William James on Truth… According to Richard Rorty

 

Many 20th century philosophers set themselves the task of defining (or redefining) the words “true” and “truth”. They wanted to see how these words were actually used in their many and varied contexts. This meant that such philosophers didn’t want to embark on the ancient — and perhaps fruitless — philosophical journey of discovering “the nature of truth” — as if truth were a pre-existing entity (or property) which has a determinate and circumscribed nature regardless of how individuals, groups and societies use the words “truth” and “true”…

However, let’s go back in time to the 19th century here and start with the American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842–1910).

The American philosopher Richard Rorty (who died in 2007) put James’s position in the following way:

“If we have the notion of ‘justified’, [then] we don’t need that of ‘truth’.”

Rorty went on to claim that James believed that the word

“‘[t]rue’ must mean something like ‘justifiable’”.

On this reading, then, it seems that we could (or should) literally erase the word “true” from our language, and simply substitute it with the word “justifiable”. Yet if “true” actually means “justifiable”, then there’s simply no need to erase the word “true” at all.

What’s more, as a pragmatist, James wouldn’t have deemed the erasure of the word “true” as a viable or sensible option. In other words, the everyday uses of the words “true” and “truth” have pragmatic utility. However, just don’t reify (or Platonise) them.

William James wasn’t really setting up a literal identity between truth and justification. In other words, it didn’t make sense to view these terms in the abstract.

Let’s now spell out James’s (possible) position:

A true statement is a statement which has been justified (or whose utterance is justifiable).

As can be seen, the statement above is about other statements: it’s not a statement about the physical or metaphysical world.

So what about the the thing (or the property) truth?

Well, we can bite the bullet and argue that truth is indeed an abstract property. It’s only a property of certain statements… However, even this isn’t really the case because the predicate “is true” (or the word “true”) is applied to certain statements — it’s not an actual property of those statements themselves. (This is vaguely equivalent to putting a dress on a mannequin: the mannequin and the particular dress aren’t the same thing.) Thus, outside the context of those statements we deem to be true (or which have been justified), perhaps there is no property that is truth.

Despite all the above, Rorty still believed that James was in “error”. He continued:

“The error is to assume that ‘true’ needs a definition [ ].”

Rorty wasn’t taking truth to be a thing or even a property. Instead, “truth” (or “true”) is a word which human beings use about certain statements. So beyond what human beings say about these particular statements, there is no thing (or property) which is truth.

More precisely, when we say that statement S “is true”, this is simply an affirmation of that statement. That said, we may still believe (to get back to James’s position) that statement S is justified (or justifiable), and therefore we’ll go straight ahead and affirm it…

Of course, we needn’t necessarily be committed to James’s particular stress on justification, let alone be committed to believing that the word “true” can be substituted with the word “justified”.

Rorty then went on to claim that idealists too made a similar (or the same) error about the word “truth” (or the property truth). He wrote:

“This was a form of the idealist error of inferring from

‘We can make no sense of the notion of truth as correspondence’

to

‘Truth must consist in ideal coherence.’ [ ].”

So the notion of “truth as correspondence” (which idealists had a problem with) fails because, again, if there’s no thing (or property) truth in the first place, then truth can’t be “ideal coherence” either. [There are, surprisingly, many other problems with the intuitively plausible truth-as-correspondence idea. See here.]

So there are two things which should be noted here:

(1) It is certain statements (i.e., not facts, properties, things, states of affair, etc.) that are true. (Truth isn’t a thing or a property separate from certain statements.)
(2) By which criteria do we decide that statements are true — even if we accept that truth is not a thing or a property?

 

Explaining Qualia?

 

“The problem of explaining these phenomenal qualities is just the problem of explaining consciousness. This is the really hard part of the mind-body problem.”

— David Chalmers [See source here.]

What does the Australian philosopher David Chalmers mean by the the word “explaining” (as in “explaining consciousness”)? That is, what is it to explain qualia or to explain consciousness?

What would an explanation of phenomenal qualities look like — even if there is one… somewhere?

This isn’t to say that there is — or there isn’t — an explanation: it’s simply to ask what such an explanation would look like.

David Chalmers

More particularly, it can be suspected that no explanation would ever satisfy David Chalmers… or any other non-physicalist for that matter. And that could quite possibly be because there can be no explanation which pleases everyone — at least not of the kind that Chalmers demands.

Perhaps this is, after all, a bogus problem.

What does that mean?

It means that the Hard Problem isn’t a problem at all. [I’ve gone into this in greater detail elsewhere. See here and here.] Either that, or no explanation would ever satisfy all those philosophers who’re demanding an explanation.

