Hawking on the End of Philosophy

Stephen Hawking says philosophy is dead because it is not keeping up with science. The video is here (most of the talk is actually about M theory).

Kaiser says it may be the physicists who dropped philosophy. To a large extent this is all a natural consequence of the academic division of labor.

Many, many philosophers have suggested they are the culmination of philosophy, and therefore that philosophy has in a sense come to an end. All have been disappointed. I think the argument that philosophy has not reached a crescendo, but has simply run its course, has more potential. Of course we'll always have a need for logic and clear thinking. If you want to call that "philosophy", then fine. But as a goal-oriented endeavor (rather than a tool building endeavor) I think Hawking has hit on something. Philosophy ought to be more like mathematics - it ought to produce tools for scientists, and perhaps amuse itself with interesting puzzles every once in a while. Philosophy can also, of course, have a historical dimension too.

Two good posts from Krugman and Vienneau

First, Paul Krugman reflects on what's been coming out of the INET Bretton Woods meeting and the revival of "the oldies" (Bagehot, Kindelberger, Keynes, etc.). In this portion, he ties the problem with the last couple decades back to the microfoundations push:

"Bagehot wrote of panics in which the collective desire to shed risky assets and debt produced a downward spiral; Keynes of situations in which the collective desire to save but not invest led to mass unemployment. And in both cases these arguments suggested a case for government intervention to undo or limit the bad macro consequences of reasonable individual behavior.

But notice that I’ve framed this in terms of “reasonable” behavior; it’s a lot harder to tell these stories in terms of perfectly rational, maximizing behavior.

One response — a pretty good response — is, “So?” After all, maximization isn’t a fact about human behavior, it’s a gadget — an assumption we use to cut through the complexities of psychology and all that, one that can be very useful if it clarifies your thought, but by no means an axiom or a law of nature.

But maximizing models have a special appeal for modern academic economists: they require solving equations! They’re rigorous! They make it easy to show that you’re doing “real research”. And so maximization tends to acquire a bigger importance in economic thought than it deserves."

The point isn't that microfoundations are inherently bad. The point is simply that we need to be intelligent about how we talk about microfoundations. In an earlier post I gave the example of physicists grappling with making quantum mechanics and relativity consistent. It would be weird (wouldn't it?) if physicists said "well relativity really needs microfoundations, so lets try to derive relativity from quantum mechanics and if relativity ends up popping out the other end, that's great - but if it doesn't we just have to abandon relativity." Would that make sense? Of course not. First, we need to really interogate this claim "relativity needs microfoundations". Why? Are microfoundations some sort of scientific pre-requisite? Nope. Nevertheless, consistency is good even if there's not a necessity for microfoundations. But that just leaves open the question - why derive macroprocesses from microfoundations? Why not derive microprocesses from macrofoundations? One is at risk of the ecological fallacy and the other is at risk of the fallacy of composition, but neither is a bad approach in and of itself. You all know my take on this - the Krugman post is very good.

*****

Robert Vienneau has a great review of Nozick up. There are a few things I especially like, starting with his assertion that "libertarians" are better called "propertarians". I would actually suggest that "paleo-propertarians" is better, because not only is libertarianism essentially a philosophy that enshrines property rights - it often offers preferential status to existing or status quo property arrangements. This distinction is important because it's precisely the assignment of rights that determines whether a social order is one of "liberty" or not. This is not something a lot of libertarian seem to appreciate. I did a double take recently when I read Bryan Caplan write: "boosting libertarians' Total Fertility Rate to 3 is the most realistic long-run path to liberty", and as far as I can tell he meant it seriously. Libertarians identify their philosophy with a philosophy of liberty, which is odd for other liberals. It's actually a very specific sort of philosophy of property, and it's not at all clear that a society arranged along libertarian lines would have more liberty. The fact that libertarians identify libertarianism with "liberty" makes engaging with them hard, because they actually do believe this. Convincing yourself of this sort of equivalence is powerful rhetorically; one need look no farther than the Bush administration for evidence of this. It's akin to equating ideas with the will of God - you obviate the need to really probe the idea when you equate it with the will of God. The modern Western world is a world of secular liberalism, and liberty is the new "will of God". If you proclaim your philosophy as being equivalent to liberty ("the will of God") as a matter of definition, you render unintelligible the counterarguments that offer different perspectives on exactly what we mean by liberty ("the will of God") and the implications of a specific philosophy for liberty. Just like with older fundamentalists, when I argue against libertarianism I am perceived as arguing against liberty.

Vienneau has other great points too - including Nozick's begging of the question on how to define "property rights" (a point I raise here a lot). He also presents Nozick's three propositions for the just distribution of property. What caught my eye here is that the third proposition: "Whatever injustices may nevertheless have arisen in original acquisition or transfer must be rectified justly" is usually defined circularly by libertarians - and it is defined on the basis of the very property rights that we're trying to rectify!

Grumpy Kuhn

Lot's of people (here, here, here and here) are picking up on this story about Thomas Kuhn throwing an ashtray at Errol Morris. Morris shares:

"The conversation took a turn for the ugly. Were my problems with him, or were they with his philosophy?

I asked him, “If paradigms are really incommensurable, how is history of science possible? Wouldn’t we be merely interpreting the past in the light of the present? Wouldn’t the past be inaccessible to us? Wouldn’t it be ‘incommensurable?’ ”

He started moaning. He put his head in his hands and was muttering, “He’s trying to kill me. He’s trying to kill me.”

And then I added, “…except for someone who imagines himself to be God.”

It was at this point that Kuhn threw the ashtray at me.

And missed."

Wow! So I have a few thoughts on this. The first one being the obvious one that everyone is pointing out - "holy cow, Thomas Kuhn had a temper!". This sounded like an agitated and easily agitatable guy (which was very interesting to find out, because he seemed very calm and methodical in his book). Morris also discusses his six-or-seven pack a day smoking habit and his growing fame. You very clearly get a picture of a guy that could lash out.

