes it interesting that Kuhn [correctly] thinks that there not being an answer is the whole point, given that Haugeland is one of Kuhn's executors.

edit: I have begun to twitter

Social Externalism, Senses, and Frege's Puzzle

Akeel Bigrami's "Naturalism and Reference" is pretty terrific.

There's a bit in Bilgrami's Crispin Wright piece (also on his website) that I'd been puzzling over for a while. Bilgrami argues there that if an individual can fail to know the sense of one of his expressions, then Frege's puzzle rears its head again (and so the original motivation for positing senses falls away). So social externalism (a la Putnam, Kripke, or Burge) must be false: what I mean can't depend on what my social group says I mean. This is an attractive conclusion, but I couldn't follow Bilgrami's argument for it. Turns out "Naturalism and Reference" is largely devoted to laying out this argument.

It seems that the inspiration for the argument comes from a criticism Jerry Fodor makes against senses (following someone named "Mates" who Bilgrami doesn't cite; I will simply credit Fodor for this line of thought in my post). Fodor wants to handle all of language denotationally -- only reference, not sense, strikes Fodor as naturalistically acceptable. (I'll leave Fodor's supposed naturalistic reconstruction of reference out of this; I'll also not be concerned with Fodor's response to the puzzles, but only with his criticism of the orthodox (Fregean) response.) Now, this is just the position that Frege is arguing against in "Sense and Reference".

As a reminder, the challenge Frege poses for such a position is to make sense of the difference between "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus" in sentences like

a) John believes that Hesperus is visible from his window in the evening.
b) John does not believe that Phosphorus is visible from his window in the evening.

Given a purely denotational theory of meaning, it looks like John is irrational (since Hesperus is Phosphorus; they're two names for the planet Venus). But John needn't be irrational for sentences a and b to both be true; John could simply be ignorant of the fact that "Phosphorus" names the same heavenly body as is visible early in the evening. A purely denotational account of meaning thus seems committed to treating garden-variety ignorance of this sort as a failure of logic: John is said to both believe and not believe the same proposition.

The same issue arises also in our attempt to evenstate the puzzle: if "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus" have the same meaning (since they denote the same planet), why would it be wrong to rephrase b as b'

b') John does not believe that Hesperus is visible from his window in the evening.

since b and b' ought to be the same sentence?

Thus Frege posits "senses", ways in which a subject is presented with objects, as a component of meaning alongside reference. "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus" are said to have different senses despite having the same reference, and thus the puzzles dissolve. So goes Frege's account.

Fodor does not see how this is supposed to help. He asks why the puzzle can't simply arise again at the level of sense. Suppose "Besperus" has the same sense as "Hesperus", but John doesn't know that; you can then replace b with b''

b'')John does not believe that Besperus is visible from his window in the evening.

and it looks like Frege's puzzle arises anew. Now, this requires that it be possible for someone to fail to know the sense of something they (e.g.) utter. But Fodor thinks that this could easily happen, on Frege's picture. For Frege, senses are Platonic entities which exist in the Third Realm (being neither mental nor physical, and being the common inheritance of the whole human race); they are entities which we express in our various human tongues. Now, if senses are at all like other entities, then we should be able to misidentify them: we can grasp a sense without knowing all of the senses it's identical to. I can grasp a mug without knowing it's identical to the mug you forgot to wash, or used to rinse your mouth with; likewise I should be able to grasp a sense without knowing everything about it, e.g. that the sense of "Besperus" is identical to the sense of "Hesperus". And if John does just this, then you can recreate Frege's Puzzle with a and b''. "Hesperus" and "Besperus" have the same reference and the same sense, and yet there is a difference between them that stands unexplained.

Bilgrami takes this as a good reason to reject Platonism about senses, and that seems right to me. If senses are not entities which are present to the mind, but are simply ways in which referents are present to the mind, then this puzzle doesn't arise. If "Besperus" and "Hesperus" have the same sense, then they present one with an object in the same way, and John can't be confused in the way this puzzle posits. Seeing something in a certain way doesn't meant that one sees two items, the "something" and the "certain way". Like Carnap said, being in a state does not mean there exists a state which one is in (unlike being in a can, which does mean that there exists a can that one is in).

