In the previous post, I discussed the analytic-synthetic distinction with a view of approaching, to my mind, one of the most fundamental problems in philosophy, the question of how we can make true or at least meaningful statements about fictional objects. The previous post wasn't perfect. For instance I suggested that the proposition "Pluto is a planet" is a false analytic proposition although it would in fact be better described as a false synthetic proposition. Aside from this slight unclarity, the previous post provides some good groundwork for today's post. Readers may well ask – what does the analytic-synthetic distinction have to do with fictional objects? In today's post, I wish to move a little closer to an answer.
I am interested in fictional objects because my training is in the study and interpretation of literature. Suppose we wish to write an essay about the Sherlock Holmes stories. We want to do two things – we want to paraphrase some of the stories and move towards deeper meanings. We want the statement, "Sherlock Holmes is the world's greatest detective and lives at Baker Street," to be true, at least provisionally; we want moreover to say that the stories say something about rationality and the powers of human deduction to solve problems. We want literary interpretation to be something capable of making true claims about what stories say, and we wish stories themselves to at least sometimes assert true claims. However, there is a thread that has run through philosophy, from Hume to Frege to today, that says that a proposition like "Sherlock Holmes is a detective" is either false or meaningless by reason of the apparent fact that it is making a claim about a nonexistent entity. Because literary interpretation is, in a sense, parasitic on literature, to accept this view would also be to accept that all literary criticism is either false or meaningless. Obviously, this is a conclusion I cannot countenance.
The best way, in fact the essential, only, way, to approach the issue of fictional objects is through a kind of story, a true story. Bear with me.
I wake up in the morning from a nightmare about vampires. In the dream, I believed the vampires to be real but when I wake up I ascribe to them a different ontological status. The vampires were unreal. I wouldn't apply the adjective fictional to the vampires because they seemed real at the time and we almost always know that fictional beings are fictional, but I might use the words illusory, imaginary or dreamlike to describe them after I have fully woken and shrugged off the fog of sleep. I climb out of bed and make myself breakfast. The bed, the bread, the butter, the utensils, and all the other objects in my apartment are real, existent. I pick up the newspaper and read articles about Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and convicted murderer Mark Lundy. I have never met either man and have never had any personal direct acquaintance with either – rather, my knowledge about them is based on written accounts or testimonies by journalists and the occasional photo. Nevertheless, I believe both Bolsonaro and Lundy to be real, existent; they are real objects existing in my cognitive environment. I know them to be real because I put my trust in the newspaper journalists to tell the truth about events that have happened or are happening out there in the real world. I pick up The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and read a little about Arthur Dent. Arthur Dent is also an object in my world and, like Bosonaro and Lundy, I know about him only through a written account. However, I do not regard Dent as real, rather I regard him as fictional. I know that he is fictional because he is the protagonist of a novel – there are multiple signs, both internal to the novel and external to it, that point to the fact of him being fictional. I then read a little from a recent translation of Cicero. Cicero is neither fictional nor existent; rather he is someone who died (and passed out of existence) more than two-thousand years ago. Nevertheless he is an object in my world because I can talk meaningfully about him with others. Having read a couple of passages from Cicero, I walk to the library. On the way I pass by a number of other human beings – I know nothing about them accept how they present themselves physically to my gaze but I regard them as real, existent. The library has two floors, the ground floor being devoted to fiction and the first floor to non-fiction. I assume that all the books held on the ground floor concern fictional objects while all the books on the second floor (with the possible exceptions of literary criticism and philosophy) concern objects that exist now, have existed in the past or are likely to exist in the future. I walk over to the graphic novels section and grab a collection of Sandman stories. Most of the characters in this comic book series, such as Morpheus, Death, and Delirium, are also objects in my world, objects in fact as important to me as Arthur Dent, but, like Dent, they are all also fictional.
This little story presents a kind of quasi-phenomenological perspective on how we engage with the world. It is not orthodox phenomenology. Orthodox phenomenology, as pioneered by Husserl, seeks out the universal characteristics of how we experience the world, brackets the individual out, but my little story is intentionally quite personal, autobiographical. Moreover, orthodox phenomenology brackets out the issue of existence (this is known as epoche) and focusses purely on experience. My intention is quite different. I am trying to show the variety of ontological categories into which we place the various objects that occupy our cognitive environments. Some objects in our world we know to be real, existent, because we have first hand acquaintance with them. Examples in my own experience include my bed, fridge, bread, butter, and my mother when I go to visit her. Other objects, such as Bolsonaro, Lundy, and Cicero (and for that matter China) I know about only through written and spoken reports, through hearsay – yet I know these objects to be existent because I place my faith in the honesty and integrity of the people who tell me about them. I choose not to believe the National Enquirer when it reports on sightings of Bigfoot. And then there are objects which I always know to be fictional, such as Arthur Dent, Sherlock Holmes, Garfield, Hamlet, and Scooby Doo. Even though these objects are fictional, and I know them to be fictional, they form part of my cognitive environment and I can talk meaningfully about them with others.
This perspective is at once obvious and surprising. What is surprising is the ease with which we categorise different types of object into different ontological compartments When we look at the world in this way, as a world containing both factual and fictional objects, it can seem mysterious the process by which we effortlessly divide the world up, into things that once existed, exist now, might exist, and have never and will never exist (and are thus either fictional like Dent or fallacious like Bigfoot). Yet children seem capable of making this distinction almost from the time they learn to talk. A four-year old child who is read Dr Seuss in bed by his parents almost certainly knows that the Lorax and the Grinch are imaginary, although he might not yet know this word. As soon as children begin to play, they play at make-believe, pretending to be superheroes or cops or Red Indians. The ability to play, to discriminate between fictional objects and non-fictional objects, comes naturally to children. I want to digress a little. Phenomenologists like Husserl thought there was something mysterious about why we believe other people have minds. Husserl's explanation is that a person compares the behaviour and physical form of the other to his or her own behaviour and physical form, and infers that the other has a mind as result. In reality, a child learns that other people around him have minds before the child realises that she has a mind herself. A four year old child never doubts that his or her parents have minds. If anything, children go too far in the opposite direction, ascribing conscious volition to natural processes. Similarly the distinction between fact and fiction comes naturally to children.
