In the Preface for his new Knowledge, Reality, and Value, Mike Huemer engages in some humorous megalomania. In response to the question, “Why read this book?,” Huemer states:
The author. I’m smart, I know a lot, and I’m not confused – which means you can probably learn a lot from this book. You probably won’t learn too many falsehoods, and you probably won’t run into too many passages that don’t make sense.
All accurate. Huemer is very smart, does indeed know a lot, and is not confused. And his book does indeed contain few falsehoods. To keep this Book Club interesting, however, I’m going to focus on what I see as the major errors. And in any case, if I focused on where he’s right, the Club would take months.
This week covers “Part 1: Preliminaries.” Let’s dive right in.
1. Philosophical progress.
Myth #2: Philosophy never makes progress. Philosophers are still debating the same things they were debating 2000 years ago.
Comment: No, that’s completely false.
Huemer then presents some examples of (a) relatively new philosophical questions (like modal realism), and (b) debates that have largely been resolved in the eyes of professional philosophers (like the morality of homosexuality).
Strictly speaking, he’s obviously right, but I still say this “Myth” is insightful (and painful). Compared to other academic disciplines, philosophers really do spend a lot of time rehashing 2000-year-old debates. It is hard to imagine, for example, that consequentialism will ever conclusively triumph over deontology.
And if it does, it will probably be based primarily on conformity, not arguments. Consider: Despite the current philosophical consensus, any halfway decent philosopher could easily construct half a dozen arguments for the immorality of homosexuality. A utilitarian, for example, might oppose it for lowering birthrates, or simply creating a large social conflict for the benefit of a small minority of people. And given the utilitarian framework, it’s not clear these arguments are wrong.
2. Validity versus soundness.
Huemer confesses, “I’m about to tell you why I hate the way my fellow philosophers (and I!) use the words ‘valid’ and ‘sound’.” Namely:
I hate the philosophical usage of “valid” and “sound” because in normal English “valid” and “sound” both sound like they mean “perfectly okay”, or something like that.
While Huemer definitely offers some puzzling examples of valid arguments that fit the textbook definitions, I still say that it’s useful to distinguish between (a) arguments that fail because they contain false premises, and (b) arguments that fail because they don’t make sense on their own terms. “Valid” and “sound” fit the bill, and I know of no substitute on the market. And any substitute would probably be equally confusing, because English lacks everyday terms for this distinction.
3. “Truth is good for you.”
Huemer writes:
Truth is good for you. More precisely, knowing the truth is generally good for attaining your goals. For whatever goals you have in your life, it is almost always useful to have true beliefs…
Ordinary errors cause you to make ordinary, small mistakes. E.g., being wrong about what stores sell burritos causes you to waste time and not get your burrito. Philosophical errors, on the other hand, cause you to make bigger mistakes, like wasting your life.
As the author of The Myth of the Rational Voter, I have to call this a major overstatement. Most people persistently hold many false beliefs, largely because most beliefs are barely related to any practical goals. Furthermore, some important truths, including philosophical truths, are unpopular. Which leads us to a major way that knowing the truth hinders the common goal of being well-liked by other people. To spell things out: Holding unpopular truths often leads to the voicing of unpopular truths, which often makes people dislike you.
On balance, I suspect that having a stern truth-seeking mentality is pragmatically useful compared to being a typical conformist, but the evidence is fairly weak. (I do however agree with Huemer that we have a prima facie moral duty to seek the truth even when the consequences are bad).
4. How to be objective.
For example, when responding to opposing views, you should respond to the most plausible opposing views and address the strongest arguments for those views – that is, the views and arguments that have the greatest chance of being correct while being importantly different from your own view. When you explain what your “opponents” think, try to state their views in the way that they themselves would state them.
What should you do, though, if almost all of your opponents believe in weak arguments for their own view? If you put the strongest arguments in their mouths, you fail to “state their views in the way that they themselves would state them.” I call this the Straw Man Straw Man, and it comes up often in political discussion. My response is to start by criticizing popular arguments, then criticize the “steelmanned” position to cover my bases.
5. Frequent fallacies.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen someone affirm the consequent or deny the antecedent. To the extent that the list identifies genuine errors, most of them are pretty dumb, so you probably don’t need much discussion of them.
A day or so after I read this, I read an argument that affirmed the consequent. Unfortunately, I can’t remember what it was. But trust me, it happened!