More technically, would such an explanation of phenomenal properties be an explanation from a first-person (or subjective) point of view?…

Well, that wouldn’t satisfy many scientists and philosophers.

Okay.

Would such an explanation be a neuroscientific (or behaviourist or functionalist) explanation?…

Well, that wouldn’t satisfy Chalmers and many other philosophers.

So what about uniting these physical (or functional) accounts with first-person accounts?

Is that possible?

Well, Chalmers gave it a try with his notion of “structural coherence”.

Anil Seth

But, firstly, the British neuroscientist Anil Seth (kind of) hinted at structural coherence when he recently wrote the following words:

“[I]f we instead move beyond establishing correlations to discover explanations that connect properties of neural mechanisms to properties of subjective experience [] then this gap will narrow and might even disappear entirely.”

David Chalmers himself tackled this issue many years ago — i.e., in 1995. So, 29 years ago, Chalmers wrote:

“This is a principle of coherence between the *structure of consciousness* and the *structure of awareness*.”

Yet, later, Chalmers also notes the problems here:

“This principle reflects the central fact even though cognitive processes do not conceptually entail facts about conscious experience [and] not all properties of experience are structural properties.”

Simply put: we can say that if x is coherent with y, then x and y still can’t be one and the same thing. Thus, we don’t have any literal identity here…

So doesn’t the Hard Problem remain?

What about the many and varied verbal reports of consciousness and/or qualia?

Daniel Dennett

A person may verbally report his experience/s of particular phenomenal properties, and that might well have satisfied, say, Daniel Dennett. [See here.] However, and so the argument will go, such reports would still only be verbal reports of qualia — not accounts of qualia themselves (whatever that may mean!).

What’s more, perhaps even if there were such an account of qualia themselves, then it still couldn’t — almost by definition — be united with a scientific account.

Thus, there’s both a definitional gap and an “explanatory gap” between scientific accounts of phenomenal properties, and the subjective (or first-person) accounts of the (supposedly) very same things — and never the twain shall meet.

Chalmers will argue that the (or his) Hard Problem remains.

The upshot here is that David Chalmers will never be satisfied with the accounts of Daniel Dennett, (many) scientists, etc. And Dennett and these scientists will never be satisfied with the accounts of Chalmers and the “mysterians”.

Again, there’s a large gap between the two positions.

What’s more, even those much-advocated structural correlations (i.e., between neural states and conscious states), and Chalmers’ own (stronger?) notion of structural coherence, will never bridge that gap…

Perhaps nothing will.

Perhaps nothing can.

Downward Causation at the Level of the Mental… and Election Results?

 

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“Events at higher levels — levels where emergent properties become evident — can in turn feed back and affect events at lower levels. For example, chronic stress, a mental event, can cause parts of the brain to become smaller. Similarly, an economic depression or the results of an election affect the lives of the individuals who live in that society.”

— Stephen M. Kosslyn [Source here.]

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It must be stated right from the start that the passage above simply assumes that there are emergent properties. Thus, only then does Stephen Kosslyn tackle what he calls “downward causality”. So readers will need to know if Kosslyn’s examples are ones of strong emergence or weak emergence.

There may be a problem here.

Kosslyn says that “chronic stress” (which he classes as a “mental event”) can “cause parts of the brain to become smaller”.

Here, Kosslyn is assuming that mental events aren’t at all physical. In simplistic terms, then, this could be read as a form of dualism.

So it’s important to stress that a mental event (such as chronic stress) may also be physically embodied in (parts of) the brain — and also in the body as a whole.

To repeat. Chronic stress must be physically embodied (or instantiated) in the brain and the body — even if it’s still deemed to be a mental event.

This may — or does — mean that (to use Kosslyn’s words) “parts of the brain” are affecting other parts of the brain — as well as parts of the body.

We can tackle this from a different angle.

Kosslyn’s words may — or do — mean that some given x can fall under two different modes of presentation. However, this modes-of-presentation idea isn’t identical to Gottlob Frege’s notions of sense and reference. It refers, instead, to a mode of presentation from the the “first-person perspective”, and a mode of presentation from the “third-person perspective”. In both cases, then, the same x is being presented in two different ways.

More broadly, Kosslyn’s “events at higher levels” are as physical as anything else. However, it’s just the case that such events aren’t identical to any single “element” which gives rise to them. Added to that, such events at higher levels are phenomena experienced from the first-person perspective.