(As an aside, I suspect that Frege just thought (or would've thought if anyone raised this puzzle to him) that we couldn't grasp senses without identifying them perfectly; they are really weird like that. "Grasping of senses" thus looks like some magical happening, but I don't think Frege was worried by that sort of thing at all: it's a problem for psychology, not logic, how "grasping" is supposed to work (says Frege in "The Thought"). This is of course not a very happy position for anyone less willing to burden psychologists than Frege was, i.e. for anyone other than Frege himself.)

But, this is not the only possibility Fodor raises for someone getting senses wrong. Even if senses are not entities, it might be the case that (as many in the literature have claimed, e.g. Tyler Burge and Hilary Putnam) sense is dictated by one's linguistic community. "Social externalists" about meaning say that the sense of what one says depends on what one's words mean in the language one is speaking, where a language is an essentially social/shared/public creature (like French or Mandarin), something with a community of users that can criticize/endorse various uses of words. One makes noises, and then they mean what the communal norms say they mean. (This is perhaps an uncharitable way of putting it, since the relevant community is always supposed to be something of which the speaker is a part. Still, the point remains that for social externalists, one can mean something radically different than what one thought one meant, because of how a word is used in one's linguistic community [apart from oneself].)

Now, the problem here is fairly straightforward: Suppose "bachelor" and "unmarried man" have the same (social externalist) sense in a given linguistic community of which John is a member. Then you can recreate Frege's puzzle with c and d:

c) John believes that Tom is a bachelor.
d) John does not believe that Tom is an unmarried man.

Now, this might seem queer at first glance; it might be thought that John can't be truly described by c and d without being irrational, so you can't reframe Frege's puzzle in these terms. (The issue of the analytic/synthetic distinction is tied up in how one reacts to this; Bilgrami has a lovely brief parenthetical about this on page 12 of his paper that he says he won't be elaborating on for reasons of space. I will plead similarly.) I think this can be smoothed by adding e to the mix

e) John believes that to be a bachelor is to be a bearded Oxford alumnus, and that bearded Oxford alumni may or may not be married.

i.e., if we say that John is a member of the linguistic community who thinks some strange things. The social externalists are committed to this not disbarring John from the linguistic community, as the discussion in the literature of a fellow who says "I have arthritis in my thigh" shows: they would say of John that he believes of unmarried men that they may or may not be unmarried (but must have beards and diplomas from Oxford). Social externalists thus think that one can fail to know (at least on odd occasions) what senses one's words have. And so Fodor complains that adding senses to the picture doesn't dissolve Frege's puzzle; they simply push it back a level. For c and d can both be true despite "bachelor" and "unmarried man" having the same sense (and the same extension), and this is not a case of John being irrational but of him being ignorant of an empirical fact (i.e. that his linguistic community treats "bachelor" as a synonym for "unmarried man" and not for "bearded Oxford alumnus"). So senses fail to do the job demanded of them.

Fodor is right: if social externalists are right about senses, then senses don't take the teeth out of Frege's puzzle. But the correct move (says Bilgrami, and I agree) is to modus tollens this modus ponens and reject social externalism about sense. One can't fail to know the sense of what one says, contra social externalism (at least one can't fail to know it due to philosophical problems -- one can mean things without knowing it due to e.g. Freudian-style unconscious intentions to insult the reader, or in other psychologically interesting diseases of rationality; these weird psychological phenomena are not what motivate social externalist accounts of sense, and I believe they are largely a distraction from the issue under discussion).

So, there's a pretty little argument that social externalism gives a false account of senses, couched in Fregean terms: the things that dissolve Frege's puzzle from "Sense and Reference" can't fly free of the subject's grasp like the social externalist picture lets them. (Too bad I didn't get clear on this before I finished my thesis; it would've been nice to work it in somewhere.)