That, I think obscures the second thought I had for a lot of people, namely that Errol Morris really doesn't seem to understand Kuhn at all and he seems deliberately provocative as well. That doesn't justify ash-tray hurling, of course. It's simply to say that these two personalities seemed destined to clash. What's particularly surprising to me is that this student of Kuhn doesn't seem to grasp what Kuhn was saying about incommensurability at all. I thought his apparent misunderstanding might just be an impression I got from a short blog post, but he goes on in part two (of five) to talk more about incommensurability (and the second edition of Structures of Scientific Revolution, which takes even more pains to point this out than the first edition) in completely the opposite way that Kuhn talked about it.

Morris writes: "In a Gestalt-flip, we never lose our ability to see the rabbit or the duck, even if we can’t see them at the same time. We see the rabbit, then the duck. Or the duck, then the rabbit. Rabbit, duck. Duck, rabbit. (I’m sure Elmer Fudd figures in here, somewhere.) But then Kuhn went on to say, “What were ducks in the scientist’s world before the revolution are rabbits afterwards.”, but Kuhn said about the Gestalt-flip metaphor exactly what Morris accused him of failing to note - that we could see incommensurable paradigms in both ways, but simply that we could not see them in the same way simultaneously or compare them simultaneously. This was the whole point of Kuhn's book, after all! To see and talk about prior paradigms on their own, incommensurable terms! Kuhn obviously believed you could see both the rabbit and the duck because his whole project was to engage and talk about Newton on his own terms, Einstein on his own terms, etc. etc.. The whole point of the book is that we never lose our ability to see the rabbit or the duck, but that two paradigms are still as incommensurable as the rabbit and the duck - you can't accept both at the same time, although you can see each on its own terms.

It would be one thing for Morris to dispute a minor point or phraseology of Kuhn, but in his first post (on the ashtray) and in this second post even more so he seems to have no concept of what Kuhn was saying, instead simply taking Kuhn's critics at their word. Throwing ashtrays is poor etiquette to say the least, but I can completely understand why Kuhn would be so frustrated with Morris.

My third thought is that this mirrors a lot of the critics of pragmatism who unthinkingly equate pragmatism with relativism, nihilism, post-modernism, etc. (and I think some people are probably similarly unfair to post-modernism although I don't know it very well). People think in terms of everything being nailed down or nothing being nailed down, but they have trouble with views that say "lots of things or even all things may be nailed down, but our perceptions can't always get to that and there's always going to be a fundamental uncertainty". Non-relativists see that and think relativism, when it's really not.

Anyway, we're forty percent through these blog posts from Morris, and while he strikes me as being a little obtuse, he's definitely intelligent and interesting - I look forward to the others.

Thoughts on The Metaphysical Club

I just finished The Metaphysical Club, by Louis Menand. I can't recommend it highly enough - a truly enjoyable book. It is an intellectual history of American Pragmatism, written as a biography of four men: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James, C.S. Peirce, and John Dewey. There is a considerable amount of history in it too - Boston abolitionism, the Civil War, the coming of Darwinism to America, the Pullman Strike, and a big chunk of the history of American higher education. This made for a very engaging read - part intellectual history, part biography, and part history. I would like to write a book like this one day.

I've had a sympathy with American Pragmatism for a while. Kate had the book John Dewey: The Political Writings from a political philosophy class back at William and Mary, and I've effectively appropriated it and browsed through it for years now. I've always been attracted to Dewey. I never knew as much about the others, though. This book both firmed up and raised questions about my relationship to Pragmatism. There's a lot I like and a lot I don't like in each of these figures. I've also started to try to familiarize myself with Rorty. I take him much the same way I take Peirce (although Rorty himself preferred James). Rorty strikes me as technically being closer to right than the others, but I do see why people consider him a nihilist. He asks the question "well who is interested in truth anyway?" to which I want to respond "I'm interested in truth, even if I agree with you it's elusive!". Where Peirce gets the contingency of our insights right, but then is too optimistic about where all that leads, I think Rorty gets the contingency of our insights right, and then is too pessimistic (even if he insists he isn't). Rorty did not come up at all in the book, which was interesting - even in the epilogue where the author discussed the role of Pragmatism in the post-war period. I suppose that would have opened up a whole other can of worms.

I should say the other thing that I like about Rorty is that he brings in two others that I've always admired - Foucault and Heidegger. I've been marginally familiar with and generally impressed with Foucault since my time studying sociology at William and Mary. Heidegger has been of more recent interest, and I can credit Evan with introducing me to him (Evan also gave me this book, btw). I just recently found out Rorty explicitly connects Foucault and Dewey on rights and coercion. That was tremendous to learn, because I've made that connection myself for a while now, but I've never been especially sure about it. It's good to know that a celebrated philosopher came to the same conclusion. Rorty is also nice because he accepts a late logical-positivism (as long as it is sufficiently chastized about its own limitations). He sees value in the logical positivists who were more introspective in that sense (just as he sees value in Heidegger for doing the same with phenomenology). I have always enjoyed Bertrand Russell, so that's nice to see in Rorty (even though he's obviously abandoned analytic philosophy in important ways too). Ultimately, philosophically I'm still floating about, but I definitely see a coalescence with the Pragmatists.

There are absolutely unmistakable connections between the Pragmastists and Keynes in terms of action under uncertainty. I checked A Treatise on Probability (1921), and Keynes cites Peirce a few times. Gladys Parker Foster writes about the compatibility of Keynes and Dewey here. I've recently become very interested in Foster and her late husband - he especially wrote a lot about the American contribution to economic thought, and while I haven't gotten a great grasp of his views yet, he seems to suggest there was a lot in American thought that paved the way for a broad acceptance of Keynes. What's even more exciting is that he's identified many of the points I remark on - Jeffersonianism, the frontier, etc.

