There are issues of moderation and extremism woven throughout this thread.

Here's a note from those centrist souls at Niskanen on Goldwater and Aristotle. (Possibly relevant to the Ukraine debate as well.)

Nobody wants only some of their rights, or to have their rights recognized and protected "to a degree." Nobody thinks a misogynist should just be a little less misogynistic. But systemically, incremental change is the reliable way. "Trudge up that hill," as Barack Obama put it.

But I'd also say that Goldwater was striking a masculine note with his remarks, entrenching the connection between the right and a particular view of masculinity. For US politics the next crucial moment is not Reagan but Gingrich, the scorched-earth compromise-is-surrender approach.

It's all packaged together: the left is trying to feminize the world; to give them even an inch, to compromise, to appease them, would also be effeminate.

We rely on moderation too much. — Isaac

Saw what you did there.

Let's imagine there was a world whereby sex was unknown. — schopenhauer1

I'm gonna stop you right there ...

This thread needs a shout out to those Australian beetles that keep trying to hump glossy brown beer bottles, the poor devils. For their sake, let's hope there's an allele for a slightly more sophisticated mate selection process.

It's childish.
— Srap Tasmaner

Yet you are the one seeming to start it. — schopenhauer1

Perfect.

Again, the tropes are there before anyone’s individual experience. — schopenhauer1

What do you think you're saying here?

No what I have to prove is our mechanism isn’t via natural selection but cultural propagation, not the exact story for this change. It’s enough to know it’s not natural selection that propagates our reproduction mechanism. — schopenhauer1

There is no conceivable selection pressure that would reward the absence of procreative genes. There is no conceivable cultural selection pressure for making sure that what biology already guarantees continues to happen.

There may be reason to lie about it. If you can convince people that the sun rises each day because you tell it to, that makes you pretty damn important -- just don't get high on your own supply. You don't make the sun rise and people don't have to be tricked into having sex.

what happened next — Isaac

Which is natural selection's whole thing, hence my insistence we must be able to at least imagine a mechanism for getting from point A to point B.

Seems, Sir? Nay, it's a necessity. Were this abstracted atomized pleasure all that was necessary, evolution would have never got off the ground and we'd all be single-celled prokaryotes instead of multi-celled eukaryotes. — BC

Which is blindingly obvious, right?

I suppose it's no use noting how much cultural capital has been spent trying to get people not to have sex, or to only have pre-approved socially useful sex. (For all we know, it's just trying to undo hundreds of thousands of years of culture making people have sex. Sure it is.)

This is called "moving the goal posts". — schopenhauer1

It's not.

You are asking for a mechanism for how it came about when I am arguing simply what is the case, not how it came about. — schopenhauer1

I'm talking about how it came about because we're talking about what results and what does not result from natural selection. Your position is that our procreative behavior did not come about because of natural selection, remember? So it's what you're talking about too.

you seem to make natural selection some kind of goal-oriented process — schopenhauer1

I've gone out of my way not to use the usual personifying and teleological language just to avoid this kind of crap. I allowed myself a colorful turn of phrase describing something that does not happen and you make an issue of it, the same way you accused me of strawmanning because I said "one day we do x, the next we don't," as if I were suggesting your claim was that it happened one night a million years ago.

It's childish.

I don't have to explain how we got rid of them. — schopenhauer1

It's your thread, do as you like. Would you rather be blogging?

But there's every reason to assume procreative behavior is wired into all living things, and that's going to include our ancestors. And I can't see any mechanism by which that changes just because we start telling stories and making pots.

So tying it back to sex, pleasure feels good. — schopenhauer1

Yes, you've mentioned this pleonasm before. Was there an option we narrowly avoided where pleasure would turn out to feel bad?

And then it just happens that sex is pleasurable and therefore feels good, like a lot of things do. Purest happenstance.

And then because the tribe wants more members -- for its cultural purposes, no biology involved -- it in essence manipulates (encourages, cajoles, tricks) people into having sex by teaching them that it's the kind of pleasure that feels good and thus getting them to reproduce.

Thank god culture showed up when it did, or our ancestors might never have had sex, and then where would we be?

But you might say, "Aha! See marriage is thus evolutionarily evolved from genes". — schopenhauer1

I can't see any scenario in which I say that.

culture could have contingently been "good enough" to take the place of some naturally selected instinct. — schopenhauer1

But do you understand what the measure of "good enough" is?

For culture to take the place either of genes that more or less directly drive reproductive behavior, or of genes that at least drive sexual behavior because that's how we reproduce, it would have to be at least as reliable at producing rates of reproduction at least as high as the genetic solution; if not, natural selection will fix that, so long as the old genes are still somewhere in the population.

For the old genes to just drop out, this culturally sustained level of reproduction will have to go on long enough not only to have the old genes miscopied into oblivion, but to catch up to and surpass any beneficial traits or behaviors that might happen to be riding in individuals with the old procreative genes, else natural selection will keep rewarding them.

In essence, the genes for procreative behavior are competing against nothing at all, so it's very hard to see how natural selection could ever definitively weed them out. Procreative genes could even just continue to proliferate as a redundant free rider; even if the cultural mandate to reproduce were more intense than the genetic, those individuals would reproduce their unnecessary genes at that higher rate. For natural selection to take any interest, the individuals carrying the procreative genes would have to be less fit, less adapted, less suitable as sex partners, and less fertile. Why would they be, especially with the 'procreators' continuing to 'interbreed' with the 'culturalists'?

That's all assuming a culture that is at least as sex-positive as the procreative genes. If it's not, it's a non starter.

Now, how on earth would such a culture arise? You want to chalk all this up to human self-awareness and positive feedback: that thing we all do, because we are biologically disposed to, we all agree so hard and so long that we should do that, and preferably do it even more than we are naturally disposed to, that eventually the biological disposition just withers away. It's easy to see what would sustain the genetic solution here; it's just how natural selection works. But what would sustain such an intense and long-lasting cultural mandate? Especially given that biology is happy to take care of this without taking up cultural resources: there's no gap being filled by culture, no problem being solved, the mandated behavior was already taking place. Culture, then, does this for no reason at all, just because, it seems to you, it can.