Kuhn and Putnam/Kripke Essentialism

From Rupert Read & Wes Sharrock's "Thomas Kuhn's Misunderstood Relation to Kripke-Putnam Essentialism":

It is only given our post-Lavoisieric framework that we are forced to see water as largely H2O. Absent that framework, ‘water’-in-all-its-states is not necessarily viewed as a natural kind (as the quotes above from Kuhn make clear: liquidity was regarded as an essential property of water [in the 1750s]) – and still less is H2O. Kuhn is bringing talk of possible worlds, one might say (paraphrasing Wittgenstein), back from its metaphysical to a more everyday (i.e. everyday scientific) use. A taxonomy supplies a ‘set’ of possible worlds between which normal science goes on to choose. If something really threatens the taxonomy, we (imagining ourselves now into the position of scientists actually confronted by such an anomaly) cannot retreat to philosophers’ assurances about what all possible worlds must turn out to be like. Rather, sometimes, we must face the need to uproot fundamental assumptions about the set of possible worlds available to us and enabled for us by our taxonomy, our ‘ontology’, our thought-style.

Redubbing is then at least as important as dubbing; and, of course, in concert with Kuhn’s reasoned scepticism as to ‘Correspondencism’: progress through revolutions is not well-described as bringing us taxonomies which themselves come closer and closer to matching the universe’s ‘own’ taxonomy.

This sounds like a Kuhn much more to my taste than I found in "Structure"; I need to read Kuhn's later stuff some day. Though I'm not quite sure what a "taxonomy" is; it seems it can't just be a vocabulary if it carries with it "assumptions", but it's clearly supposed to be something more like a vocabulary than like a set of beliefs, or else the name (and all of the talk of "failures of translation") seems quite strange. Maybe the "assumptions" here are supposed to be analytic truths; but then it looks strange that they can need revising when things get rough. Though perhaps I'm wrong that Kuhn thinks they can need revising; perhaps it's just a fact that we do revise them. It's not that a taxonomy starts to look confused so much as that whatever taxonomy you use will end up looking shaggy after repeated use. So you get a new one, which isn't better, just new. Kuhn then ends up looking weirdly Carnapian. This seems like it can't be right.

The picture seems to be that a "taxonomy" involves assumptions about how the world might be, and it's these assumptions (inter alia) which provide a set of possible worlds that normal science tries to whittle down to a singleton. And then when that inevitably falls apart, a different taxonomy is adopted. And I think Kuhn does hold it to be inevitable; this seems to be why he denies that change of paradigms is progressive. You cease to be bothered by certain anomalies in normal science; this is the progress made by changing paradigms. But there will always be more anomalies elsewhere which previous paradigms didn't have to worry about (because they didn't come up). (I may be misremembering "Structure" here; I can't remember if he allowed a sense in which revolutions meant progress. Skimming the last chapter suggests he didn't.) Maybe it is a sort of ersatz Carnapianism, then. Hmm. Have to read more about this.

Read's article is a good counter to the "'Water' is a rigid designator, so it was never an element" line that people seem to take as decisive against Kuhn, though. This other article of his is pretty decent, too; he wants to stump for a version of "incommensurability" which is "non-semantic", but involves something related; he opens with Wittgenstein's bit about someone who "believed in the Last Judgement" and how his disagreement with the believer "would not show up at all in any explanation of the meaning" of their words. Incidentally, Jason Bridges's paper "Wittgenstein and Contextualism" (which has very little about Wittgenstein) closes with this quote, to make the point that "meaning" and "point" (in the Charles Travis sense, that the meaning of an utterance is heavily tied to our particular point in making it) are not the same thing. Getting clear on what's at stake in saying that something is or is not a matter of meaning seems potentially fruitful. It seems to be something different for Bridges and for Read.

Spinoza and Anomalous Monism

From the comments to my previous post:

And that Spinoza class sounds awesome. Nadler is the man. Maybe you could post the Davidson/Spinoza stuff. My sense is the comparison is much richer than just saying, gee, they're both kind of saying "there's just one kind of stuff with different aspects." But I wonder what you said, and if Nadler said anything interesting back.

I do think that there's a deeper connection between Davidson and Spinoza than that. I think the most straightforward expression of this is actually in "Aristotle's Action"; Davidson is really free with his historical connections there, and praises Spinoza for his dismissal of "the will" in favor of having ideas themselves having force. (This is Spinoza's famous criticism of Descartes as imagining ideas as being like "mute pictures on a wall".) Davidson and Spinoza both have a keen sense of humanity as being a special sort of thing within nature, and not something which is added to nature from outside, as "a kingdom within a kingdom". This basic sense that "We are just bodies, though mental-talk isn't body-talk" is one thing that makes Spinoza feel special among the early moderns, and makes him relatable in a way that someone like Malebranche isn't.