I'm not sure what I'm reading next - I'll decide by tonight. Possibly The Road to Serfdom, although I'm not sure I'm in the mood. Maybe The State and Economic Knowledge, which has been tempting me for a while. Maybe Forged Consensus which has also been tempting me for a while. Maybe Cycles of Unemployment, a short book by William Berridge from 1923 on the causes of unemployment. Maybe The Eerie Silence, about detecting extraterrestrial life - just for a lighter read. I feel somewhat adrift... not sure what it will be.

Pragmatism, Uncertainty, and the Modern Economy

Two short statements by Rorty made me think about the deep social roots of the modern economy, as outlined by Keynes.

The first is Rorty on "The End of Inquiry". He talks about the modern world as a world where we have stopped preparing for immortality and started preparing for our great grandchildren. This is reflected in the transition from essentially Platonic to essentially Pragmatic philosophy. We have gone from philosophizing the "ideal" and the "true" to philosophizing the useful. In Weber this transition almost emerges as a crafty trick fate plays on Protestantism - but the import for the modern economy is essentially the same - secular growth through capital accumulation. This is the picture offered in Keynes's Economic Conditions for Our Grandchildren, which I think coincides nicely with the Hans Blumenberg quote that Rorty mentions in the video:

But when we abandon Platonism and truth the world becomes far less certain. It always was uncertain, of course, but the human project was a project of rationalizing that uncertainty. Myth filled the voids in our understanding; ideas of Providence took care of the dark forces of time and ignorance that enveloped our future; philosophy, taking the Greek cue, took care of everything else and even displaced myth and Providence where it could. But with the abandonment of this project and the dawn of Pragmatism, post-modernism, critical rationalism, and whatever else may be appropriate to class together as a rejection of an idealized pursuit of "truth", the uncertainty was unavoidable.

This leads to something of a tension. The abandonment of idealism and truth means that we focus on investing in the future. But the uncertainty unleashed by this abandonment of idealism and truth means that we hoard to erect protective barriers against the unknown. It's important to note here that Rorty identifies uncertainty as a sort of luxury good. But that's largely the point, isn't it? Uncertainty, as a luxury that we did not have in earlier epochs, is a creature of the modern world - the modern economy.

I think regular readers should know how these two pieces of the puzzle work together to furnish us with Keynes's understanding of modern society: secular growth from capital accumulation combined with bouts of underutilization due to fear of the unknown. It's one thing to say "this is how the modern economy works", but I think it's useful to look at much broader social developments and see the deep roots of this Keynesian worldview.

Read this way, Keynes calls for a sort of Progressive Pragmatism. We need a society that continues to invest in possibilities for our grandchildren without succumbing to the very willingness to confront uncertainty that makes us modern.

In 1921, Keynes and Knight both published books about how we deal with uncertainty, with Keynes developing his ideas further through his career. Both men were right, and Keynes came to the same conclusion that Knight did when he wrote about "the social object of skilled investment". What we need, in response to this uncertainty, is less fear and more entrepreneurialism.

UPDATE: I was thinking about this a litle more, and it reminded me of a portion of a poem that my grandad recites from time to time - it's from Maculay's Horatius:

Then out spoke brave Horatius, the Captain of the Gate:
"To every man upon this earth, death cometh soon or late;
And how can man die better than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods,

And for the tender mother who dandled him to rest,
And for the wife who nurses his baby at her breast,
And for the holy maidens who feed the eternal flame,
To save them from false Sextus, that wrought the deed of shame?

What's interesting is that Horatius doesn't see his stand as a defense of what Rome might become (this is the very early republican period), or even really for his children. The first thing he stands for is the dead. The second thing he stands for is the Gods. Then he stands in defense of several contemporaries, but he never even says he stands in defense of his children - just his wife who happens to be nursing his children at the time. Granted, this is a nineteenth century rendition of a Roman hero, but even if it cannot be taken as a transcription of the sort of classical attitude that Rorty describes, it's certainly a telling dramatization of it. Rorty's claim is that modernity experienced a wholesale temporal reorientation. When we are future-oriented we are future-oriented in a more practical, less idealistic way. It's an uncertain orientation, but in many ways a more productive one.

Daniel Klein, Progressivism, and Rights

Arnold Kling links to an essay at Cato Unbound by Daniel Klein on the political philosophy of progressivism that I find a little troubling. Klein's case is that progressives found their perspective on the "overlordship" of the state, that all rights and freedoms are derived from the state, and that the state has ultimate ownership of all things.

I struggle with how to react to something like this. On the one hand, I feel like it's such nonsense that it really ought not to be responded to. I'm even more frustrated because I'm starting to notice a pattern with Klein: evidently, he really believes that non-libertarians are not friends to liberty, that they ignore or are ignorant of economics, and essentially that the position is bankrupt. Instead of actually discussing some non-libertarian position with him, one ends up trying to walk him back off the brink of his own claims. It's not a productive dialogue, and it's not a very pleasant dialogue to partake in when you know he thinks you're ignorant of economics and indifferent to liberty.

I struggle with how to react - but clearly I'm "reacting" with this blog post so I better get to it. I don't find Klein's point especially convincing. He cites several late nineteenth century and early twentieth century collectivists claiming that the state owns everything. Fine - that certainly isn't hard to find. What's not clear is how that is the basis of modern progressivism. As far as modern progressives go he only really cites Cass Sunstein (and some co-authors of Sunstein). Even that is hard for me to evaluate because he doesn't cite him extensively at all. The only citation is that "Private property [is] a creation of state action". I wouldn't imagine this is that controversial even if you wouldn't agree with it. I think private property can be an emergent social institution as well, but I wouldn't quibble too much with Sunstein on this - the state, after all, is the source of the legal framework for property rights. To say that property rights are somehow contingent on the state is not the same as saying the state owns everything, of course. But this is one of the many points that Klein simply finesses. So it's very hard to get a handle of the argument. There is no real connection offered between early collectivists and modern progressives, and the sparsely quoted quoted Sunstein is hardly representative of modern progressives - Sunstein is an interesting guy, but a very odd, unique guy.