There is an important point I need to make before we move on. Although fictions primarily concern fictional objects, they contain existent objects as well. Sherlock Holmes lives in London, and London was and is a real place. Arthur Dent is obsessed with tea, and tea is an existent beverage. The Sandman sometimes features people who once lived, such as Augustus and Shakespeare. Moreover, fictions like Romeo and Juliet and Othello can tell us true things about love and jealousy. This fascinating topic, the way fictions mix fact and fantasy, is important, but is not something I wish to explore in this post.
The world-view I am presenting is one in which we live and move within a cognitive environment that contains fictional as well as existent objects. This leads to the conclusion that existence is a property that objects either have or don't have. The name for this position is Meinongianism, an ontological and logical system invented by Alexius Meinong and criticised by Bertrand Russell among others. Many logicians before, during and after the time of Meinong found the idea that existence might be a property or predicate intellectually or logically unpalatable (I think the first to say that existence isn't a property was Kant). In my opinion, however, I don't think Meinong went too far but rather that he didn't go far enough. Meinong argued, I understand, at least early in his career, that there is an object for every property or set of properties. I believe, by contrast, that all objects exist in the mind or world of a conscious knower. Meinong's position tends a little toward the Platonic world-view I criticised in the post immediately preceding this one– it suggests a realm of Platonic Ideas divorced from reality. I believe, by contrast, that objects are created in a conscious mind as a result of perceptions of the world and of verbal communications with others. If we adopt the position I am advocating, a number of paradoxes associated with conventional Meinongianism, paradoxes first proposed by Russell, evaporate.
For instance, Meinong argues that there are objects that each only have one property. This leads to the following paradox. "1. There is an object, x, which has the sole property of being blue. 2. The object x has the additional property of only having one property. 3. Therefore the object x has only one property and has at least two properties." This paradox can be avoided if we suppose that Meinong was wrong in postulating that there can be objects that only have one property, if we suppose that objects are created in the mind of a knower. Suppose a friend tells me, "There is an object that is blue." I have no reason not to believe her and consequently constitute such a blue object in my mind. Suppose my friend says, "There is an object that is blue and this is its sole property." I can choose not to believe her on the grounds that it is logically impossible for something to have both only one and two properties. If my friend says, "There is an object that has only one property," I can again choose not to believe her on the grounds that it is logically incoherent to presume the existence of objects that only have one property each. If we accept the position that objects exist in the minds of conscious knowers, all objects, existent and nonexistent alike, have a potentially infinite number of properties, as many as I or others wish to grant them.
According to Meinong, there is a sharp distinction between existent and non-existent, Meinongian, objects. Existent objects have infinitely many properties while Meinongian objects only have a finite number of properties. I think Meinong was wrong to propose this sharp distinction. I know that Arthur Dent is fictional because he is talked about by novelist Douglas Adams in a novel; I know that Bolsonaro exists because he is talked about by journalists in the newspaper. We base our determination of whether an object is existent or nonexistent on circumstantial evidence. There is no sharp distinction between the two types of object. Suppose a friend says to me, "I know a chap called Kevin who went to prison for tax evasion." In my mind, at first, there are only a few properties I can assign to Kevin: that a person called Kevin exists, that he went to prison, and that the reason he went to prison was for tax evasion. However, I can and do infer additional properties. I can infer that Kevin is a man, that he has two arms and two legs, that he has a heart, a brain, a liver and kidneys. I can presume that my friend knows Kevin and has a first-hand acquaintance with him. And so on. There are also things I don't know about Kevin. I don't know where he lives, if he is married, what his job was, how long he was imprisoned, if he is currently in prison, and so on. My understanding of Kevin will improve if my friend tells me more about him. I can add properties to the mental object "Kevin who went to prison for tax evasion" as a result of what my friend tell me about him. Now suppose that my friend says, "In the novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Arthur Dent escapes Earth just before it is destroyed by the Vogons to make way for an interstellar bypass". At first, there are only a few properties I can assign to Dent: that he is a fictional character, that he appears in a novel called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that in the novel Earth is destroyed by entities called Vogons and that Dent escapes this fate. However, I can and do infer additional properties. I can infer that (in the novel) Dent is a man, has two arms and two legs, a heart, brain, liver, and kidneys. As my friend tells me more about Dent I can ascribe more properties to the Arthur-Dent-object in my mind, such as the property that his travelling companion is an alien called Ford Prefect, and the property that Dent likes tea. Obviously, this drastic revision of Meiongianism requires further work. But the fundamental idea I am proposing, here, is that existent and nonexistent objects alike both have a potentially infinite number of properties, as many as we assign to them.
Russell argued that Meinongianism leads to a second paradox. It seems that, if existence is a property, we can say "There is an existent golden mountain" or "Pegasus is an existent flying horse." In both cases, we are asserting that an object exists that we empirically know does not, yet it seems to have the property "existence". If however we assume that both "the golden mountain" and "Pegasus" are objects created in the mind of a conscious knower, we can confidently expect most people to deny that either proposition is true. Ordinary people, if you ask them, will tend to subscribe to the proposition "Sherlock Holmes lives on Baker Street" and deny the proposition "Sherlock Holmes exists". For most people, a property of "Sherlock Holmes" is that he is fictional and thus nonexistent. Now consider Bigfoot instead. In my mind, Bigfoot does not have the property of existence. I might have a friend however who believes in Bigfoot. In her mind, Bigfoot does have the property of existence. Which one of us is right? We might say, with Russell, that it is an empirical fact that Bigfoot does not exist but, in fact, neither I nor my friend can be absolutely sure. We can only say that the proposition "Bigfoot exists" is false for me and true for her. It might seem that I am now advocating an extreme form of relativism, the notion that all truth is subjective, but in fact my position is more subtle and complex. I think truth is arrived at dialectically, discursively, through conversation and negotiation with others and with the world. It is difficult for me to plainly and distinctly delineate this position and so I point to the work of Richard Rorty instead for a better description of it.