My Spinoza paper's main argument was that to make sense of the argument for E2P7 as actually being something like a good argument, we had to understand Spinoza as committed to there being only one "order of things in nature", with each "connection" being both a causal connection between ideas and a causal connection between bodies (depending on how we make sense of it -- and we can only make sense of it in one of those two ways, and not just as "connected things in nature", because of Spinoza's connection of causation with knowledge in E1Ax4, which is supposed to be a sufficient proof for E2P7). Now, it's still hard to see how the argument in E2P7D is supposed to work, but if all Spinoza wants to say there is "Look, there's just the one nature with its mess of causal connections", then it can at least begin to make sense how this claim could have such slim argumentative support. Any richer notion of "psychophysical parallelism" as being what E2P7 is talking about has a serious problem trying to make sense of the idea that this follows "evidently" from "The knowledge of an effect depends on and involves the knowledge of a cause". That's just not a wide enough base to build much off of.

And if I can get that much from E2P7, then it's pretty easy to see that Spinoza is an anomalous monist: he's committed to there being no psychophysical laws (because all explanations are internal to a single attribute), he holds that all causation is backed by strict physical laws (because all things in nature are at least modes of extension, and all causation is lawlike, by E1Ax3), and he's committed to there being (in some sense) psychophysical causal relations. Which are close to the three premises from which Davidson gets to anomalous monism in "Mental Events"; at any rate they're close enough that showing their consistency leads to an interesting position.

This last premise was the part I had to argue for the most, since Spinoza seems to flatly deny it in E3P2. Davidson has some arguments for what to say about this in "Spinoza's Causal Theory of the Affects", but I found some aspects of his reading of Spinoza to be unsatisfying (because he relies on Curley's reading of "Ethics", which Nadler used as a foil for a lot of the class). Thankfully Della Rocca's work was incredibly helpful here ("Representation and the Mind-Body Problem in Spinoza" is fantastic). The key twist was to treat "a causes b" as intensional, for Spinoza. You can change its truth-value by changing how 'a' or 'b' is described. So Spinoza's explicit rejections of cross-attribute causation do not show that he has to reject an extensional notion of cross-attribute causation, which is what's at issue for Davidson's argument. And then all of the standard "psychophysical parallelism" bits in "Ethics" are pretty smoothly handled by treating Spinoza as talking about psychophysical causation while not mentioning extensional causal relations, and the general close connection of the mind and the body through "Ethics" (especially in the treatment of the affects) becomes easy to understand. (This obviously has a "principle of charity" motivation to it, too, since the complete rejection of psychophysical causal relations is pretty nuts; Spinoza's mockery of Descartes's attempts to make sense of the soul literally moving the body look a lot more sensible if he has some other way of saying how our attitudes can make us move. If Spinoza's real gripe there is that the idea of a Cartesian mind which is totally separate from the body does not make sense (and so instead we should identify the mind and the body, while understanding it in two different ways), then BS is suddenly a much more attractive character for we modern naturalists.)

Della Rocca also has a nice little argument that "things" (as in "one and the same thing expressed in two ways", E2P7S) have to be modes: all there is (for Spinoza) is substance and its modes, E1P15D; "thing" as "substance" does not make sense in the context of E2P7S, since then "the circle in nature" might as well be identified with "the idea of the Panama Canal" as with "the idea of the circle'; ergo things=modes. So modes can expressed in multiple ways (as bodies and as ideas). This was the only place where Nadler had a problem with my paper: Spinoza never talks about modes that way, as if they could have different descriptions under different attributes. And he sometimes seems to speak of the mind and the body as two modes, not one. But my answer to that was to take the same line as I did with causation: Spinoza has an intensional notion of mode-identity. The truth-value of "a is the same mode as b" depends on how 'a' and 'b' are described.