I've sketched out my basic political philosophy (which I see as essentially classical liberal and able to accommodate multiple classical liberal ideologies - so not uniquely "progressive", but it certainly includes progressivism) here before, but this seems like a good opportunity to again because Klein - in the end - is trying to erect a progressive political philosophy in terms of its understanding of property rights.

My view is similar to Sunstein's (as quoted by Klein - I'm not deeply familiar with Sunstein) insofar as I think property rights (by which I mean our claim to anything for use or disposal) are largely artificial or constructed. I do not find "natural rights" to be a coherent position. Klein's error is in assuming that this artificiality implies (1.) meaninglessness, or (2.) contingency on the state. It doesn't imply either. But it does imply that property rights may be incomplete, unfair, etc. The fundamental problem and justification of the state is not that our property rights are contingent on the state (that would be circular), but that justice is contingent on property rights. I cannot establish the injustice of theft unless I can identify what is stolen as my property. Otherwise it's simply free appropriation. So justice becomes contingent on an artificial framework of property rights, that are incomplete and hereditary. We inherit our property rights regime and the property that has been amassed under that regime from prior generations. What we have is wide scope for injustice. If I take a pump and run poisonous smog into your house, I could be prosecuted for poisoning you. If a firm pumps the same poisonous smog into the air they could not be prosecuted (at least they couldn't at one point... and they're limited in prosecution now). Why? It's the same act. The difference is the arrangement of property rights.

This is what bothers me so much when libertarians act as if they genuinely believe their's is uniquely a philosophy of liberty, or that those who raise questions about the property rights regime are somehow unfriendly to liberty. When you ignore one act of poisoning because property rights are incomplete but pay attention to another because property rights are complete, you're not espousing a philosophy of liberty or non-coercion at all. You're espousing a philosophy that legitimizes coercion by virtue of the incompleteness of property rights. There is nothing classically liberal about that.

But what is the alternative? That's not easy either. What we're stuck with - which John Dewey noted back in 1935 - is a situation with coercion in either direction. But people weren't waiting around for Dewey to say this. It was implicit in the property rights regime. People understood its fundamental artificiality when fields were being enclosed in England, and when titles were being passed down. Do you think it's coincidence that the nation-state emerged with the rise of property rights and market activity as the fundamental principle of social organization? Of course it's not coincidence. We are faced with coercion on all sides. I am coerced when someone pollutes the air I breath, and that happens because property rights to the air are incomplete. I face a fundamental disadvantage in remedying the situation because the law acts on the behalf of property-owners and the very fact of property-ownership gives property-owners a resource advantage in challenging my claim. The solution has been the emergence of the institutions of a democratic state to weigh these claims and represent people independent of property although that, as libertarians are quick to note, is coervice too - we are coerced on all sides. The classical liberal idea of the state (I am not using the word as Klein does - as a synonym for libertarianism) is therefore not one of overlordship of the state, but a repudiation of the assumption that a fundamentally artificial property rights regime is natural - and an attempt at a weighing of various coercions in a way that is consistent with human liberty, human equality, and human dignity. This is not in opposition to property rights - quite the contrary! Democratic, liberal states emerged precisely to purge coercion from an artificial property rights regime, when necessary. What I think is appropriate for classical liberals of all stripes to acknowledge is that this does mean that the authority of the state is artificial and coercive in the context of the existing property rights regime. But what libertarians like Daniel Klein need to recognize is that it is an artificial institution that has emerged naturally in response to the artificiality and coercion of an emergent property rights regime. In that sense it is not inherently more coercive than a minimalist libertarian state (which itself has the potential to be extremely coercive for the reasons I outlined in the previous paragraph).

I need to bring Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine into this before I close. Jefferson and Paine wrote a lot about the role of time in political philosophy, particularly as it related to this question of property rights and coercion. They noted that property rights are inherited and over the course of English history they were legitimated by their inheritance. Centuries ago theft, conquering, and corruption established privilege and over the centuries privilege evolved into property. That which was artificial and coercive became legitimate. That isn't all - inherited privilege granted resource advantages to descendants. We see the same thing in America today with the legacy of slavery. Inequality is durable. Slavery may have ended one hundred fifty years ago and segregation may have ended fifty years ago, but if your father didn't get a good education because your grandfather was forcibly prevented from getting a good education or from earning the money to send your father to get an education that is a tangible disadvantage for you. Jefferson and Paine recognized the power of time in translating these disadvantages. The black community today is still being coerced by the institution of slavery and by the institution of segregation because of the heritability of property rights.

Libertarians puzzle and fret over the nation-state as if its some accident that the state and the market emerged together. Similarly, some libertarians puzzle over why good freedom-loving guys like Jefferson and Paine were so keen on inheritance taxes. It's not an accident that inheritance taxes, popular democracy, and liberty were all embraced by the same people in the founding era! It's not an accident that enemies of inheritance taxes and popular democracy were also the enemies of liberty. It's because what is known as "libertarianism" today is fundamentally imbalanced and coercive (when it's left on its own), so people who were opposed to coercion in the founding era added popular democracy, inheritance taxes, and the like to their calls for liberty. Those who embraced coercion opposed all three. Real classical liberalism always embraced self-governance, equality, and liberty. Libertarians quote the support for liberty and try to recreate a classical liberalism that excludes the other priorities.

