Wishful Thinking And Other Philosophical Reflections 9783110321722, 9783110319118

Table of contents :
Contents
PREFACE
Chapter One WISHFUL THINKING
Chapter Two AGENCY AND THE FUTURE
Chapter Three MIND-MATTER PARTNERSHIP
Chapter Four ON MORALITY AND ETHICS
Chapter Five QUASI-OBJECTS
Chapter Six LEGISLATED QUANTITIES
Chapter Seven TOTALIZATION AND ITS PROBLEMS
Chapter Eight PHILOSOPHICALCOUNTERARGUMENTATION
Chapter Nine ORIENTATIONAL PLURALISM
Chapter Ten ANALYTICITY RECONSIDERED
Chapter Eleven ON ISSUES OF EXPONENTIALGROWTH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
NAME INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Nicholas Rescher Wishful Thinking And Other Philosophical Reflections

Nicholas Rescher

Wishful Thinking And Other Philosophical Reflections

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Philosophical Reflections Contents Preface Chapter 1: WISHFUL THINKING

1

Chapter 2: AGENCY AND THE FUTURE

11

Chapter 3: MIND MATTER PARTNERSHIP

15

Chapter 4: ON MORALITY AND ETHICS

31

Chapter 5: QUASI-OBJECTS

43

Chapter 6: LEGISLATED QUANTITIES

47

Chapter 7: TOTALIZATION AND ITS PROBLEMS

57

Chapter 8: PHILOSOPHICAL COUNTERARGUMENTATION

63

Chapter 9: ORIENTATIONAL PLURALISM

69

Chapter 10: ANALYTICITY RECONSIDERED

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Chapter 11: ON ISSUES OF EXPONENTIAL GROWTH

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Bibliography

99

Name Index

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About the Author

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PREFACE

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uring 2007–2008 I continued my longstanding practice of writing occasional studies on philosophical topics, both for formal presentation and for informal discussion with colleagues. While my forays of this kind have usually been issued in journal publications, this has not been so in the present case so that the studies offered here encompass substantially new material. Notwithstanding their thematic variation, these exemplify a problem-oriented method in the treatment of philosophical issues that is characteristic of my philosophical modus operandi and inherent in its endeavors to treat classical issues from novel points of view. For I am usually more concerned with what should be said about a philosophical question than with what X, Y, and Z have said about it, and am inclined to address issues of the latter sort primarily as a means for addressing the former.

Nicholas Rescher Pittsburgh PA December 2008

Chapter One WISHFUL THINKING 1. BIG WISHES

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ishful thinking is a characteristically human capability—and a deeprooted one at that. For the thought that “It would be a fine thing if X were so” involves two characteristic human capacities: the imagination of unrealized conditions, and the evaluation of states of affairs, actual or possible, in point of desirability. The objects of wishful thinking can of course be large or small. But three issues are particularly significant in this regard, namely those indicated by the questions: What would I ideally want in respect of the following if I could have things my own way: —God —Society —Self

Let us briefly consider these three issues in turn. 2. THEOLOGICAL WISHING So: what sort of God would you want there to be if you could have matters your own way? The question here is not whether one believes that God exists—clearly a question about God—but rather a question about oneself, about one’s own wishes and desires. (One must be careful not to change the subject!) Some people are wish-atheists. If they could have it their way, there would be no God at all. The prospect of an all-seeing spirit concerned to observe, judge, and possibly disapprove their thoughts and actions fills them with unease. As they see it, a godless world means less need for feel-

Nicholas Rescher • Philosophical Reflections

ings of guilt and inadequacy. For those who view matters in this light, a godless world is a prime desideratum of personal comfort. By contrast we have the wish-theists. Among these, some will want a personal guardian, protector, mentor—someone to look out for their wellbeing and to ensure that all goes well for them and theirs. Then, too, it seems that some people would relish the harsh judge who separates the wheat from the chaff and condemns the latter into the allconsuming fire. Yet others yearn for the protective father who forgives his errant children and shields them against the natural consequences of their follies. Clearly, there are many possibilities here.1 Very different things are at issue with such volitional as contrasted with ontological theism. In principle, one can believe in the reality of a God whose existence one does not welcome, or on the other hand, one can yearn for the existence of a God in whose reality one does not believe. In a way, volitional atheism is a far more drastic position than doxastic atheism, seeing that the volitional atheist is someone who, irrespective of whether he does or does not believe in God, would prefer to have him nonexistent, and would do away with him if he could. And so, two decidedly different questions arise in this context: • What sorts of God does X wish for? • What is the reason why X wishes for this sort of God—what is there about such a God that leads X to wish for him? It is clear that decidedly divergent approaches are involved here, seeing that the first set of questions looks to beliefs, and the second to reasons and grounds. The former issue pivots on a person’s convictions. But the latter pivots on a person’s values. Accordingly, where someone stands on this set of issues speaks volumes—less, perhaps about the status and nature of God than about that individual himself. To know of someone what kind of God they really wish for is to gain deep insight into their condition and nature. An interesting case is posed by the volitional theist who sees his commitment to God as a matter of value-based desire or, at most, hope—rather than a probatively assured confidence derived from the evidential impetus of revelation, mystical encounter, or rational demonstration. In the backdrop of such a theism there looms something that is essentially utopian—a mind’s-eye view towards an ideal order that one would have to exist if only one could manage it. What is at issue is a fundamentally evaluative

