What Modesty Forbids

I’m sure every reader has his/her way of working her/his way through a book or paper with the help of a pen, underlining and making notes in the margin. The ”notes in the margin”, for me, has settled on a quite restricted number of expressions. There’s ”qb”, of course, for ”question begging”, there is the exclamation mark (which I hardly ever use otherwise) for remarkable statements, there are shorthands for missing premisses, spurious reasonings. and so on. There is the occasional ”good point”, when something strikes me as being just that. And the ”Exactly”, when someone makes a good point with which I agree. Finally, the ”Exactly. Damn it”, when the point is good, I agree, and it is so essential to my own argument that I curse the fact that someone else got to publish it first. (These things tend to happen when your views are true and interesting.)

This happened to me constantly while reading Leonard D Katz’ absolutely superb dissertation ”Hedonism as metaphysics of mind and value” (and yes, my title is a bit of a hommage). In fact, I might as well have put a sticker with ”Exactly. Damn it” on the cover. (His practically book-length on pleasure in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is simply amazing, without doubt the best piece of philosophical writing there is on the subject, and the fact that things still get written about pleasure without reference to either of those two texts is nothing short of a scandal. (Stop it David, you are getting all worked up and excited, and that’s a shame).)

And now it happened again, in the work of Sharon A Hewitt. The most striking resemblance of my view and hers is our claim that goodness and badness are basically phenomenal properties: the experiences of pleasure and displeasure. ”Feeling good” is, in fact precisely that: having that feeling which goodness consists in. I would like to praise her work, because it is really quite brilliant, but it seems to me that modesty forbids it. We have not been in contact while working on our respective dissertations, so either there is a common source (and Katz’ work might very well be it. That, or C.I. Lewis’ ”An analysis of knowledge and valuation”), or we have some sort of snail-telegraph thing going.

What did you Quine today?

”Does it contain any experimental reasoning, concerning matter of fact and existence?” – David Hume

In last weeks installment of the notorious radio show that I’ve haunted recently, I spoke to the lovely lady on my left on the picture below about the use of empirical methods in moral philosophy. The ”use of empirical methods” of which I speak so fondly is, on my part, constricted to reading what other people has written, complaining about the experiments that haven’t been done yet, and then to speculate on the result I believe those experiments (not yet designed) would yield.

Anyway: I have a general interest in experimental philosophy, but I haven’t signed anything yet, you know what I mean? That is: I don’t think (what the host of the radio show wanted me to say) that ”pure” armchair philosophy is uninteresting. Indeed, I believe that any self-respecting empirical scientist ought to spend at least some time in the metaphorical armchair, or nothing good, not even data, can come out of the process.

When coming across a philosophically interesting subject matter (and, let’s face it, they’re all philosophically interesting, if you just stare at them long enough. Much of our discipline is like saying the word ”spoon” over and over again until it seems to loose its meaning, only to regain it through strenuous  conceptual work) I often find it relevant to ask ”what happens in the brain”? What are we doing with the concept? It is obviously not all that matters, but it seems to matter a little. Especially when we disagree about how to analyze a concept, there might be something we agree on. Notoriously, with regard to morality, we can disagree as much as we like about the analysis of moral concepts, but agree on what to do, and on what to expect from someone who employs a moral concept, no matter what here meta-ethical stance. Then, surely, we agree on something and armchair reasoning just isn’t the method to coax it out.

I try to be careful to emphasize that empirical science is relevant to value-theory, according to my view, given a certain meta-ethical outlook. Given a particular way to treat concepts. If we treat value as a scientific problem, what can be explained. Since there is no consensus on value, we might as well try this method. Whether we should or not is not something we can assess in advance, before we have seen what explanatory powers the theory comes up with.

Treating ”value” as something to find out about, employing all knowledge we can gather about the processes surrounding evaluation etc. is, in effect, to ”Quine” it. It seems people don’t Quine things anymore, or rather: that people don’t acknowledge that this is what they’re doing. To Quine something is not the same as to operationalize it, i.e. to stipulate a function for the concept under investigation, and to say that from now on, I’m studying this. To Quine it is to take into consideration what functions are being performed, which have some claim to be relevant to the role played by the concept, and to ask what would be lost, or gained, if we were to accept one of these functions as capturing the ”essence” of it. It is to ask a lot of round about questions about how the concept is used, what processes influence that use and so on, and to use this as data to be accounted for by an acceptable theory of it.