6. “Subjective claims” are underrated. Huemer plausibly writes:
Roughly, a “subjective” claim is one that requires a judgment call, so it can’t just be straightforwardly and decisively established. For example, the judgment that political candidate A is “unqualified” for the office; the judgment that it’s worse to be unjustly imprisoned for 5 years than to be prevented from migrating to the country one wants to live in; the judgment that Louis CK’s jokes are “offensive”; etc…
Note: I am not saying that there is “no fact” or “no answer” as to whether these things are the case, or that they are dependent on people’s “opinions”. What I am saying is that there are not clear, established criteria for these claims, so it is difficult to verify them…
People often rely on subjective premises when arguing about controversial issues. The problem with this is that subjective claims are more open to bias than relatively objective (that’s the opposite of “subjective”) claims. So people with different philosophical (or political, or religious) views will tend to disagree a lot about subjective claims. And for that reason, they are ill suited to serve as premises in philosophical, political, or religious arguments. Advice: Try to base your arguments, as much as possible, on relatively objective claims.
Yet on reflection, it is hard to reconcile this with Huemer’s earlier advice to “Use weak, widely-shared premises,” when crafting arguments. How so? Because many claims that “can’t just be straightforwardly and decisively established” are also widely-shared – and many claims that can be straightforwardly and decisively established remain controversial! “Being mean to children is worse than being mean to adults” is weak, widely-shared, and hard to straightforwardly and decisively establish. “Communist governments murdered millions of people” is strong, narrowly-shared, and easy to straightforwardly and decisively establish. I agree that subjective claims are less likely to be “weak and widely-shared.” But given that you’re reasoning from weak and widely-shared premises, it’s hard to see any additional reason to avoid subjective premises.
7. The popularity of absolutism.
Beginning philosophy students sometimes want to know whether there is “absolute truth” or “objective reality”. These questions are not much discussed in contemporary, academic philosophy because there is not much disagreement about them among philosophy professors.
Later:
Philosophy professors, at least those from major research universities, tend to hate truth relativism. (Sometimes, we wonder where students learned relativism and what can be done about it. It wasn’t from us! Maybe they learned it in high school?) Why should we hate relativism?
So people like Richard Rorty are a tiny minority in academic philosophy? (More a question than a criticism).
Like Huemer, I took many undergraduate philosophy courses at UC Berkeley. While I don’t recall anyone promoting relativism, many professors spent most of their time arguing for radical skepticism. Logically, saying “No one knows anything” is not the same as “Truth is relative.” But once students feel like they have no way to reach the truth, it’s hardly surprising if they switch over to ersatz agent-relative versions of “truth.” So maybe philosophy professors bear some collective guilt for this after all?
8. Since I’m basically out of disagreements for Part 1, let me end with a particularly excellent passage which I emphatically support:
Truth relativism does not just fail to be true, and it does not just fail to aim at truth; truth relativism actively discourages the pursuit of truth. How so? The relativist essentially holds that all beliefs are equally good. But if that’s the case, then there is no point to engaging in philosophical reasoning. We might as well just believe whatever we want, since our beliefs will be just as good either way. But this undermines essentially everything that we’re trying to do. When we teach philosophy, we’re trying to teach students to think carefully, and rationally, and objectively about the big philosophical questions (which hopefully will help you think well about other stuff too). When we do research in philosophy, we try to uncover more of the truth about these questions, so that we can all better understand our place in the world. All of that is undermined if we decide that it doesn’t matter what we think since all beliefs are equally good.
To repeat, please leave your questions in the comments for both me and Huemer. I’ll respond later this week, and he’ll reply in due time.
READER COMMENTS
KevinDC
May 31 2021 at 3:54pm
Thoughts/comments directed primarily towards Bryan:
I suspect this is at least in part due to the fact that of all the disciplines in the academy, philosophy is the one with the longest history. Chemists don’t rehash 2,000 year old debates because 2,000 years ago, chemistry wasn’t a thing. Historians, by contrast, do tend to spend more time rehashing, say, the history of the Roman Empire and other subjects that are thousands of years old, simply because history, like philosophy, stretches back that far as a discipline.
Here I agree – I see arguments where people affirm the consequent frequently. I suspect part of the reason Huemer underestimates how often this occurs is because he spends a disproportionate amount of time talking with people who know better than to make these common fallacies.
My sense of the situation is that in philosophy, Richard Rorty is in a similar position to the way Paul Krugman described John Kenneth Galbraith in economics. To the lay public and non-experts, both were widely seen as brilliant thinkers. Within their field, however, both were viewed as intellectual lightweights who had almost nothing of value to contribute. But maybe Mike can correct my impression here?