In summary, no conceivable selection pressure against procreative genes, no conceivable cultural selection pressure for culturally mandated high rates of reproduction.

Now, if your answer is that there is no reason to think there ever were any procreative genes to start with, keep in mind that we had to come from somewhere. We have ancestors without language, without culture, and their procreative genes would certainly have been selected for, all else being equal. You have to explain how we got rid of them, and I don't see how you can.

It's clear you didn't — schopenhauer1

but I did my best.

Have a nice day.

The "natural selection" for which we mean genetics leading to variations that lead to survival is one thing. But "natural selection" as simply a "strategy" (like certain stories that work) that work towards survival is different, and I think we should use a term like "cultural strategy" or something like that. — schopenhauer1

I'll just focus on this, because I don't have a handle on how you understand evolution by natural selection.

The word missing here in your critique is "reproduction". Survival, for natural selection, is enough survival to reproduce at least as much as everyone else. Adaptation is enough adaptation to survive enough to reproduce at least as much as everyone else.

Reproduction is the thing. No reproduction, no natural selection.

Hence my claim that if reproduction becomes too chancy in a population, those for whom it is still as close to a sure thing as natural selection can make it will be rewarded in subsequent generations. This is not a hard one for natural selection, and as many times as it has to fix a population's relative disinclination to reproduce, it will. That's all it does.

And as I said, we have to look at what's apparently left to chance in human sexuality in this light. There may be very, very good reasons humans reproduce the way they do, unpredictably (per occasion) and at any time, not seasonally. If not, if it's something that just happened -- came along for the ride when some other features or behaviors won out -- natural selection will work with what it's got to ensure reproduction.

1. There should be the ability to search for all of a single user's posts within a thread. Technically you can do this but for some reason the search never returns any results. — Leontiskos

Search for "." or something. I agree it would be nice if you could just leave that box empty, but this works like a charm.

Suppose we start with some ancient single-cell organisms, alike in every way except their proclivity to reproduce. Natural selection is just the process by which the descendants of those with the higher proclivity to reproduce will swamp the descendants of the others in short order.

Presumably then the instinct (let's just call it that) to reproduce is about as old as anything could be and shared across almost all living things. But even if this is a problem natural selection had to solve multiple times, for whatever reason -- population separation, for instance -- it would, every time, exactly the same way. If anything is in natural selection's wheel-house, this is.

You would want to argue that somewhere along the way, in the evolution of hominids. culture became self-reinforcing enough that natural selection no longer needed the instinct to reproduce and could kind of slough it off, just not bother selecting for it because culture had that covered, and that in essence this could have happened without people ever noticing. One day our ancestors had an instinct to reproduce, the next they didn't but culture had already taken the baton. And this would only have happened with us because we're the only species with rich enough cultural lives to have pulled this off.

Okay that's a just-so story. Might even be true. Is there any evidence of the sloughing off mechanism? Is that even a thing that can happen? Maybe some of our ancestors ended up with junk instead of the reproducing-gene and it didn't make any difference because culture. Maybe we're a mixed lot now, some with it, some without, and it's hard to tell one from another because culture. I have no idea.

Also possible that there is no instinct to reproduce per se, but in our case an instinct for sex, because that leads to reproduction, which is what natural selection is actually aiming at. Kinda tricks us into it. Possible. Maybe even likely, since "I will now reproduce" is not really a sensible intention, one you can reliably put into action. But "I will now have sex" sure is. Should really be having sex whenever you're not doing something else you absolutely have to.

But the whole point here is that natural selection is simply unable to leave this to chance, without changing its name to "natural something or other". Reproduction is the only thing natural selection really cares about, and everything else is a means to that end.

Look at it this way. Copulation doesn't always lead to reproduction, which is why it makes sense to say we can't have a reproducing instinct but only a sex instinct. But natural selection is also responsible for the fact that sex is not, among us, guaranteed to result in reproduction. Why did it allow that? With a lot of other species, we see clear seasonality of reproducing, clear indicators of readiness (like, right now readiness) to reproduce, and so on. If we don't see that with Homo sapiens, that's what needs to be understood first. All natural selection can do is change the prevalence of alleles among offspring, it's all based on reproduction, and evidently at some point this version of hominid sexuality and thus reproduction won out. How did that happen and why?

And if I remember right even Darwin thought sexual selection was probably a thing among our hominid ancestors, so there's more mud in the water.

I have no idea if there's evidence for any of this.

Still seems risky to me. Surely the chances of genetic drift are by definition higher where sexual behavior isn't selected for. Culture's good, but it's not as good as your genome. It seems like natural selection will just keep stepping back in to reward those with the instinct to knock boots, so long as there are any left.

Because of our (human) self-awareness, we can create feedback loops that self-reinforce something we think we know. So if X trait is supposed to be some sort of selection factor, people act that way because that is what was supposedly selected for. Thus the behavior is not necessarily instinctual or natural, but reinforcing around the narrative they heard. — schopenhauer1

Do you honestly think the proclivity to reproduce might not have been selected for? That it might be merely cultural?

Which is scientific realism. — Wayfarer

Is it? I thought that was the Quinean view, as distinct from instrumentalism. No matter.

But what it doesn't see is the role of the mind in creating the context within which empiricism itself is meaningful. — Wayfarer

Which I remember being the exact point of my post. Why does it sound like you're pointing this out to me? And keep in mind, I learned this from science.

And as the mind itself is never amongst the objects of cognition — Wayfarer

And here's where we disagree, but I won't spoil your thread rehashing that.

Cognition is viewed as emerging from the dynamic interaction between the agent and its environment, which is not, as physicalism presumes, a pre-given, independently existing domain of objects, but is more like the Husserlian 'meaning-world' or 'lebesnwelt', a world of meanings rather than objects. — Wayfarer

I struggle with this.