Finally - I want to share a link that Xenophon shared with me the other day on a libertarian critique of Rothbard's views on the rights of children. It hinges on the idea that children didn't choose the families they're born into, and therefore it's legitimate to expect certain care for children from parents. Otherwise, parents are coercing children into acquiescing to a situation they didn't freely choose. I think the ties between this argument and the Jefferson-Paine point about the role of time and inheritance should be clear, and I largely agree with it. Not surprisingly, Jefferson was also a big fan of universal, public education for children. This makes sense when you see classical liberalism as a claim about artificial, potentially coercive inherited social constructs. It makes less sense to support public education in the way that Jefferson did if you see classical liberalism as synonymous with libertarianism.

Guttenberg and Synthetic a Priori

Mattheus von Guttenberg has probably his clearest articulation yet of a priorism and Austrianism. He starts with a review of Kant's four part explanation of knowledge - the intersection between synthetic/analytic and a priori/a posteriori. Guttenberg refreshingly does not just fall back on the claim that analytic a posteriori is some kind of impossibility - he gives an example and moves on. Most of the discussion of course focuses on the synthetic a priori and Mises.

I want to briefly play Friedman to Guttenberg's Mises. Mises's logical deductions are fine. Of course no economist objects to synthetic a priorism. But does it follow from the soundness of true synthetic a priori knowledge that empiricism is useless for the practice of a priorism? I don't think it does. Guttenberg writes of Mises:

"All his conclusions arrive from logical deductive processes, and are therefore logically sound. Empirical evidence is useless to challenge these views, they must be argued via reason if one finds them faulty."

I would have rewritten the first sentence as:

"All his conclusions arrive from an attempt at logical deductive processes from asserted axioms, and therefore are logically sound if the attempt is successful"

I don't think Guttenberg would object to the addition of this caveat. To follow in the Kantian spirit, my revision of that sentence is an analytic a priori statement (or is it? one could critique my "classical foundationalism" in this claim, as it was critiqued in this post). My revision of the first sentence immediately reveals the problem of the second sentence. Since Mises's soundness is contingent on his argument, the usefulness of empiricism is also contingent on his argument. True synthetic a priori statements cannot be challenged by empirical evidence because that would imply a logical contradiction. The point is, we're not dealing with "true synthetic a priori statements" here - we're dealing with a whole book full of statements that may or may not be "true synthetic a priori statements" written by an economist in 1949.

The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money is another synthetic a priori work of economics. It has a few pieces of data in it, but they're all used to illustrate points rather than derive knowledge. Clearly, though, Keynes and Mises are at odds on some points. Guttenberg would suggest that we should arbitrate between Keynes and Mises on purely logical grounds. Fine. I say Mises neglects an important axiom (or else fails to derive it from the single axiom he does use). Mises notes that "man prefers sooner rather than later", but he neglects "man prepares for unforeseen contingencies" - i.e., liquidity preference. One could make some kind of argument about how "man prepares for unforeseen contingencies" is an axiom. Or one could make an argument that it can be derived from Mises's axiom, that "man acts". I think the second is probably the better option. The point is, a lot of the differences between Austrianism and Keynesianism come back to Keynes's use and the Austrian's neglect of liquidity preference. Guttenberg wants to arbitrate this with logic, and I consider the Austrians to be on the losing end of the logic. They've neglected an essential synthetic a priori point and it screws up the rest of their system. Guttenberg is obviously going to deny there is a logical problem at all. So where does this get us? Nowhere. What's the solution?

This is why empiricism is so important for any science. Human minds are not perfect, and we make mistakes. Obviously either I am wrong about economics or Guttenberg is. Or, perhaps more likely, both of us are. But what we do know (barring, of course, those critiques of classical foundationalism) is that even if Guttenberg and I can't agree on what constitutes true synthetic a priori knowledge, we both can agree that true synthetic a priori knowledge and true synthetic a posteriori knowledge can not contradict each other. We can also agree that false claims that claim to be synthetic a priori knowledge and true synthetic a posteriori knowledge may contradict each other. It seems to me, then, that since the whole question is whether Mises gives us real synthetic a priori knowledge or not, one potential way of determining the question is testing it against synthetic a posteriori evidence. Since neither Guttenberg nor I will give ground on the synythetic a priori front, and since we have a sense of the non-contradictory nature of different types of knowledge, empiricism should be useful for arbitration if you accept Kantian epistemology.

Of course, practical attempts at synthetic a posteriori knowledge (like a linear regression run in 2010) may be as faulty as practical attempts at synthetic a priori knowledge (like bounded collections of statements written in 1936 or 1949). We always run the risk of being wrong in any of these endeavors. The question is, why does Guttenberg privelege one endeavor over another (a priori over a posteriori), when the problem is so obviously that we have two synthetic a priori theories that contradict each other but that neither of us will concede logical fault on?

Another way of making my point is to say that OK, true synthetic a priori statements and true synthetic a posteriori statements cannot contradict. So if real-world attempts at synthetic a priori statements and real-world attempts at synthetic a posteriori statements don't contradict we have good reason to think both may be true. But if they do contradict then at least one of them, and perhaps both, are faulty. My question to Guttenberg is why, in the case of such a contradiction, is he so quick to assume that it is the real-world attempt at the synthetic a priori that is true? How does he arbitrate between those two? Kant gives us no way to arbitrate - so instead I think we're forced to be pragmatic and corroborate. Guttenberg only feels comfortable with his position because he doesn't see both the synthetic a priori and synthetic a posteriori claims as being imperfect, potentially faulty, real-world attempts at knowledge. He assumes that one is and one isn't. He assumes that the synthetic a posteriori breaks on the synthetic a priori. I'm saying that that assumption has no basis.

I could rewrite Guttenberg's whole post and replace references to Mises with references to Keynes. Would that convince him? Of course it wouldn't. Appeals to Kant don't settle the question because we all more or less agree with Kant. Kant was not an Austrian (he was a Prussian, actually!).

Wherein certain philosophers demonstrate their unflagging ability to shoot themselves in the foot.

