Conditionals and Future Contingents

Conditionals must be, by their very nature, unsound. They're unsound because they are non-deductive. They express what could be the case, not what is the case. What could be the case isn't what is the case.

Sometimes conditionals are about what will be the case or what is necessarily the case. These conditionals can rely on a certain amount of sound and deductive reasoning. Though even what will be the case isn't the case now. And many sound and deductive systems wouldn't concern themselves with what will be the case in the future. That wouldn't be the domain of deductive logic; even if the future could, as it were, be deductively inferred.

Future Contingents

Many philosophers say that “future contingents” can't be either true or false. Thus this would create a problem for deductive logics.

What about conditionals which tell us what will necessarily be the case now or what is necessarily the case now? Even these cases would be about the future, strictly speaking.

That is, if I say,

“If I drop this stone it will necessarily fall to the ground.”

the falling stone (hitting the ground) is still in the future when the statement is actually made. Thus it's still a future contingent. The future it concerns itself with is just the very near future.

Conditionals don’t deal with what is the case now and what has already been the case. These kinds of necessities aren't the concern of conditionals. You can't, for example, say:

“It's necessarily the case now [i.e., 2006] that if in 1912 someone had dropped a stone it would have necessarily fallen to the ground.”

We can say that it was necessarily the case; though that wouldn’t be a conditional at all (not even on the surface).

Similarly if someone says the following:

“If someone had added 2 + 2 in 1912, then he would necessarily have got 4.”

That appears to be some kind of conditional in that it uses the argument-form “if…then...”. However, it's only an appearance. How could a particular past mathematical addition be verified? Perhaps certain adders were poor adders. Thus not every act of addition would have come out correctly. Of course we could add the qualification:

“If someone had added 2 + 2 correctly…”

Though that isn't an if-then scenario at all: it's a statement that 2 + 2 necessarily equals 4. The truth of the arithmetical addition doesn't depend on any conditions. And conditionals are, of course, about (possible/hypothetical) conditions.

Take this present-moment statement:

“When someone adds 2 + 2 correctly now, he will necessarily get 4.”

This too is about the near future; though still the future. In addition, not all additions can be verified. However, if we're again talking about the necessary truth that 2 + 2 = 4, then this has nothing to do with conditions, as such.

Acceptable Unsound Reasoning

 

Despite the problems with unsound reasoning, most of us (or everyone!) who use such reasoning will still require that our unsound inferences be reliable to some unspecified degree. There'd be no point otherwise.

Zero reliability would make unsound reasoning useless. Alternatively, 100% reliability is impossible. Thus the reliability ratio may be, at times, somewhere in the middle.

This reliability of unsound inferences is sometimes expressed in terms of the reliability of predictions; the explanatory power of its conclusions; whether or not it relies on false, true or unknown assumptions; and what the precise status of the observations utilised are. (E.g., are they good, bad, clear or unclear?)

What also matters with unsound reasonings is the power and utility of the conclusions derived from them. Do unsound inferences and conclusions help us in any way? Are they practical? And so on.

No prediction is foolproof. Who knows what the future may bring? Even predictions about future necessities are philosophically problematic to many philosophers.

Of course inductive reasoning must rely on observations; though that doesn’t stop the inductivist asking questions about the nature and status of his or other people’s observations. How were they experienced? Can we trust those who had them? Was the observational equipment working correctly at the time? Is the observer biased? What assumptions did the observer bring to his observations? What previous observations were required in order to make sense of the observations we're now commenting upon? Were they genuine observations at all? And so on.

There's another way of saying that certain correct/valid forms of reasoning don't lead us to truths. This doesn’t entirely matter because they're still valid/correct (if not sound).

If we observe ten white swans, it's largely correct to infer that swans are white. However, the statement “All swans are white” is still unsound. That is, it's possible that there may be black swans. In addition, the means used to come to that conclusion didn't depend on deductive inferences and the premises might included  past observations; not axiomatic truths or deductively-derived premises.

What other kinds of unsound reasoning are there?

The inductive form is simply one of generalisation. This is something that's of vital importance not just to science and philosophy, but to everyday life as well.

One observes a finite numbers of objects or events, and from that finite (or limited) amount one generalises about what will probably be the case with all other unobserved objects or events. Without such generalisations, we'd need to wait until we'd observed every example (or sample) of the thing in question. This would be impossible to do (in most cases) in a finite amount of time.