The reader may wonder what all this has to do with the analytic-synthetic distinction I talked about in the previous post. What I am saying is that objects are created in the minds of conscious beings, either through observations of the world or through verbal reports by other people. A verbal report can be considered a kind of definition, and a definition is a kind of speech-act. A work of fiction is an extended speech-act. When we first pick up The Hobbit, we know nothing about it except that it concerns a creature called a hobbit. As we read the book, Tolkien defines the particular hobbit who is the hero of the story, fleshes out this abstract object with more and more properties – the hobbit in question is called Bilbo Baggins, lives in a hole in a ground, a very comfortable hole, hates the idea of adventures, embarks on an adventure anyway with thirteen dwarves, finds a magic ring deep under the Misty Mountains, converses with a dragon... and so on and so forth. Tolkien creates the object Bilbo Baggins in the mind of the reader. It is important to recognise that although the mind of every conscious being is different, we tend to agree about Bilbo Baggins's properties even though there is no existent object in the world denoted by the term "Bilbo Baggins". This is a reason why I reject subjectivism.
There is much more I could say on this topic but I will end this post with just some final thoughts. The approach to fictional objects I am advocating is known as creationism – the term creationism has a different sense in the rarefied world of philosophy than it does in the popular imagination where it denotes the fundamentalist religious view that the Earth was created by God some six thousand years ago. The creationism I am talking about is something quite different. For an interesting essay about nonexistent objects, see the article on them in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nonexistent-objects/).
Thursday, 29 August 2019
Saturday, 24 August 2019
The Analytic-Synthetic Distinction
I am considering writing a book of philosophy, focussing on whether it is possible to make true statements about fictional entities. In today's post, I wish to discuss the analytic-synthetic distinction, a distinction first proposed by the philosopher Emmanuel Kant. Talking about this distinction is an entry-point into a conversation about fictional objects such as Sherlock Holmes and Spiderman, and I hope that getting my thoughts in order in this blog will help me when I get around to writing the book.
According to Kant, a true analytic proposition is true by virtue of the meaning of the words in it while a true synthetic proposition is true both by virtue of the meanings of the words in it and by virtue of one's experience of the world. Another way to put this is that a true analytic proposition is true in all possible worlds while a synthetic proposition may only be true in some possible worlds. The classic example of an analytic proposition is the statement, "All bachelors are unmarried". This proposition does not require knowledge of the external world for us to know that it is true– rather the word "bachelor" means an unmarried man and so no experience of the external world is required. The predicate is contained in the subject. If however we say, "All bachelors are lonely," this is a synthetic proposition, a proposition which we may tentatively suppose to be true until we discover a bachelor who isn't lonely, in which case we will be forced to say that this proposition is false. Its truth or falsity depends on observations of the real world. The proposition "All bachelors are unmarried", however, can never be shown to be false, can never be disproved, because it follows directly from the meanings of the words in it.
I have been thinking about this distinction since I was nineteen and was first introduced to this idea by the Otago philosophy professor Alan Musgrave. I sensed that there was a problem with it even then but it is only in the last couple of weeks that I have decided that it is possible to clearly state what is wrong with it. I will not be the first to criticise the notion of an analytic-synthetic distinction. The most famous critic was a chap called Willard Quine and his central argument is known as "The Indeterminacy of Translation". The precise meaning of Quine's critique has been a topic of considerable debate among philosophers ever since he proposed it in 1951. I will not be engaging with Quine's argument in this post but it is possible that I have hit on a similar critique and that I can present it more clearly today than he could back then. To reiterate – I am not deeply familiar with Quine's critique but it is possible that there might be overlap between my critique and his.
Before I advance to my own critique, I would like to discuss the world-view entailed by an uncritical acceptance of the analytic-synthetic distinction. It seems to me that people and philosophers who accept Kant's argument have a particular view of language. They regard language as universal, unchanging and independent of the real world and of how real people use words. This world-view is almost Platonic. According to Plato, the world of Ideas or Forms, of Universals, exists independently of the real world and in a sense precedes it. Forms are eternal, aspatial and atemporal; real phenomena are just shadows of these Platonic Forms. A form is the essence of a thing and exists in a separate realm. Plato, apparently, believed that we are aware of these Forms before we are born, before we are thrown into a world of appearances, of imperfect representations of these Ideas. The world of Forms, in this Platonic conception, is somehow more real than the material, physical world.
This world-view is almost mystical and, although many philosophers would bridle at the suggestion that their wold-view partakes of something obscurantist, I think it does. Nevertheless, some such world-view follows from the Kantian distinction. My own world-view, my own attitude towards language, is quite different. It seems to me that there are three unquestionable assumptions or axioms we can assert about language. These are:
1. Language is learnt.
2. Different people define words in different ways.
3. The generally accepted definition of a word is open to revision, can change.
If we accept these three claims, the analytic-synthetic distinction falls apart.