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position rather than one that bears doctrinally on existence as such: a position that reflects one’s deepest hopes, wants, and fears. Volitional theism is not to be identified with what is generally known as fideism. For what is at issue is not a belief undertaken at the behest of the will rather than the intellect—of willing to believe or trying to believe (as per what St. Thomas Aquinas characterized as actum intellectus secundum quod movetur a voluntate ad assentiam; ST II, ii, 4, 2c). Something along the lines of a Jamesian “will to believe” is not required by volitional theism. Its pivot—to reemphasize—is the evaluative matter desire and hope, not the cognitive matter of belief. Accordingly, a strongly committed volitional atheist takes a rather extensive and not particularly sympathetic line. He goes beyond the daunting dictum that “God is dead” to add: “And good riddance, too.” His stance is that of the person who says “I just can’t think of any sort of being worthy of the name of God whose existence I would be prepared to welcome.” Such a position does not say much about God, but it speaks volumes about the person at issue. For of course there are many possible versions of volitional theism. Does one want a God who would avenge one’s wrongs and wreak havoc on one’s enemies—a God who labors for the advancement of one’s tribe or clan (or who assures victory to one’s side in battle), a God of justice to punish wrongs and reward good deeds, or a God of love, understanding and forgiveness? Clearly, a substantial range of variation exists, and people betray much about themselves in positioning themselves in such a spectrum. But enough of God. Let us now turn to man—and specifically to man in society. 3. SOCIETAL WISHING Perhaps Plato’s Republic qualifies as the founding work of societal imagination, but the claims of St. Thomas Moore’s Utopia do not come far behind. So in the spirit of such ventures, one can ask: What sort of sociopolitical system would I ideally like to see in operation for me and my fellows, if I could have it my own way? What sort of socio-political lifecontext would I view as ideal for people as they are rather at they ought to be? Obviously, this, too, is an issue on which there will be widespread disagreement. And once again, where a given individual’s choice lies will tell a great deal regarding his view of the human condition, with the anarchist,

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for example, having a view of things decidedly different from the law-andorder aficionado. In the end, the sort of society that a rational person would want is doubtless that into which one could most comfortably insert oneself—one that is user friendly from one’s own point of view. But of course the self that is at issue here is not “the man without qualities” whose personality, tastes, dispositions, and idiosyncrasies are hidden behind a Rawlisian “veil of ignorance.” Instead, it is apt to be the flesh-and-blood individual that one happens to be. Just this is why one’s utopism affinities are so revealing. They, too, speak volumes about oneself. So let us now turn to this matter of a self, but approaching it once again from the angle of wishful thinking. 4. SELF-ORIENTED WISHING What sort of person would I ideally like to be? What would I want to make of myself? What would I really like to do with my life if I had an unfettered choice? The question here is not, of course, that of one’s heroes. It is not a question of wishing one were a Beethoven or Renoir—or Bismarck. Accepting oneself as one is is part of the deal. In thinking through the issue of selfregarding wishes it is important to distinguish between fate and luck. Fate relates to the very conditions of one’s existence—for example, the time, place, and parentage into which we are born. Luck, by contrast, relates to the fortunate and unfortunate events and encounters we meet with as our life moves along within those nature-mandated constraints. It is by fate that you were born a contemporary American male/female. It was by luck that you first encountered your beloved spouse. Consider the analogy of cardplaying—say at bridge. It was by fate that you were dealt the hand you have, but it was a matter of luck that the play so evolved that chance gave you an opportunity to make the most of it. And here the difference between wish and hope also comes into operation. Wishing is not the same as hoping. The factor of common-sense reasonableness comes in between. One can wish for pretty much anything— the pie is the sky. The sensible person can only hope for those developments whose actualization has some actual chance of realization. Beyond this lies the sign of forlorn hopes and irrational expectations. After all, we may have no hope whatever of ever becoming the person we would wish to be. You may wish that your fate were different, but it would be fanciful to