Now, one big difference between Davidson and Spinoza is on the nature of psychological understanding. Spinoza is the theorist of man as "a sort of spiritual automaton"; Davidson does not believe in psychological laws. One interesting thing that I realized during this paper is that the way Davidson introduces "anomalous monism" does not entail accepting the three principles he argues from in "Mental Events"; the position Davidson defends in that paper is just one possible form anomalous monism can take. So the three principles Spinoza accepts which I said were "similar" to Davidson's are in fact sufficiently similar to make him a genuine anomalous monist by the terms of "Mental Events".

The way Davidson divides up his four categories (nomological monism [materialism], nomological dualism [interactionism, parallelism, epiphenomenalism], anomalous dualism [Cartesian dualism], and anomalous monism) is by looking at whether one accepts or rejects psychophysical laws, and whether one identifies mental events with physical events or not. Spinoza clearly rejects psychophysical laws and identifies mental events and physical events. So Spinoza is an anomalous monist despite holding a nomological view of the mental. Which is an interesting sort of position.

One thing I didn't deal with in my paper (except very briefly) was adjudicating between Davidson and Spinoza on the topic of psychological laws. Davidson I think gets this just right: the anomalism of the mental is just the sort of freedom we should want the mind to have. I can't see the attraction Spinoza is supposed to have here; his lists of affects just felt tedious, though some of the definitions are clever, and I just don't see how the conatus argument in E3P6 is supposed to work at all. (Della Rocca and Nadler both said that the argument just doesn't work; it's a key part of the book where the argumentation is just shoddy, as with E1P6D. In fairness to Spinoza, his bad arguments are at least very clearly laid out.) This isn't even to mention the really embarrassing parts of Spinoza's psychology, like the incredibly simplistic account of memory in E2P18S. The interesting stuff in "Ethics" seems to me to largely be in the broadly naturalistic picture Spinoza offers, and in the fun Descartes-bashing and anti-religion stuff sprinkled throughout. (I think it's this last bit that Nadler got most excited about.)

I should read "Spinoza's Heresy" some day to see just how E5P23 is supposed to get dealt with; Nadler's view seems to be that the "eternal" part of the mind is just the abstract idea of its essence. Which seems to fit with the demonstration well enough, but I can't see how it fits into the book. On Nadler's reading, Spinoza just thinks that the soul is mortal and dies with the body, end of story; which makes all of the stuff about the "intellectual love of God" and "the eternity of the mind" that closes the book out very, very weird. On Nadler's reading it seems like all of the weirdness is superficial; really Spinoza is not saying anything that a materialist would have any problems with. But it feels like Spinoza has something in the background here that's going lost; that superficial weirdness is really weird, in a way that (e.g.) his doubletalk about the value of "religion" is not. The praise of religion is plausibly just Spinoza trying to win over converts to his anti-religious way of thinking; the stuff about the amor intellectus Dei doesn't seem like something that we're supposed to just slough off once we are converted to Spinozism. It's supposed to be genuinely liberating in some way; the sad passions are somehow being combated by the eternal part of the mind. This part of Spinoza is just dark to me. I don't get it.

i has an m.a.

I officially graduated last weekend. Finished my thesis in late November; I haven't been blogging because whenever I would get the urge to blog (or would begin a post), I would think "Shouldn't I really be working on my thesis instead?", and that killed the fun of it. And then after finishing my thesis, I had to get PhD applications done. Finished those of earlier this week. I am now free of any academical-type obligations, for the first time in quite a while. (It feels strange, like I must owe someone a paper, and just can't figure out who.)

So, now I can blog freely again.

Because it seems like a thing to do, here's a brief recounting of my year at Chicago:

Fall quarter was when I had to take the MAPH "core" course, which was about Theory. I was reminded of the "Theory's Empire" book-event from The Valve often. I did not enjoy this course, and was glad when it ended. I really can't say I got anything from this course, except some painful and awkward introductions to Freud, Lacan, and Adorno (and some other guys I would've been happy to never encounter). It wasn't even good for writing practice; the longest paper I had to write was five pages or something like that. And that paper was about Lauren Berlant and some movie I've never seen based on a book I've never read. Just a mess of a class.

There was an "introduction to analytic philosophy"-type course that was only open to MAPH students; I figured it was a good thing to take. There were issues that lead to the class being taught by a PhD student, Tom Lockhart, but he did a good job of it I thought. I enjoyed the class, and it was a pretty gentle way to get back into the swing of things after having a semester off (and before that, a semester of law school). I wrote a paper on the second part of "Mental Events" for it (and a shorter one on "Naming and Necessity", which was much easier to lay out than the second part of "Mental Events").