On the one hand, there's a story that says, here's an organism and here's its environment, and here's how the organism is or isn't well adapted to that environment, and here's how evolution takes hold to shape future generations of that organism.

It's just that we learn two things from biology and psychology (and evolution back of both of them). First, that the environment is obviously not uninterpreted for the organism: it's food and shelter and threat and opportunity and all those things that are meaningful to its career as a living organism and a reproducer. Second, we're in the same boat as scientists (and philosophers), that we know we're dealing with a reality we construct, that reality so-called can only be our predictive model.

But that's a bit of a knot, because we lever ourselves up to the position of recognizing reality as constructed by means of a theory that's more naturally taken as treating reality as this objective, mind-independent milieu we interact with. So then what becomes of that theory? Not just evolution, but even our conception of organism here, environment there.

@apokrisis has an answer to that, and maybe you have to go in for a great totalizing theory to handle this problem.

For the moment, while I try to adjust my worldview, I'm just allowing that there's a contradiction if you look at it from a non-pragmatist point-of-view, and I remind myself not to care that there's a contradiction.

And it's also why I have so little sympathy for your approach which places such heavy emphasis on ontological issues: is physicalism true? what sort of being do numbers and other abstract objects have? all that stuff. I've come around to the view that all we're talking about -- with organisms and with science -- is pragmatic assumptions, working hypotheses, and the true nature of things is not on offer. Naturalism, as I conceive it, is a matter of how we learn and how we investigate, not a claim about what kinds of things are in the world, as if we have some other way of checking -- because rational argument is also not a way of checking.

I'll post this lovely quote from Grice once again (fourth time I think) but this time to point out the word work:

My taste is for keeping open house for all sorts of conditions of entities, just so long as when they come in they help with the housework. Provided that I can see them work, and provided that they are not detected in illicit logical behaviour (within which I do not include a certain degree of indeterminacy, not even of numerical indeterminacy), I do not find them queer or mysterious at all…. To fangle a new ontological Marxism, they work therefore they exist, even though only some, perhaps those who come on the recommendation of some form of transcendental argument, may qualify for the specially favoured status of entia realissima. To exclude honest working entities seems to me like metaphysical snobbery, a reluctance to be seen in the company of any but the best objects. — Paul Grice

There's not some other test for the existence of entities besides, do they work? That's the pragmatist spirit and the scientific spirit, as I understand them. Everything is subject to revision, and ontology is at best bookkeeping for the current state of theory. (Quine thought the distinction important, and it might be for certain purposes, but it's not inherently important.) And theory, like life, is inherently prospective not retrospective, which means it is understood that theory will evolve.

That's perfectly clear in politics. Women can be just as committed to their bliblical understanding of gender roles as the men they marry and whose children they raise.

There are milder versions of it too. My mother worked as a secretary of one sort or another for most of her life, and worked for a number of men she deeply respected, but toward the end of her career she had female bosses sometimes and never got along with, or thought well of, any of them.

And this is the story philosophy has told itself, that ordinary criteria for judgment are “inadequate” and/or “misleading” — Antony Nickles

It really doesn't take philosophy, just an Ames Window or an Abelson square, a 'gorilla' walking past some kids bouncing a ball, an estimate of how many countries are in Africa. We have an everyday theory about how we perceive and think, and that theory is, you know, wrong. That's hyperbole, of course.

And now science has taken the bait to really tell us how things are — Antony Nickles

"Taken the bait" -- I love that. I'll say instead that modern science has stepped up to continue doing what philosophy used to do but barely does at all anymore, for reasons that are less and less relevant. I think most philosophers from throughout the Western tradition would be thrilled by what science has achieved. Can you even imagine Aristotle's reaction!

But you think almost all Western philosophy is a train-wreck anyway, and you're among the special few who understand how most philosophy and almost all science is based on a colossal mistake.

What my charge would amount to is an invitation to see how the intrinsic CONTENT of scientific theory changes, including how the RESEARCH is conducted and interpreted, as a direct result of a shift in metaphysics or philosophy of science. — Joshs

Agreed! Though if I said this I would probably have only said "theoretical framework" instead of metaphysics.

All accepted science works, but changes in the metaphysics of science leads to changes in our understanding of HOW it works, and as a consequence de leads to fresh concepts. — Joshs

Also agreed, though again I wouldn't have reached for metaphysics.

So let's talk about that. I think we are both committed to a view of science evolving and changing, and I that's roughly why I think of pragmatism as most clearly expressing the spirit of science. There's some confusion possible because there's presumably a hierarchy here, with the predictions of research down near the bottom, very changeable, theoretical frameworks above that, somewhat less changeable, and maybe way up at the top something like metaphysics.

Some of the constraints from above on what happens below are clear enough, as in the way theory guides experiment design. But those aren't absolute, because theory doesn't get to determine the experimental result, that's what the lab and the field are for.

But to some degree what's above theory does determine the result, in the sense that it guides interpretation, and that in the two ways I think you were referring to: something like metaphysics which guides the interpretation of any theory-and-research program, what it all amounts to, what sort of thing you learn when you learn something by doing science; and something like philosophy of science, which guides decisions about whether and how experimental results count as evidence for theories.

It's clear enough how the latter can constrain practice, or not, but I'm not as clear on how the 'metaphysical' arm does. If it doesn't cash out as a change in methodology, or in how theories are judged, then it seems like it might be possible to swap out the metaphysics without too much change in practice. BUT, as you point out, how research already done is understood, and how research to be done is undertaken might change considerably.

The important thing to me is that change at the various levels here is always a live option, and I think this is the pattern that pragmatism spots, so there's no reason to be wedded even to your top-level constraints of the moment.

What threw me about the way you were putting this earlier was that it sounded to me like the important thing to you was picking the right metaphysics, the one that jibes with your philosophical views, which is why I referenced Lysenkoism. I don't see it that way, obviously.