Thoughts/comments directed primarily towards Mike:
I was very surprised with your criticisms of how philosophers use the terms “valid” and “sound,” in large part because I was taught slightly different definitions from how you present them. For example, you defined a valid argument as an argument where it’s impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion to be false, and a sound argument is a valid argument where the premises also are true. This in turn, you say, leads to dumb arguments that are valid and sound such as:
This, you say, is technically “valid” and “sound.” The premise is true and the conclusion is true, which makes it “sound,” and since the conclusion is true necessarily, that also means its impossible for the premise to be true and the conclusion false – because the conclusion can’t be false. But I was taught that an argument being valid meant something more like “If the premises are true, then it’s impossible for the conclusion to be false.” That it, the definition of validity depended on the idea that the conclusion must follow from the premises. I don’t see any indication in your definition that conclusions following from the premises is important. So…did I just accidentally learn a better definition of validity than what philosophers have been using in general?
Also, you say you hate the fact that philosophers use terms like “valid” and “sound” because the common English usage of these terms don’t match their technical definition. As an economist, I can sympathize! (If I had a nickel for every time someone spoke of “public goods” as if it meant “things that would be good for the public to have”, or “goods provided by the public sector”…). But, I notice, you don’t reserve any of this ire for the philosophical meaning of the term “begs the question.” In common English, saying “this begs the question” sounds a lot like “this makes me want to ask such and such,” which is how it is often used. But in this case, instead of dunking on the philosophical term, you dunk on the common usage. What’s different in this case?
KevinDC
May 31 2021 at 3:57pm
As a side note, even though I’m labeling parts of these comments as being “primarily” towards one author or the other, if one of you feels like commenting on something I said towards the other, feel free to do so.
Jasper
May 31 2021 at 10:55pm
Your definition and Huemer’s definition are not actually different. You’ve simply misunderstood the implications of the conditional statement. In formal logic, the statement “If A, then B” is equal to “B or ~A.” That means we can restate your definition (“If the premises are true, then it’s impossible for the conclusion to be false”) as this disjunction:
“Either it is impossible for the conclusion to be false, or the premises are false.”
This means that the given argument (The sky is blue, therefore 7 = 7) actually fits your conditional for validity: it is impossible for the conclusion to be false, thus the first disjunct is true, thus the original argument is valid. To make the definition “better,” you need to replace if/then with if and only if: with the former, as long as the consequent is true, the antecedent doesn’t matter at all.
KevinDC
Jun 1 2021 at 9:56am
Thanks for the interesting reply – but I still feel as though the issue I was (trying) to get at is still unsettled. Let me try to be more precise about what I meant.
Part of what I was trying to emphasize was that (as I understood it), for a syllogism to be valid, required more than just the disjunct you highlight. It also needed to be the case that the conclusion was entailed by the premises, or that the conclusion followed from the premises, or something like that. So, to use the classic example of a deductive syllogism:
In the way I have understood validity, this syllogism is a way of saying, in effect, “If it is the case that Socrates is a man, and if it is the case that all men are mortal, then it follows from this that Socrates is mortal.” But the other syllogism seems importantly different in that respect:
That would (at least in my understanding) be tantamount to claiming that “If it is the case that the sky is blue, then it follows from this that 7 = 7.” But that’s obviously false. 7 being equal to itself isn’t entailed by the color of the sky, it doesn’t follow from the color of the sky, or anything like that. If on an exam, I was asked to write down some examples of valid or sound syllogisms, I would have expected to be marked down for that syllogism, with a comment along the lines of “This is an invalid argument, because the conclusion does not follow from the premise.” To say that an argument is valid even though the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises seems very odd to me.
Dr. Zoidbergo
Jun 1 2021 at 11:38am
I think the example you’re using might be contributing to the confusion here. Strictly speaking, “The sky is blue, therefore 7=7” is not formally valid, because it relies on the hidden premise: “If the sky is blue, then 7=7.”
When you look at the argument in this way, then it makes more sense to say that the conclusion is entailed, or follows from, the premises. Which, I think, supports Huemer’s complaints about how philosophers use these terms.
Some philosophers (here’s an example: https://hwpi.harvard.edu/files/hwp/files/philosophical_writing.pdf on p. 33) get out of this by saying that arguments of this type are not cogent, i.e. the only reason to believe the conditional is that its consequent (“7=7”) is true, but at the same time, “7=7” is the claim being argued for. So, the only reason you have to believe one of the premises is that you already believe the conclusion.