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the point of madness for you to expect this totally unrealistic wish to be realized. By contrast, to wish that your luck would change for the better is not hopeless—thought to expect this to happen may well be not only unrealistic, but also open you up to the pains of disappointment. Nevertheless such a hope can be constructive in a way that a mere fanciful wish cannot. For it may well provide an incentive for making or remaking oneself—of opportunity, means, and motivation to become what one feels one can and should be. But in any case, it is just this, namely what we would hope for, that is relevant in the present deliberations—and deeply revelatory of the sort of person we at bottom are. After all, what could be more telling than that since the issue is one of aspiration—and aspiration defines the person. Even as home is where the heart is, so self—one’s true self—will be where one’s wishes and hopes are ultimately invested. 5. WISHING AND RATIONALITY Philosophical discussions of rationality have almost always focused on beliefs. The questions that have dominated the field are on the order of: “What are X’s reasons for believing that p?” But of course, rationality applies just as much to wants and wishes. When someone believes some thesis, we can ask why they believe it—and expect an answer. And exactly this same issue also arises when someone yearns for something. In general, beliefs are backed by other beliefs: someone believes p because they believe q (and believe that q implies or requires p). And the situation is exactly the same with wants and wishes. In general X wants Z1 because he wants Z2 and believes that Z1’s obtaining will conduce to Z2’s obtaining. However, we cannot go on indefinitely wishing Z1 because Z2 and Z2 because of Z3 and so on. At times one wishes for something not in relation to other wishes, but just because one sees it as having value. For when something is acknowledged as having value, there is no need for anything further to undervalue a rational desire for its realization. And so, the natural and ultimately decisive rationale for wanting or wishing lies in the guidance of values—in seeing a certain state of things as having inherent value and intrinsic merit, as deserving pursuit on account of its own value.

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Nicholas Rescher • Philosophical Reflections

6. THE ROLE OF IDEALS Granted, in theory wishing can be sterile, unproductive, pointless. But it certainly need not be so—and often is not so in practice, seeing that wish projection can be a potent stimulus and incentive to action. Human aspiration is mercifully not restricted by the realities—neither by those of the present moment (from which our sense of future possibilities can free us) nor even by our view of realistic future prospects (from which our sense of the ideal possibilities can free us). Our judgment is not bounded by what is, nor by what will be, nor even by what can be. For there is always also our view of what should be. The vision of our mind’s eye extends to circumstances beyond the limits of the possible. A proper appreciation of ideals calls for a recognition of man’s unique dual citizenship in the worlds of the real and the ideal—a realm of facts and a realm of values. It is remarkable that nature has managed to evolve a creature who aspires to more than nature can offer, who never totally feels at home in its province, but lives, to some extent, as an alien in a foreign land. Those who feel dissatisfied with the existing scheme of things, who both yearn and strive for something better and finer than this world affords, have a touch of moral grandeur in their makeup that deservedly evokes admiration. Skeptically inclined “realists” have always questioned the significance of ideals on the ground that, being unrealizable, they are pointless. But this fails to reckon properly with the realities of the situation. For while ideals are, in a way, mere fictions, they nevertheless direct and canalize our thought and action. For while ideals are irrealities, they are nevertheless irrealities that condition the nature of the real through their influence on human thought and action. Stalin’s cynical question, “But how many divisions has the Pope?”, betokens the Soviet Realpolitiker rather than the Marxist ideologue. (How many soldiers did Karl Marx command?) It is folly to underestimate the strength of an attachment to ideals. Though in itself impracticable, an ideal can nevertheless importantly influence our praxis and serve to shape the sort of home we endeavor to make for ourselves in a difficult world. Expelled from the Garden of Eden, we are cut off from the whole sphere of completeness, perfection, comprehensiveness, and ultimacy. We are constrained to make do with the flawed realities of a mundane and imperfect world. But we aspire to more. Beset by a “divine discontent,” we cannot but yearn for that unfettered completeness and perfection, which (as