I doubt my little sketch here is perfectly satisfactory to you, but I still think there's broad agreement.

It shouldn’t be ashamed since they are intertwined aspects of the same company. My point is the ways philosophy and science are different is much less significant than you think they are, such that it is silly to even try to distinguish the domain of philosophy proper from science proper, other than as a matter of the conventionality and generality of the vocabulary. — Joshs

Ah, okay, that's a funny thing, because I have been exactly questioning that sort of boundary policing. I think they should be taken as continuous. So here again you and I are on the same page, or same enough we can talk.

I've been trying to undermine @Antony Nickles's claim that science should get off philosophy's lawn. My talking up the virtue of science was not to cordon off philosophy as its unworthy cousin, but to convince philosophy to accept science as kin.

Oh, there’s correspondence there all right. — Joshs

I mean, I get that "correspondence" is like a swear word for you, but you're just making stuff up.

It may be in the form of indirect modeling, but there is something in your notion of scientific observation and measurement that keeps science apart from the humanities and other areas of cultural creativity, and I think it has to do with how science gets a grip on the real. — Joshs

What notions? Where did I talk about observation and measurement? You're just projecting, which -- it's just weird. Do you need me for this conversation?

Here's the thing. I could explain what my actual conception of science is (communal, pragmatic, predictive, sensitive to feedback, self updating, blah blah blah), thus defending myself against your charge of philosophical sin. But I don't have to.

What does your "correspondence" charge amount to? Suppose it's true and "correspondence" is inscribed in the Great Book of How to Do Science and What It Really Means. Then you could object that correspondence to the real is -- what? Is refuted? Is bad? Is a discredited metaphysics? Is problematic? Should science care? If it works, it works. You can stand outside all day shouting, "This whole enterprise is a farce! They believe in correspondence to the real, those scientists!" No scientist will care. No one else will either. You will maintain your philosophical purity, as you understand it, but so what? Science will go on doing what it does.

Which is of course the point. Science is successful. Art is also successful. Literature is successful. History is successful. All of them in different ways, and it's no knock on art or literature or history that they are not science. Science is also only what it is. Is philosophy successful? I think most people feel it's a little harder to say whether it is -- but it's easy if you count spawning the natural sciences as part of the history of philosophy, because philosophy ought to be proud of that.

I still don't see any good reason for philosophy to be ashamed to be seen in the company of science.

It sounds like science to you is tied to a notion of correspondence between scientific observer and observed reality — Joshs

Nope. You got all of that just out of me using the word "research"? Geez.

You then have pragmatism arising out of the new scientific spirit of inquiry where the mind is all about modelling, habits and judgements - constrained by the fact of being in the world rather than being remarkable for standing apart from that world. — apokrisis

Exactly. I can't speak to Peirce, but it takes no more than a page of Dewey or James to see this. I mean, James literally wrote the book on psychology. His career is physiology > psychology > philosophy. I don't how much more obvious this can be.

And a quick reminder that the full title of Hume's book is A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects.

The pragmatists I'm reading may differ from Hume in where they land on particular issues, but it's the same spirit, and I see no reason for work undertaken in the spirit of science to be discontinuous from other work undertaken in that spirit.

We know what picking the results of research ahead of time looks like, and it's not the same thing as working within an existing paradigm.

Inspiration can in theory come from anywhere. In practice, it often comes from a handful of prophetic thinkers who had to wait decades before the larger culture was ready to embrace their ideas. — Joshs

I wouldn't even describe Darwin this way, so we're just not talking about the same world. Lots of people have interesting ideas, it's the research that matters. It's the research supporting and extending Darwin's insights that makes his ideas matter. Picking ideas you like -- well, we all do that, but that's not science.

Thank goodness! Yes that makes perfect sense, and I see now you were filling in a possible motivation.

I was deeply confused. Apologies if I misread you.

Such a search will reveal philosophically reformulated notions of brain, body , language and culture that are much more compatible with Wittgenstein — Joshs

I'm right now reading a book of psychology that I would argue is in some clear ways compatible with the later Wittgenstein.

On the other hand, who cares? Wittgenstein is interesting, but aligning your theory with Wittgenstein or with any philosopher really should not be a goal of any scientific research program.

Inspiration taken from Wittgenstein? Absolutely. But inspiration can come from absolutely anywhere and ought not guide you toward a particular result.

seems like it stems from the common tendency to conflate "truth" and "objectivity." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I have no idea how you got that out of what I wrote or what you quoted. I was making very close to the opposite point, that you need to commit to an interpretative presentation for the history lesson to hook into a larger argument. Reciting only facts leaves out how those facts contribute to the argument and why what they contribute matters (unless that's clarified elsewhere, obviously). It turns reasons into non-sequiturs.

Here, for free I'll give you another reason you might not express explicitly what makes particular facts relevant to the case you're making: they're not. This can be play out a couple ways but the result is the same: the connection between the facts recited and the point you're making doesn't show up because there isn't one.

Btw, a little cluster of articles about masculinity in American politics recently dropped over at Politico.

my guess is that masculinity probably isn't related to where we landed — Moliere

Maybe you're right, and maybe bullying is just one style of a manipulation among others. The ones that matter here lean heavily on devaluing the target. It looks a bit like shaming, but the twitter threads I've looked at did not seem to be shaming as a means to get someone to change, but as a means to get them to shut up, to take away their power and their agency. It's not you ought to reconsider your life; it's you need to understand that you're a piece of shit who doesn't deserve to speak. It's the sort of thing abusive husbands say. Manipulation on kickass 'roids. All of which is why it struck me as bullying, and as the kind of manipulation we associate, for very good reason, with less than admirable men.

And when I distinguish an object to someone, and they ask how I am distinguishing that object (in what way am I distinguishing it, by what features or attributes), no one ever explains a process of the brain. — Antony Nickles

This happen to you a lot, someone asks you, "By what features or attributes are you distinguishing that object?"?

