Review of On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It

Link to review on Amazon

Review of On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It, by David Livingstone Smith, Oxford University Press, 2020.  Review by Todd Stark.  

This book is a valuable new entry in the literature trying to explain how ordinary people become complicit in the wholesale exploitation and murder of entire populations of human beings.  Smith has created his own synthetic framework for thinking about this which draws on a wide range of sources from psychology, sociology, history, and anthropology, as well as drawing on philosophical analysis to clarify many of the critical points which rely on terms that are commonly used in diverse ways.

The author's framework differs from the way we usually tend to think of these things in several important ways. This framework proposes a very specific way of thinking about racism, and then a very specific way of thinking about dehumanization, and offers a process relationship between the two which explains how oppression and atrocity seem be justified and sustained by ordinary people who are not necessarily callous or bigoted.  

Although his argument is very much about race, he doesn't start from the usual ways of thinking about racism.  Instead he adopts a very specific definition of racism for his argument which serves to distinguish the cultural construct of a folk race from any of the similar sounding ideas in population biology and anthropology.  He draws on the concept of essentialism and the psychology of essentialism for his definition.

This is very valuable for the purposes of his argument, although it takes a little getting used to.  We tend to think of racism already as either (1) individual prejudice or (2) institutional oppression or (3) disparity in outcomes.  These usual definitions are already a bit troublesome.  It isn't just that they are different, they can also be conflicting, and there is often an implicit relationship between them when people speak of racism. 

 

Some race theorists have tried to separate the concept of race entirely from prejudice, which is a big source of confusion when someone uses that concept in speaking with someone who has the concept of racism as individual or institutionalized bigotry.  Then the idea that racism means thinking one race is inferior to another in every way doesn't seem quite right.  People we call racists don't necessarily think some races are inferior in every way to others.  They might for example think certain races are superior in some ways and inferior in others, as in the case of the Nazi racists who thought Jews were diabolically intelligent but otherwise less than human.    The idea that racists hate the races they consider inferior isn't quite right either.  Slavers wouldn't necessarily hate their slaves, they more likely thought of them the way they thought of livestock.

  

Taking the sweep of troublesome examples and confusions into account leads Smith to back off from all of those meanings somewhat to focus on a fundamental mechanism ("racializing") that makes them all happen.  That is our tendency to see a population as having an inherited shared essence that applies to all of the individuals.  If this was all there was to racism, this would mean that merely adopting the concept of folk races is racist by definition.  But why should merely defining categories of people result in racism?  Smith proposes that the concept of a hierarchy of categories of human beings of different value is already there from the start.  Because we already think in terms of a hierarchy, defining human beings into races is then all that is needed to have racism.   

This means that racist thinking need not necessarily have anything to do with skin color or any other physical characteristic, those are historical artifacts. Since we already have a sense of hierarchy of humans based on relative value, all it takes is to find some way of placing people into different categories, and we have a formula for systematic bias.  

That idea of a hierarchy of human types, each with its own essential value is what constitutes racism in this argument.  So for example, racist thinking need not necessarily have anything to do with skin color or any other physical characteristic, those are historical artifacts. 

So the notion of psychologically and conceptually "racializing" a population is a fundamental idea here. This is not enough by itself to lead to unfair treatment, much less genocide or slavery, but becomes a powerful lever for other processes which do make it much easier to carry out all of those things.  

One of the lessons the author wants us to learn is that once we identify "racializing" a population as a lever that makes mass atrocities possible, we also have an important tool for fighting back against them if we catch them early enough. Categorizing people in this way combined with making the categories into a hierarchy is what racism is about here.    

From the start this approach distinguishes Smith's framework from the way many of us think about exploitation and hatred.  These days especially, with all of the polarizations we see between people, we often think of ourselves as fundamentally "tribal," as if identifying with a group in some way automatically disposes us toward other members of the group and also against members of other groups.  We often see arguments based on the theory that loyalty to our group leads to loathing of other groups.  This aligns somewhat with some of the thinking in social psychology that starts with the minimal group model and extends to all sorts of other kinds of out-group hostility models. 