Alexander Davis
May 31 2021 at 4:23pm
I’m not sure that this is exactly a disagreement, but it seems relevant. On 6), about subjective claims: I think that we should avoid the words “objective” and “subjective” as much as possible. Why? Well, look at how they are often used in language:
–As rhetorical sticks with which to beat your interlocutor over the head. Compare “X is true!” with “X is objectively true!”. Adding objectively did not alter what was being claimed. It just seems to add arbitrary extra justification juice to X, but for no additional reasons. We can say something similar about responding to “X is true!” with “That’s subjective”. No additional specific reasons have been given to undermine X, yet that seems to often be what this response does. And in my experience, this response also tends to be said disdainfully.
–As premature ends to what could have been a productive conversation. As examples, at multiple times in my life, I found myself trying to engage someone in a philosophical conversation about ethics, or free will, etc., only to run into the “X is just subjective” wall. This is especially annoying, because that’s assumed to be an uncontroversial fact, when it isn’t even among the people who study it the most (philosophers). Had they not been so sure of themselves, we could have discussed that. And these have been otherwise smart people. But the amount of work required to chip away the wall blocking productive conversation seems quite substantial. If they had been merely ignorant, but not so sure of themselves, there would have been no wall, and no problem.
It’s not that the subjective/objective distinction is entirely bogus; it’s just misused, and assumed to be more clear-cut than it really is. In response, I try to avoid the words entirely by describing the sense in which a claim is true. Instead of “vanilla ice cream is subjectively good” we can say “vanilla ice cream tastes good to me” (though in this case, it’s unnecessary because it’s simple enough to avoid confusion). If subjective just means mind dependent, then subjective truths are objective truths about particular minds. In which case, there is just objective truth. But if all truths are objective, and if the objective/subjective distinction harms the quality of conversation, then using objective/subjective is at best redundant, and at worst, harmful.
There is just truth.
John Alcorn
May 31 2021 at 10:31pm
Re: Fallacies
Fashionable discourse about racism often commits the fallacy of affirming the consequent. ‘If an institution is racist, it has negative disparate impact on Blacks. Institution A has negative disparate impact on Blacks. Therefore, A is racist.’
The fallacy of affirming the consequent mistakenly interprets a sufficient cause as a necessary cause. In the example I gave above, disparate impact of institution A on Blacks might have main causes other than racism. The fallacy of the consequent regrettably short-circuits empirical inquiry and careful causal analysis.
Compare Michael Huemer’s incisive blogpost, “It’s Not Racism (but here’s why it might look that way).” In that blogpost, Prof. Huemer asks, among other questions, “Why Does It Looks Like Racism?.” Among the answers, he lists and discusses confirmation bias, which he discusses also at p. 56 in his book, in the chapter on fallacies. I conjecture that confirmation bias (a commonplace psychological mechanism) helps to explain why many people commit the fallacy of the consequent when theorizing about racism.
Jackson Johnson
Jun 1 2021 at 3:57am
I am shocked you did not discuss Huemer’s ideas on the media starting on page 75! They seem to be in stark contrast with your own, and I was expecting you to mention them for sure. You trust the media when they make direct observations, but distrust them with regards to “causation, meaning, and importance.” I agree with this position. However, Huemer seems to distrust the media for even direct observations. Why? The example he uses is a case where the media got a direct observation wrong. They used the defendant’s lawyer as a source rather than the court, which appears to be a failure of direct observation rather than those three things. From what Huemer says, it appears that NPR is reporting the man on death row as being innocent when he really isn’t. Maybe he meant to argue for something more like your position, but this wasn’t a good example to make the case for it. It’s not even a good argument for his position (he admits that it’s just an anecdote and not sufficient, but It’s not 100% clear why he didn’t make a more substantive case). Obviously, no one is saying the media is flawless at direct observations (and he knows defenders of the media are not saying that). It’s just that for every direct observation by the media, what they say is probably true. I would be shocked if Huemer denies this, and it appears he did.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Jun 1 2021 at 8:45am
#4 Suppose someone holds a position: Policy X will have good effect Z and just does not mention bad effect Y or just dismisses it as negligible. A “strawman” counterargument would be that Policy X has a non-negligible effect Y and therefore X should not be adopted. The steelman argument would be that according to some weighing scheme that the proponent of X might accept, the sum of the good effects Z and bad effects Y is less than zero and therefore X should not be adopted. A super steelman argument would be that Policy X’ will have the good effects of X but without the bad effects Z and so X’ should be adopted instead of X. I think one should always use the steelman or super steelman argument and eschew the strawman argument entirely.