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empiricists rightly emphasize) the limited resources of the human situation cannot actually afford us. Not content with graspable satisfactions, we seek far more and press outward “beyond the limits of the possible.” It is a characteristic and worthy feature of man to let his thought reach out toward a greater completeness and comprehensiveness than anything actually available within the mundane sphere of secured experience. Homo sapiens alone among earthly creatures is a being able and (occasionally) willing to work toward the realization of a condition of things that does not and perhaps even cannot exist—a state of affairs where values are fully and comprehensively embodied. He is an agent who can change and transform the world, striving to produce something that does not exist save in the mind’s eye, and indeed perhaps cannot actually exist at all because its realization calls for a greater perfection and completeness than the recalcitrant conditions of this world allow. Our commitment to this level of deliberation makes us into a creature that is something more than a rational animal—a creature that moves in the sphere of not only ideas but ideals as well. After all, life is a single-opportunity venture. We cannot reset the program, go back to the start, and play the game over again. And human life is an exercise in self-creation. To fail to be guided by duly scrutinized wishes, to fail to pursue one’s dreams, is a wasting of opportunity. Perhaps luck will run against one. But in the end blaming matters on bad luck is decidedly superior to self-recrimination for wasted opportunities. A knowledge of their evaluative ideals once again gives us much insight into people. “By their ideals shall ye know them.” 7. ETHICS Moralists standardly focus upon actions. Their concern is usually directed at what people do and addresses the nature and motivation of their action. In this regard they lead to take an overly legitimatic view, for by and large, in legal regards, where corrective considerations are at issue society does well to downplay wishes and put intentions on the back burner.2 But to apply this limitation to morality would not make sense. For of course the law focuses upon action and concerns itself with what people actually do and not with what they merely contemplate and consider doing. But with morality, matters stand differently. While there is good and sufficient reason why the law should focus upon acts, there is no good reason why ethics and morality need be so practicalistic about it. From a moral and evaluative point of view what sort

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of person someone is is every bit as much manifested in what that individual thinks as by what that individual does. And in this regard what an individual wants and why they want it becomes a critical consideration. But in matters of education, where formative considerations are at issue, a society is naturally entitled to let thoughts, motives, and wishes come into consideration. The good citizen is marked as such not merely and only by his acts, but by his wishes, wants, and aspirations as well. 8. UNREALISIM AND DESIDERATURM COMPLEMENTARITY Wishes have their problems. One of them is heedlessness. An oft-cited cautionary admonition has it that one should “Be careful about what you wish for.” For when wishes are granted us, this can have unforeseen consequences and involve unexpected systemic interactions. Bad things can happen when wishes are granted. A second big problem with wishes inheres in their putative unrealism. We can, and no doubt frequently do, wish for things we deem unlikely or even impossible. To this extent our wishes can be unrealistic. But there are different levels of infeasibility. Sometimes we wish that things would happen which we realize full well just aren’t going to. And there are different levels of infeasibility and unrealism here. We may wish that a friend would give up a bad habit, and yet know full well he isn’t going to because he simply can’t. We may wish that human nature would be different from what it is—that man would give up his cruelty to man, but we know better than I expect it. One putatively striking context in which this sort of thing happens is with what has been characterized as matters of “desideratum complementarity.” This phenomenon arises when two (or more) parameters of merit are linked in a see-saw or teeter-totter interconnection where more of factor 1 automatically ensures less of the factor 2. Here gains on the one scale only come at the expense of losses on the other. It lies in the nature of things that their desirable features are in general competitively interactive. A conflict or competition among desiderata is an unavoidable fact of life, seeing that since positivities cannot all be enhanced at once since more of the one can only be realized at the expense of less of the other. Situations of trade-off along these general lines occur in a wide variety of contexts, and many parameters of merit afford instances of this phenomenon. Thus as the medieval knight-in-armor soon learnt to his chagrin, safety and mobility are locked into a conjunction-resistant conflict when it