Of course mistakes are made when we generalise, as every scientist knows. However, it's still impossible to do without generalisations, both within philosophy and without. Even those philosophers who claim never to generalise do so. In fact that very claim is a generalisation and it's also false.

There are dangers which result from generalising, not just in philosophy.

For example, “All blacks are criminals”, “No blacks are criminals”, “Hegel is a generaliser” and so on. However, never generalising would also be very problematic. Or at least it would be if anyone actually completely abstained from generalising.

Some Newish Takes on Mind-Body Dualism

Quantum mechanics has been used to explain just about everything that's so far unexplainable. Consciousness doesn't escape that net (at least as cast by non-scientists).

For example, perhaps the nature of quantum phenomena can explain (or make sense of) good old-fashioned mind-body dualism:

“… loosen up our thinking and nudge us away from the simple billiard ball model of causation… When this is combined with a certain influential interpretation of quantum theory, dualism can start to seem, not merely, possible, but positively commonsensical!” [2004]

Presumably this is because in the “billiard-ball model of causation”, billiard balls were required to be next to each other (or ‘contiguous’, as David Hume put it) in order to affect one another. Theories of quantum mechanics deny that this is necessary. There's talk of “action at a distance”. However, it's not immediately clear what this has to do with consciousness or dualism in the philosophy of mind.

Is there an inference here from

 

             i) Action at a distance tells us that objects needn't be next to each other to be causally related.

                                               to                                                              

ii) The non-physical nature of mind doesn't need to be physical in order to causally affect the physical.

Isn’t quantum mechanical theory still about physical phenomena? (That is, no matter how far apart they are and no matter how loose the definition of ‘physical’.) If the mind is simply non-physical (or made of mind-substance), then it's not immediately obvious how quantum theory helps dualism. It's not distance that's the issue here: it's the fact that dualists believe that mind-substance can causally affect body-substance.

We need more arguments to accept the relevance of quantum theory for the mind-body debate. So here’s one argument:

“If minds were themselves parts of the material world, they would be, like the camera in Tibble’s box, merely parts of the whole system, hence themselves in a superposition of states.” [2004]

Again, it's not immediately obvious how quantum theory provides some kind of defence for dualism. Not even when we're given a parallel. The argument seems to be that the mind is a superposition of states - as in the Schrödinger’s cat thought-experiment. Would this automatically make minds non-physical?

The other possibility is that the minds are only parts of larger systems. Thus are we to conclude that minds emerge from these larger total systems because of, say, their very complexity?

E.J. Lowe on the Self

One of the major problems with Cartesian dualism is the clear fact that mind-substance is viewed as being completely different to body-substance. The major difference, according to Descartes, is that the mind is non-extended and that the body is extended. What if a contemporary philosopher accepted that account? E.J. Lowe does (partly) accept it. He says that it has relevance to our notion of the self. John Heil expressed Lowe's position thus:

“The self, he holds, is perfectly simple. What could be the parts of a self? You entertain different thoughts, your preferences evolve, and memories come and go. But these are not parts of you in the way arms, legs, hearts, and livers are parts of your body.” [2004]

The self, on this picture, is like a Leibnizian monad. It too has no parts. It follows that our thoughts, preferences and memories can’t be parts of the self because the self is a perfectly simple unity. Not only that: it's non-spatial or non-extended. How can something non-spatial have parts... even in principle?

Thus if we have mental items (of whatever sort), we can't see them as parts of our mind or self. So what are they? How do they all belong together? How, indeed, do they come and go? What do they belong to (if they belong to anything)? How does the unity and continuity of the self come about without physical (causal) connections?

The answer is that mind-substance holds it all together. However, even with mind-substance and non-extension we're still using spatial and physical metaphors like “to bind” and “to contain”. A dualist surely shouldn't be using such metaphors. Despite saying that, the problem is that if he didn't do so, he'd effectively be denying himself the possibility of saying anything. Metaphors and analogies are all he has. And they get him into trouble.

