Don't think I've ever seen the whole poem and it's magnificent! As a bookseller, I will cherish this.

There's always Gore Vidal:

whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies

Neal Stephenson — T Clark

The inventor of my name.

Well there's a whole thing about being respectable that's crap, of course. SF may be "the dreams our stuff is made of" now (book by Tom Disch about how sf took over popular culture), but so far as "literature" (pronounced derisively) is concerned, it's still a ghetto. Which is fine by me.

I reserve my greatest disdain for mainstream folks who figure anybody can write speculative fiction. (The way celebrities seem to think anyone can write a children's book.) They don't get it. They don't get what makes it different.

I don't generally think of writing as competitive. — T Clark

Yes, exactly that. I will try to convey what I love about Phil Dick.

I think this is true of a lot of science fiction from the 40s, 50s, and 60s. "The Foundation" and it's two successors had a big impact on me, but rereading the first recently enlightened me to how ham-handed the writing is. — T Clark

Theodore Sturgeon is often credited with pushing sf in a more literary direction from the early 50s onward. Later, there's Bester. And LeGuin. And later still there's Delany. We have some "real writers".

But I love 50s science fiction. It's the triumph of substance over style. There's a purity about those stories, the centrality of the idea, and the demand of the audience that the idea itself be the most interesting thing in a story, not the author's style.

Jolly. I withdraw the phrasing.

Is there a third option? — Tom Storm

I can't help but think the only real option is oscillating between the two, what I was gesturing at with the word 'dialectic'. The synthetic and analytic impulses must both get their say.

Alright. It's been years since I read it though, and often can't convince myself to reread things just for class.

But you know I'm always up for talking about Saint Phil.

Coulda sworn the taxonomy of trees had already been established. — Vera Mont

Probably the sort of thing I had in mind as science.

I don't understand this exchange. Is there something we disagree about? Could you tell me what it is?

I wouldn't try to convince you guys that Ubik is a great novel. I'm not sure he wrote a great novel, really. But all the work I've read is of a piece, and it makes a tapestry I find very appealing.

That said, I like Ubik a lot. I could say some things about why, but it might be hard to disentangle what I like about Ubik from what I like about the work taken altogether.

Both from The Atrocity Exhibition. Weird stuff.

But don't miss Vermilion Sands for the other side of Ballard.

universal of trees — Vera Mont

It was picturesque. I only mean that science seeks generality, else it's stamp collecting. Do trees have a common structure? How do they differ from other plants? And so on.

As for particular trees and our practical interest, I had in mind questions like, does that limb block my driveway? You don't need a scientist to answer that.

Here's a classic statement, from Raymond Chandler's "The Simple Art of Murder," published in The Atlantic in 1944, a defense of hard-boiled detective fiction and particularly of Hammett.

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.

He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people; he has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge; he is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks — that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.

The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in. Such is my faith. — Raymond Chandler

That's funny though, because you could align the theoretical and the practical the other way around, and it would make just as much sense. (Science looking for the universal of trees, practical concerns addressing this tree in all its particularity.)

@apokrisis is surely right, they implicate each other. Always this dialectic of the general and the specific, that's all philosophy is. But this paragraph is all generalities...

when processes disappear in favor of results — Baden

There's also the problem of Goodhart's law.

Here's a more controversial example because it speaks to methodology. Timothy Williamson tells a story about explaining the Gettier problem to an economist colleague, who was really puzzled by all the fuss: "So there's a counterexample, so what? Models always have counterexamples."

And your local philosopher will complain if you mention that not every tree in a pine forest is a pine.

(To quote J. L. Austin yet again, "You might almost say over-generalizing is the occupational hazard of philosophy, were it not the occupation.")

Not the same, but also not too far from the way William James uses the handy pair 'rationalist' and 'empiricist' or 'tender-minded' and 'tough-minded', as there is a tendency toward monism of principles for the former and pluralism for the latter.

I have sometimes felt bad, when sitting on the porch discussing philosophy (and politics and music and art and...) with my son that I begin every response with "It depends" or "It's complicated." --- Might be another one of those side effects of having been a competitive chess player in my youth, learning that generalities have exceptions and everything comes down to specifics. I kinda miss being more hedgehog, but you live long enough and you learn.

Missing the forest for the trees is a real thing, but a forest without trees is a castle in the air, if you don't mind mixed metaphors.

The hedgehog and the fox?

mathematical and artistic abilities can't be accounted for in terms of the theory — Wayfarer

We're the only critters we know that have math and art, and we are the way we are because of natural selection, so evidently it does account for math and art.