For one thing, "feature" in everyday life is (a) a salesman's word, (b) refers to a guest vocal by a hip-hop artist, or (c), rarely nowadays with the disappearance of shorts and doubles, a movie. But that's not how you're using it; you're using it as a bit of philosophical shop-talk. "Attribute"? "Object"? Hardly used by ordinary people at all. I've been asked whether I think a pair of pants is green or grey, but I wasn't asked what color I would attribute to them, or by what features I distinguished the pants as an object. If you have these sorts of conversations on the regular, your life is very different from mine.

The question that @NotAristotle asked was clearly a question looking for a scientific explanation that would involve processes of the brain. He could not have been clearer. The answers he received referred to gestalt principles (@Pantagruel), neural networks (@wonderer1), the predictive and inferential nature of perception (@apokrisis), the involuntariness of object perception (@L'éléphant), pattern recognition (@DingoJones), survival value so that natural selection can kick in (@litewave), and how object perception arrives very early in our lives (me). Those are all important pieces of a very complicated answer.

Only you told him, don't do that, this is a philosophical issue, and therefore a question about our ordinary criteria for objects; turning to science is just your desire for certainty, your fear of uncertainty, and an evasion of responsibility. And then @Joshs showed up to throw Husserl at me, god love him (and oddly choosing not to mention that Merleau-Ponty references early gestalt psychology).

I would've given odds that you would say that, but no one who's read any of your posts would have bet against. The odds were also pretty high that @wonderer1 was going to say something about neural networks, that I was going to say something about learning and "go read some more", that @Joshs was going to question the foundations of science, and that @apokrisis was going to say something a lot like what he did, which most of us can recognize but not reproduce (although I did know that if he answered this one, the word "crisp" would be there), showing that there is a hierarchy of issues involved and how those fit together.

We're all pretty predictable. It might all seem very interesting to @NotAristotle, but it'll seem less interesting the fourth time he asks a question and gets exactly these answers for the fourth time.

Most of the sciency posts here were more or less explicitly partial answers, with the exception of apo's, because apo doesn't do partial.

Only you and then @Joshs argued that science is more or less irrelevant here, @Joshs because science itself has foundations that are, I guess, metaphysical, you, I think, because nothing could be a 'higher court of appeal' than our practices. @Joshs accepts some sort of continuity between philosophy and psychology, but on the grounds (I guess) that psychology is more philosophical than it lets on. You do not. I'm not clear whether you have a critique of science in mind, or only of the reliance on science when doing philosophy or perhaps also in everyday conversation.

I would defend the use of science in philosophy this way: we begin in the middle, with conceptions we only know through our everyday reliance on them, scientists being just like other people; we investigate ourselves and our environment relying on those conceptions but without assuming they are the last word, that we already know everything that can be knowed. It will frequently turn out to be the case that our everyday conceptions are inadequate for understanding what we find, even misleading, but we can also come to understand why we have come to conceive of things as we ordinarily do. Why, for instance, we perceive a world of objects, to use a philosopher's word. What science helps you resist is the elevation of your everyday understanding into a theory, which is the philosopher's game. Scientists, not philosophers, "leave everything as it is": of course you perceive tables as solid, here's why, and here's why "solid" can't mean what you might reflectively think it means, but your sense that there's a difference between room-temperature wood and room-temperature water is right, and here's more why.

Philosophers used to talk about stuff like this but they don't anymore for the simple reason that science does it better. They know it. Ordinary people know it. @NotAristotle knows enough to know it's science that will answer his question, not philosophy.

Having been painted into an increasingly small corner by science, some philosophers have gotten their own paint to mark the line that science Shall Not Cross. Only Philosophers Allowed. You can keep all the territory you've conquered (an amusing gesture, considering there's no way philosophy is getting any of that back), but no more! What's left in this corner? Metaphysics? Probably not for long. Transcendental arguments? They fit the bill, apparently, but the need for the transcendental move is premised on a deeply flawed psychology, folk psychology elevated to theory. Language? The same transcendental issue. No, it's become pretty clear that philosophy is (at best) a methodology in search of a domain. (@plaque flag) Unless you're apo, and your domain is everything.

I've been on the other side of this argument as @Isaac could attest. I've tried defending the specialness of philosophy. I think there's still some room for stuff that science isn't quite suited to or that it doesn't bother with, but I'm through chasing science off my lawn. I think it's a betrayal of the spirit of philosophy and resentment of the success of science.

What's your take? I'm asking.

we're dealing with the personal psychology of J.K. Rowling and whether or not that is a good psychology or if she is a bad person, and this is why she's good/bad, and if you do/not like her then you're also good/bad. There is no demand hooked to the decision which can be debated. It's her, and reflectively our own, moral character that's at stake. — Moliere

Certainly there are people who see this as the job, sorting people into good and bad.

Some people feel it's important -- and their job -- to sort art into good and bad. To sort artists into good and bad.

It's related to something I have found very peculiar about the reading habits of my millennial and gen-z friends and coworkers, that the first thing it occurs to them to say is, I liked this character and I disliked this other character. I didn't grow up reading novels that way, and I don't understand how this happened or why people do it.

When I say certainty I only mean predictable, repeatable, knowable, etc., which are the criteria for the conclusions of the scientific method. EDIT: most importantly here is that it does not matter which (competent) person does the experiment to reach the same conclusion. — Antony Nickles

But those are all good things, and the best way to fight off dogmatic certainty. Over here in the science-friendly world we say "Better a question that can't be answered than an answer that can't be questioned." (Feynman, though maybe not originally, I dunno.)

Science can never be a dogma-free zone. It can be a practice that is self-aware with regard to its reliance on guiding presuppositions — Joshs

I think that's abusing the word "dogma". Of course there are working assumptions, all of those things you mentioned, but in the long run any of them can change. In the right circumstances, even what constitutes an experiment can be up for grabs. Science is how we fight entrenched certainties and dogmas.