Heil offers us a simple thought experiment to help us determine whether or not dualism is in fact true (or even if it makes sense). He talks in terms of a status and the bronze out of which the statue is actually made. Heil writes:

“Now imagine that the mind or self is related to the body in something like the way the statue is related to the lump of bronze that is on the scene when the statue is one the scene. Selves and bodies have very different identity conditions, so there is no prospect of identifying the self with the body. Moreover, the self is simple (or so Lowe contends), altogether lacking in parts. Nevertheless the self and the body (like the statue and the lump) might share certain properties. If the body has a particular mass, so does the self; if the body is in Gundagai, so is the self. The body and the self do not share all their properties.” [2004]

We can intuitively say that the lump of bronze is the statue. Or, less strongly, that they're identical. Clearly we can't say the same about the body (or brain) and the self. They do indeed have different properties. Though does this mean that they aren't identical? Perhaps the self is X under one description and the body is X under a different description. This is pretty much what Donald Davidson believed in his position of ‘anomalous monism’. That is, the mental and the physical are indeed identical. However, the mental can't be satisfactorily reduced to the physical; nor do they have the same properties. That's because X is seen under two modes of description (just as a table can be described qua table or qua collection of moving molecules).

There's a hint of Leibniz’s law here as well. That is, if the self has different properties, and therefore things true of the body won't be true of the self (as well as vice versa), then the self and the body can't in fact be identical. However, that doesn't seem to work for the lump of bronze and the statue. As Heil says, both share the same mass and both exist in the same place at the same time. Despite that, the lump of bronze must have existed before it was made into a statue. Since that's the case, then the lump will have at least one property that the statue doesn't have: being older than the statue.

If the self is indeed simple, as Lowe contends, then it couldn't have the properties which a body has. This, again, can be accounted for in terms of two modes of description of the same thing. We have a mode of presentation of the self that simply precludes us from giving it any properties. Nevertheless, that's a result of a particular mode of presentation, not of X. If the self is truly simple, how could we really describe it at all, let alone say that it's the same as the body in which it is supposed to exist?

Perhaps the self and body can be identical; though not numerically identical. This doesn’t help because it raises the prospect of identity-at-a-distance (as it were). In any case, Leibniz would would have told that they can’t be identical because they don't share all their properties. In fact the self (whatever it is) shares no properties with the body or brain. How could it? We've already been told that the self is simple and non-extended. How could it share properties with something, the body, which is complex and extended?

The old question therefore arises:

If these radical differences and distinctions between body and self are real, then how can we account for the fact that they're connected in some - or in many - ways?

This isn't only a question of the improbability of causal connections between mind-stuff and body-stuff: it's also about the improbability of any substantive connections between substances which share no properties whatsoever. We must conclude (if we are dualists) that the analogy between self/body and lump/statue is far from being acceptable or precise. The two examples simply aren't parallel in any way.

The most palatable solution (in that it appears to be mid-way between dualism and materialism) is the following juxtaposition of ‘substance monism’ and ‘property dualism’ (as advanced by Davidson, amongst others). Heil writes:

“… 'property dualism', the view that mental and physical properties, though quite different, can be properties of one and the same substance.” [2004]

The problem with this position is that although it provides us with a middle way between hard-core materialism (or eliminativism) and dualism (as well as what seems like a satisfactory explanation), it in fact isn't really much of an explanation at all. How can one and the same substance be the ground or cause of two sets of completely unlike properties? How can a single substance be responsible for these anomalies between properties? It's an explanation; though not a solution to the mind-body problem. Indeed, as has just been said, it's not really an acceptable explanation at all!

Thus some philosophers may accept it (along with supervenience) simply because they don't - or can't - accept any of the alternatives.

References

Davidson, Donald. (1970) 'Mental events'

Heil, John. (2004) Philosophy of Mind: A Guide an Anthology (pages 815-817)
Lowe. E.J. (1996) Subjects of Experience (see chapter 2)

Carnap and Quine on Implication and Entailment

According to Quine, Bertrand Russell (as well as others) confused “if-then” with “implies”.

Quine said that

“there is much to be said for the material conditional as a version of 'if-then', there is nothing to be said for it as a version of 'implies'…” 

We can now say:

material conditional = ‘if... then’

material conditional ≠ implies (or “If A, then A implies B”)

Rudolph Carnap makes this position clear by analysing English usage. He argues:

“to imply” = “to contain” or “to involve”

Clearly this means that in English ‘implies’ isn't that unlike Kant’s position that in an analytic subject-predicate expression the subject-term’s concept ‘contains’ the predicate-term’s concept. Or, more generally, we say that “A implied B” because in the expression of A we can find (as it were) - after analysis - the implied B. Thus when someone implies B with A, he doesn't want to stop people concluding B. He simply doesn't want to state B. Thus we can say that A ‘involves’ B, as Carnap does.