John Alcorn
Jun 1 2021 at 10:21am
Re: Bryan Caplan’s point no. 2
If philosophers distinguish premises and logic when they assess an argument, then they should distinguish 4 combinatorial possibilities:
a) True premises + Logic = Correct argument
b) True premises + Illogic = Illogical argument
c) False premises + Logic = Unfounded argument
d) False premises + Illogic = Unfounded and illogical argument
Does my fairly simple vocabulary square with ordinary English? To my ear, it sounds better than the misleading usage of “valid” and “sound” (per Michael Huemer’s criticism).
John Alcorn
Jun 1 2021 at 11:35am
Re:
It’s complicated.
An ordinary error by a physician, police officer, or juror occasionally ruins or ends another person’s life.
Hume and Kant can’t both have been right, but neither philosopher wasted his life.
Francisco Garrido
Jun 1 2021 at 1:04pm
Huemer writes:
and then mentions a number of areas in which there has been philosophical progress: slavery, gay rights, etc.
He seems to be suggesting that progress in these areas is (at least partially) the result of philosophers getting their acts together and developing better (sounder/valider/cogenter) arguments.
If this is not what he is saying then what is, i.e., progress in these areas is largely independent of philosophical progress in these issues, this would call into question the practical importance of philosophy. Sure philosopher’s largely agree that slavery is bad and homosexuality is not, but societal changes would have happened any way!
If this is actually what he is saying, i.e., progress in these areas is partially the result of progress in philosophy, then I think he should support the claim with some empirical evidence. At least to me, it is not clear that changes in philosophical arguments against slavery and homophobia, have brought about societal changes. It might very well be the other way round.
Philo
Jun 1 2021 at 2:15pm
“English lacks everyday terms for this distinction” (valid vs. sound). This example illustrates what is the principal value of studying philosophy: to furnish one’s mind with important distinctions that are slurred over by ordinary, careless thinkers. A few other examples: mind vs. brain (the former is what engages in thinking, the latter is a certain kind of physical organ that does, indeed, do the thinking in terrestrial mammals, but that might be quite absent in a thinking thing of some other kind); rational action vs. successful action (the rational action is that which, from the perspective of the agent, has the greatest expected value; this may be different from the action that does or would achieve the most valuable result); person vs. human being (the former being a moral category, the latter biological). Clear general thinking is more important in the sophisticated modern world than it was for our distant ancestors; nowadays, at least, for an intelligent person with leisure, conceptual enrichment through philosophizing is worth the effort.
Brian Holtz
Jun 1 2021 at 6:16pm
There is a straightforward argument for the authority of the state that I don’t see addressed by Huemer online e.g. in his Cato Unbound discussion with Caplan et al. I doubt it’s original to me, but I wrote it down a while back after encountering Heumer’s state=individual formulation so often while serving 2004-2010 on the Libertarian Party platform committee. I’m curious if anyone has seen it addressed by Huemer.
https://blog.knowinghumans.net/2009/01/whence-authority-of-state.html
A Country Farmer
Jun 1 2021 at 7:57pm
Hi Brian, You might be interested in reading Huemer’s book, The Problem of Political Authority. Regarding your claim:
Who decides what “or is inadequate” means? Huemer starts off his book discussing just such an issue. Chapter 1 is free on his website: https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/1.htm
Brian Holtz
Jun 2 2021 at 3:20am
Thanks! I checked it, and that chapter doesn’t address the homesteading symmetry-breaking argument I referenced.
Re: “who decides?”, the answer is roughly: the same people who decide whether to secede or revolt — or that a neighbor is abusing his children.
A Country Farmer
Jun 2 2021 at 8:53am
Hi Brian,
Why can’t a non-state actor break symmetry (if I’m understanding your terminology correctly)?
Similarly, why can’t a non-state actor save a child if necessary? As discussed in his book, Huemer only believes in the Non-Agression Presumption (he has a separate book on the basis of this: ethical intuitionism) and even discusses the idea of a temporary state-like authority to deal with extreme emergencies. It seems similar to your argument and you might find interest reading the whole book. Part 2 of the book also discusses the realities of anarcho-capitalism in response to your claim that “These kinds of coordination cannot plausibly be achieved”.
Brian Holtz
Jun 2 2021 at 1:30pm
My entire point is that it has to be a non-state actor who breaks the symmetry and sets up a legitimate state. Again, the idea is that “whence the authority of the state?” has a similar answer to “whence the authority of an orphan’s guardian?” or “whence the authority of a land homesteader?”
At time T0, everyone has equal right to 1) homestead unoccupied land, or 2) claim guardianship of an orphan with no guardian, or 3) set up a legitimate state where none exists. But when at time T1 somebody has duly asserted the relevant authority, then the symmetry is broken. So at time T1, it’s as silly to ask Heumer’s question about state authority as it would be to ask: “why don’t I have equal parental authority over your adopted orphan?”, or “why don’t I have equal authority over the land you homesteaded?”