A Lamp, David Brax (yours truly) and Birgitta Forsman (I cannot speak for her, but I’m sure she likes you to). The lamp did not volunteer any opinions on the subject matter, but has offered to participate in a show on a certain development in 1800-century philosophy. Foto: Thomas Lunderqvist

Science Fiction, when the science is not fictitious

Around 50 pages before the end of a Richard Powers novel, I pause and hesitate and fret a bit. Once again, I’m heading towards that unenviable state of having nothing by Richard Powers left to read. ”Generosity” is highly recognisable, veering towards the parodically Powerisian (”Powerful”? The New Yorker ought to have a field day setting titles to reviews). On the one hand, there is the Science (this time around: the science of affective enhancement), on the other: the people doing the science, or being affected by the science (Geneticist, Science-reporter,Psychologist, Writing-Class Teacher, Unaccountably Happy Algerian girl). Powers is that rare thing, someone who writes excellently stuff on both topics. The science is a bit pushed aside this time, made redundant by common knowledge perhaps, and there might be something a bit off about some of the characters (the theme of his former book, the Echo Makers, btw), but in the end, the objection just boils down to the fact that it is too short.

Radio Days

Tonights episode of the chockingly popular radio show ”Filosofiska Rummet” (The Philosophical Room) features Yours Truly, the philosopher, translator and allround splendid person Jeanette Emt and the multitalented David Polfeldt, managing director at Ubisoft Massive and author of children’s books. We will talk about the value of pleasure. I will argue that pleasure is very good indeed, and the other two will suggest that maybe it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be.

And, as I am doing my best to outstay my welcome in the media (really, this romance must come to an end sometime), I’ll be featured in next weeks episode as well, discussing the use of empirical methods in moral philosophy. In short: For the next week or so, I’ll be the spoon in your coffee, the knife that butters your bread.

(Foto: Thomas Lunderquist, Lokatt media)

Stop reading, start writing

My first all too serious philosophical essay was on Heidegger (well, actually, I did a number on the ”positionality” concept in the work of Sartre earlier still, but it would take an insane amount of scholarly obsession for anyone to ever dig that up). The nicest thing said about was that it is ”not as incomprehensible as these things usually are”. The literature I discussed, I found at the University Library, actually going through a number of philosophy journals. I had a computer at the time, which was just barely hooked up to the internet, but didn’t use it for literature searches, just for writing and the occasional email. I spent a lot of time thinking about the subject of my essay, and used a very limited amount of sources.

A year or so later, while working on a different essay, I discovered JSTOR, and for about a month and a half, the printer didn’t get a rest. It suddenly dawned on me that everything interesting had been written about, at length, from almost every perspective, and the goal to find a theoretical position that was not currently occupied, and then to occupy it, suddenly struck me as much more difficult than I’d imagined. I spent the next few years reading more, too much probably, and thinking and writing less.

I used to do all my best thinking during walks and while running (or derogatorily: ”jogging”). Usually in very dull environments, not to distract from the thinking. Then I got an iPod, and started to listen to lectures, podcasts and audiobooks during those walks and runnings. (iTunes university has some great stuff, the podcasts from Nature, and from TED and the RSA are excellent. BBC 4’s ”thinking allowed” and ”in our time” just have me in stitches). And instead of thinking about what I’ve just heard, I tended to listen to another lecture, podcast or audiobook. Similarly with papers, even books. Before I start working on this chapter, I argued, I just need to read this paper, or that book. One wouldn’t like to be caught out ignorant, now, would one? No, one would not.

The all too great availability of other people’s writing and thinking made me quite heavy on the consumer side of science and philosophy, and much less of a producer. It is, of course, a great thing to learn, and to listen, but in order to become a philosopher, it is necessary to start doing it for yourself. To actually not care, for a bit, whether someone has written that same thing before, and been more well read while doing so.

My dissertation took longer than it should have, and I know people who have been, and still are, in that state where they just can’t seem to finish their texts. Partly, I believe, for this reason. They are excellent, well-read consumers and thoughtful, accomplished critics, but seems almost to have forgotten how to actually do philosophy. (The dominance of ”critical” philosophy among published articles is a testament that this tendency is very common indeed). The kind of second-order thinking were you are constantly reflecting on how what you are writing relates to what other people have written tends to stand in the way of confident, genuinely original and interesting work. At some point, you just have to get out of reading mode, and enter writing mode.

Pleasure is very good indeed

Hardly anyone denies that pleasure is good. ”Because it is pleasant” is an excellent answer to the question ”why do it?”, even if some people find it a slightly to self-indulgent one. But so what? Pleasure is good, but so are a lot of things. Justice is great. Knowledge is just excellent. Excellence to has a lot going for it. And True Friendship and Self-knowledge and Health and Success are all good. At least we talk as if they are, and a good theory of goodness, or of any common sensical concept, should respect the objects that we group under the term that expresses that concept. Right?

If we respect our actual evaluations, then, something like pluralism seems to be right.