All this is in opposition, so Quine and Carnap thought, to logical consequence:

logical consequence ≠ A implies B

This, Quine argues, is what Russell called ‘implication’. It left

“no place open for genuine deductive connections between sentences”.

Although Quine rejected the linguistic notion ‘implies’ (i.e., “A implies B”), he still believed that deductive connections were still “between sentences”, not between abstract or concrete objects (i.e., propositions and suchlike).

We can now ask if

p ⊃ q = p implies q

According to Carnap and Quine, it doesn't. We can now add:

deductive connection = logical consequence

Finally

implication relation ≠ consequence relation

Even if we study everyday English language, we can still clearly see a distinction between the words ‘implies’ and “was a consequence of”. We can say

i) “John implied B by saying A.”

though we can't say:

ii) “B is a consequence of what John said [A].”

or

iii) “John didn't say B; though it's a consequence of what he said [i.e., A].”

We usually take the word ‘consequence’ as a consequence-relation between B and A. That is

iv) “B is a consequence of A.”

Thus consequence can be a causal connection, as in:

v) “The consequence [B] of John holding that meeting [A] is that there were riots on the streets [B].”

Clearly when we say “John implied B by saying A”, this isn't a causal connection of any kind. It is, in a Kantian way, an instance of the conceptual containment of B in A. Thus we can say that the concept [person] is contained in the concept [philosopher].

Linguistically, we can have the following:

“Child-killers are animals.”

Thus if someone said the above, it would imply that child-killers aren't human beings. Thus:

the concept [non-human being] = the concept [animal]

Even if the concept [non-human being] isn't identical or even synonymous with [animal], we can still loosely claim that

“He implied that child-killers aren't human beings when he called them ‘animals’.”

This situation is complicated by the fact that Carnap continued to believe that

i) a material conditional = an implication

and didn't believe that

ii) logical consequence = an implication

Thus we need to ask: What, exactly, is a logical consequence?

For example, is

p ⊃ q

a case of logical consequence (i.e., q’s being a logical consequence of p)? Or is it an implicational conditional in that q is implied in p? Clearly, because of our prior look at the English language, we can now say that it doesn’t seem right to say that “p implies q”, “q is implied by p” or that “q is the implication of p”. Thus we can intuitively see Quine and Carnap’s point before any logical distinction is made.

A logical consequence relation is a relation of entailment, not one of implication. Thus in p ⊃ q we can say that “p entails q” or that “q is an entailment of p”. An implication isn't the same as a logical consequence. Though does the notation p ⊃ q represent an entailment relation? Actually, entailment is said to be expressed by something stronger.

The notation p ↔ q symbolises entailment. That is, “p entails q”; or “p iff q”. Thus:

i) p ↔ q = entailment relation

and

ii) iff (if and only if) = is part of an entailment relation

References

Carnap, R. (1934) The Logical Syntax of Language

Marcus, Ruth (1990) 'A Backward Look at Quine's Animadversions on Modalities', in Philosophy of Logic, edited by Dale Jacquette.
Quine, W.V. O. (1961) 'Reply to Professor Marcus'

Strawson and Wittgenstein on Descriptive Philosophy

The English philosopher P.F. Strawson (1919–2006) helped to define the notion of “descriptive metaphysics” and also defend it as an acceptable and feasible philosophical position.

There have been many examples of what could have been called descriptive philosophy — if not actually descriptive metaphysics. Because descriptive metaphysics is precisely that — descriptive; so it followed (to Strawson) that it’s not the philosopher’s “task to modify or correct the structure of commonplace thinking”. Commonplace thinking would be left untouched by Strawson precisely because it’s related to what he saw as the “conceptual structure” or “central core [of] human thinking”. Commonplace thinking simply embodies (or expresses) Strawson’s “conceptual structure”. And because that’s the case, such a logically fundamental, universal and a-historical basis to commonplace thinking can’t be changed, modified or corrected even if a philosopher wanted to do such a thing. Such a philosopher would be attempting to tamper with the fundamental forms and logical features of minds.