Smith does not start with this "loyalty leads to loathing" idea.  He finds that humans seem to have a more fundamental disposition to see each other as human by default and to treat them as human beings even while identifying with different groups.  What he finds makes atrocity possible is not the "othering" mechanisms themselves but the way our cultural artifacts, especially our ideologies, trigger and maintain our aversive social psychological mechanisms while suppressing our natural and automatic ability to see each other as human.  

Importantly, in this framework, ideologies in this sense are not arbitrary, they are motivated ways of thinking that specifically preserve the conditions that let some people take advantage of others for their own benefit.  The classic example is how the Great Chain of Being divided the world up into a hierarchy of beings of different value, and was a natural fit for justifications of the enslavement of lesser beings.  

So if this framework is correct, we have some good news: we are not biologically doomed to exploit each other.  We do need to be vigilant of how we think of identity and how our sense of identity and the identity of others is being exploited by social and political messaging that draws on ideologies that support oppression and fuel resentment.

The way Smith's framework sees mass atrocity becoming possible is through a process with at least two steps.  

First we identify a population in terms of the inherited shared essence that applies to all the members.  This is simply the essentialist tendency, it doesn't imply any negative connotations about the population identified, it just attributes an essence to them all.  This first step is critical to the framework because it distinguishes the cultural construction of folk races from any scientific use of similar terms in population genetics or anthropology.  In this framework, the essentialist tendency is the bedrock foundation that lets additional mechanisms exploit or kill entire populations.

If we aren't being tricked into thinking of everyone in a population as having some sort of hidden shared essence, we could see people as individuals and populations as having diversity within them, which can greatly reduce the effect of propaganda meant to stir up hostility and fear.  Seeing a population as having a shared hidden essence lets us discount the individuals we see who are exceptions to the stereotypes because their hidden essence still means they have the potential in them to express it.  

Next, once a population is seen as having a shared hidden essence, the mechanisms of dehumanization come into play.  Smith defines dehumanization in a very specific way for the purpose of his framework.  Dehumanization for the author is a combination of psychological dispositions and social and political mechanisms that cultivate and trigger those dispositions.  We have an individual ability to bypass our instinct to see see each other as human and instead to see others as lesser humans or as non-human, and this is the psychological aspect of dehumanization.  Once we see a population as having a shared hidden essence that ability can be exploited in service of an ideology that treats the whole population as less human or non-human, and that is the social and political aspect of dehumanization.  

Importantly, dehumanization in this framework is a motivated process.  It is not used blindly but because it serves our advantage to view other people as a resource for us to use at our whim or as a threat in some sense and exploit resentment and fear of them.  This means that once dehumanization is part of a widespread ideology, it is very difficult to combat because people are relying on it and benefitting from it. 

Since the point of theorizing about human inhumanity is to fight against it, I want to summarize the points from the Resisting chapter at the end of the book.

1.  Dehumanization is both psychological and political.  We have to recognize how individuals are affected by social and political factors which push us in particular directions in our thinking.  When people and organizations say things that leverage essentialistic thinking about human beings we need to fight the temptation from the start.  When we see people's humanity being ignored or denied for some political or rhetorical purpose, we need to recognize it.  The political and the psychological are linked by such things.  

2.  Being both political and psychological, we need to fight dehumanization both by recognizing and opposing its political expression and by recognizing it in ourselves.  Our temptation to dehumanize people who are themselves dehumanizing others is very strong.  This promotes the very pattern of thinking that we are trying to fight.       

3. Dehumanization isn't the same as bias in general, there are many kinds of bias.  The sense of dehumanization where we attribute less human or inhuman qualities to a group with some attributed shared essence is particularly dangerous and associated with the worst atrocities of humankind.  We need to be on guard against that in particular.  

4.  We can study history to understand that everyone is subject to these temptations, even our in our own nation, religion, or ethnic group.  We can't let our loyalties blind us to the powerful forces that make ordinary people complicit with terrible things.

5.  This framework emphasizes that dehumanization is not a natural result of seeing people as different.  It is a result of ideology exploiting our natural psychological mechanisms.  

6.  One of the things that lets oppressive ideology take control is the failure of people to listen to each other, to allow dissenting viewpoints, and allow credibility to be destroyed through cynicism.  Tyrants typically destroy the credibility of the press as part of their strategy to make their own ideological message stronger.   