And the exact point is that if we are talking about brain processes, we’re not talking about mistakes and excuses and responsibility because of the desire to make our interplay with objects pure instead of muddled with those considerations and our relation to others. — Antony Nickles

There is plenty of room for all that, while still understanding where we're starting from, where we are all starting from insofar as all of our brains handle distinguishing objects, some basic physics, color constancy of objects and loads of other things in roughly the same way so long there's no damage or inhibited development. Rather than denying our responsibility for what we do with these capabilities, it provides the ground we stand on when we have those discussions.

focusing on our biological relationship to objects is fine (it’s not wrong), but only, it’s trying to answer a question that philosophy has misconstrued out of fear and desire — Antony Nickles

There may be something to that, but our very unconscious construction of objects is also and unavoidably driven by fear and desire, fear of what might harm us, desire for what sustains us. Just the nature of being an organism. My version, instead of telling people they need (philosophical) therapy, just shows them why they were so puzzled, shows the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. Hume would have been deeply gratified, as he would have had he lived to read On the Origin of Species, some of which he also intuited. (Darwin had the benefit of reading Hume, and did.)

I'm still looking for the loop back — Moliere

There's some stuff here. One is that the behavior we all deplore -- because Street's gone, so there's no one to take the other side -- among certain groups of young progressives has a name: bullying. So there are some cultural paradoxes about masculinity threaded through all this.

Harry Potter, and the fate of its ("its" because I don't mean him but the world and the stories) creator, is the big case in point. On the one hand, Harry Potter was deeply meaningful to a great number of young people because part of the message was, it's okay to be a weirdo, it's okay to be different, it might even -- ugly-duckling style -- be wonderful to be different. Queer kids everywhere got the message.

But with time it's been possible to take stock of Harry Potter, and more people have done so. (My son has pointed me to some interesting video essays re-appraising HP.) Even early-ish on, Ursula K. Le Guin was asked about it and commented that it seemed to her pretty derivative and "somewhat mean-spirited." This is the point a number of people have been converging on: it is mean-spirited, and in fact the whole thing looks a bit of a revenge fantasy. The queer kids, the theater kids, the weirdos, they get bullied a lot (as Harry does by the Dursleys) but secretly they're the ones with the real power, power you can't imagine, and when it's their turn, you're gonna pay.

When Jo Rowling shot her mouth off, a generation of readers of put into practice what she'd taught them: make her pay.

If Street were here, he'd argue that this isn't violence, it's counter-violence. Fuck Jo Rowling. She's got it coming. But to the rest of us, this looks like the same old tragic tale of the revolution adopting the means of the oppressors they overthrew.

And in this case, the means are unmistakably associated with toxic masculinity: it's bullying. The desire for revenge is understandable but besides being wrong, it's a mistake. It retrenches the technology of power you were trying to undo. What's wrong with toxic masculinity is not that it's abuse of women by men, but that it's abuse at all, and that ought to be obvious because asshole men are more than happy to abuse other men. (It's why the conclusion to the British Office -- as we call it over here -- is so satisfying, when Brent stands up to his bully. That's not a blow for cis-white-men, it's a blow against bullies.)

What comes out of the superhero stuff is issues about what the favored term is. Because of the holocaust, there was a lot of talk for a while about how dangerous it is to dehumanize the other, and that's true so far as it goes. What struck me -- and why that story stuck with me all these years -- is that the how-to-make-a-torturer story takes the torturer as the favored term, not the victim. Everyone not the torturer is a potential victim.

For whatever reason, the current state of play takes victim as the favored term, and everyone not a victim is (potentially?) equivalent to the torturer. And the trouble with that turns out to be that you miss the opportunity to mark characteristic behavior of the villain as what makes him the villain. You the victim have no problem becoming the bully in turn because the problem with the world was only that you were being bullied, not that there were such things as bullies at all.

But your notion of superheroes would make sense of righteous fury. — Moliere

I don't know if this holds up, and these days I would associate it with the Stanford prison experiment (which I didn't know about when I heard this) for good or ill, but I remember clearly an explanation of how you create torturers -- or, more broadly, that sort of personal guard or secret police, the trusted elite troops of the dictator.

The main idea is that it's not about dehumanizing the enemy. What you actually need to do is convince these young men that they are special, that they are the real defenders of the nation, uniquely qualified to do this important work. You build them up so that they feel they are above everyone except their master. That's why it is as easy for them to torture collaborators, their own countrymen, even their own friends and family, as it is to torture the foreign spy or soldier, the rebel, the ethnic other. None of those distinctions matter to them. Whatever your status or position is, theirs is higher, in their eyes. You convince them that they are in effect superhuman, and that's why they are beyond good and evil, and needn't concern themselves with questions like whether what they're doing is moral. That's what lesser beings worry about.

Now, I don't spend any time on Twitter or the like. But I hear things, and read thoughtful highbrow articles about what goes on over there. Any sense that some of these folks have taken such a view of themselves? The right still seems overwhelmingly driven by grievance and resentment. That's not my impression of the left. They do seem a bit more like avenging angels, meting out justice with an unforgiving certainty people used to be much more hesitant to claim for themselves --- unless someone went to the trouble of teaching them.

A surprising answer! Good for you.

Nietzsche has that line, "Most philosophers are bad writers because they show you not only their thought, but the thinking of their thought."

He might have been bullshitting though.

I'll say this though: the style you're describing can be perfectly appropriate as a pedagogical tool, and it's one reason what sprung to (your) mind was wisdom traditions, where someone is definitely the master or teacher and someone else is the student.

That is not appropriate here, where we are all collaborators, and that's why you won't find this kind of thing in science either. What we do is a cooperative venture. There are no masters here to gnomically bring us to enlightenment.

it does appear that objects are by and large constructed within the brain, without our awareness, — Srap Tasmaner

What we want with this picture is to understand seeing and identification of objects without our participation in the process. The chance of error previously led philosophy to create the idea of “appearances” (compared to something more “real” or certain). The current fascination with brain processes comes from the same desire. — Antony Nickles

I think you're on the wrong track here.