The most important of these three claims is the first but I shall tackle it later in this post. I'll start with the second assertion. Suppose I am talking to my friend Steven. Suppose in my own mind I define the word "bachelor" as "a man who has never married" but he defines the word "bachelor" in his mind as "a lonely man". We both know Chuck, an unmarried man. I tell Steven, "Chuck is a bachelor" (a synthetic proposition). Steven replies indignantly, "Chuck isn't a bachelor – he has heaps of friends!" (another synthetic proposition). Which one of us is right? It seems the proposition "Chuck is a bachelor" is true for me and false for Steven; conversely the proposition "Chuck isn't a bachelor" is false for me and true for Steven. This difference occurs even though we agree on matters of fact, that Chuck is unmarried but has many friends. Now, the reader may say that I am right and Steven is wrong, that Steven has an incorrect understanding of the word "bachelor". The reader may exclaim, "Everyone knows that the word 'bachelor' means a man who has never married!" But how can you be sure that this is true, that everyone shares this understanding of the word? It seems that in the dispute between Steven and me we must appeal to an external authority. I grab my Oxford English Dictionary and show Steven that the primary accepted definition of the word "bachelor" is "a man is who is not and has never been married" and he may or may not alter his mental definition of the word as a result.
We can go further. The idea that an analytic truth such as "All bachelors are unmarried" is true in all possible worlds is obviously wrong because we can imagine a world in which all the people and all the dictionaries define "bachelor" as "a lonely man", a world in which it is recognised that even married men can be lonely.
It might seem, then, that the only way to escape this impasse is to say that the meanings of words are codified by a kind of priesthood of lexicographers, linguists, scientists, and other experts, and that these people have always agreed on the meaning of words. Even if there is disagreement about semantics among ordinary people, among the laity, there is a generally accepted definition of every word established by some consensus of relevant professionals. We can always appeal to some external authority to ground our understanding of the meanings of words. However, this move also fails. Consider the proposition, "Pluto is a planet". Today, in 2019, we know this proposition to be false. In 2006, the word "planet" was redefined in such a way that it ruled out Pluto on the grounds that Pluto was too small and that some massive bodies in the Kepler belt were larger than it. The definition of a planet (according to Wikipedia) is "an astronomical body orbiting a star or stellar remnant that is massive enough to be rounded by its own gravity, is not massive enough to cause thermonuclear fusion, and has cleared its neighbouring region of planetesimals"and by this definition Pluto isn't a planet. But if we were to say, in 2000, "Pluto is a planet" we would be expressing a true proposition because the word "planet" was defined differently then. According to my Oxford Dictionary, published in 1998, the word "planet" is defined as "a celestial body moving in an elliptical orbit around a star" and, by this definition, Pluto actually is a planet. In fact the dictionary goes on to explicitly state that Pluto is a planet. It seems then that the proposition "Pluto is a planet" was analytically true in 2000 and is analytically false today. This causes all kinds of problems for Kant. We could say that the meaning of a word is established by a contemporary consensus of experts, by the most recent definition, but we would also like to say that all propositions are either unequivocally true or false. What happens if two years from now the astrophysicists get together and agree on a new definition of "planet" which again includes Pluto? How can we know if the proposition "Pluto is a planet" is true or false?
I'll give another example of this problem, the problem that even the generally accepted definition of a word can change over time. In the nineteen-fifties, "homosexuality" was defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as "a sociopathic hatred of the opposite sex". To modern readers, this definition sounds absurd. We all know gay men who have female friends and lesbians who have male friends. In fact, the definition of "homosexuality" as presented by Wikipedia in recent times is constantly changing, is in a permanent state of flux. We only need a cursory understanding of Michel Foucault to realise that this is a serious problem, and that the health of our society depends on the best possible definition of homosexuality.
At this point in the post I will turn to the first claim, the assertion that language is learnt.
According to Kant, analytic truths are known a priori. This means that a proposition like "All bachelors are unmarried" is known independently of experience. Logically this would suggest that infants are born somehow already knowing that the word "bachelor" means "unmarried man". But of course this is absurd. At some point during early life, a child is either explicitly told that the word "bachelor" means "a man who has never married" or infers that this is what the word means from his or her observations of how others use this word. This seems to me quite obvious, yet it leads directly to the conclusion that analytic truths are known a posteori, that they depend on our experiences of having learnt a language.
We can approach this issue, the almost self-evident fact that we learn the meanings of words from others (from dictionaries, books, conversations), from another direction. Suppose I wish to discuss American politics with a friend and coin the word "glockle" to describe people who voted for Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016. My friend obviously won't know what the word "glockle" means and so, before we can have a meaningful conversation about glockles, I first need to say to him, "I define the word 'glockle' as meaning 'anyone who voted for Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016'. " This utterance of mine is neither true nor false – rather it is what John Seattle called a "speech act" and J.L Austin called a "performative". Like the statement "I now pronounce you husband and wife" when declared by a priest or the statement "I sentence you to two years imprisonment" when issued by a judge, my utterance has the effect of changing the world. Subsequently my friend and I can meaningfully discuss glockles – one of us could say for instance, "The Democrat presidential candidates need to win over the glockles in order to defeat Trump"– and such statements will either be true of false. Yet our ability to discuss glockles at all depends on my prior speech act, the utterance in which I defined the word, an utterance that is neither true nor false.
Of course it would be silly to suppose that "glockle" can be associated with some kind of Platonic Idea which I have discovered and named.
All this raises the fundamental and most difficult question of all. What is truth? The common sense answer is that truth is a relation between a proposition expressed in language and a fact about the world. This is the Correspondence Principle – "A" is true if and only if A. But the Correspondence Principle, when subjected to scrutiny, disintegrates. Suppose we say " 'Pluto is a planet' if and only if Pluto is a planet." Given our discussion of Pluto above, it is easy to see why the Correspondence Principle often fails. It doesn't provide a satisfactory account of the relationship between words and the world. I believe that truth is a kind of process, something dialectical, conversational, communal, a horizon that we continually approach but never arrive at. I believe I think in the idea of truth sketched out by Richard Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. I know that this is a vague claim but perhaps I will be able to elaborate on it in later posts. Or in the book I may or may not write.
