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.

december is the blackest month

When we were first dating, my wife to be gave me a box of home-made fortune cookies with personal messages (one of them suggested that I should get a drivers license. Five years later, I finally got around to it. Another simply said ”Heart of Gold, Brain of Jam”. She was on to me at the start). A stream of thoughtful, witty and useful gifts later (she converted me to mac, for instance), the beginning of december brought around  one of the nicest yet: the Liquorice Christmas Calender.

I’ve gone on record declaring my devotion to liquorice, listing it as one of my main sources of pleasure. I also have a  thing for weekday-labeled socks. Alice combined these two things so that each day of december, there is a weekday sock stuffed with delicious liquorice of some variety I haven’t tried before. All have been interesting, and has helped me define my preferences, and some have been just fantastically good eatin´.There is a specialist shop Stockholm which I have yet to visit, but when I do, I now know just what to look for. (I think I’ll wait a bit, though, making january ”liver failure awareness month”).

I try to reciprocate, of course, and hope to have covered some distance by dedicating my dissertation to her.

Calender of socks

The Liquorice Stuffing

when does it get interesting?

We just returned home with our newborn child, who shall remain nameless (but not for long). And, in a very Carrie-like trope indeed: it got me thinking. (Carrie of New York single life fame, not the gym-hall massacre one. Or the one hilariously falling over in the opening credits of ”little house on the praire”): At what age does a human being get interesting? Every now and then I come across opinions, and decided preferences (and you know those interest me no end), in this matter. Most frequently the (faux)controversial opinion is that kids are tedious and uninteresting at least up until the point they develop thoroughly thought through political views and a natural distaste for their parents. Also, they should be able to help you with your computer.

Others require less. Capacity for speech, for instance, and some creative thinking/acting to boot. This preference is guided by wanting a human being to be treatable as an equal, and the relevant equality is one of thought, rather than of bowel movement or need for constant attention. Four-year olds will do for these people. There is a trend in moral psychology to make a big deal out of the stage where kids start to distinguish conventional from non-conventional wrongs, which is usually a bit earlier still and that certainly is an interesting age.

Infants, on the other hand, are often perceived as poop/sleep/crying machines that have the mild added value of smelling quite nice. (Young, single intellectuals – the group I’ve spent the larger portion my life belonging to, and thus have some inside knowledge of – have a hard time realising how they could possibly enjoy the company of, and thus care for, people of this miniscule sort.) They may be cute, and they may evoke some positive emotions, but interesting? Not as such.

I beg to differ (from the people I just kind of made up). Infants exhibit complex behaviors, and while it might seem random beyond the bare essentials, learning does takes place. The study of infants needs to take into account what they actually control. One particular interesting study used the baby’s ability to change the speed with which it sucked on a pacifier to reveal its preferences. We don’t need  to assume fullblown intentions in order to identify interesting behaviors and the beginning of individual differences. To me, at least, the Little One has been interesting from the start.

The media is the message, and the media is gingerbread.

This is the motive from the cover of (for?) my dissertation, made from gingerbread. It is totally edible, but, according to certain critics, a bit hard to digest.

On a lighter note

On a lighter note, here is a picture of some cookies.

(Cookies enabled by my fabolous wife, Alice)

Now, about this response-dependency thing

I am a fan of keeping options left open, and of not leaving open options left undeveloped.  When we find ourselves with conflicting intuitions in situations where intuitiois our only ground for theoretical decisions, it is basically an act of charity to develop a theoretical option anyway, in case someone will find it in their heart to – as we so endearingly say in philosophy – entertain the proposition. (My attitude here, you might have noticed, is a bit counter to my lament about a certain trope in the post below.)

Store that in some cognitive pocket (memory, David, it’s called ’memory’ ) for the duration of this post.