7.  Dehumanizing propaganda is usually not directly about hate.  Assuming that dehumanization is motivated by hate is a mistake because it makes it harder to recognize when people are doing it.  It is more often about desperation, fear, and longing for salvation.  Accusing people of being hateful and responding in kind is a big obstacle rather than a help because that tends to further lean into and draw on dehumanization.  Avoid accusing people of "hate speech" when you mean prejudice or dehumanizing speech. 

8.  The very concept of folk races leans us into the unfortunate uses of the term, and people use the term racism in very different and sometimes even conflicting ways, so an important counter-intuitive result of this framework is that we should not be fighting racism by accusing individuals of it.  We should instead be very specific and explicit about what sort of bias or bigotry we think is going on rather than calling people racists in general.

9.  Remember that folk race is about a hidden essence, not a biological reality.  So any population can be "racialized."  It needn't depend on folk race or appearance at all.  Ethnic groups, national groups, religious groups, and even political parties can be and have been "racialized" for the purpose or result of dehumanizing them.

10. Know the warning signs of dehumanizing speech and ideology: people claiming to be victims of a vulnerable racialized group, people saying that a group doesn't belong here, is not one of us, should go back to where they come from, comparing them to parasites or vermin, or other non-human creatures, accusing a group of sponging off of other groups, of having special privileges that the majority are denied, of breeding quickly and threatening to replace the majority.

Book Review

Action Versus Contemplation: Why An Ancient Debate Still Matters

Jennifer Summit and Blakely Vermeule
University of Chicago Press, 2018

I found this a very valuable discussion of the various forms this ancient dialectic has taken, from ancient Greece to the modern era of industry and knowledge work.

The authors use a touch of philosophy and history to some small degree but mostly selected literature to illustrate how we have come to see the active life and the life of contemplation.  Their conclusion is one I find myself agreeing strongly with, that the split between the life of action and the life of contemplation turns out to be artificial and historically contingent rather than something we can (as we typically seem to do) confidently take sides on.  Each of us has within us, "two contrary states of the soul" that each serve us in different ways.  Our need to make sense of these contrary motivational states pushes us ever toward telling moral stories that emphasize one or the other in different cultural environments. 

The argument mostly takes the form of examples where what seems to be reasons supporting one path or the other turn out to be better supporting some difficult balance of action and contemplation.  Herman Melville and George Eliot feature in particular.  The authors take pains to prepare the reader that they will not be comfortable with this conclusion, they will want to take sides, and it is opposing this deep temptation rather than defending a particular way of life that is the motivation for their book. 

Among the forms that the dialectic takes in this book are: the moral tale of the prudent industrious ant vs. the pleasure seeking grasshopper, skill vs. knowledge, theory vs. practice,  worldly engagement vs. otherworldly reflection, goal-oriented action vs. more broadly construed action, frenzied busyness vs. idleness, stress and relaxation, work and leisure, and ultimately they focus in on the modern University and its deeply entrenched division of sciences and humanities.  Taking the history and purposes of the modern college education into account, the authors make their final bid for reconciliation of the divided states of the soul.

At the very least the point is well taken here that we cannot afford to see our reflective nature as mere "idle navel gazing" nor can we afford to lose our goal orientation and love of efficiency.  We need to take the contrary motivational states that drive us to action and to reflection collectively as vital aspects of ourselves.  Though there are some intriguing and valuable examples such as trans-disciplinary studies and examples from art and fiction, just how to accomplish that reconciliation for ourselves is left mostly as an exercise for the reader.   

My related book list on Amazon

My review on Amazon

Book Review: The Blind Spot by William Byers

The Blind Spot: Science and the Crisis of Uncertainty

William Byers

Princeton University Press, 2011

Full review on Amazon.

Interesting food for thought, a reason for some humility, and an argument for perspectivism

I got some real value out of this book because it made me think more deeply about an important and fundamental philosophical problem, the problem of knowability.  How well do we directly know the universe we live in, and how well can even our best explanations really help us grasp it?  In the Western intellectual tradition, the question goes all the way back to the ancients, and we still frame it in much the same way they did.  The problem is fairly obvious to any reasonably reflective person I think, but I suspect most people tend to assume it is either an illusion or something of little consequence.
 