According to Kant, a true analytic proposition is true by virtue of the meaning of the words in it while a true synthetic proposition is true both by virtue of the meanings of the words in it and by virtue of one's experience of the world. Another way to put this is that a true analytic proposition is true in all possible worlds while a synthetic proposition may only be true in some possible worlds. The classic example of an analytic proposition is the statement, "All bachelors are unmarried". This proposition does not require knowledge of the external world for us to know that it is true– rather the word "bachelor" means an unmarried man and so no experience of the external world is required. The predicate is contained in the subject. If however we say, "All bachelors are lonely," this is a synthetic proposition, a proposition which we may tentatively suppose to be true until we discover a bachelor who isn't lonely, in which case we will be forced to say that this proposition is false. Its truth or falsity depends on observations of the real world. The proposition "All bachelors are unmarried", however, can never be shown to be false, can never be disproved, because it follows directly from the meanings of the words in it.
I have been thinking about this distinction since I was nineteen and was first introduced to this idea by the Otago philosophy professor Alan Musgrave. I sensed that there was a problem with it even then but it is only in the last couple of weeks that I have decided that it is possible to clearly state what is wrong with it. I will not be the first to criticise the notion of an analytic-synthetic distinction. The most famous critic was a chap called Willard Quine and his central argument is known as "The Indeterminacy of Translation". The precise meaning of Quine's critique has been a topic of considerable debate among philosophers ever since he proposed it in 1951. I will not be engaging with Quine's argument in this post but it is possible that I have hit on a similar critique and that I can present it more clearly today than he could back then. To reiterate – I am not deeply familiar with Quine's critique but it is possible that there might be overlap between my critique and his.
Before I advance to my own critique, I would like to discuss the world-view entailed by an uncritical acceptance of the analytic-synthetic distinction. It seems to me that people and philosophers who accept Kant's argument have a particular view of language. They regard language as universal, unchanging and independent of the real world and of how real people use words. This world-view is almost Platonic. According to Plato, the world of Ideas or Forms, of Universals, exists independently of the real world and in a sense precedes it. Forms are eternal, aspatial and atemporal; real phenomena are just shadows of these Platonic Forms. A form is the essence of a thing and exists in a separate realm. Plato, apparently, believed that we are aware of these Forms before we are born, before we are thrown into a world of appearances, of imperfect representations of these Ideas. The world of Forms, in this Platonic conception, is somehow more real than the material, physical world.
This world-view is almost mystical and, although many philosophers would bridle at the suggestion that their wold-view partakes of something obscurantist, I think it does. Nevertheless, some such world-view follows from the Kantian distinction. My own world-view, my own attitude towards language, is quite different. It seems to me that there are three unquestionable assumptions or axioms we can assert about language. These are:
1. Language is learnt.
2. Different people define words in different ways.
3. The generally accepted definition of a word is open to revision, can change.
If we accept these three claims, the analytic-synthetic distinction falls apart.
The most important of these three claims is the first but I shall tackle it later in this post. I'll start with the second assertion. Suppose I am talking to my friend Steven. Suppose in my own mind I define the word "bachelor" as "a man who has never married" but he defines the word "bachelor" in his mind as "a lonely man". We both know Chuck, an unmarried man. I tell Steven, "Chuck is a bachelor" (a synthetic proposition). Steven replies indignantly, "Chuck isn't a bachelor – he has heaps of friends!" (another synthetic proposition). Which one of us is right? It seems the proposition "Chuck is a bachelor" is true for me and false for Steven; conversely the proposition "Chuck isn't a bachelor" is false for me and true for Steven. This difference occurs even though we agree on matters of fact, that Chuck is unmarried but has many friends. Now, the reader may say that I am right and Steven is wrong, that Steven has an incorrect understanding of the word "bachelor". The reader may exclaim, "Everyone knows that the word 'bachelor' means a man who has never married!" But how can you be sure that this is true, that everyone shares this understanding of the word? It seems that in the dispute between Steven and me we must appeal to an external authority. I grab my Oxford English Dictionary and show Steven that the primary accepted definition of the word "bachelor" is "a man is who is not and has never been married" and he may or may not alter his mental definition of the word as a result.
We can go further. The idea that an analytic truth such as "All bachelors are unmarried" is true in all possible worlds is obviously wrong because we can imagine a world in which all the people and all the dictionaries define "bachelor" as "a lonely man", a world in which it is recognised that even married men can be lonely.
It might seem, then, that the only way to escape this impasse is to say that the meanings of words are codified by a kind of priesthood of lexicographers, linguists, scientists, and other experts, and that these people have always agreed on the meaning of words. Even if there is disagreement about semantics among ordinary people, among the laity, there is a generally accepted definition of every word established by some consensus of relevant professionals. We can always appeal to some external authority to ground our understanding of the meanings of words. However, this move also fails. Consider the proposition, "Pluto is a planet". Today, in 2019, we know this proposition to be false. In 2006, the word "planet" was redefined in such a way that it ruled out Pluto on the grounds that Pluto was too small and that some massive bodies in the Kepler belt were larger than it. The definition of a planet (according to Wikipedia) is "an astronomical body orbiting a star or stellar remnant that is massive enough to be rounded by its own gravity, is not massive enough to cause thermonuclear fusion, and has cleared its neighbouring region of planetesimals"and by this definition Pluto isn't a planet. But if we were to say, in 2000, "Pluto is a planet" we would be expressing a true proposition because the word "planet" was defined differently then. According to my Oxford Dictionary, published in 1998, the word "planet" is defined as "a celestial body moving in an elliptical orbit around a star" and, by this definition, Pluto actually is a planet. In fact the dictionary goes on to explicitly state that Pluto is a planet. It seems then that the proposition "Pluto is a planet" was analytically true in 2000 and is analytically false today. This causes all kinds of problems for Kant. We could say that the meaning of a word is established by a contemporary consensus of experts, by the most recent definition, but we would also like to say that all propositions are either unequivocally true or false. What happens if two years from now the astrophysicists get together and agree on a new definition of "planet" which again includes Pluto? How can we know if the proposition "Pluto is a planet" is true or false?