(1) Science is not the land of certainty. People talk this way sometimes, sure, even scientists, but when it comes down to it, science is a dogma-free zone. So if you're looking for certainty, it's religion you want, not science.

(2) No description of what the brain does concludes, "And this is how your brain allows you to know for certain that ..." It's similar to (1). Those perceptual processes we're unaware of, they do not provide some faithful reproduction of our environment, but useful working predictions. There are well-known ways -- various optical illusions, in particular -- in which if you think that's what you're getting, what you actually get will be awfully confusing.

(3) There have been persistent puzzles in Western philosophy that I believe largely stem from not having the concept of unconscious mental processes. Hume seemed to intuit some of this, in seeing that reason alone cannot account for our understanding of objects, causality, and so on, and yet finding that he experiences a world of objects and causal events. Objects, for instance, are given for us, because we do not in fact have conscious access to the "raw data" our senses take in -- by the time there's something we can be aware of, it's already been constructed as an object.

Our usual “unawareness” of these acts are because we are so trained in them we handle everything effortlessly — Antony Nickles

Depends a little on what you mean by "trained", but no this is just not what the research in developmental psychology looks like. The physics of objects begins showing up at less than six months old, practically as early as we can devise tests for it. If by training you had in mind some kind of social convention, that's just not it.

And it looks like we are not aware of how some of the basic building blocks of the world are put together for us because we cannot be. The connections aren't there. It may present a bit like a habitual activity that you can perform "on automatic", without thinking, but there are things that you were never thinking, not consciously.

For example: I point out an object you had no awareness of and you “construct” it into your world in learning to identify and differentiate it, learn where to find it, etc. In an actual sense, your unawareness of it as a separate distinct object means it does not exist (for you), as you have no reasons for it to matter, no criteria of our reasons to be interested in it. Basically, the brain’s activity during all this is not critical to, nor does it illuminate, the philosophical issues involved. — Antony Nickles

I don't see what philosophy has to gain by walling itself off from science.

What you give here is a description, and there are always alternative descriptions of phenomena possible, relying on differing frameworks, some more illuminating than others. Philosophy can sometimes do this really well, and there's value in that.

Science is something else altogether, not just description but explanation. They're not in competition.

I also think people like historical narratives of how science, math, etc. develop because we are innately geared towards remembering people, conflicts between people, social interactions, etc. as a social species. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yeah I'm not contesting any of that.

Let's put it another way: suppose you're making some argument and you have in mind a particular interpretation of the 60s that would support your claim; but instead of presenting that version, you present a scrupulously neutral presentation of the 60s at the point where your tendentious interpretation would hook into the larger argument you're making. The reader either gets what you're (not) getting at or they don't.

But what you've done is suppress your reason for referring to the 60s at all by moving to the scrupulously neutral version, and you've done this instead of just not reaching for the 60s in making your argument. You're trying to have your cake and eat it too, and violating Grice's maxims. It's not about whether the point you're making is persuasive or worth considering or 'legitimate' in some sense; it's the roundabout way of (not) making the point that is at issue.

I do the same thing you did, where you suggested that 'an argument could be made ...' I use that one. I also use 'Some might argue ...' I think that's acceptable when it's really and truly not my position but a position I want to talk about or I want someone else to talk about. (I tried it several times in this thread.) I also use that when I'm not sure what to say about it except that it's a position that occurred to me is possible.

But it might be a habit worth breaking, or at least it might be better just to directly say what those little phrases are standing in for. I think I'm happier when I just say things like "I think there are three options here..." and then lay them out. No confusion there about whether I'm advocating in a deniable way, etc.

That said, I don't think this leaves us unable to analyze intellectual history at all. We can observe that Renaissance thinkers "rediscovered," classical culture in an important way. We can spot major swings in US culture when comparing the 1950s and 1960s and be quite confident in describing real differences in trends. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Okay this is the perfect example.

What will you say about the difference between the 50s and the 60s? Let's say this comes up in a discussion here on the forum, and broad strokes are acceptable. You want to describe the difference, how will you do that? What words will be in your description?

There are to start with the two obviously opposing views, which I won't rehash in any detail. The 60s was either a time of liberation or of everything going to hell. But suppose you don't want to say either of those because you're doing philosophy, you're being scrupulous, you don't want to rely on an explicitly tendentious description of the 60s, so what will you say instead?

You might just state some facts, by "facts" here meaning statements about the 60s you assume will be for the most part uncontroversial. More young people read Marx than in previous generations, and more claimed to have read Marx. Young people in considerable numbers publicly protested many government policies relating to the war in Vietnam. Many people protested racialized laws and police practices especially in segregated Southern states and large cities throughout the country. Blah blah blah. We're going to aim for neutrality here.

My issue is not to nitpick over how neutral you can manage to be, but this: the more neutral you manage to be, the less likely it is that what you say has any direct connection to the larger argument you're making. That won't be true for all cases, obviously; if someone claims to prove that young people have never taken to the streets, that argument lands on a factual claim which can be refuted with a counterexample.

But the cases I was interested in look more like this:

A: The Industrial Revolution was a mistake.
B: Why do you say that?
A: The steam engine was invented in the 18th century and the first commercial use of Watt's improved design was in 1776 by an ironworks...

Etc etc etc.

By being scrupulously neutral in your description of history, you force the reader to 'connect the dots', to figure out what inferences you intend them to make. In a case like this it's obvious there's some connection, and depending on the rest of the paragraph many more connections might be implied or inferred, but none of that is actually stated. This is exactly the point I was addressing in the OP.

So to make the point you're making clear, in many cases, you'll have to give up on this scrupulous neutrality and give in to being at least a little tendentious. In a lot of cases. Where you only need facts to support your argument, no. But if you need something taken as something for it to hook into your argument or your claim explicitly, for it to be anything more than obiter dicta, then you're down in the trenches offering an interpretation.