We have come to understand a massive number of details about our existence in various ways through science and we have discovered that with a bit of ingenuity, we can use mathematics to describe and predict the behavior of real things remarkably well.  This gives many of us the sense that we can grasp just about anything about our existence in the same way.  Afterall, from the modern humanistic point of view, what else is there besides our scientific causal explanations, our mathematical models, and our various superstitions? 

Byers seems to be playing something like the mischievous role of Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park here in some ways. He is telling us that we shouldn't be so certain that we really understand everything the way we think we do.  Nature will always surprise us.  And he is not saying this because he thinks we should believe in miracles or because science doesn't work as well as we think.  He is saying it because science and mathematics cover the universe as we experience it rather like a lumpy carpet covers a smooth floor.  You can push down the lumps, but they always pop up again somewhere else. 

Our ability to explain our existence doesn't quite map to the totality of that existence in any uniform way.  We end up taking different perspectives on the same things in order to understand what we perceive.  This need to take different perspectives is "ambiguity." Our sense of certainty about what we understand, the perception of smooth areas of carpet, is not an illusion, but neither is it absolute, perfectly generallizable, not even entirely objective.  We tend to ignore ambiguity when we see it because it makes us feel uncomfortable.  Byers claims this discomfort creates a permanent blindspot in our perception of our own existence. 

The central theme of the book is that there are many different expressions of ambiguity in nature, and that they are all expressions of the same underlying limitation in our ability to grasp nature in terms of concepts and symbols.  It isn't just that there are some problems more difficult than others, it may be, according to Byers, that some difficulties are impossible to resolve permanently, they will always appear again in another form whenever we grasp them.  Blindspot tells us that something about the territory makes it fundamentally unmappable in any complete and consistent sense.  This, for Byers, drives us to keep trying to explain by grappling with the ambiguity in nature.

 
Byers makes some fascinating points and uses a lot of good examples from mathematics and science to make his points.  Most of the examples will be familiar to avid readers of science and math.  They include the usual suspects such as Godel's Incompleteness, Heisenberg's Uncertainty, wave/particle duality, the problem of the objective and subjective perspectives, intentionality, self-reference, and so on. Byers also draws on his own field of mathematics for some less well trodden examples such as real number theory and differential vs. integral calculus. 

While this book is definitely worthwhile in my opinion, I don't quite share the same excitement as some of the other reviewers because I also found it very repetitive and for me personally it sometimes seems to jump from point to point without really taking on important points in the detail they deserve.  I think this impression I get comes from Byers background in mathematics.  He will often start to talk about something I find really interesting, like the problem of intentionality or the problem of mental causation, but quickly turn it back into a logical question instead of exploring the scientific or philosophical questions in more detail.  I suppose my criticism is that Byers seems to be a "math" but not a "polymath" and the ambitious topic he has taken on may require someone with deep understanding of many different fields, since the thesis is that the blindspot is not just a quirk of mathematics but of our symbolic and conceptual abilities in general.

Ultimately I think the claim Byers is making is basically that the perception of clear understanding of nature is a local phenomenon not a global one because we can never get rid of the problem of incompatible but valid perspectives.  We can make the carpet perfectly smooth in an area, but we can never make the whole carpet completely smooth.  The "consilience" of nature's laws will never have a final expression in one scheme because we can't ever reconcile the different viewpoints that: (1) accurately describe situations, (2) are each self-consistent, and (3) are not only different but incompatible with each other. 

From my perspective, I think Byers has identified the problem in a legitimate way, but his logical arguments don't really convince me that the problem of perspectives is forever irreconcileable.  I agree with him that we should take the problem(s) more seriously than we do, since we usually wave this sort of problem away through various tactics.  I also agree that we should incorporate the challenge of multiple perspectives in our thinking.  It is not clear to me that the lumps are an intrinsic part of nature, or that they are all manifestations of the same blind spot, and Byers doesn't seem to me to exhibit the depth and breadth of scientific knowledge across the various relevant disciplines to make that point stick, but it does seem reasonable to think of them that way until we have actually smoothed them out and to take Byers' claim seriously as at least a sensible policy and a reason for humility.