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comes to dealing with his armor. Or consider the homely situation of a domestic garden. On the one hand, we want the garden of a house to be extensive—to provide privacy, attractive vistas, scope for diverse planting, and so on. But on the other hand we also want the garden to be small— affordable to install, convenient to manage, affordable to maintain. But of course we can’t have it both ways: the garden cannot be both large and small. The desiderata at issue are locked into a see-saw of conflict. Regrettably, desideratum complementarity is pretty well inevitable with any complex, multidimensional good whose overall merit hinges on the cooperation of several distinct value-components. In all such cases we have a teeter-totter, see-saw relationship of the general sort here characterized as desideratum complementarity. Beyond a certain point, augmentations of the one are simply incompossible with augmentations of the other (to use Leibniz’s terminology). There is always a trade-off curve that characterizes the decrease in one parameter of value that is the unavoidably exacted price for an increase in the other. Consider an automobile. Here the parameters of merit clearly includes such factors as speed, reliability, repair infrequency, safety, operating economy, aesthetic appearance, road-handle ability. But in actual practice such features are interrelated and it is unavoidable that they trade off against one another: more of A means less of B. It would be ridiculous to have a supersafe car with a maximum speed of two miles per hour. It would be ridiculous to have a car that is inexpensive to operate but spends three-fourths of the time in a repair shop. Invariably, perfection—an all-atonce maximization of every value dimension—is inherently unrealizable because of the inherent interaction of evaluative parameters. Throughout such cases of desideratum complementarity cases we have the situation that to all intents and purposes realizing more of one benefit entails a correlative decrease in the other. We cannot have it both ways, so that the ideal of achieving the absolute perfection at issue with a concurrent maximization of every parameter of merit at one and the same time lies beyond our grasp as a matter of principle. In the interest of viability, some sort of compromise must be negotiated seeing that the concurrent maximization of desiderata is now automatically unrealizable. For absolute perfection consists in the concurrent realization of every relevant parameter of merit. But whenever different sorts of merit stand in a teeter-totter relationship it is clearly inevitable that they cannot both achieve a maximal degree at one and the same time. Desideratum complementarity is a clear indication that the idea of absolute perfection is alto-

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gether inapplicable and inappropriate in many evaluative situations. The holistic and systemic optimality of a complexly articulated whole will require some of its constituent value components to fall short of what would ideally be desired for them considered in abstractly detached isolation. So here the concurrent maximization in every relevant positivity is simply unavailable in this or indeed any other realistically conceivable world. All that one can ever reasonably ask for is an auspicious combination of values—an overall optimal profile. For in cultivating ideals there comes a point of counterproductiveness where “the better is the enemy of the good.” Accordingly, one does well to distinguish between hyperbolic wishes that are effectively hopeless and hopeful wishes that stand some realistic chance of realization. Ideals as such are oriented at a maximum. But in their cultivation it is the optimum of a balanced accommodation and harmonization that we must seek. Otherwise our wishes become infused with the vitiating unrealism of a hopeless fancy—a pie in the sky. Like the dog in Aesop’s fable one then bays for the moon. And this will inevitably be penalized by the bane which affects so much of our wishful thinking— namely disappointment.3 NOTES 1

The author’s Human Interests: Reflections on Philosophical Anthropology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), offers some further variations on this theme.

2

Not entirely. The degree of culpability in wrongful killing (murder) or injurious action (hate crimes) can appropriately come into it.

3

This chapter evolved from a paper presented at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio in December of 2008.

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Chapter Two AGENCY AND THE FUTURE

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retty much everyone agrees that we cannot change the past. But most of us are convinced that we can change the future. When one speaks of changing the future, one does not (or should not) mean changing it from what it is irreversibly destined to be given that the present is what it is. (If Fred is dead now we cannot have it be tomorrow that he has never expired.) The science-fiction prospect of travelling backwards in time to avert disapproved actualities is simply too far-fetched. Rather one (presumably) means “changing it from what it would otherwise be if one did not presently act on the matter.” Actually, in the context of agency, there are four futures or—more cautiously formulated—four different ways to looking at the future. They are: •

the future as it will evolve if the agent does not intervene.

•

the future as the agent thinks it will evolve if he does not intervene.

•

the future as it will evolve if the agent does intervene.

•

the future as the agent thinks it will evolve if he does intervene.

The object of rational planning is to endeavor to realize the optimal result of having the actual future be identical with that which is envisioned as desirable. However, the imperfection of human knowledge being what it is, there is no way ever to produce a totally failproof guarantee that this will be so. After all, the realities being what they are, we have no guarantee that the actual future will ever be just as we envisioned it. Slippage is always possible here. So how are we to manage rational planning for the future? Fortunately, we have observational access to past futures. And just this affords us with the resources for planning. For the basis of planning is experience. One thing that we learn from experience is that different ranges of phenomena are variously stable. In parts of the globe the temperature is volatile, in parts it is uniform. In some cultures life follows a fixed pattern, in