Jamie Smith is right to dismiss the complaining of Brian Leiter over the choice of Simon Critchley as a moderator for a new NYT philosophy blog.  Setting aside legitimate concerns about the quality of Critchley's work (there may be, I am not one to say), it seems obvious enough that Critchley does a lot of work, that a good deal of people do receive it well, and that a person like him would be perfect for the job.  I haven't read any of Critchley's stuff, but simply listening to a few of his lectures online (he's speaking at the Divinity School soon and I'm trying to get at least a quick-and-dirty introduction) makes it plain enough to me that he is the sort who would do well introducing a general public to a philosophically oriented life.  In this sense he is similar to the recently deceased Pierre Hadot, from whom one had the sense that a reflective posture was important, not simply for mental puzzles, but for persons.

This sort of thing is pretty typical of Leiter.  He has now, for instance, moved on to discuss the place of philosophy in universities.  Reading this sort of thing from Leiter is always extremely awkward because of how much he tries to 1) professionalize and quantify philosophy yet, 2) speak of it as some sort of venerable tradition that transcends current market-oriented and other problems of university life.  Leiter Reports is not the sort of place that a modern-day Socrates would be well-received.  Without getting too grandiose in identifying Critchley as a sort of Socrates, I think the same dynamic is in play here.  In a frantic rush to establish the Scholarly Serious Bona Fides of the discipline, Leiter forgets that the lifeblood of any sort of dynamic inquiry is those scholars who make of it a real endeavor of human pursuit of meaning, challenging those both within and without the circle of tenured university professors to think more deeply.

With humanities departments losing funding left and right, it strikes me that the last thing we should do is condemn a decision to try to bring the philosophical life and public life into closer contact.

Will the real "epistemic closure" please stand up?

There has been considerable discussion in the blogosphere about the "epistemic closure" of modern American conservatism. It seems to have started with Julian Sanchez, who expressed concerns about AEI's treatment of David Frum (an issue that has been disconcerting for me as well, as a think tank employee myself). Douthat, Yglesias, McArdle, Friedersdorf, and many others responded to Sanchez's thoughts. Another major engagement has involved Manzi and Levin at The National Review, over a piece that Levin wrote on climate change. Bruce Bartlett has shared his own, very well known experience in the conservative movement. Ezra Klein adds some interesting (if limited) empirical evidence (I share his criticism of the method - but as he suggests, something similar could be expanded upon). There's certainly a lot that I've missed, but each of these links will lead you to other links - so you should be able to catch up (I haven't read through it all in detail - I've been putting my free time into studying for a final this week).

Anyway, through all of these really great thoughts, I think the meaning of the initial "epistemic closure" concern has been lost. I count at least three versions of "epistemic closure" available to us - two of which are being addressed in this ongoing debate, and a third that I think is especially interesting to think about.

Version 1 (Wrong and Uninteresting): "Epistemic Closure" as shorthand for various and sundry bitching about conservatism
One of my biggest concerns, however, has been that this whole debate has degenerated into complaining about conservatism, rather than providing a clear critique of conservatism. For Bruce Bartlett, conservatism's alleged epistemic closure amounts to: "They don’t think there are any new ideas of particular interest to them. Their philosophy is fully formed. The only question is how best to implement conservative ideas in the political debate". His concern seems to be the increasing activism of conservatism, and the rigidity of their value system. Others have talked about the "conservative cocoon" phenomenon, where conservatives (allegedly) have restricted interactions with those who don't share their views (in a similar vein, a friend from college shared this this interesting research with me on the closedness of the conservative blogosphere). Douthat focuses on the point of whether there are internal debates in conservatism, a question that is especially salient in light of the Frum Affair. But none of these address the more fundamental point of epistemic closure that was originally raised.

Bartlett's concern about activism and values is beside the initial point. Marxists, for example (at least the early Marxists) were unalloyed activists with a completely closed value system, but they were very thorough in thinking through epistemological questions. As for the "cocoon", the phrase "the ivory tower" is definitive of the cocooning of a group of thinkers - and yet no one accuses the academy of having an underdeveloped approach to epistemology. Douthat's concern with internal debate also has nothing to do with epistemic closure. There is no debate to speak of that 2+2=4 or that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Does that mean it is supported by a suspect epistemology? As I say, I haven't read all of this in great detail, but a lot of the debate seems to simply be a random assortment of complaints about conservatism, with the fancy phrase "epistemic closure" thrown in as a catch-all.

Version 2 (Wrong and Interesting): "Epistemic Closure" and the way that conservatives know what they "know"
Beneath the surface of these random complaints, there is real concern with and discussion of what Julian Sanchez initially meant by "epistemic closure" - namely, how conservatives derive knowledge about the issues that they pontificate on. Sanchez argues that accuracy of the knowledge inputs for the conservative movement are increasingly unimportant. Conspiracy theories, birth certificate skepticism, and crazy Beckesque guilt-by-association chalkboard flow charts have (so the argument goes) become sufficient factual fodder on which conservatives build their arguments.

The Manzi-Levin debate on the National Review is worth looking at as an example (well, at least Manzi's initial post is an example) of a genuine discussion of epistemological questions. Climate change is one issue where I think conservatives are pretty clearly ignoring the evidence to defend what is essentially an ideological position. Other issues, such as financial regulation, health reform, and fiscal stimulus are more dubious issues. I think it's hard to make a blanket statement that conservatives "ignore the evidence" more than liberals. Often they're taking the same evidence and simply applying a different set of values to it. Regardless, it's a fruitful question to ask - and there are a lot of conservatives, particularly in Washington, that do seem to be assuming their own conclusions rather than carefully reviewing the evidence.