The Expected Unexpected, a review of The Black Swan by Taleb

The Expected Unexpected - or, What can we learn from White Swans?

A review of The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Review by Todd I. Stark, 12/20/2009

Link to review on Amazon.

I came to this book expecting a clever but flawed argument for intellectual laziness or superficial thinking, another popular argument for "gut" or "intuition" or "Zen." Or perhaps a slick Gladwell-esque treatment of randomness. Perhaps a popularization of postmodernism or neo-pragmatism applied to financial markets, or a "Thriving on Chaos" (Tom Peters) for the 21st century.

This book is none of those things. Instead I found myself immersed in a very intriguing and deep intellectual journey into the roots of applied statistics and empirical science that had me thinking and taking notes prolifically. As readable as it is, this is not (or should not be) a quick read. Taleb is an erudite scholar but he uses his scholarship in the service of ideas rather than to accumulate impressive footnotes. His lectures are conversational but convey great weight.

I do find his tone somewhat arrogant in spots, oddly so. The half dozen or so people he finds interesting are worthy dinner companions, the rest of the world of intellegent mortals are pretty much fools who he chooses to stereotype and parody. Anyway, that's the impression I get. Contempt for audience usually works against an author. Still, very few modern authors can combine technical knowledge, originality, and readability the way Taleb can, and this to me kept me reading even when I imagined I was one of the many targets of the author's contempt.

Enough on style and impression, the content of this book is what makes it merit five stars. The core idea here is that we are creatures who quickly and easily sort things into categories and tell stories to make sense of them. Narration comes unbidden to us, but not skillful abstract thinking. This much of course we have heard before from the heuristics and biases school and behavioral economics.

Taleb's contribution is to point out a particularly broad implication of this principle, that our knowledge rapidly degrades when rare events are consequential. We explain them away and miss their importance. At the same time, we overestimate the impact of rare events for arbitrary reasons when they really have no consequence.

That would be of mostly academic interest except for one thing. The key to Taleb's overall argument is his claim that the impact of rare events is domain-specific. That means we can learn to distinguish domains where: (a) classical risk statistics apply ("Mediocristan") from (b) those where rare events and winner-take-all competitions dominate ("Extremistan").

In "Mediocristan" domains, classical decision theory in principle should help us (although Taleb seems to feel that these domains are few and far between among things we really care about). In "Extremistan," Taleb advises, we should take steps to protect ourselves from rare adverse events and use diverse aggressive risk taking to exploit rare positive events.

The idea here is that we are betting that something rare will eventually impact us in these domains, even though we can't know what specifically it will be. The point is that in domains where likelihood can't really be calculated, we should focus our efforts instead on the impact rather than guessing at the probability. Taleb doesn't make this argument lightly, he explains the limits in our predictive ability in an understandable way yet he also takes heed of technical details in his arguments.

"Extremistan" consists of all of the domains where scaling and nonlinear accumulations occur, or rapid deviations from small differences in initial conditions. In line with complexity theorists, Taleb finds these effects pretty much everywhere of interest to social scientists, economists, and people in general. He suggests that we might be able to use scalable non-linear maths to get a rough idea of what to expect in some domains, but that we need to remain careful of the illusion of mathematical predictive power.

Biological values like height and weight and average life expectancy are areas where the normal curve applies, and perhaps mean failure rate of parts in engineering. But when important things like money or fame or success can accumulate virtually without limit and often for arbitrary reasons like contagion, the assumptions of Gaussian distributions are just not relevant. At least that's how I understand Taleb's claim that the normal distribution is a great intellectal fraud: it is applied confidently to things where it has no place being applied.

With one strange but perhaps unavoidable exception, Taleb usually follows his own advice. He considers theories for storytelling purposes and explanation but doesn't take them seriously or depend on them for his argument. He does use storytelling quite a bit to make his point, even though his argument is largely about the unreliability of our stories. He seems to be saying that we automatically make sense of events through stories, so it takes a story to help us understand the argument against relying on storytelling.