As someone somewhere on this forum once said, the answer to "How long would it take monkeys to compose the complete works of Shakespeare?" is about 300,000 years. That experiment has already been run.

Question: how important to the argument from reason is your unusual interpretation of human evolution?

I don’t think Srap’s criticisms come to terms with the argument — Wayfarer

That may very well be, but I have tried. I'm not even sure I've posted a criticism of the argument so much as I've tried and failed to understand it.

Apropos seeing the point, a gift:

I don't usually do hot takes but here's one: it's about risk. I doubt it's entirely a social construction, but if I suggested that male mammals are more, shall we say, disposable, that would be a just-so story. Vaguely the right place to start though, to find the material social construction has to work with.

The roles men are expected to take on -- with the usual caveats here -- that neither women nor children are, are risky. Men go to war, not just because of their aptitude for violence, but also because there is considerable risk.

The Pony Express used to run this ad: "Wanted. Young, skinny, wiry fellows. Not over 18. Must be expert riders. Willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred." As a group essential but individually disposable.

I won't multiply examples, but I'll add that it might make sense for a society to arrange itself partly in terms of risk. There have generally been dangerous things that need doing, so you probably don't want everyone doing them. Obviously today we have women soldiers, fire fighters, and so on, and we have child soldiers too. Yay.

Obviously I agree, but I'll add one more point, which might count as a sort of non-reductionism.

It seems to me a lot of our traditional "mental" vocabulary does not refer to exclusively internal states of human beings, but rather to mental rather than, I guess, bodily interactions with the environment and objects. We distinguish, and presumably have for a very long time, between chopping down a tree and looking at it, wondering if it's big enough for the beam we need. Both descriptions involve both the guy with the sharp implement and the tree, so just as <chopping down a tree> doesn't map cleanly onto postures and movements of my body alone, in the absence of a tree, so <estimating a tree's yield> needn't map onto something going on in my brain in the absence of a tree.

As it happens, representational theories of mind will map the necessary tree onto my internal representation of the tree, and you'll see often on this forum theories that claim my goal in either case to produce a certain state of my internal model. I think that's a very different issue from whether our everyday vocabulary around thinking, perceiving, imagining, remembering, and so on, not only presupposes objects for these activities but folds them into terms that are in some ways holistic.

Does that make any sense?

By giving reasons, yes? — Wayfarer

Proceed.

it's not really relevant to the argument at hand. — Wayfarer

That may be, but I assure you it was relevant to my understanding what you're talking about.

1. No belief is rationally inferred if it can be fully explained in terms of nonrational causes. — Wayfarer

Suppose I just deny this. As I understand it, Anscombe did, and argued that there was no reason you could not give both a causal and an inferential account of the same phenomenon.

I accept that the causal explanation is not the same as an inferential explanation, but I do not see why having the one excludes having the other.

How will you persuade me to accept (1)?

You're splitting hairs. — Wayfarer

Look at this way: we think of logic as normative, within limits; if P entails Q, and you believe P, then you ought to believe Q. Do people always do what they ought?

Robert Kowalski (early developer of Prolog) has been suggesting that instead of trying to get machines to think like us, we ought to consider learning to think more like machines. Wrote a book about it.

However, if I adopt a view on account of logic, then that informs my 'belief states', I am willing to accept it, and act on it. — Wayfarer

Adopt, willing, accept, act -- all of this is beyond the purview of logic. It's really straightforward. One proposition can entail another; one belief state cannot, in this same sense, entail another.

How could you specify 'content' in this sense? How would you ascertain what the 'brain state' is for some ostensible content? — Wayfarer

It was "for the sake of argument," but that branch of the discussion never materialized.

Isn't that psychologism? — Wayfarer

It isn't.

I don't have to reduce logic to psychology to point out that logic describes some relations between propositions and no relations among an epistemic agent's belief states. It's a known fact. You won't find a logician anywhere who would claim otherwise.

You seem to be taking it for granted that a pure deduction cannot be at the same time a neural process. — Janus

Not 'taking for granted': presenting an argument for it — Wayfarer

I don't think so. That's what I asked for earlier:

That's why you need an actual argument showing that if brain state A, with contents P, causes brain state B, with contents Q, that a causal relation between A and B is incompatible with a logical relation between P and Q. — Srap Tasmaner

I'm not sure there's exactly an argument here at all, and even if there is, whether it works. Certainly if the whole thing turns on libertarian free will (that "obscure and panicky doctrine" as Peter Strawson called it), that's a kettle of fish of a different color.

On the other hand, I'm also inclined, as I've indicated in recent postings, just to let it rip. Maybe naturalism does show that the sort of reasoning we think we do is a myth.