Haugeland's Heidegger's "Being and Time" was a good excuse to read the rest of division one of "Being and Time". I fell a day behind in the reading at one point, and caught up by skipping a section I'd read before: the bit about the broken hammer. It turns out that if you read all of division one except that bit, the "present at hand" sounds like a philosopher's fiction: nothing is ever actually given to Dasein like that. It's always something richer, like the ready-to-hand, the living, Daseins, etc.; the "present-at-hand" is paradigmatically what is presented to a res cogitans (i.e., it is nothing but something confused philosophers dreamed up). Now, in the broken hammer passage, this is clearly not Heidegger's view. We can see the broken hammer, and he says we see it as just something present-at-hand. So I spent a lot of this quarter misreading "Being and Time". I like my misreading a lot more than Heidegger's actual view, though, and I think that my misreading makes sense for pretty much all of the rest of division one (especially section 21, "Hermeneutic Discussion of the Cartesian Ontology of the 'World'"). Incidentally, this is the class that taught me how the quarter system works: I suddenly had to scramble for a paper topic when I realized the course was almost over, and ended up having to get an extension for the paper (by a week or two). I ended up writing something about Dreyfus's Heidegger and "Telling" that I don't think really came together, but was kinda fun to work on.

Winter quarter was very cold and dark.

I sat in on Ford's "Action and Practical Knowledge" seminar, which gave me an excuse to read Anscombe's "Intention" and Thompson's "Naive Action Theory", along with some more of Davidson's old action papers. This also got me up to speed on philosophy of action well enough to know some of what was going on at the Anscombe Conference in the early spring. Definitely glad I didn't take this for credit, though; I'm still mulling a lot of it over, and I'm not sure I really get what's so important about Thompson. (I've read the rest of "Life and Action" now, and still don't see it. Though he did say some stuff about gold and Kripke-Putnam essentialism in the third part that lead me to suspect I in fact do not want to get on board with his broader program. I should probably look at that passage again, and post on it.)

I also sat in on Irad Kimhi's "Active Thoughts" seminar. It was utter madness from beginning to end and I couldn't get enough of it. I couldn't tell you what the class was about, but there was a lot of interesting stuff crammed in there. Sitting in on it also gave me an excuse to read more Frege ("The Thought" and "Negation" especially), and some other fun logic-y stuff.

For credit, I took "Intermediate Logic", "Modern Moral Philosophy", and Pippin's "Kant's Critical Philosophy". Logic did not require me to write a paper, or to read very much; this made it an excellent course for the winter quarter. It was also fun to do more logic homework, though some of the completeness proofs were annoying.

"Modern Moral Philosophy" was taught by a visiting professor from Rome, Piergiorgio Donatelli. We read a little Bernard Williams, several Iris Murdoch pieces, two chapters from "The Claim of Reason", a McDowell essay I hadn't read yet, and then a lot of Cora Diamond's stuff. And Donatelli brought up dozens of other figures in the lectures. It was a heady mix of stuff; my lecture notes are a mess (though not as bad as the notes for "Active Thoughts"). I read an article of Diamond's that wasn't assigned for class (her piece in the "Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein") that bothered me in ways I couldn't quite get a handle on; I wanted to write on that, but wasn't getting a grip on it, so instead I wrote about something Diamond said about McDowell, and somehow a quarter of the essay ended up being about Davidson.

I read several Diamond pieces about Truth and Tarski-type approaches to it for this paper; I did not like them very much. She seemed to go after Rorty for the wrong reasons (as Conant did, in much greater length, in his article about Rorty and Orwell), and she seemed unhappy with Davidson's take on truth for no reason I could figure out. (If I recall correctly, it had something to do with there being "many ways something could be true"; I couldn't see how this was a problem for Davidson, since any difference between e.g. moral facts and chemical facts would be paralleled in the relevant T-sentences: they would say that the different sorts of sentences are true IFF different sorts of things are the case. Diamond didn't flesh any of this out so much as say we needed to pay attention to it. I can't tell what exactly I'm supposed to notice, so I don't see why Diamond-on-ethics-and-truth is so great.)