So all this may be a case of the physical affecting the physical, rather than the non-physical affecting the physical. And, if that’s the case, then this may not be a case of downward causation at all!… Or, at the very least, the words “downward causation” need qualifying.

Kosslyn also mention an “economic depression” and the “result of an election”.

An economic depression and the result of an election are both abstractions. In other words, all the precise, many, varied, and individual physical details which make up an economic depression or an election result are factored out. That is done in order to abstract up to to something more basic and simple — i.e., an abstraction. That abstracting process, then, is essentially linguistic and due to the (human and cognitive) requirement for conceptual simplicity. However, reifying an abstract entity (such as an economic depression of the result of an election) may well make it seem to have a nature which encourages us to think in terms of it bringing about some kind of downward causation.

Yet an abstraction isn’t a physical phenomenon.

More mundanely and linguistically, the words “economic depression” make up an abstract noun (or, at the least, an abstract noun prefixed with an adjective), and the same is true of the words “election result”. But this is just a factor of language and the cognitive utility of such abstract terms. It certainly doesn’t tell is that something non-physical (or emergent) is affecting something physical.

Consequently, thinking in terms of abstract entities (i.e., at the same time as not fully realising that) makes it seem that a non-physical phenomenon is taking part in a process of downward causation. Yet this is to believe that these abstract terms (i.e., in a language) are actually non-abstract things: things are deemed to be non-physical in some way, and also responsible for cases of downward causation.

The American philosopher Mark A Bedau is also suspicious of such strong emergence. He writes:

“Although strong emergence is logically possible, it is uncomfortably like magic. How does an irreducible but supervenient downward causal power arise, since by definition it cannot be due to the aggregation of the micro-level potentialities? Such causal powers would be quite unlike anything within our scientific ken. This not only indicates how they will discomfort reasonable forms of materialism. Their mysteriousness will only heighten the traditional worry that emergence entails illegitimately getting something from nothing.”

The point here is that the “higher-level” entity or process (in Kosslyn's examples, chronic stress, economic depression and an election result) is deemed to to be over and above “the aggregation of the micro-level potentialities”…

Mark Bedau

Well, it is if seen purely as an abstract entity/process or an abstract term. However, abstractions don’t have downward causal powers. Indeed, they don’t have any causal powers at all. (The entities and processes which abstract terms refer to, if indirectly and circuitously, do have causal powers.)

So if we’re talking about abstractions which are (tacitly) taken to be real non-abstract things, then the latter aren’t “something form nothing”. In a loose sense, we can take the abstractions themselves as being something beyond the aggregation of the micro-level potentialities. But, of course, supervenience theorists aren’t talking about abstractions qua abstractions.

Downward causation and strong emergence aren’t one and the same thing. That said, Mark Bedau does connect them together — as does Stephen Kosslyn himself in the opening passage. In other words, that which strongly emerges is also deemed to have “supervenient downward causal power”. Thus, in Kosslyn’s examples, chronic stress, economic depression and an election result are deemed to be (strongly?) emergent phenomena which, nevertheless, have downward causal power. Yet, as hopefully shown, these examples are simply linguistic or conceptual abstractions. And such things can’t have downward (or upward!) causal power. However, whatever collective or individual physical elements these abstract terms indirectly refer to, will indeed have causal power. None of them are individually emergent at all.

So, if anything is emergent (if only in a loose sense), then it’s the linguistic (or conceptual) abstractions we use every day (such as “stress”, “election result”). Yet these terms won’t help much because such abstractions alone can’t have downward causal power.

There is Science. And There Are Individual Scientists.

 

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Of course, you can’t have science without flesh-and-blood scientists. Yet, in broad terms, it can still be said that science is an abstraction which has been derived from the work of many individual scientists over hundreds of years.

Science is science.

And scientists are scientists.

So it’s wise not to confuse what an individual scientist states — or believes — with science itself.

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The evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis once said that Richard Dawkins is “arrogant” and “solipsistic”. Richard Dawkins, in turn, said that Margulis is an “extremely obstinate” person who “doesn’t listen to argument”. These two examples — among many others — help show us that scientists are emotional creatures. They also often have fragile and/or large egos — just like you, me and all the other readers of this piece.

Scientists also hold strong political and moral views. Arguably, those views sometimes impinge on their science. And that’s precisely why the distinction between science and scientists should be made…

All this basically means that Stephen Hawking wasn’t theoretical physics. Michael Mann and James Hansen aren’t climatology. And Richard Lindzen and Freeman Dyson aren’t climatology either. Richard Dawkins isn’t evolutionary biology or Darwinism. And Stephen Jay Gould isn’t evolutionary biology either. Anthony Fauci isn’t immunology or medical science…

And Brian Cox, Nigel DeGrasse Tyson and Michio Kaku aren’t the whole of science.