Version 3 (Right and Very Interesting): The "Epistemic Closure" of Julian Sanchez's undergraduate subconscious
The New York Times reports Sanchez's confession that "he probably fished “epistemic closure” out of his subconscious from an undergraduate course in philosophy". Indeed he did. Sanchez used "epistemic closure" to describe the problem of "epistemological closed-mindedness", but "epistemic closure" is also a technical term in philosophy, which I only stumbled across recently while preparing for this blog post. The short definition of "epistemic closure" is:

"The principle that, where P and Q are propositions, if we know that P, and know that P logically entails Q, we know that Q"

In other words, "closure" refers to a closed system of knowledge, not closed-mindedness. I think it's fine that Sanchez didn't use "epistemic closure" in this technical sense, but it's interesting to think about the implications of this definition. The idea of "epistemic closure" is often closely associated with skepticism, because of the very real possibility that your knowledge of your initial statement (P), somehow (implicitly) presupposes the later statement (Q). The example given in this longer treatment of epistemic closure is:

"the proposition I have a driver’s license issued by the state of North Carolina entails that North Carolina is not a mere figment of my imagination"

The skeptical position would point out that your ability to make the initial statement presupposes the truth of the second statement. It's not exactly what Sanchez had in mind (and I should point out that I think what he did have in mind, while not exactly "epistemic closure", was also very interesting), but this does relate to a problem that I'm personally concerned about: the problem of deductively extended logical systems of thought. Theoretically, deductive logic is a fantastic source of knowledge. But it relies on two fundamental pillars: the accuracy of its axioms and presuppositions, and the validity of its deductions. The skeptical objection to arguments based on "epistemic closure" are very similar to my (perhaps less formalized) reservations about deductive logic and a disproportionate emphasis on rationality and reason in general.

Logical formality can amplify the errors of bad initial assumptions, while providing the veneer of incontrovertibility. As logical systems get increasingly extended, making broader and broader claims, the initial errors (which may have been negligible) can easily multiply into substantial errors. As Nikola Tesla once said: "Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality". In economics, I think the Austrian School and Real Business Cycle School are both excellent examples of Tesla's scientists who have "wandered off", confident in their deductive systems that bear no relation to reality. At least Real Business Cycle theorists will do empirical work to check up on things. The Austrian School explicitly refuses to do this check up.

I suppose I've wandered quite far from the point of conservative "epistemic closure" over the course of this etymological exercise. Are conservatives more likely to "wander off" with deductive arguments built from fallacious assumptions? Quite possibly. I think that's an open question.

Of Miracles

Who has taken the time to read their Hume?:

A.) The Insane Clown Posse

B.) Christopher Hitchens

Here's a tougher quiz. Who is more entertaining and offensive to the tender, mild-mannered mainstream:

A.) The Insane Clown Posse

B.) Christopher Hitchens

Histories of the Self

In his other blog, Clavi non Defixi, Evan has an interesting post on work by Jan Goldstein, a history professor he is taking a course with at the University of Chicago. He provides selections from, and thoughts on, her book The Post-Revolutionary Self: politics and psyche in France, 1750-1850. Evan's post emphasizes Goldstein's sharp distinction between Cartesian and Lockean understandings of the self - a distinction that is minimized in other treatments of the subject. As a theologian, Evan also seems to be thinking about how this attempt to provide a sharper contrast between Descartes, Locke, and the post-revolutionary thinkers attempting a return to Cartesian selfhood can be used to broaden theological work on the self, which primarily engages Augustine's treatment of the issue, and the Augustinian precedent in later Western work on the subject.

However, as I click through Evan's links, I get the impression that Goldstein herself offers a far more institutional and historical perspective on the post-revolutionary concept of selfhood, which honestly interests me more. Goldstein argues that the post-revolutionary quasi-resurrection of Descartes served as a sort of prop for the new regime. This is the blurb for the book:

"In the wake of the French Revolution, as attempts to restore political stability to France repeatedly failed, a group of concerned intellectuals identified a likely culprit: the prevalent sensationalist psychology, and especially the flimsy and fragmented self it produced. They proposed a vast, state-run pedagogical project to replace sensationalism with a new psychology that showcased an indivisible and actively willing self, or moi. As conceived and executed by Victor Cousin, a derivative philosopher but an academic entrepreneur of genius, this long-lived project singled out the male bourgeoisie for training in selfhood. Granting everyone a self in principle, Cousin and his disciples deemed workers and women incapable of the introspective finesse necessary to appropriate that self in practice.

Beginning with a fresh consideration of the place of sensationalism in the Old Regime and the French Revolution, Jan Goldstein traces a post-Revolutionary politics of selfhood that reserved the Cousinian moi for the educated elite, outraged Catholics and consigned socially marginal groups to the ministrations of phrenology. Situating the Cousinian moi between the fragmented selves of eighteenth-century sensationalism and twentieth-century Freudianism, Goldstein suggests that the resolutely unitary self of the nineteenth century was only an interlude tailored to the needs of the post-Revolutionary bourgeois order."

My guess is that like me many readers will find this description of Goldstein's work as a historical project more interesting. But please click through and read Evan's post - it's a good read that focuses more on the substance of the understandings of the self, rather than the function that they served.

Critical Rationalism Blog

Commenter Lee Kelly (and Rafe Champion as well, it looks like?) have a blog called Critical Rationalism that I'd like to share with readers. I've only recently discovered it, and it doesn't look that old anyway (posts start in January).

The blog describes "critical rationalism" as:

"A kind of evolving philosophical tradition concerning how we should approach knowledge. It is the Socratic method only with a little bit of modern awareness. While most philosophical traditions regard knowledge as something that has to be certain and justified, CR takes the view that we don’t have ultimate answers, but knowledge is nevertheless possible. Truth is an endless quest"

I'm not personally familiar with it, but it sounds interesting and I plan on keeping up with their posts. I am severely under-educated when it comes to philosophy. But I am educated enough to locate my general impressions and approach to knowledge within the broader landscape of philosophy. I am generally speaking an empiricist and have an innate skepticism of systems that strike me as being excessively reliant on deduction. I see that critical rationalism draws heavily on Karl Popper. What I know of Popper is his views on falsifiability and on determinism. I've always associated Popperian falsifiability with empiricism, and of course his critique of determinism and historicism as being especially damning for rationalists. So I'm not quite sure how Popper fits in with "critical rationalism". I suppose that's the whole point - that "critical rationalism" tempers the excesses of some other rationalisms? I just don't know - I'll have to read the blog on a regular basis, and probably read more Popper too!

