Karl Smith understands Hayek better than many Hayekians

This is a great statement by Karl Smith. The point really transcends Hayek, of course. After all, Hayek is often not the best source to go to if you want to give primacy to an evolutionary [dare I say yet again - pragmatist] understanding of the world over a logical foundationalist understanding of the world. His Austrian fellow-travelers are often far too caught up in deductionist conceits, and after all it was Hayek that Keynes was referring to with the "remorseless logician" line - and he had some cause for it. Hayek certainly matured into a more evolutionary understanding of our knowledge of the world and he left behind some of the most important applications of those ideas we have. Anyway - these are important insights where ever they come from. I picked up a lot of these ideas from Dewey and Rorty, and most importantly Keynes. But Smith is right to cite Hayek too - it's not a point that should be lost on libertarians (and before people go nuts in the comment section, it should go without saying that I know it's not lost on many libertarians and this is what attracts many libertarians to Hayek in particular - but you're not going to convince me for a second that the sort of thing Smith describes, this cult of reason, isn't out there - even among people who know Hayek and therefore should know better).

Anyway - I've talked long enough. Time to let Karl Smith talk:

"[C]ommon sense lies – as Hayek might have said – between instinct and reason. It has evolved over generations of folks dealing with each other.

And, importantly it does not depend on reason itself. People don’t have to have any understanding of why they believe what they believe for what they believe to be usefully true. That is, operating as if the world was this way informs you about the world.

A reasoned theory of the world should acknowledge this anchor. In some way our reasoning should accommodate common sense. Either as a special case, or as an approximation, or as a local maximum or something.

Otherwise, you have a hard time explaining why common sense has stood the test of time and cultural selection."

A nice passage from G.E. Moore

"I am not at all sceptical as to the truth of such propositions as "The earth has existed for many years past." "Many human bodies have each lived for many years upon it," i.e. propositions which assert the existence of material things: on the contrary, I hold that we all know, with certainty, many such propositions to be true. But I am very sceptical as to what, in certain respects, the correct analysis of such propositions is. And this is a matter as to which I think I differ from many philosophers. Many seem to hold that there is no doubt at all as to their analysis, nor, therefore, as to the analysis of the proposition "Material things have existed," in certain respects in which I hold that the analysis of the propositions in question is extremely doubtful; and some of them, as we have seen, while holding that there is no doubt as to their analysis, seem to have doubted whether any such propositions are true. I, on the other hand, while holding that there is no doubt whatever that many such propositions are wholly true, hold also that no philosopher, hitherto, has succeeded in suggesting an analysis of them, as regards certain important points, which comes anywhere near to being certainly true." - G.E. Moore, 1925

Moore with Keynes

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.

Losing my contractarianism...

...I haven't entirely yet, but I feel as if it is looming. I'm attempting a controlled descent into this pragmatism business, which I feel is warranted. James, after all, willed himself to believe in God and argued that he had warrant for doing that. This idea that beliefs are functional and we can pick up beliefs like we pick up hammers or rakes - trying them out, assessing their utility - seems to give me warrant to do this. If there is no chance of conclusively establishing a correspondence between perception and reality, all that we have available to us is to assess experientially the value of certain beliefs in navigating the every day world we live in.

One belief I have consciously "kept" is a contractarian emphasis on property rights (because it's easier to talk about how rights function if you conceive of all rights as a sort of property right). Social contract theory has always bothered me tremendously, and although I've always agreed with Bentham on rights ("nonsense on stilts"), we certainly act as if rights meant something, even if they are fundamentally meaningless. That seemed to make them more productive than the idea of a social contract, which we don't even pretend is real (or so I think). So I've been interested in talking about democratic self-governance in contractarian terms in order to justify the common sense of how democratic self-government works without slipping into a naive libertarianism (i.e. - "I didn't agree to be governed so the state is illegitimate"). A lot of these attempts in the past have been "government of the gaps" attempts, similar to "God of the gaps" apologetics. I find both of these to be unsatisfying. It seems both insufficient and something of an insult to your subject of inquiry. "Government of the gaps" proofs amount to a litany of market failures. "God of the gaps" proofs amount to fillers for where science hasn't made a case (yet). But you can also understand why people might make these attempts. With the tremendous progress of science, they hypothesis of God (to uses Laplace's formulation), no longer seemed necessary. Anyone truly interested in justifying the idea of God had to reckon with this. There was no point in denying the science. The same goes with market economics. No modern non-Marxist economist wants to overthrow market economics. The advances are obvious, and yet there is an intuition that this doesn't simply negate the state. But the state can't be justified on claims that do violence to our insights about the market. If I were given the choice, I would choose the market - hence a "government of the gaps" argument emerges. But that just doesn't seem right. A lot of us don't feel like the government is naturally opposed to the market the way naive libertarians suggest, but because of the way the argument is structured it can be hard to explain why. So in my attempt at understanding why democratic self-government is "justified", but not on the basis of a "government of the gaps", I've hit on a few basic reasons that I find to be convincing and not "government of the gaps":