Response-dependency. Some concepts, and some properties, are response-dependent. That means that the analysis of the concept, and the nature of the property, is at least partly made up by some response. To be scary, for instance, is to have a tendency to cause a fear-response. There is nothing else that scary things have in common. Things are different with the concept of danger: Dangerous things are usually scary too, but that is not their essence. Their essence consist in the threat they pose to something we care about,  or should care about. Fear is usually a reasonable response to danger; fear is usually how we detect it. Danger might still be response-dependent, but then fear is not the crucial response.

Response-dependency accounts have been developed for many things. Quite sensibly for notions such as being disgusting. Famously by Hume for aesthetic value. And arguably first and foremost under the name ”secondary qualities” by Locke, and unceasingly since by other philosophers, for colours.  Morality, too, has been judged response-dependent , and a great many things have been written about whether this amounts to relativism or not, and whether that would be a point against it.

Response-dependency accounts of value and of moral properties has a lot going for it. Famously, beliefs about moral properties are supposed to involve some essential engagement of our motivational capacities. And if the relevant property is one our knowledge of which is dependent on some motivational response, say an emotion, this we’re all set. Further, if these concepts/properties are response dependent, it would account for many instances of moral disagreements – we disagree on moral issues when our moral responses differ, and when the difference is not accountable by a difference in other factual beliefs and perceptions. If we accept that responses are all there is to moral issues, we might have to learn to live with the existence of some fundamental disagreements between conflicting responses, and moral views. Relativism follows if there is nothing that moral respones (for the most part, the moral response involved is some kind of emotion) track. What the account gives us is a common source of evaluative meaning in located in the fact that we all share the same basic type of responses. We just disagree in what causes those responses, and about what objects merit the response.

If we insist on locating the value (moral or otherwise) in the object/cause of the response (note that the object and the cause might be different things – we might project an emotion of something that did not cause it. This happens all the time), the response-dependency account results in a form of moral relativism. If one finds relativism objectionable, and there is no way to provide firm moral properties in the cause/object structure of typical moral responses, one might therefore  want to reject response-dependency wholesale. I think this is mistake. If we agree that there is such a thing as a moral/evaluative response, and this response is something that all conceptually competent evaluators have in common, we have our common ground right there, in the response. It is not the kind of relativism where we find that seemingly disagreeing parties are actually speaking about different things altogether. In fact, there is a common core evaluative meaning, and that meaning is provided by the relevant response.

So, to the suggestion then, our theoretical option left open for development: that moral/whatever value is in the response, not in the object of the response. This seems to be the obvious solution once we’ve established that the value is metaphysically dependent on the response, and there is no commonality to what causes the response. If the responses themselves can is something that seemvaluable, and emotions usually do, we should develop that option, and disregard the fact that we tend to project value to the object of mental states. (If we keep on, as I do, and argue that the evaluative component of any emotion consists in it valence, and valence is cashed out in terms of pleasantness – unpleasantness, we have a kind of hedonism at our hands, but this option is open for any response you like).

Nothing is metaphysically more response-dependent than the responses themselves, and yet, this move avoids any objectionable form of relativism, while explaining the appearance of relativism. And, given that the response is motivationally potent, we have an inside track to the motivational power of moral/evaluative properties/beliefs. This, I’d say, makes it a theoretical option worth pursuing.

One might, but I wont

I consider banning the phrase ”one might argue that…” from all my future writings. Since these writings have a better than average chance of being writings in philosophy, this ban would be the equivalent of Perec’s ban of the letter ’e’ from that novel you know you ought to have read already.
You see, it’s such a useful phrase, and it rids you of all responsibility for anything that follows. No referee, however anonymonous, is likely to insert the comment ”no, one might not”. Since philosophy consist to such a large extent of stating propopositions to which one does not assent, dispensing with this trope is perhaps masochistic of me, and might well prove near impossible, but I believe it would be an improving exercise.