Philosophical Musing 2: Brain-dump on the Nature of Time

***This is the second in a series I call "philosophical musings".

It's meant to be speculative and exploratory - enjoy***

---

On and off this fall I've been extremely interested in the nature of time. The immediate interest was sparked by a few things. First, I've been refocused on the work of John Maynard Keynes as a result of the financial crisis. Time is very important for him for several reasons: (1.) the uncertainty of the future underpins his liquidity preference theory of the interest rate and investment, (2.) his differentiation between the long and the short run (not the first to do this, but one of the most emphatic about the importance of it, and (3.) despite his quip that "in the long run we're all dead", Keynes is very preoccupied what he elsewhere called the "economic possibilities for our grandchildren" - social organization in the far future. In addition to Keynes, I also have a personal interest in human social organization in the very long run: space colonization, further political unification on Earth, changes to the structure of production along the lines that Keynes was concerned with, etc. I'm particularly interested in the problems that the very long-run poses - namely that market actors don't respond to far distant incentives. The state may act on these incentives, but elected officials can have notoriously short-run planning horizons as well. So the question is - given the vista of possibilities in our distant future, how do we prepare, given the extent to which we are anchored in the present? And finally, my very basic introduction to Martin Heidegger's work, through my brother, has piqued my interest in time as well. In Heidegger's ontology, what it meant "to be" was crucially dependent on a Being's existence in time. As Heidegger says: "The existential and ontological constitution of the totality of Dasein [Being] is grounded in temporality". Moreover, Heidegger sees a purposiveness or intentionality as being central to our understanding of being, and this intentionality essentially means the use of an object in time. For example, pre-Heidegger you might ask "what is the reality, the 'thing-in-itself' of this hammer, independent of my perception of the hammer". Heidegger points out that the ontological significance of these objects is our intentions for them in time. He says "I experience this hammer as something that I use to hit nails - that is my phenomenological experience - and then maybe later I consider it's essential reality". So the temporal intentionality that pervades our experience has to be meaningful when we ask "what is this hammer"?, because it is temporal experience and intentionality that define our phenomenological experience of the hammer. I know that's quite an introduction, and Keynes and Heidegger will both show up below as well, but this post will basically be a collection of bulleted thoughts and links on things I've stumbled across regarding the nature of time.

---

-- First, this post was most immediately motivated by something I read in The Watchmen, a graphic novel about a group of superheroes that was recently made into a movie. Dr. Manhattan, a physicist disembodied in an experiment gone awry, experiences reality in a very unique way. Time is not unidirectional for him, he can make quantum leaps across the universe, and he can understand and reform objects at the atomic level. Midway through the story he finds himself on Mars (I won't say why - it's a major plot theme), and he muses:

"Through my blue fingers, pink grains are falling, haphazard, random, a disorganized stream of silicone that seems pregnant with the possibility of every conceivable shape. But this is illusion. Things have their shape in time, not space alone. Some marble blocks have statues within them, embedded in their future." I read that and thought "I've really been entranced by time for too long - I think this needs to be a second 'philosophical musing'."

-- I found these very interesting - it's a series on the philosophy of time that relies heavily on physics, which is nice. Here are parts one, two, and three.

-- This is William Lane Craig discussing the "tensed theory of time". This is basically about how we divide time into "tenses" - past, present, and future. What constitutes the "present", exactly. And whether we can objectively divide time this way [a side note - I was surprised to find out Evan isn't particularly impressed with William Lane Craig. I'm not sure exactly why - I thought he was pretty good, although I didn't agree with everything he said].

-- An entire semester of lectures on Heidegger by Hubert Dreyfus, who I suppose is considered the world's foremost expert on Heidegger (certainly one of them at least). I haven't listened to this at all yet, but I have heard other interviews of Dreyfus about Heidegger. So eat your heart out - I imagine the only way to get a more thorough treatment would be to read Heidegger's Being and Time yourself. I guess I'll say here that one of the things that interests me most about Heidegger is how he makes temporality central to reality, and the applications this might have to political or social philosophy. A lot of Anglo-American political philosophers take a "de-temporalized" view - Anglo-American philosophy is notoriously de-contextualized in general. When it comes to political philosophy, think of a Hobbesian state of nature or a Rawlsian "veil of ignorance". There is no (1.) temporal context, and more importantly to me no (2.) recognition of the importance of political and social institutions for deliberately creating a future. Society is or should be timeless for most of these Anglo-American conceptualizations. Heidegger is nice because he breaks out of that: history is important and intentions for the future are important.

-- A Keynes quote I've always liked about time: "The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelope our future". Keynes's system is dependent on uncertainty about the future, which causes fluctuations in liquidity preference and the propensity to invest.

-- A Scientific American piece about why we experience time in one direction.

-- This is a one-pager I wrote around Thanksgiving about space-time and value theory. Very speculative - sort of a "why do we think about things in this way" piece. Nothing came of it and I'm guessing nothing will.

-- Finally, it's worth noting another reason why time has been on my brain lately - I'm taking a partial differential equations course this Spring (starting next week actually), so time will probably come up a lot there. Differential equations are often used to model dynamic systems of variables: in other words, the interaction and behavior of variables over time. One of the most classic dynamic systems to model, for example, is the Lotka-Volterra predator-prey model, where you look at the oscillation of something like the rabbit population and the fox population over time.