To state the obvious: scientists are human beings. So, like all human beings, they’re emotional creatures who also have strong political and moral views. Not only that: those views sometimes impinge on their science…

And — again — that’s precisely why the distinction between science and scientists should be made.

It’s also worth making a distinction here between the following:

(1) Those scientists who use science (or specific scientific theories) to advance their prior political goals, values and ideologies. 
(2) Those scientists who believe that science itself is always political (i.e., regardless of the specific goals, values and ideologies of particular scientists).

Of course, there can be much overlap between (1) and (2).

Some commentators believe that science itself is (always) political. In that, they’re following the footsteps of Soviet agronomist and biologist Trofim Lysenko (1898–1976), who divided science into “bourgeois science” and “proletarian science”. (Lysenko had a problem with the Darwinian notion of competition too.) And other commentators — even some scientists — speak of “gendered science” and “white male science”. [See note.]

However, most scientists wouldn’t say that science itself is political. They may, instead, say that science can be politicised. However, it can be argued that some (perhaps even many) scientists do use their scientific theories to advance their prior political goals and values…

Of course, highly-politicised scientists (or those activist scientists who use science for political ends) may argue that these distinctions are naive or problematic…

But they would do…

Wouldn’t they?

And all that, again, is a good reason to distinguish science itself from the words and theories of individual scientists.

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Note:

Take this passage from an article published by the Times in the 1930s, which discussed the views of Nazi scientists and mathematicians:

“[L]ogic alone was no sufficient basis for them, and that the German intuition which had produced the concepts of infinity was superior to the logical equipment which the French and Italians had brought to bear on the subject.”

 

Relationalism/Relationism and its Violent Hierarchy: Relations vs Things

 

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[The word “things” is used to refer to objects, entities, particulars, individuals, etc.]

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“Relationism” and “relationalism” are terms which denote two different philosophical positions. The following is one account of both terms:

“For relationalism, things exist and function only as relational entities. Relationalism may be contrasted with relationism, which tends to emphasize relations per se.”

Relationism is said to simply emphasise the relations between things: it doesn’t deny that things exist.

With relationalism (i.e., with an added “al”), on the other hand, “things exist and function only as relational entities”. In other words, if there were no relations, then there would be no things.

However, on analysis, the distinctions between these two isms appear to break down — at least in certain respects.

Relationalism is like ontic structural realism in that the latter eliminates things (as in “every thing must go”). Relationism, on the other hand, simply places relations in an important position in any metaphysics.

Having said all that, it’s hard not to see the importance of relations — even if one also accepts the existence of things. (One can also see the vital importance of relations when it comes to — particularly — physics.) Yet, on the other hand, one can’t really see how things could be entirely eliminated. (This may largely depend on how the word “thing” is defined.)

In addition, relationalism itself can be read as not actually being eliminativist (i.e., about things) at all. After all, this metaphysical position may simply have it that things aren’t what’s called “self-standing”, which isn’t in itself a denial that things exist. Alternatively, we can say that literally all a thing’s properties are relational. In other words, things don’t have intrinsic properties. Thus, in a weak (or even strong) sense, if all things only have relational properties (and such properties literally constitute things), then in one sense things are are indeed eliminated from this metaphysical picture. To put that more simply: if a thing’s relations (or relational properties) were eliminated, then it would no longer be that thing. Indeed, it would no longer even exist!

Despite all the above, it’s still hard to make sense of the idea that, to use Lee Smolin’s words, “the world is made of relations”.

What does that mean?

The same goes for Smolin’s claim that “all properties are about relations between things”.

In any case, Smolin explicitly states his relationist (or Leibnizian) position in the following passage:

“There is no meaning to space that is independent of the relationships among real things of the world. [] Space is nothing apart from the things that exist. [] If we take out all the words we are not left with an empty sentence, we are left with nothing.”

However, there may be a problem here (again) with the use (above) of the word “relationist”.

On my own reading, Smolin seems to go one step beyond relationism in order to delve into the domain of relation[al]ism. What I mean by this is that — to repeat — it can be said that relationism simply emphasises the relations between things: it doesn’t deny that things exist. With relationalism (with an added “al”), on the other hand, “things exist and function only as relational entities”. In other words, if there were no relations, then there would be no things.