I'll give another example of this problem, the problem that even the generally accepted definition of a word can change over time. In the nineteen-fifties, "homosexuality" was defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as "a sociopathic hatred of the opposite sex". To modern readers, this definition sounds absurd. We all know gay men who have female friends and lesbians who have male friends. In fact, the definition of "homosexuality" as presented by Wikipedia in recent times is constantly changing, is in a permanent state of flux. We only need a cursory understanding of Michel Foucault to realise that this is a serious problem, and that the health of our society depends on the best possible definition of homosexuality.
At this point in the post I will turn to the first claim, the assertion that language is learnt.
According to Kant, analytic truths are known a priori. This means that a proposition like "All bachelors are unmarried" is known independently of experience. Logically this would suggest that infants are born somehow already knowing that the word "bachelor" means "unmarried man". But of course this is absurd. At some point during early life, a child is either explicitly told that the word "bachelor" means "a man who has never married" or infers that this is what the word means from his or her observations of how others use this word. This seems to me quite obvious, yet it leads directly to the conclusion that analytic truths are known a posteori, that they depend on our experiences of having learnt a language.
We can approach this issue, the almost self-evident fact that we learn the meanings of words from others (from dictionaries, books, conversations), from another direction. Suppose I wish to discuss American politics with a friend and coin the word "glockle" to describe people who voted for Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016. My friend obviously won't know what the word "glockle" means and so, before we can have a meaningful conversation about glockles, I first need to say to him, "I define the word 'glockle' as meaning 'anyone who voted for Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016'. " This utterance of mine is neither true nor false – rather it is what John Seattle called a "speech act" and J.L Austin called a "performative". Like the statement "I now pronounce you husband and wife" when declared by a priest or the statement "I sentence you to two years imprisonment" when issued by a judge, my utterance has the effect of changing the world. Subsequently my friend and I can meaningfully discuss glockles – one of us could say for instance, "The Democrat presidential candidates need to win over the glockles in order to defeat Trump"– and such statements will either be true of false. Yet our ability to discuss glockles at all depends on my prior speech act, the utterance in which I defined the word, an utterance that is neither true nor false.
Of course it would be silly to suppose that "glockle" can be associated with some kind of Platonic Idea which I have discovered and named.
All this raises the fundamental and most difficult question of all. What is truth? The common sense answer is that truth is a relation between a proposition expressed in language and a fact about the world. This is the Correspondence Principle – "A" is true if and only if A. But the Correspondence Principle, when subjected to scrutiny, disintegrates. Suppose we say " 'Pluto is a planet' if and only if Pluto is a planet." Given our discussion of Pluto above, it is easy to see why the Correspondence Principle often fails. It doesn't provide a satisfactory account of the relationship between words and the world. I believe that truth is a kind of process, something dialectical, conversational, communal, a horizon that we continually approach but never arrive at. I believe I think in the idea of truth sketched out by Richard Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. I know that this is a vague claim but perhaps I will be able to elaborate on it in later posts. Or in the book I may or may not write.
Friday, 9 August 2019
Evolution and Chance
In this blog, I have discussed quantum physics and I have discussed the Darwinian explanation for evolution. These two theories may seem utterly removed from each other, may seem to deal with almost completely unrelated phenomena, but both are alike in one important respect. They both put probability, chance, at the centre of their respective systems. I have discussed quantum physics before in this blog. In tonight's post I am going to discus evolution again and will return to quantum physics towards the end. I worry that this post may end up a little dry, but bear with me anyway.
The orthodox Darwinian explanation for evolution is quite simple, so simple it can be summarised in a paragraph. We have a population of organisms that are physically very similar and breed with each other, a species. These individuals carry a string of DNA, a genetic code, in the nuclei of their cells (the same code in every cell). Occasionally an individual is born with a slightly different genetic code than that which it could have inherited from its parents. This is known as a mutation. Mutations occur randomly. Almost always the mutation is deleterious to the survival of the organism, but occasionally it is beneficial, resulting in a longer life span and more progeny than its unmutated compatriots. Over time (therefore) the mutation (or adaption) spreads through the population as a whole, causing either the entire species to evolve incrementally or a new species to incrementally emerge. I believe this is a fair summation of the Darwinian argument as it is presented today. Although I feel sure that many evolutionary biologists would criticise this summation as being too simplistic, it is adequate for my purposes in tonight's post and is not just a straw man.
At the centre of modern Darwinism is the idea of a chance mutation. Darwin himself didn't know about DNA and didn't propose the idea of mutations – rather he said that variation existed among members of the same species and that nature 'selected' the fittest individuals. He didn't explain the cause of this variation or how novel changes could appear. It was modern Darwinists who introduced the idea of chance mutations. If we accept the modern Darwinian orthodoxy limned above, we might be inclined to believe that mutations are occurring all the time. How else could evolution occur? How else could variation come into existence? What I am going to argue however is that the standard Darwinian explanation fails because the likelihood of beneficial mutations occurring with the frequency they would need to for evolution to happen is so remote that we need some kind of additional mechanisms to account for it.
If we wished to defend modern Darwinism, it would be helpful to know how often mutations arise in a species. According to the Internet, the global human population increased by close to one hundred and thirty million people last year. How many of those babies were born with small mutations? Of course, no one knows. We could make an estimate, perhaps, if we mapped the genomes of a thousand babies, compared those genomes to the genomes of their parents, and then extrapolated the results. Or we could do the same thing with lab rats (this might be easier). However we carry it out, what we wish to find is the mutation rate, how often mutations occur, or, to put it another way, the probability that an infant will be born with a mutation. In fact, I suspect mutations (rather than recombinations of parental DNA) are extremely uncommon. We hear occasionally about rare genetic diseases but we almost never hear about unique genetic diseases. This suggests to me that the mutation rate, at least among humans, is incredibly low.