And again: that authority is not absolute/eternal, in that anybody may later assert that the relevant rights are being violated regarding the land/orphan/jurisdiction. (Yes, land too — I’m a geolibertarian q.v.) In the case of the state, the recourse is revolution/secession.
This seems to me like a very straightforward idea, with clear analogies to standard libertarian theoretical debates regarding homesteading e.g. Walter Block’s “evictionist” theory of homesteading guardianship rights of evicted-not-aborted infants. The fact that a reader of Heumer is not recognizing my argument strongly suggests to me that Heumer is unaware of it, or at least doesn’t address it.
Brian Holtz
Jun 2 2021 at 1:42pm
P.S. regarding the plausibility of anarcholibertarianism — been there, debated that. During my 4 terms on the LP Platform Committee, I created a wiki on these topics: see “Platform-Related Debates” at http://libertarianmajority.net/platform-portal. Over the last few decades these have all been debated to death among libertarians. I prefer to focus on Heumer’s state-authority topic, as he seems to see it as the gateway drug for anarcholibertarianism, and it is on this topic I claim to have an argument that I haven’t ever seen any anarcholib address.
Dwarkesh Patel
Jun 1 2021 at 10:42pm
This is highly nonobvious to me and I would love to hear you explain why. It makes sense to me why decision makers have a moral duty to seek the truth about the topics relevant to their decision (the President or a CEO should be thoughtful and well informed). But why do ordinary people like me have a moral duty to seek truth about things which we have no hope of affecting? Why is it even supererogatory to seek truth in these cases?
Jackson Johnson
Jun 3 2021 at 12:18am
There are things you do have hope of affecting. In fact, the two issues he discusses at the end are two of the biggest. For example, people are incentivizing factory farms to cause more suffering to animals by eating animal products. Huemer provides evidence in “Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism” that individuals can change the meat farms make in a year.
Another example is charitable giving and effective altruism. By donating, you can help people directly. An underrated final instance is the philosophy of religion. People often determine their marriages by the religious (and political) beliefs of their partners. You can probably make a plausible theological argument that you should marry another Christian in Christianity, for example. A conservative evangelical would also want a spouse that shares their conservative viewpoints.
This also works the other way around. If you are in a secular marriage and come to believe that conservative evangelicalism is true, your partner might not tolerate your new social viewpoints. You would want to teach your kids that certain sexual actions are wrong, and your spouse would say they are fine.
Parrhesia
Jun 2 2021 at 12:20am
While reading the quotes and section on truth relativism, I was reminded of something I thought of while reading Ethical Intuitionism. One further argument against truth relativism and moral relativism is internal inconsistency. If I say A and ~A, then which is true for me? If it is both, then we can betray the law of non-contradiction. If you tell me we are in agreement about the meaning of square root and 144 and I tell you the square root of 144 is 12 and you respond with “no, it’s 13” then you would be correct (in the relative sense). This means that under relativism, we cannot form valid arguments because one can simply correctly (in the relative sense) deny the conclusion, regardless of the premises.
—
Although funniness realism seems to overcome objections of the non-cognitivist and nihilistic kind. In Ethical Intuitionism Chapter 8.5, Dr. Huemer rejected the idea of objective funniness with arguments I do not find fully convincing . The idea of humor relativism is again put forth in Knowledge, Reality, and Value:
It is fairly uncontroversial that some things are subjective in this sense. For example, consider the property of being funny. A plausible analysis is that for a joke to be “funny” is for it to have a tendency to make ordinary humans who hear the joke laugh, feel amused, etc. – or something like that. Funniness isn’t an intrinsic property of funny things; it is in the ear of the observer. The funniness just consists of the tendency to provoke amusement in us.
I believe that people speak of humor in a subjective sense and an objective sense, as they do with coolness, beauty, cuteness and other adjectives. “That was funny to me” is a coherent statement but so is “It’s funny but not to me.” Someone could also engage in a conversation about why “Most people think it’s not funny, but it is.” These statements seem semantically correct and not incoherent. If every English speaker died and no one could understand Dave Chappelle’s comedy specials, I would think that they remain funny. Maybe it is plausible that there is an objective humor, but it is always directly sensed rather than a consequence of constructing a chain of arguments from intuitions. This could plausibly explain the dumbfounding that would happen when someone is asked to explain how it is funny. I feel unsure as to whether things like beauty, coolness and funniness are real in some sense. They seem like they should not be.