I suppose there is a touch of the postmodernist skepticism of narratives in The Black Swan, but the possibility of having specific strategies for dealing differently with specific domains is an intriguing and welcome update to that tradition, bringing it perhaps more in line with the critical rationalism and conjectures and refutations of Karl Popper and the scientific skepticism of the classical pragmatists than with the modern cynics. Taleb is not rejecting theory entirely, but he certainly prefers direct experiment and aggressive risk taking (in strategic areas) to bland assumptions of predictable statistical likelihood and the reliability of knowledge.

For me this book ties together a lot of diverse ideas very nicely in an original and interesting way, and yet stays on target with its message.

Very impressive effort and a very worthwhile read.

Dualism and its modern nuances

"Dualism" and its modern nuances


To my understanding, most people are dualists of some sort since: (1) we have a powerful intuition that mental events are real in some sense and not just an artifact of physical processes, and (2) the properties of mental phenomena are extraordinarily difficult if not impossible to describe in purely physical terms. At the very least, most of us acknowledge that the very fact that we are so compelled to talk about minds the way we do means that they have their own kind of description, and thus their own properties in some sense. There are an awful lot of nuances possible within this grand view, however.

To clarify a point about “dualism,” consider some conventional alternatives for comparison, and focus on good examples (definitional entries copied from http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/MindDict/ )

Dualism in general, with classical examples: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/MindDict/dualism.html

Most generally, the view that reality consists of two disparate parts. In philosophy of mind, the belief that the mental and physical are deeply different in kind: thus the mental is at least not identical with the physical.

That is a very different proposition from the claim that that they are “independent” or saying that “the mental cannot be reduced to the physical.” Not to mention that “independent” and “reduce” can mean vastly different things in different contexts.

First important question: are mental and physical “different objects” or are they “different properties of the same object?” Answering that gets you off the back of people who think you are making “Descartes’s error.”

Second question (nuance): If mental and physical are different properties of the same object (presumably brain, or body and their associated processes in the materialist tradition) then what is the relationship of those properties. Is it causal, and in what way? Is it descriptive or explanatory (does it provide a way of describing things that cannot be achieved otherwise) ?

Third question (nuance): Can one be subsumed entirely within the other (“supervenience”)?

Fourth question (nuance): Can one be explained entirely in terms of the models we use to describe the other, either in principle or in practice? What sort of translation is possible and how?

Notes

=============================================================================================================

Property Dualism

The view that the mental and the physical comprise two different classes of property that are coinstantiated in the same objects

According to property dualism, even though mental properties are totally different than physical properties, they are nonetheless all properties of the same kinds of objects. Thus, for example, a single object instantiates the property of my being six feet tall and my believing that the Eiffel tower is in France. Property dualism is compatible with the token identity thesis, but not the type identity thesis. Property dualists are typically, if not unanimously, anti-reductionists about the mental, which is to say, they deny that it is in-principle possible to translate mental predicates into physical predicates.

Substance Dualism

The view that the mental and the physical comprise two different classes of objects: minds and bodies.

Perhaps the most famous proponent of substance dualism was Descartes, who cashed out the distinction between minds and bodies as follows: minds are things that think but lack spatial magnitude, and bodies are things that have spatial magnitudes, but don't think. Different substance dualists may disagree as to how best to define what's essential to being mental and physical, but they do agree that the difference in question is one of objects, not properties. So, for example, my belief that the Eiffel tower is in France and my being six feet tall are properties of different objects, i.e., my mind and my body, respectively.

If you see mental and physical as having some causal connection, it can easily be distinguished from the various forms of parallelism, the classical forms of dualism which do not connect them directly in any causal way (I suspect they have variants that still have modern adherents):

Occasionalism: Espoused by Clauberg, de la Forge and Malebranche, occasionalism entails the contention that everything is devoid of causal efficacy and that God is the only truly causal agent. So, for example, placing your hand on a hot stove is does not cause pain, but is rather an occasion for God to cause the mental state of pain. So, not only mind/body interactions, but all causal interactions become the work of God.

Preestablished harmony: This doctrine was formulated by Leibniz and is basically Cartesian interactionist dualism without the interaction. Thus, rather than causal interaction, God has provided setup in which the mental and physical are synchronized so as to provide this appearance. However, it should be noted that Leibniz himself was not a dualist: for him there were no physical substances, these were just appearances. Nevertheless, this position is often considered a possible dualistic solution to the mind-body problem.