I'll go and read the IEP article, thanks. It looks better than the New Yorker piece.

My first reaction to what you've quoted is that this a damned clever idea, based on the simple insight that we evolved when and where we did, and so it's the conditions then that have the most explanatory value. That strikes me as obviously true.

For instance, there's a related theory kicking around, because climate change is on everyone's mind: Africa had long periods of being stably dry and long periods of being stably wet, but there's a brief period -- maybe 40,000 years or so? -- when the climate of Africa was swinging wildly back and forth, massive lakes here today gone tomorrow, that sort of thing; and it's right around then that home sapiens emerges, so the theory is that we represent in part a hominid that is somehow more climate-adaptable than others. ---- You could have just looked around at where humans ended up living and seen that, but that's not an explanation for why we are capable of living everywhere. -- But this theory does not seem to be committed to a "climate module" or something, but maybe someone has tried that.

Rather than me just going through the same stuff you're reading and also responding to it, are there specifics in what you quoted that bother you?

I can look at what you bolded.

(2) sounds kind of speculative, right? But it does make sense: we face severe evidential constraints theorizing the mental faculties of early humans, but we can still figure out what their physical environment was like, so that's a way in. It's a clever idea.

(4) is just true, isn't it? Or at least it's known that the human brain does have a considerable number of somewhat specialized modules, and that a lot of the more complex behavior we engage in (including cognition) is enabled by those modules being linked together in various particular ways. (It's all very reminiscent of Smalltalk because Alan Kay wanted computing to take biology as its model.)

And (5) is just saying that we're stuck with our biology, isn't it? You and I choose to write different things, but the biology that enables us to read and write is almost identical.

Here -- I'll just make what I assume is your point. Sometimes it appears we can actually overcome some habit of thought or behavior that goes so deep it might as well be innate. The example I have in mind is color constancy. There is reason to think visual artists can in some sense overcome the slightly misleading way we think about what we see. The example you have in mind is that we're programmed to reproduce but we can overcome that by moral reasoning.

I would be interested to know what exactly painters are doing when they "see what colors are really there". Is that an after-market un-correction of the mis-correction our visual processing engaged in? The eyes do take in the "real" colors but presumably all the "original" data is destroyed without making backups. Maybe it's a matter of attention? Maybe you can train yourself to exclude contextual information about the ambient environment? --- For one thing, I assume not even painters do this all the time, but still see my blue Corolla as a kinda uniformly blue car. (There's some fading, some dirt, and some rust -- even I can see that.)

For your point, obviously people can choose not to reproduce, so I'm puzzled about why you feel like you need to prove that, or why you think evopsych might be trying to prove that they can't.

It's not an accident that Occupy has fallen silent with absolutely zero impact whilst there are actual workplace regulations about pronouns. It's because the former threatened Money, and the latter didn't. — Isaac

But also because pronouns are just easier right? I mean, yeah, there's the cultural fight over it, but, as you note, the policy opportunities are straightforward. Even banning teachers from using a student's preferred pronouns is straightforward, if that's what you prefer.

But Occupy, that was a heavy lift. Wholesale restructuring of the world economy is not a before-the-legislature-breaks-for-Thanksgiving kind of thing.

Basically, all the stuff telling you that the visual pathway you stimulated by imagining the moving lawnmower was you doing it, not the outside world. — Isaac

So visualizing, imagining, hypothesizing, all that sort of thing, might be accomplished at least in part by inhibiting channels to an area involved in all sorts of practical issues (wiki says error detection, reward anticipation, decision making, on and on). That's extremely interesting.

Here's a curiosity: the crazy right, and let's pick on QAnon, has both superheroes (we've all I assume seen the images of Trump's face on Rambo's body) and supervillains (Barack and Joe and Hilary, George Soros, Bill Gates?!); the crazy left? Kathleen Stock's very presence made certain people feel unsafe, so supervillain evidently. Jo Rowling. Trump obviously. But where's the left's superhero? For some in the US back in 2016 it was kinda Bernie Sanders. Otherwise? There are heroes certainly for the left, activists, but there's not much sign of a Trump-like superhero to rally around.

Is that the difference between authoritarian and anti-authoritarian politics? No superheroes but plenty of supervillains? I suppose we could say that's a good thing, it's just that the other thing going on is that the crazy left seems to have agreed that everyone not a hero-activist is not a bystander, not an opponent, not a villain, but in fact a supervillain. The right still seems to distinguish between the evil masterminds of the new world order and the gullible cucks and libtards that they've taken in.

Interesting quote I just came across today:

On the one hand, reading acquisition should “encroach” on particular areas of the cortex—those that possess the appropriate receptive fields to recognize the small contrasted shapes that are used as characters, and the appropriate connections to send this information to temporal lobe language areas. On the other hand, the cultural form of writing systems must have evolved in accordance with the brain’s learnability constraints, converging progressively on a small set of symbol shapes that can be optimally learned by these particular visual areas. — Stanislas Dehaene and Laurent Cohen

The spot for the recognition of letters and such is right next the area dedicated to recognizing faces. I love the suggestion that on the one hand we have a largely innate capacity for recognizing faces, but that the writing systems we developed were designed to take advantage of just that sort of capability, so with a little specialization we get this. It's not that our writing systems are innate, but it's also no coincidence that we have the writing systems we do.

I don't know much about the whole war over modularity, but I don't understand how lesion studies make any sense if the brain just gives us one big general intelligence. Some degree of modularity seems really obviously right.

On the other hand, the great bulk of our behavior is going to draw on many, many modules in the brain. Exceptions might be things like flinching, ducking, those basic reflexes. But not, you know, art, or modeling someone else's beliefs, or making dinner.

Maybe that puts me -- as if I had any expertise here, and I don't! -- in your lowercase "ep" camp.