Lecturing in the shower

I don’t sing in the shower. It’s not that I don’t sing Period, I will join in when people let me and have even been known to attempt the occasional added fifth or fourth or thereabouts. It’s just not a shower thing. I do, however, prepare lectures in that setting. Trying out how they sound and so on. Thinking is usually a rather unstructured, associative affair, and even writing these post-typewriter days has lost some of it’s definitiveness (as these rather freefloating associations of mine amply demonstrate), but Thinking Out Loud helps getting the clarity and simplicity required for getting the ideas across. Just ask the neighbors in the poorly soundproofed apartment next to ours.

Going Through the Emotions

Here are some words that, stringed together, are bound to make you gasp and salivate with anticipation (thus supporting the James-Lange/Tex Avery theory of emotion): The Non-Conceptual Representational Content of Emotions.

Emotions are tricky things. But what kind of tricky things are they? ”Cognitivists” believe that emotions are at least partly constituted by judgments, wereas non-cognitivists typically claim that emotions are mere experiences, uncommitted to any propositional content.

One problem for cognitivists is that judgments seem to require concepts, and we might want to say that creatures incapable of housing the relevant concepts might nevertheless experience emotions. This depends on what you require from your concept possessors: we can lower the bar, so that most animals have at least some concepts needed for certain emotions. Or we might want to exclude non-humans from the world of full-fledged emotions. Cog and Non-Cog may not disagree over the facts, but only about the terms, and the implied policies.

The problem for non-cogs is that we sometimes treat emotions as justifiable, and it is hard to see what that amounts to if emotions are not judgments. The case is analogous to perception.

Emotions can’t just be judgments since for every judgment , something could be that judgment and yet not be an emotion. I.e. even though emotions might have conceptual content, they are not exhausted by that content. We need more in order to differentiate emotions from states having the same content as an emotion.

Now, representation is a great notion to invoke here, since it’s eminently flexible: to represent somehing is a relational, i.e. non-intrinsic, feature. In order to represent something, even something propositional, you need not yourself have a propositional nature. So an emotion might be something like a pure experience, and still have non-conceptual, representational content – the ”meaning”, as it were, of the emotion, is not intrinsic to the emotion, but derived from its function. When what is represented by the emotion is a judgment, or something to that effect, we can treat it as justifiable. Analogously, again, perceptions represent things as being a certain way, but in order to represent a judgment, it need not itself be a judgment. The fear of a snake is a mental state that represents the snake as being dangerous, but it is not itself the judgment that the snake is dangerous.

Is representation essential to what you feel?  Representations according to Dretske-influenced theories (Tye, Schroeder, probably Prinz), are causal, functional affairs, and it might not be obvious to you what caused your current mental state, or what function that mental state plays. In fact, seeing how one and the same mental state might represent/be caused by different things, it might not even be introspectable what you are feeling. The feeling is obvious to you, but what the feeling is saying need not be.

Are we left with enough to identify and individuate emotions? It seems not. It is not surprising that emotions have the function to represent, since practically all mental states have that function. But that is not all it does. Indeed, there are plenty of reasons to believe that emotions are not exhausted by their function, either, let alone the strictly informational one-

I believe that ”emotion” is a usefully vague notion, but that all emotions have a hedonic component. They are either positively or negatively valenced. Also, any mental state having a hedonic constituent deserves consideration as an emotion. When they are prompted by judgments, or followed by judgments, or just associated with judgments, it makes sense to assess them accordingly. In addition, you may be held responsible for an emotion, even if that emotion is not something you can directly choose to have or not too have: you might be responsible for the judgment that prompts the emotion.

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This post was inspired by reading this book, which I’m sure will prompt (and thus then be represented by) more posts over the next few weeks):

Jesse Prinz: the Emotional Construction of Morals

Another day, another photoshoot

For the second time this week, I find myself drinking wine in the early afternoon, prompted by a photographer. This time, it’s my wife who is organizing the event, a december food thing. Our kitchen often looks like this.