Both occasionalism and preestablished harmony are considered instances of parallelism: the view that the mental and physical realms co-occur but are not causally connected.

More usefully, if you do see M and P as having some causal connection, then it is very helpful to distinguish it.

supervenience - A set of properties or facts M supervenes on a set of properties or facts P if and only if there can be no changes or differences in M without there being changes or differences in P.

http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/MindDict/supervenience.html

In other words, the mental supervenes on the physical if it is impossible to have mental events that have no physical correlates whatsoever. This is one of the most useful and nuanced ways to talk about “independence.” The term was introduced by the late Donald Davidson, but Jaegwon Kim has written some of the most interesting modern analysis about supervenience in mind-body questions.

http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00000392/00/kimrevcogprt.htm

Philosophical Generosity and Richard Dawkins

In Ektopos, Matthew writes:

Philosophical Generosity (AKA Why do I hate Richard Dawkins)

I’ve been wondering why it is that every time I see Dawkins name my blood just boils, especially when I see a quote. I figured out last night that I get irritated not so much by Dawkins ideas as by his attitude. Simply put Dawkins lacks philosophical generosity. Perhaps it is the case that this was not a concept that anyone ever taught young Dawkins at Oxford. Perhaps it might stem from the fact that Dawkins studied zoology and not philosophy. Whatever the case you would think that Dawkins would have stumbled across the concept by now.

I think the concept is really rather simple. When discussing philosophical matters try and give the most positive reading to your opponent, remember that you may think your opponent wrong but that doesn’t necessitate them being stupid, and try to act magnanimously .

I’m wondering if anyone else ever learned of such a concept, or maybe it’s just my little neck of the woods? Perhaps such a notion is well spirited but wrong-headed?

I agree with this assessment, and I'm gratified to hear others taking a similar perspective. The more of Dawkins I read, the more impressed I am by his intellect and his knowledge of certain aspects of biology, and ability to reason through difficult biological theories. However I'm also taken aback by exactly what Matthew calls philosophical ungenerosity.

Dawkins seems very much to assume that anyone reasoning from a background of any theistic tradition is arguing from revelation or "blind faith," and that this is the kind of reasoning that characterizes anything associated with religion. While he's not entirely wrong, it certainly seems to lead him to sometimes to cross that translucently veiled line we all (should) fear into assaulting strawmen.

This is indeed one of the things that for me best distinguishes Dawkins from other people who often take very similar positions on current issues. For example, Dawkins is often aligned in the media with Dennett, for example for their nearly simultaneous and similar assaults on Stephen Jay Gould, and their nearly simultaneous and similar support of the Brights movement. However, to me Dennett is a model of philosophical generosity, and takes great and admirable pains to argue against the strongest form of his opponents argument he can stomach. Some of his dialogs with Rorty are a great example of this.

I agree that philosophical generosity is a worthwhile value, perhaps a core value of what I think of as the modern liberal intellectual tradition, and that we can and should support it both through reasoned argument and by directly expressing our gut feelings about it.

To put the matter succinctly, as it was in a negotiation course I once took, I take as a useful and important guideline to be "hard on principle, but soft on people." To me that translates to giving some benefit of the doubt to opposing viewpoints, to explore them actively rather than simply taking our gut impression of them as accurate and final, but to do this exploration without capitulating on important principles. It's a challenge, but sometimes it isn't hard to identify people who seemingly haven't even accepted the challenge.

http://www.ektopos.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&p=315#315

Does philosophy succeed or fail?

In response to an interesting post at Ektopos, claiming that philosophy was a failiure and an "untruth," I had some thoughts...

Whether philosophy fails at its goal depends on what the goal is supposed to be. If philosophy is an ongoing endeavor continuous with the Greeks, and if that endeavor was a program to discover the truth about the foundations of knowledge and reality, then yes, it has probably failed thus far. Neither have the sciences yet filled in the gaps, if such a thing is even forthcoming.