I thank you both very much for your time and consideration.
Henri Hein
Jun 2 2021 at 3:24am
Regarding Affirming the Consequent and Denying the Antecedent, I agree they commonly occur. Like Bryan, I can’t think of a specific example, but I did think of this talk by Steven Pinker. Given so many people are having trouble faced with the “If A then C” type of rule when the subject is abstract, we should expect people to also make the error when they present arguments.
Vincent P
Jun 2 2021 at 11:45am
I, too, would like more help understanding these fallacies using more contemporary examples. The post above by John Alcorn was helpful with his example. I often hear arguments of this nature: ‘Covid is a deadly disease. B is an uncertain treatment for preventing Covid. If you believe in Treatment B, then you must not believe Covid is a deadly disease.’ Would that be an example of Denying the Antecedent?
So often I come across arguments that just don’t “feel” right to me. And by feel, I mean don’t seem logical, but I have difficulty pinpointing where the logic goes wrong. Any ‘best practices’ tips for analyzing an argument?
I am learning so much from the book. Really enjoyed the section on Being a Good Philosophical Discussant. More people need to read that.
Henri Hein
Jun 2 2021 at 3:27am
I agree with this. Many of my friends hold false beliefs, some quite fantastic by my estimation, yet lead successful lives. I generally find most people to be intellectually incurious. One friend in particular told me outright she was comfortable with her views and didn’t want to change them.
Henri Hein
Jun 2 2021 at 4:33am
In the preface, Huemer writes: “It just happens that virtually everyone starts out extremely confused.” (Emphasis in original). In chapter 3, he writes “if a person attacks rationality/objectivity, this is evidence that some key point of their ideology is false.” If virtually everyone starts out confused, that would include most people that claim to be rational. You have to study philosophy to become un-confused, and few rationalists do that. Presumably, a few others become un-confused through other means, but my take from Huemer’s report is that most rationalists are confused. Then for someone who is not a rationalist and who has interacted mostly with these confused rationalists, you can understand why they might not be impressed.
Regarding the discussion on Relativism and Toleration, I find the Toleration view somewhat ironic. Other cultures have also discovered objectivity and rationality. Claiming these are specific to Western culture is itself a chauvinistic viewpoint.
P.40: “so much so that we don’t even have a word for [someone who easily change their beliefs].” Isn’t that what a push-over is? Granted, it’s broader than just belief holding, but if you said “I had a discussion with Al, he was a push-over,” the meaning is clear. The words conformist (which Bryan used) and sycophant also seems related. That’s tieing your views to someone else, but the alternative seems to be to just make views up at random now and then, which would be really odd.
“I don’t know why this is.”
I have a theory: survival characteristic. Anecdotally, it’s pretty commonly recognized that persistence is one of the most important attributes for an entrepreneur or inventor.
I don’t want to spend too much time hashing this out in completeness, but here is another story, from roughly 20,000 years ago. It involves 2 tribes, the Pushovers and the Pigheads. They each had their Creative Genius. One time, the Genius from the Pushover tribe comes into the cave with a burning log and says “Look, we can control fire! We can use it to cook our food, have light to work inside our cave, and stay warm during winter!” The others objected. They didn’t want the smoke and it seemed to dangerous. So the Pushover Genius said, “oh well, you are right, it was probably a dumb idea.” That winter the Pushover tribe got wiped out by the Neanderthals. The Pighead Genius also came into the cave one time with a burning log and the same speech. She was presented with the same response. She then proceeded to demonstrate how to use the fire in a pit, but the others kicked her and her log out. Then she approached her friends one by one to convince them to let her try the fire in the cave. She made camp-fires and slept by them, and cooked her food. Over time, the resistance softened, and the other Pigheads came around to at least wanting to try this fire thing. They all survived the winter, beat the Neanderthals, and they became fruitful and multiplied. Obviously, being a Pighead is a survival trait.
John Alcorn
Jun 2 2021 at 6:02pm
Re: “Irrationality Is Immoral” (Huemer, Section 3.1.4-5)
To censure one another at almost every turn for forming irrational beliefs would poison relations and would leave little time or energy for more productive endeavors. Most of life is not a philosophy seminar.
An irrational belief is blameworthy if it is clearly dangerous. Striking examples are Nazi beliefs about Jews, neo-con beliefs about WMDs in Iraq, and Maoist beliefs about economics.
And let’s beware also rationality when it harms others. Hitler’s wildly irrational beliefs about Jews were catastrophic partly because Eichmann and many others implemented the Holocaust with painstaking instrumental rationality (precise, accurate beliefs about logistics etc.).