Even if mutations do occur, most will either be detrimental to the survival of the organism or will have no detectable effect on the organism. We are interested only in advantageous mutations because it is only advantageous mutations that will spread through the population over time and result in the evolution of the species. Yet the possibility of a mutation being beneficial rather than detrimental or undetectable is also incredibly low. According to Stephen Meyer (see "Mathematical Challenges to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution" on Youtube) the probability of a string of codons on DNA coding randomly for a useful protein rather than gibberish is miniscule. (Note: the four participants in this clip come across a little as crackpots but their arguments are good.) A third factor comes into play. If a pigeon is born with a small beneficial mutation, is, say, born a little smarter than its fellow pigeon rivals, but is eaten by a cat when it is still a fledgling or before it has had an opportunity to reproduce, the mutation dies with it.
What we are interested in is the probability that a mutation will occur that will spread through a population over time until every member of the population carries the same mutation. This probability is the mathematical product of three other probabilities: the probability of a mutation occurring in the first place, the probability of it being beneficial rather than detrimental or invisible, and the probability that the individual who bears this mutation will survive long enough to reproduce as will its offspring. This product is extraordinarily tiny. And this is just the probability of one small incremental change rather than the enormous series of incremental changes that would enable an animal like a hipopotamus to evolve into a dolphin. Now, evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins would argue that even though such evolution is extraordinarily unlikely to occur in a short span of time, it is not just possible but highly probable to occur if the time span given is long enough (say four billion years) and if there are sufficient organisms around. However, I doubt this – I suspect that even four billion years is not long enough.
The argument is simple. Suppose we work out that the chance of a random mutation occurring that is beneficial and will spread through a whole population is one in a billion trillion. And we then find out that such mutations occur one time in a million. We would then be forced to conclude that such mutations aren't entirely random, and we would need to posit an additional mechanism as the cause of them rather than simply ascribe them to blind chance by itself.
This argument could be called the argument from improbability. In this blog I have also presented another argument against the Darwinian orthodoxy (in the post "On Evolution). In this previous argument, somewhat related to the Irreducible Complexity argument associated with Behe, I concluded that, when a significant mutation occurs, it must occur to a number of organisms existing in the same vicinity at the same time. I wish now to present a third argument against the modern Darwinian orthodoxy. We live in an era in which the fashionable school of thought in the social sciences is evolutionary psychology, a discipline I have criticised before in this blog. Although evolutionary psychologists don't seem to want to use this word, they are interested in instincts, behavioural adaptions. For instance, an evolutionary psychologist might say that people are born with an instinctive fear of snakes, an instinct that is genetic. He or she might imply that people are born with a 'fear of snakes' gene. Somehow we go from DNA to a protein, then to an arrangement of neurones in the brain, then to an aversion to snakes. I don't comprehend this move. I simply can't understand how a fear of snakes could be encoded in DNA, in a sequence of bases.
And now it's time to bring in quantum physics. As I argued in the posts on probability and Schrodinger's cat, quantum physics introduces a new concept – objective uncertainty. In a determinist world, people can be uncertain but reality is certain; in the quantum world, however, reality is itself indeterminate, uncertain. For example, if we fire an electron through a slit at a detector, it diffracts and there are a range of possible locations it can arrive at – and we have no way of predicting precisely where. In those posts, I argued, in effect, that everything is connected to everything else, that non-local hidden variables are at play, and I speculated that higher intelligences may operate through the quantum world. This might apply to evolution. I am not arguing that evolution didn't happen. Rather I wish to suggest that mutations are not wholly random and that some kind of intelligence may be working behind them or through them, bringing them about.
The argument about Darwin is often framed as a dispute between die-hard materialists and Christian fundamentalists. The Darwinists believe that evolution has got rid of God; the Christians see arguments against Darwin as bolstering the case for Christianity. Both sides are dogmatists. I am neither a Christian nor a Darwinist. For example, although I suspect some kind of higher intelligence may be at work in the world, and see evolution as evidence for this. I don't necessarily believe this intelligence to be benevolent or loving. This is why I like Rupert Sheldrake. Sheldrake is a practising Angican but not a devout Anglican. Although he talks about telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition, he doesn't ever invoke God as an explanation for things. His theory of 'morphic resonance' is a third way between the dogmatisms of the Christian fundamentalists and the orthodox Darwinists. I am not sure that I believe in 'morphic resonance'. But Sheldrake's view that consciousness is everywhere and that everything is connected to everything else resonates with me.
It may be frightening to give up our convictions. But sometimes the truth involves recognising that no one knows the truth.
The orthodox Darwinian explanation for evolution is quite simple, so simple it can be summarised in a paragraph. We have a population of organisms that are physically very similar and breed with each other, a species. These individuals carry a string of DNA, a genetic code, in the nuclei of their cells (the same code in every cell). Occasionally an individual is born with a slightly different genetic code than that which it could have inherited from its parents. This is known as a mutation. Mutations occur randomly. Almost always the mutation is deleterious to the survival of the organism, but occasionally it is beneficial, resulting in a longer life span and more progeny than its unmutated compatriots. Over time (therefore) the mutation (or adaption) spreads through the population as a whole, causing either the entire species to evolve incrementally or a new species to incrementally emerge. I believe this is a fair summation of the Darwinian argument as it is presented today. Although I feel sure that many evolutionary biologists would criticise this summation as being too simplistic, it is adequate for my purposes in tonight's post and is not just a straw man.