1. Macroeconomic instability - Keynesian democratic socialization of investment. Macroeconomic stability emerges because of aggregation issues and monetary issues as a problem distinct from microeconomic stability and efficiency, which property rights and free exchange are able to guarantee.

2. Temporal autarky - Jefferson referred to it as "swindling futurity". We are coerced by generations that come before us and we coerce generations that come after us, so a contractarian system grounded on contemporary rights and exchanges is necessarily a coercive system. Democratic self-government is tasked with reducing these coercions.

3. Necrocratic political economy - Our system of political economy is necrocratic - it is ruled by the dead. Property rights crystallize past inequalities and pass them on to future generations by the roullete wheel that is birth. Coercion in the past only takes one generation to legitimize itself. This is also a major concern of Jefferson and Paine*.

These start to provide, without losing a contractarian perspective at all (indeed with introducing what I think is a more robust contractarianism), a basis for democratic self-government that may be coercive from a naive contractarianism, but which is ultimately a reduction of coercion. It provides a broad basis particularly for (1.) investments, (2.) egalitarianism, (3.) education, and (4.) social stabilization. Add to this basic agreed upon justifications for police powers, and you largely have a picture of that which American democratic self-government had taken for itself.

But it also provides the seeds of the unraveling of contractarianism. What you start to see is that "property rights" are historically contingent and are themselves inherently coercive (democratic self-government is, after all, a response to the coercion of the property rights regime). As Dewey wrote "this relativity of liberty to the existing distribution of powers of action, while meaning that there is no such thing as absolute liberty, also necessarily means that wherever there is liberty at one place there is restraint at some other place. The system of liberties that exists at any time is always the system of restraints or controls that exist at that time. No one can do anything except in relation to what others can do and cannot do. These... points are general. But they cannot be dismissed as mere abstractions. For when they are applied either in idea or in action they mean that liberty is always a social question, not an individual one. For the liberties that any individual actually has depends upon the distribution of powers or liberties that exists, and this distribution is identical with actual social arrangements, legal and political - and, at the present time, economic, in a peculiarly important way."

I feel like I've chased contractarianism to its implications, and come back out at something like social contract theory! I'm losing my contractarianism. If this gets pursued far enough, clearly the same old problems with social contract theory are going to come up.

So what does one conclude? Well, precisely the point that these are just beliefs that we use because they are useful, not because of any correspondence with reality. Rights are a convenient fiction. When we pretend that we are real and think about them long enough as if they are real, we run into all sorts of self-contradictions that force us to conclude that system of private property rights is necessarily coercive. The solution, however, is social and coercive as well. This is largely where I've come out; my respect for abstractions like "property rights" and "self-government" has both dwindled and been reinforced. It's dwindled because their fundamental fictive nature seems more or less obvious to me now. But it has been reinforced because I'm starting to see how the interplay of these two fictions produces real results. We have a guide of sorts for when self-government reduces and when it increases coercion. We have a guide for when property rights reduce and when they increase coercion.

Writing this is in many ways just an attempt to think through all these ideas again... I will be going to "debate" Jan Helfeld later today, and I am increasingly of the opinion that his method does not get to the heart of the issue... although I'm concerned I won't be able to adequately express why. We shall see.


* I recently came across an interesting post by Gavin Kennedy on Adam Smith that has a great passage from Cantillon emphasizing this "necrocratic political economy" problem: "It does not appear that Providence has given the Right of the Possession of Land to one Man preferably to another: the most ancient Titles are founded on violence and Conquest. … But howsoever people come into the property and possession of Land we have already observed that it always falls into the hands of a few in proportion to the total inhabitants"