I don't think that the argument from reason is setting out to prove that reason is infallible or all-knowing - simply that it comprises the relationships of ideas, and so that can't be reduced to, or explained in terms of, the physical cause-and-effect relationships that are grist to the naturalist mill. — Wayfarer

This is the thing, though, you keep eliding the difference between propositions and epistemic agents holding those propositions true (or probable, whatever).

Logic is not the natural science of thought. That's psychology. Logic, taken narrowly, is a science of some of the relations among propositions, but includes no concept of an agent at all. You can take it somewhat more broadly, as it used to be, but then we're really looking to logic for normative guidance on what works. Decision theory kinda lands in here, and lives at the intersection of psychology, philosophy, and economics.

But to reiterate: taking "logic" as we usually do these days, my believing that P does not entail my believing that Q, even if P entails Q. If there's a relation between my believing that P and my believing that Q, logic may play some part in that, but it is unquestionably also a matter of psychology, as it's my belief states that are at issue.

Considerably more smoke than light in most of the above. — Wayfarer

Hey, you're doing the best that you can.

phenomenology — wonderer1

I didn't mean the school of thought, but the thing itself, the detailed account of a type of experience.

I have enjoyed this meeting of the minds immensely. — wonderer1

Likewise.

That sounds a lot like "But where's the university?" It is a spectacularly awful argument.

The much-vaunted (around here) failure of neuroscience neglects two facts: (1) neuroscience is still in its infancy, maybe adolescence; (2) it has been having truly astonishing and accelerating success.

You evidently think we've been wandering down a blind alley since Phineas Gage's accident. I find that view incomprehensible, but you do you.

"Better a question that can't be answered than an answer that can't be questioned."

I think he said that. (Reading Surely You're Joking at I guess 16 or so was a formative experience for me.)

But I insist the phenomenology of this is hard.

I have sometimes said that many people on this forum don't seem to believe in disagreement: "if you seem to disagree with me, it can only be because you didn't understand what I said, so I'll say it again." We do recognize that even correct arguments don't always land with an audience, do not compel them with the force of reason, so we try different wordings, different analogies and examples, hoping that one of them will finally do the trick. --- My point here is only that we don't know what will work, why it will work, and what worked in our case. We hope to explain this lack of transparency by distinguishing form from content, as if it were the same as to say I've never been convinced by an argument presented in Polish, since I don't speak Polish. If you grasp the meaning at all, logic is supposed to carry the day, but experience tells us this is not so, though we believe it of ourselves. (This a little like @NOS4A2's suggestion that it is always other people we believe need to be kept in line by force, not us!)

Going with intuition is relying on the deep learning which has occurred in neural nets between our ears. — wonderer1

Sure, but

I wouldn't say that the foundations aren't rational, but that the foundations are intuitive, and intuition is a foundational aspect of human rationality. It's just that many philosophically minded people have tended to think simplistically of rationality as somewhat synonymous with logic. — wonderer1

even though there's a story we can tell about sound Bayesian inference being adaptive, even if unconscious, cognitive biases tell another story, that, as Kahneman says, and I never tire of quoting him, system 1 is a machine for jumping to conclusions.

So I still think Hume's horror is hard to shrug off. Our thinking is not what we thought it was. We learn some things about it that are reassuring and some that aren't, but the real problem is there is no transparency here; we're in the land of "for all we know..."

While I think this is fundamentally the right sort of answer, it does require a wholesale rethinking of the idea of rationality, and that might be a bitter pill to swallow.

What happens when we are persuaded by an argument? When we are convinced to change our minds? Those idioms leave us a bit passive, as if an argument pushes and pulls our beliefs like so much gravity. It's more decorous to say that we find an argument persuasive or the evidence convincing; sounds like we've rendered a judgment, in keeping with our high station.

Neither of those is particularly attractive. I think it's easy to accept pragmatism in the abstract -- to think this must be the way we think -- but difficult to believe it in particular cases, where it seems to us we have closely examined the logic and the evidence and taken a position. When doing philosophy, in particular, this is what we tell ourselves, and each other.

We may claim to be comfortable distinguishing the logic of discovery and the logic of confirmation or justification, but I think mostly we aren't. Chess provides a clear example, as usual: there's a saying among masters that the move you want to play is the right move, even if it seems impossible. This is intuition, and the idea is that careful analysis will justify your inclination, so some part of your mind must have zipped through that analysis without bothering to keep you informed, which would only slow things down. That fits nicely with the two-systems model, because the fast system here is just the unconscious and efficient habits that used to be carried out laboriously and consciously. --- But that still suggests that the conscious analysis you do is properly modeled as reasoning of the most traditional sort. There's no difference in kind here, only a difference in implementation. (This algorithm is known to work, so we can run it on the fast but unconscious machine.)