At the centre of modern Darwinism is the idea of a chance mutation. Darwin himself didn't know about DNA and didn't propose the idea of mutations – rather he said that variation existed among members of the same species and that nature 'selected' the fittest individuals. He didn't explain the cause of this variation or how novel changes could appear. It was modern Darwinists who introduced the idea of chance mutations. If we accept the modern Darwinian orthodoxy limned above, we might be inclined to believe that mutations are occurring all the time. How else could evolution occur? How else could variation come into existence? What I am going to argue however is that the standard Darwinian explanation fails because the likelihood of beneficial mutations occurring with the frequency they would need to for evolution to happen is so remote that we need some kind of additional mechanisms to account for it.
If we wished to defend modern Darwinism, it would be helpful to know how often mutations arise in a species. According to the Internet, the global human population increased by close to one hundred and thirty million people last year. How many of those babies were born with small mutations? Of course, no one knows. We could make an estimate, perhaps, if we mapped the genomes of a thousand babies, compared those genomes to the genomes of their parents, and then extrapolated the results. Or we could do the same thing with lab rats (this might be easier). However we carry it out, what we wish to find is the mutation rate, how often mutations occur, or, to put it another way, the probability that an infant will be born with a mutation. In fact, I suspect mutations (rather than recombinations of parental DNA) are extremely uncommon. We hear occasionally about rare genetic diseases but we almost never hear about unique genetic diseases. This suggests to me that the mutation rate, at least among humans, is incredibly low.
Even if mutations do occur, most will either be detrimental to the survival of the organism or will have no detectable effect on the organism. We are interested only in advantageous mutations because it is only advantageous mutations that will spread through the population over time and result in the evolution of the species. Yet the possibility of a mutation being beneficial rather than detrimental or undetectable is also incredibly low. According to Stephen Meyer (see "Mathematical Challenges to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution" on Youtube) the probability of a string of codons on DNA coding randomly for a useful protein rather than gibberish is miniscule. (Note: the four participants in this clip come across a little as crackpots but their arguments are good.) A third factor comes into play. If a pigeon is born with a small beneficial mutation, is, say, born a little smarter than its fellow pigeon rivals, but is eaten by a cat when it is still a fledgling or before it has had an opportunity to reproduce, the mutation dies with it.
What we are interested in is the probability that a mutation will occur that will spread through a population over time until every member of the population carries the same mutation. This probability is the mathematical product of three other probabilities: the probability of a mutation occurring in the first place, the probability of it being beneficial rather than detrimental or invisible, and the probability that the individual who bears this mutation will survive long enough to reproduce as will its offspring. This product is extraordinarily tiny. And this is just the probability of one small incremental change rather than the enormous series of incremental changes that would enable an animal like a hipopotamus to evolve into a dolphin. Now, evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins would argue that even though such evolution is extraordinarily unlikely to occur in a short span of time, it is not just possible but highly probable to occur if the time span given is long enough (say four billion years) and if there are sufficient organisms around. However, I doubt this – I suspect that even four billion years is not long enough.
The argument is simple. Suppose we work out that the chance of a random mutation occurring that is beneficial and will spread through a whole population is one in a billion trillion. And we then find out that such mutations occur one time in a million. We would then be forced to conclude that such mutations aren't entirely random, and we would need to posit an additional mechanism as the cause of them rather than simply ascribe them to blind chance by itself.
This argument could be called the argument from improbability. In this blog I have also presented another argument against the Darwinian orthodoxy (in the post "On Evolution). In this previous argument, somewhat related to the Irreducible Complexity argument associated with Behe, I concluded that, when a significant mutation occurs, it must occur to a number of organisms existing in the same vicinity at the same time. I wish now to present a third argument against the modern Darwinian orthodoxy. We live in an era in which the fashionable school of thought in the social sciences is evolutionary psychology, a discipline I have criticised before in this blog. Although evolutionary psychologists don't seem to want to use this word, they are interested in instincts, behavioural adaptions. For instance, an evolutionary psychologist might say that people are born with an instinctive fear of snakes, an instinct that is genetic. He or she might imply that people are born with a 'fear of snakes' gene. Somehow we go from DNA to a protein, then to an arrangement of neurones in the brain, then to an aversion to snakes. I don't comprehend this move. I simply can't understand how a fear of snakes could be encoded in DNA, in a sequence of bases.
And now it's time to bring in quantum physics. As I argued in the posts on probability and Schrodinger's cat, quantum physics introduces a new concept – objective uncertainty. In a determinist world, people can be uncertain but reality is certain; in the quantum world, however, reality is itself indeterminate, uncertain. For example, if we fire an electron through a slit at a detector, it diffracts and there are a range of possible locations it can arrive at – and we have no way of predicting precisely where. In those posts, I argued, in effect, that everything is connected to everything else, that non-local hidden variables are at play, and I speculated that higher intelligences may operate through the quantum world. This might apply to evolution. I am not arguing that evolution didn't happen. Rather I wish to suggest that mutations are not wholly random and that some kind of intelligence may be working behind them or through them, bringing them about.
The argument about Darwin is often framed as a dispute between die-hard materialists and Christian fundamentalists. The Darwinists believe that evolution has got rid of God; the Christians see arguments against Darwin as bolstering the case for Christianity. Both sides are dogmatists. I am neither a Christian nor a Darwinist. For example, although I suspect some kind of higher intelligence may be at work in the world, and see evolution as evidence for this. I don't necessarily believe this intelligence to be benevolent or loving. This is why I like Rupert Sheldrake. Sheldrake is a practising Angican but not a devout Anglican. Although he talks about telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition, he doesn't ever invoke God as an explanation for things. His theory of 'morphic resonance' is a third way between the dogmatisms of the Christian fundamentalists and the orthodox Darwinists. I am not sure that I believe in 'morphic resonance'. But Sheldrake's view that consciousness is everywhere and that everything is connected to everything else resonates with me.
It may be frightening to give up our convictions. But sometimes the truth involves recognising that no one knows the truth.
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