For Pippin's class I wrote a paper on the Transcendental Aesthetic. It was straightforward: Kant says that the transcendental ideality of space and time are established here; what are his arguments, and do they work? I defended the venerable "neglected option" objection, more or less. It was pretty easy to write, which was good because the rest of the quarter had me pretty frayed.

The Anscombe Conference was in the early spring. Thompson is a lot of fun to watch, and McDowell is surprisingly frail and birdlike in person; he looked like he might break if someone ran into him. I made it to most of the papers; most of them were good. McDowell had a paper on Anscombe-on-sensations that was pretty much the paper you would expect him to write on that topic. I will need to find my notes to say much about the rest of the speakers, but I do remember this: Thompson is a genius.

I was supposed to have a draft of my thesis done early in the spring; difficulties finding a workable topic lead to that not happening. I ended up writing about McDowell's criticisms of Davidson in "Gadamer and Davidson on Understanding and Relativism"; most of the paper was devoted to setting the stage, since "Epitaphs" is a tricky paper to get right. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, though Kremer (my advisor) remains unconvinced. One section of the paper ended up getting cut before it was even to the draft stage, what I was trying to articulate in the comments here, because a) I realized that spelling things out would take another paper to do well and b) I'm not at all sure that McDowell makes this argument against "Epitaphs" (and I'm suspicious that he doesn't make it because he knows it's not a good objection; certainly the closest he comes to making it explicitly is very hand-wavey stuff, and he could've made it very straightforwardly. I think Dummett does make it, for instance.). This paragraph probably makes sense to nobody except me, since only three or so people on the planet have read my thesis, but I refuse to cut it! Blogging is for vanity's sake.

Bridges taught a course on "Rationality" and a seminar on "Contextualism" in the spring; I considered both, but ended up taking neither. (I didn't know anyone in the seminar and it felt awkward; the "Rationality" course was not exciting in the first few courses, and was overfull -- I dropped it so someone else could have my slot.) Stephen Nadler (a visiting prof from U Wisconsin-Madison) had a course on Spinoza's "Ethics" which was simply phenomenal; I'd planned on just sitting in on it (and asking some questions about Hegel and Spinoza), but by the end of the second class I knew I had to take this course. Nadler did an amazing job leading the class: we got through the entire book, and discussion was always lively and unforced. I wrote a paper on Spinoza and anomalous monism, which I thought turned out very well, and it was the third Davidson-y paper I'd written in as many quarters. (When I asked Nadler about the topic, I assumed it was probably too banal to write on, and was going to ask for suggestions as to what in specific to focus on in the area; turns out it's not all that well-represented in the Spinoza literature, though Della Rocca does defend the connection, so I got to write a paper that came very easily.) Hands-down the best course I took for credit at Chicago.

Another (regularly) visiting professor, Jocelyn Benoist, was teaching a seminar titled "Intentional Objects: An Inquiry into the Common Origins of Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology"; about half of the course name shows up on my transcript. Benoist lectured about a lot of interesting people I'd had only superficial knowledge of before, like Bolzano and Brentano and Meinong, and some I had never heard of (mostly Polish philosophers, who were all interesting to read). All of it was shiny and new, and Benoist covered a lot of material very quickly. The guiding thread through most of the class was what to do about terms with sense without reference (if Meinong is wrong and there are any), and what lead into that question getting asked in that way. I wrote a paper about Frege and Evans's account of him in chapter one of "The Varieties of Reference", basically just trying to make sense of how Frege could be so cavalier in saying that "Odysseus" has the same sense whether or not Odysseus ever existed. (One nice point Benoist stressed was that Frege's example was not random; this was around the time when Troy was discovered by archaeologists, after having been considered as mythical for centuries.) I read a lot of Frege (and a fair bit of Evans) in preparation for this paper, but something just didn't quite come together in the end; I'm happy with what I have in the paper, but feel like I didn't really finish it. I don't know what I failed to write, but I definitely did not write something that needed writ.

It was a fun year.

And randomly: these conference papers are pretty good listenin'. And the "Coherentisme" paper is actually delivered in English. Hours of Sellarsian fun.