It’s also been said that ordinary language philosophy was a descriptive kind of philosophy (if not actually metaphysical in nature). In this case, rather than leaving our commonplace thinking alone, ordinary-language philosophers left our “commonplace idioms” well alone.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) put the basic position of descriptive philosophy in his usual radical way. He believed that such a philosophy basically “leaves everything as it is”. In Wittgenstein’s own version of descriptive philosophy, the only task such a philosophy had (at least according to the Tractatus and the Wittgenstein of the first half of the 1920s) is to analyse the propositions of the natural sciences. And even then only to analyse and describe such propositions, rather than modify or correct them. Indeed it would be rather unbecoming of the Wittgensteinian philosopher to correct, modify or alter the propositions of the natural sciences. This was primarily the case in terms of scientific propositions because such things would already contain correct and acceptable “logical forms”. That is, they abided by the rules stipulated in the Tractatus.

Because such a philosophy would only be descriptive (or analytical), then the Wittgensteinian philosopher was left with virtually nothing to do. There was, however, still a basically peripheral role to play: the analysis and criticism of all “metaphysical propositions”.

We’re left with the seemingly contradictory conclusion that otherwise descriptive (or Wittgensteinian) philosophers must become (Strawsonian) “revisionary metaphysicians” — if only when modifying, correcting or rejecting the claims expressed by metaphysicians or in metaphysical propositions. That is, they criticised, etc. the metaphysical propositions deemed “grammatically correct”, though “logically false”.

When it came to the propositions of science, Wittgensteinians were simply pen-pushers. When criticising metaphysical propositions, they too became metaphysicians — revisionary metaphysicians who indulged in (if only in these cases) revisionary metaphysics. That is, a metaphysics that actually wants to change the way we talk and think about the world. However, this metaphysical revision couldn’t be applied to Strawson’s “structure of commonplace thinking” (or the “commonplace idioms” of the ordinary- language philosopher). It certainly couldn’t be revisionary (according to Wittgenstein) when it came to the analysis and description of scientific propositions.

In the early days, Wittgenstein wasn’t really concerned with leaving commonplace thinking (or idioms) well alone. However, Wittgensteinian descriptive philosophy indeed left “everything as it is” when it came to the propositions of science. That said, Wittgenstein did come to believe in leaving ordinary language (or commonplace thinking) well alone. Indeed, at this later stage, Wittgenstein did believe that all philosophy (not only of the descriptive kind) must in the end be a philosophy which leaves everything as it is.

If such a philosophy (along with all the other versions of descriptive philosophy) literally leaves everything as it is, then this obvious question must be asked:

What is the point of this descriptive (or deflationary) philosophy? What would one actually do (as a philosopher) in this Wittgensteinian scheme?

Not only does this extremely radical stance leave philosophers with almost nothing to do; what it argues philosophers can do can also be done by logicians, mathematicians and scientists; along with linguists or even lexicographers. Such a radical (or deflationary) attitude toward philosophy must surely be philosophically suspect, flawed or even illogical in some — or many — ways.

It’s therefore relevant to say here that few analytic philosophers have certainly not accepted the work of the later Wittgenstein in its radical fullness. Some philosophers (e.g., Thomas Nagel, Colin McGinn and Michael Dummett) have even claimed that the conclusions of the late Wittgenstein are so radical and extreme that any attempts to act on — or apply — them would result in destructive and negative consequences for the whole of philosophy. This was seen to be the case to such an extreme that philosophers saw the later Wittgenstein as they saw the “usual suspects” of Continental philosophy (i.e., with their equally radical notions of relativism, historicism, radical contingency, anti-rationalism, anti-science and so on). The consequences of such views were seen as equally destructive and negative. Indeed such destructive consequences and negative beliefs would and have filtered out into the larger communities outside (sometimes well outside) the tiny communities of analytic and Continental philosophers.

In conclusion, it seems strange that a philosophy which argued that all correct philosophy should leave everything as it is should also be one that could have had (at least in principle) a destructive and negative impact on philosophy and the wider world. Surely you’d have thought that only revisionary philosophers (such as, say, A.N. Whitehead, Martin Heidegger and Derrida and their radical restructuring of the entire history of Western metaphysics) would have had a radical impact on philosophy and the wider world.

References

Haack, Susan. (1979) ‘Descriptive and Revisionary Metaphysics’

Strawson, P.F. (1959) Individuals
Wittgenstein, L. (1922) Tractatus
 — (1951/53) Philosophical Investigations

[I can be found on Twitter here.]