What is difficult to accept is that reason is really and truly rationalization, that justification is always and only post-hoc, that we are simply incapable of relying on logic and evidence alone to form our beliefs even if we do so to justify them. We want to believe that the process by which we reach a conclusion is quite similar to the process we would use to justify reaching it, and we want to believe that includes a free act of judgment.

I don't believe we ever choose what to believe, but only find that we do or we don't. And that applies here as well. It's what I find I believe, and others find they believe differently. What's worse, I find I cannot help but believe I have considered evidence and argument to reach this conclusion, but even if that is so, at no point did I weigh it all up and freely judge that it is so. All I can say is that argument and evidence seem to assail me like so much sensory input and the result is that I believe what I believe. I have to hope that what reason I have has done a good job filtering and weighing its inputs to reach a sound conclusion. If I try to justify my belief, I will surely succeed. It's one of my best things, as it is for everyone; rationalizing is our super power. Now I have to hope, as well, that my post-hoc justifications are everything they seem to be.

So, yes, I broadly agree with what you posted, @Janus, but I reserve a bit of Humean horror that the foundations of my rationality are not themselves rational.

It is, of course, true that you're not compelled to believe 'c' by anything other than reason. — Wayfarer

The version I presented really targets determinism rather than naturalism, but we'd also want not to say that a conclusion is rational if reached by a process at least one step of which was genuinely stochastic. (Big tent determinism.)

Still, how literally do you want to take "compelled by reason"? Does reason operate something like a natural law, compelling me to reach a particular conclusion as surely as night follows day? (The latter being, you know, physics.)

(That's certainly not the plan for Lewis, who's going to want the sort of libertarian free will I gestured at, and for whom this is a direct confrontation between theism and naturalism, not just between naturalism and 'something else (to be determined later)'.)

But that is not really the point, which is to differentiate the kind of causation involved in physical cause-and-effect, on the one side, and rational necessity - believing something due to reasons - on the other. — Wayfarer

But this is why I need clarification. This "rational necessity" you're talking about, I don't know what that is. We sometimes speak of "logical necessity" but most such talk is pretty loose; if you really need such a thing, it's just a necessity relation that doesn't include any facts or history or natural laws and so on. A "bare necessity", as it were. It just means logic and logic alone, and only applies to what logic applies to. (Propositions, even if those propositions are proxies for states of affairs.)

Your rational necessity sounds like something that applies to epistemic agents, compelling them to hold certain beliefs if they hold others. Logic alone, famously, can't pull this off, or the world would be a better place.

(( Unlikely I'll slog through Victor Reppert, but if I do, I'll let you know. Probably will look at the Stephen Talbott. ))

Back to business.

What does human reasoning look like? Let's go back to the Lewis example. He wants to contrast (1) Grandpa sleeping in because he's sick from (2) my inferring that he's sick because he's sleeping in.

(1) asserts a causal relation between two states of affairs: Grandpa is sick causes Grandpa sleeps in; (2) is considerably more complicated. I am said to know or believe a couple things: (a) Grandpa is sleeping in; (b) Grandpa sleeps in if and only if he is sick. From these, I deduce that (c) Grandpa is sick.

Unlike Grandpa, whose sleeping in is caused by his being sick, my state of believing (or knowing) that Grandpa is sick is not caused by my beliefs (a) and (b); it is a free choice (or act?) of mine to believe that (c) on account of (a) and (b). (a) and (b) together entail (c), and I choose to align my beliefs with what is logical, and so hold (c). Nothing forces me to believe (c), and I could (perversely) do otherwise if I choose. As a matter of logic, (c) flows automatically from (a) and (b), but my holding (c) does not flow automatically from my holding (a) and (b).

That's the Lewis account of the basic situation, but that account is actually intended to be embedded into another argument that will include the free act of inference, something like this: if I am caused to believe something, then I have not freely inferred it; if I have not freely inferred my belief, then I cannot consider it rational, for only beliefs arrived at by the use of reason are rational.

Is that a fair account of the argument from reason as you understand it?

To respond in terms of the argument from reason, I would say that the brain-mind identity theory collapses or blurs the distinction between logical necessity and physical causation. — Wayfarer

Logical necessity never holds between one belief state and another; it only holds between the contents of one belief state and the contents of another.

That's why you need an actual argument showing that if brain state A, with contents P, causes brain state B, with contents Q, that a causal relation between A and B is incompatible with a logical relation between P and Q.

But I digress. — Hanover

Don't think for one second your reputation for depravity can be restored that easily.