The arguments above can be used against ontic structural realism, which is very much like relationalism (at least in these respects).

Ontic Structural Realism

James Ladyman and Don Ross offer a list of four statements which they believe summarise the position of what they call “standard metaphysics”.

Take (1):

“There are individuals in spacetime whose existence is independent of each other. Facts about the identity and diversity of these individuals are determined independently of their relations to each other.”

The problem is how to take the word “independent” in the above.

One can happily accept individuals (which is a similar term to particulars), and also believe they that they aren’t independent of other individuals. In other words, the reality of individuated objects, and their lack of independence, aren’t mutually exclusive.

What’s more, one can accept the “identity and diversity of these individuals”, and also deny that such individuals are “determined independently of their relations to each other”. In other words, why is a commitment to individuals necessarily also a commitment to their complete independence from all other individuals (or from relations, events, processes, etc.)?… Unless this is true by definition.

Rovelli’s Binary Opposition: Relations vs Things

This seeming (to use a term from Ferdinand de Saussure) binary opposition between relations and things is given a scientific and historical reading by Carlo Rovelli in the following:

“But physics has long been asked to provide a firm basis on which to place relations: a basic reality underlying and supporting the relational world. Classical physics, with its idea of matter that moves in space, characterized by primary qualities (shape) that come before secondary ones (colour), seemed to be able to play this role [].”

The very phraseology in the above seems odd.

Surely no physicist or scientist would ever have thought in terms of a “relational world” at all. So perhaps that’s precisely Rovelli’s point. In other words, there is indeed a relational word, but physicists simply haven’t seen it that way. Yet if physicists haven’t seen the world this way, then why were they (according to Rovelli) “asked to provide a firm basis on which to place relations”?

The odd thing is that a philosopher, scientist or layperson could accept most of what Rovelli argues, and still believe that things are important — or even vital.

So is Rovelli simply inverting what he sees as the violent hierarchy in which a supreme importance was supposedly given to things in Western philosophy and physics? In other words, is Rovelli now simply putting interactions and relations in the place of things? In addition, if he is doing so, then why is this clear and blatant reversal of a previous hierarchy a better philosophical position?

Lee Smolin’s Relationism/Relationalism

Lee Smolin (who was mentioned a moment ago) cites Gottfried Leibniz as a relationist. Or, at the very least, he sees Leibniz as being a relationist when it comes to space and time. So, unlike Newton, Leibniz

“wanted to understand [space and time] as arising only as aspects of the relations among things”.

Smolin sums up the two opposing positions when he says that “this fight” is

“between those who want the world to be made out of absolute entities and those who want it to be made out of relations”.

Smolin adds that this opposition is a “key theme in the story of the development of modern physics”. [See note 1 on Smolin’s philosophy of space and time.]

In terms of Leibniz again. Leibniz’s position (as expressed by Smolin) is that space and time don’t exist — at least not as independent phenomena. Instead, space and time essentially arise as ways of making sense of the (as Smolin puts it) “relations among things”. In other words, space and time are the means by which we plot the relations between things. That basically means that if there were no things, then there would be no space and time either. That is, space and time aren’t (to use Smolin’s word again) “absolute”: they’re a consequence of things and their interrelationships.

Nonetheless, if space and time don’t exist, then what are these things moving about in?

It can be supposed, of course, that both space and time come into being as soon as there are things which have relations with one another…

But how does that work?

Even if space and time do spring into existence as soon as things spring into existence, then it’s still the case that things move about in space, and exist through time.

So here are two alternative conclusions:

i) Space and time depend on things and their relations.

ii) Things and their relations depend on space and time.

The obvious way out of this opposition is simply to say that there’s no hierarchy involved here: spacetime and things depend on each other. That is, space and time aren’t more important (or fundamental) than things, and things aren’t more important (or fundamental) than space and time.

What’s called “relational theory”, however, is indeed eliminativist about space. This theory has it that if there were no things, then there would be no space either. Relational theory is eliminativist about time too in that if there were no events (in space), then there would be no time.

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Note:

It’s hard to decide if Lee Smolin’s position on space and time is a purely metaphysical position, a position within physics and cosmology, or a metaphysical position on the physics and cosmology. Whichever option is taken will make a big difference to how readers should (or will) interpret his positions on this particular subject.

For example, an entirely metaphysical position on space and time may run entirely free of how they’re tackled in physics and cosmology. (You wouldn’t expect this to be true of a physicist like Smolin himself.) Of course, there may also be a degree of interplay between the metaphysics and the physics and cosmology. However, this isn’t always the case.