Jackson Johnson
Jun 3 2021 at 12:24am
One more thought. I think there was a major omission in this part: the deflationary theory of truth. According to the famous PhilPapers survey, the deflationary theory is the second most popular theory of truth. I would love to see Huemer’s comments on this theory.
Tejas Subramaniam
Jun 3 2021 at 2:15pm
A common example of affirming the consequent is treating a p-value greater than 0.05 as evidence that your results are the result of randomness.
The idea behind p-values is that “very low p-values are evidence of non-randomness,” but that is not the same as “non-randomness implies very low p-values.” Andrew Gelman has written lots about conflating P(A|B) and P(B|A).
Michael Huemer
Jun 3 2021 at 2:27pm
As further evidence that the philosophers’ terms “valid” and “sound” cause confusion, I think they even confused Bryan. He writes:
But that’s not really the distinction drawn by philosophers’ use of “valid” and “sound”. Rather, the philosophers’ distinction is between (a) arguments for which it is impossible for the premises to all be true and the conclusion be false (N.B., regardless of whether the premises provide any reason to believe the conclusion, or have any relevance to the conclusion), and (b) arguments for which it is impossible for the premises to all be true and the conclusion be false and whose premises are true.
John Alcorn
Jun 3 2021 at 11:21pm
Re: 3.3.1.i “Accept the hypo.”
I submit that ‘the hypo’ in such ‘trolley problems’ deeply misleads. In trolley hypos I must make a fateful choice on the spot, without time for deliberation or consultation, in a peculiar, dramatic, bystander contingency I’ve never encountered. Such a scenario is antithetical to philosophical decision-making. It is designed to elicit suspense and anxiety. But we’re told to reason carefully to an ethical choice.
Somewhat less misleading hypos start from stylized policy issues for professionals, authorities, and citizens.
For example, suppose that I am a surgeon. May I kill a random healthy person in order to harvest organs for transplantation and thereby save the lives of five patients (and restore them to health)? Alternatively, may governmental authorities do so?
Or suppose that a country wages war against the USA. Suppose also that there is good reason to believe that one million American civilians will be killed on home soil unless the USA restores military conscription of one million soldiers. Suppose, finally, that there is good reason to believe that 20% of the conscripts will be killed in battle. Should President and Congress restore conscription?
Or suppose that a pandemic is deadly to the elderly but not to the young. Suppose also that there is good reason to believe that a draconian lockdown policy would have two, mixed effects on mortality: (a) It would reduce transmission of the pathogen and thereby save 100,000 elderly persons. (b) It would increase despair among youths and thereby cause 20,000 deaths by suicide or drug overdose. Is draconian lockdown warranted?
Interlocutors will have different intuitions, and will reason to a variety of conclusions, across these examples. Maybe the trolley hypos are meant to show that my examples are really all one and the same ethical problem — but I don’t buy it.
Henri Hein
Jun 4 2021 at 1:42am
I think you probably meant “Covid is a deadly disease. B is an uncertain treatment for preventing Covid. If you do not believe in Treatment B, then you must not believe Covid is a deadly disease”
The one you gave, assuming my correction, would be an example of Denying the Antecedent, since there could be another good reason to not believe in Treatment B.
If you saw the Pinker talk, then maybe it helps to think about which are the fallacies in the answers from the students. If you believe 3 should be turned over, that would be Affirming the Consequent. Since the rule is “If one side as a D, the other side must be a 3”, then something like a card with “A|3” would not be violating the rule. If you believe “F” should be turned over, you are Denying the Antecedent – a card with “F|3” would not violate the rule.
Here are some other examples that is less abstract and more contemporary. A socialist might reason like this: “Exploiting workers make people rich. Factory owners are rich. Therefore, they are exploiting workers.” That would be Affirming the Consequent. Maybe a mutually beneficial relationship also make factory owners rich. So we don’t know which situation obtains, even if we accept the socialist’s Antecedent. Likewise, a conservative might reason: “Lazy people don’t work. The bum on the street isn’t working. Therefore, the bum is lazy.” But the bum might have a condition that prevents them from working, or maybe the local economic conditions are bad for unskilled labor. So again, we don’t know if the bum is lazy, even if we accepted the Antecedent.
Sometimes people commit fallacies in personal judgements. If a Christian reasoned: “Religious people are nice. Bob is not religious. Therefore, Bob is not nice,” that would be an example of denying the Antecedent. Bob could still be a nice person, even if agnostic, just denying the Christian of a potentially beneficial friendship. (This could apply to any religious person – I am not trying to single out Christianity).
Comments are closed.