If you accept the arguments of the pragmatists, philosophy failed self-consciously to find a foundation for certainty. If you go farther and accept the arguments of many of the latter 20th century philosophers, then philosophy failed even to form a coherent tradition of reasoning from which to explore the questions of importance to us. (I'm partial to the pragmatists, but the latter argument seems to me to often be too pessimistic about human knowledge).

On the other hand, if you think of philosophy in a less conventional way, as a questioning process, identifying the issues and assumptions, grouping issues by intellectual history, traditions of reasoning, and background assumptions, and less emphasizing the solving of problems, then it still seems very relevant to each of us personally in our thinking.

That is to me somewhat independent of academic fashions in philosophy, and not reliant upon technical expertise in the field.

Philosophy as a lifelong study and a way of thinking still supports the individual search for knowledge and wisdom, and serves as a useful way to organize our reasoning, without neccessarily being a solution finding process per se.

Essay about "The Brights" and their goals

Essay about "The Brights" and their goals ...

Originally posted at Ektopos

http://www.ektopos.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&t=16

I'm simultaneously fascinated and disturbed that two issues are so closely linked in our discussions: (1) freedom of speech for atheists, and (2) the value of religious practices and institutions to human life.

The first is the stated goal of the Brights movement, and I can wholeheartedly agree with it. Whether you consider atheism as the lack of religion, a quasi-religion, or modern secular religion, and whether it may be partisan speech in some sense notwithstanding, it is speech deserving of protection, often made by very knowledgeable people deserving of our attention.

That's the critical issue of freedom of philosophical speech. I would argue should include reasoning from secularist traditions and religious ones. I don't think that all speech or all reasoning is equal on merit, but it does seem to me unavoidable that there is more than one rational tradition of value to political and social issues. Either side of an issues like abortion or euthanasia can be argued from progressive/secularist or orthodox religious traditions, in spite of our tendency to associate progressive reasoning with one side (e.g. pro-choice, pro-euthanasia, "pro-death"), and the orthodox reasoning with the other (e.g. "pro-life", anti-euthanasia).

The second issue, raised by Dawkins especially, seems to be linked by Brights to their justification for the first issue: atheists need their speech protected partly because they are right, and partly because people who think differently are not only wrong, but often dangerously wrong. I'm referring to Dawkins' anti-religionism. We all know that atheists are not always anti-religious, but there is a dark side anti-religionism just as there is a dark side to religion. For one thing, it denies the aspect of our nature that makes us think of ourselves as spiritual beings.

This comes very close to presenting a paradox to the humanistic values espoused by the Brights. We probably don't need to escape naturalism entirely in order to value a human spirit and share an optimistic and egalitarian ethos, that's the central point made by atheist philosophers. However, we do need to frame naturalism in a way that doesn't preclude or discourage the very values we are trying to promote.

That is, Brights have to be careful not to let their argument for free speech get in the way of their core humanistic values, the way we find left liberal political activism sometimes gets in the way of liberalist values, and the way conservative activism against their perceived enemies of social order sometimes gets in the way of their core values as well.

My claim is that thinking of ourselves as spiritual beings is not simply a matter of being superstitious, it is also a way of thinking about persons that supports the reasoning that lies behind some of the core values of humanism.

The rational challenge for Brights seems to me to be separating out the value of a spiritual view of the human person from the specific traditions of theistic reasoning, and moving toward the Enlightenment goal of universal reason in its support. That is, finding a way to incorporate humanity into what are supposed to in principle be non-sectarian traditions of reasoning such as science. That, and recognizing the legitimacy of orthodox religious reasoning, while seeing through its unfortunate frequent dependence on sectarian assumptions.

For the opponents of the Brights, the challenge is recognizing the legitimacy of secular tradition of reasoning. and separating it from its unfortunate frequent dependence on its own sectarian assumptions.

We can argue for atheist speech, which seems important in the current conservative climate in the U.S., while also having a a productive dialog about the roles religion plays in human life, and arguing for some kind of legitimacy of both progressive and orthodox traditions of reasoning. This limited pluralism seems to me a very worthwhile thing to promote in both philosophy of politics. Atheist speech merits protection not because it tells the whole story, but because it often tells an important part, and I would argue that the same is true of some religious speech.

I would argue that the presence or absence of a religious background of assumptions does not determine the value of the reasoning.