We could perhaps think up a concept that would cover the things we usually value, and such a concept would probably chime well with our ordinary language (good luck finding such a concept that cover an uncontroversial set of things, however). But when I say that Pleasure is Good, I say something slightly different from when I say that friendship, knowledge or excellence is good. Pleasure has some more intimate relationship to goodness than any of those things. Pleasure is not only one of the things that we value, it is the basic means by which we value. To experience pleasure is already to pass an evaluative ”judgment” on whatever object that happens to be saliently in our mind at that moment.

I believe this means that pleasure should be given a foundational role in the theory of value. The value that accrues to it is much more fundamental than the ”value” we might want to assign to other objects. The scope of the common sensical concept ”value” has probably evolved to extend beyond its humble origin in hedonic processes, but its origin is still relevant to that concept. Pleasure, I say, is not only good, it is very good indeed.

the year of David Mitchell

David Mitchell is no Eddie Izzard, whose free-floating musings on the history of the world can have you in fits and influence the structure of your thinking for weeks after listening to it. Nor is he a Bill Bailey, whose considerable musical talents were featured in this years ”BB’s guide to the Symphony Orchestra” (The recycling of material from earlier shows, especially the brilliant ”Is it Bill Bailey”, shouldn’t bother anyone. How can you get enough of the Belgian Jazz-version of the Doctor Who theme?). David Mitchell is not a comedian for the big arena. He could not entertain you with an impromptu lecture, or lull you to sleep reading anything loud, like a certain S. Fry (whose tweets will be missed, but the prospect of a second installment of his autobiography has me almost indecently excited). And he does not have the good-natured instant rapport with the audience of a Dara O’Briain (as Mitchell’s refusal to dance even a little on ”the big fat quiz of the year” the other night amply demonstrated).

But David Mitchell was the consistently funniest man during 2009. He is simply molded to fit the all-important comedy quiz show format, and 2009 saw him perfecting his sound-bytes and his trade-mark rants. Perhaps too heavily featured in the podcast ”David Mitchell’s Soapbox” but put to great effect in small doses in episodes of ”Qi”, ”Would I lie to you”, ”I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue”, ”Have I got News for you” and ”Mock the week”. He also squeezed in series of both ”That Mitchell and Webb Look” and ”That Mitchell and Webb Sound”, showing that radio actually is the better format for the duo, hosted another series of ”The Unbelievable Truth” on BBC radio 4 and provided consistently interesting, funny and yet utterly common sensical columns in the Guardian. Oh, and there was a new series of ”Peep Show” too, but personally, I find it too painful to watch.

He is certainly not the first british comedian to make a virtue out of being a bit displeased with state of affairs, and being amusingly sarky and witty about it, but in 2009, no one did it more effectively. And his capability to respond to insults should be an inspiration for generations to come.

changing preferences

A number of things are said to happen when you become a parent. One of these is the curious event of changing preferences: an unprecedented, radical and rather immediate switch in interests and priorities which, so it is said, is impossible to imagine beforehand. The last bit is usually added by people who are already parents, and with more than a detectable  hint of smugness. This smugness is earned by not sleeping very well.

(Topic for an another blogpost: the inflated case for first-hand  experience. When people say things like ”you had to be there” I often react ”Well, then you must not be telling it very well”. Not to their face, obviously. Also: don’t say ”this town is too small for me”, it has the metaphorical implication that you are in some important sense bigger than the people for which the town in question is not too small. Rather, say ”I’m not capable of flourishing in this environment”. Or, come to think of it: don’t say that either. You might get a short, sharp visit from the smack-fairy).

What’s interesting about changing preferences is that they muck rational decisions up a bit. If a travesty of the classical model of a rational person is correct, and a rational person is one who acts in accordance with his/her preferences: How can we make the decision that involves changing those preferences rationally? What preference is satisfied by my creating new preferences? It might be a meta-preference: for having preferences that are more easily satisfied, for instance. If you have a preference for chinese food, and there is no good place for chinese food where you live, and you wont move (what? I question your devotion to chinese food, sir) there is a case for you giving up on this preference. At least if you take the preference to be contingent on its own existence, i.e. if there are no preference independent reasons to care for chinese food.

If the change in preferences brought about by having a kid is radical and unforeseeable, it becomes even more difficult to make the decision rationally: you don’t know whether the preferences created will be easy to satisfy, nor what they will involve when it comes to changing your preferences for things that you know genuinely care about. In fact, you might even loose the preference (meta- or not) that made it seem like a rational decision in the first place.

Comparable decisions are to start caring about a sports-team or to use drugs. In particular the latter is comparable, since it has a tendency to consume other preferences. (The drug case is different insofar that it is very rarely a good idea).

What adds complexity to the child-case is that not only do you change your own preferences: you create a new subject of preferences and those are in a very real sense unpredictable in the long run.

Let the record show that so far, there has been a clear net gain in preference satisfaction, notably among the unforeseen ones (such as rekindling my interest for preference changes), and a non-significant loss of previous, important ones.