Nicholas Rescher • Philosophical Reflections

others it is in constant flux. But conditions are not always and everywhere benign in this respect. Experience teaches that our knowledge of the future is spotty. Predicative foresight of the future is only possible with stable phenomena—in matters where the future is like the past. As David Hume rightly insisted, the predicative presupposition that the future is like the past underlies all of our claims about the future. And we can never have unconditional guarantees here. All purposive action is future-oriented. It aims at bringing about a condition of things which, in the agent’s judgment, would otherwise not—or probably not—obtain. But things being what they are, the agent inevitably acts on the face of potentially mistaken views about the future. A rational agent cannot but acknowledge the possibility of error in the judgment of future events. For it is simply a fact of life that our knowledge of the future is imperfect—that the prospect of being mistaken here is an unavoidable fact of the human condition. After all, it is always today; tomorrow never comes. We inevitably live in the present. The future is never a present reality to us, all we ever actually have in hand is the envisioned future. Imagination is our only window that is presently open to the future. As far as we are concerned, the future is a thought construct, every bit as unreal as centaurs and unicorns. No-one has ever observed the future. Aristotle was the first theorists to address explicitly the problem of the future. In On Interpretation he noted that the future can be open in respect of its occurrences, so that (for example) it is as yet indeterminate which side will prevail in the sea battle projected for tomorrow. Whether this indeterminacy is ontological in that the actual outcome remains undecided or whether it is merely epistemological in that in being unknown and unknowable is an issue detracted by philosophers to the present day. Like the future itself, its determination appears to be an open question. One of the prime tasks of scientific inquiry is to afford us a better grasp of the future. This automatically makes the discovery of nature’s laws into the one of the pivotal aims of the enterprise, seeing that, by definition, these laws are always and everywhere the same. Scientific progress always carries advances in predictability in its wake. But the whole course of its history teaches that this impacts upon the course of human affairs only to a very limited extent. The fog of uncertainty in which we make our life’s journey never lifts to all that great an extent.

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The most stable feature of the world is the inevitability of change. The Greek poet Simonides spoke wisely of the all-devouring truth of time. And just herein lies the basis for the inherent recalcitrance and uncertainty of human agency. We must live our lives and conduct our affairs with a view to a future whose realities lie largely outside our ken and control. All human endeavor is subject to riskiness and uncertainty. To live is to give hostages to fortune.1 NOTES 1

This paper was originally published in the Baltic Journal of Philosophy, vol. 1 (2009).

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Chapter Three MIND-MATTER PARTNERSHIP 1. A TWO-SIDED COIN

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he salient characteristic of free agency is the exercise of mental control over bodily movements. But how is this possible in view of the intimate interrelation of mind and matter—of mental processes and brain-physiological transactions? How can the deliberate choice of people possibly function independently of causal determination by brain processes? Given its apparent dependence on the brain, how can mind possibly exert dominance over matter? As psycho-physical determinism sees it, freedom of choice and decision is a thought illusion. The outcome of any choice or deliberation is a result of the associated physico-physiological processes of the brain, which are determined—and indeed pre-determined—by the world’s state at times long past on the basis of nature’s laws. Viewed in this light, human consciousness in general and deliberation and choice in particular are epiphenomena supervenient upon the physico-physiological processes of the brain. However, the interpretation of most empirical studies of psycho-behavioral aspects of free will is often seriously muddied by a failure to achieve due conceptual clarity here. They misinterpret the fundamental fact that the interrelation of mind and body is mutually reciprocal. Granted, we here have a mind-body coordination with these two resources operating in unison, and thereby have what one recent writer refers to as: The Correlation Thesis … to the effect that there exists for each discriminable conscious state or occurrence [in the mind of an agent] a theoretically discernable [characteristically coordinate] brain correlate.”1

Nicholas Rescher • Philosophical Reflection

But even with a rigid, lock-step mind-brain coordination there yet remains the question of who is in charge. Which is the dependent and which the independent variable? Who commands and who follows? And the tighter the coordination, the more pressing this question becomes. Unison of operation will not as such establish primacy of control. And this critical point is almost universally overlooked. For coordination is a two-way street. Changes in the psychological states carry changes in cerebral physiology in their wake: when the mind frets the brain buzzes. And conversely, changes in brain states carry changes in mind-states in their wake. The coordination of mind and matter—however tight—does not put matter into the driver’s seat. For here things can go either way. One can think of mental experience as a matter of the mind’s awareness of what the brain is doing. And conversely, one can think of brain activity as the brain’s response to, or reflection of, what the mind is doing. But there is no reason to think of either of these as an inevitable arrangement, excluding the prospect that sometimes the direction of determinacy runs one way and sometimes the other. Any adequate mind-body theory must accommodate two facts of common experience: 1. That mind responds to bodily changes (drugs, fatigue, anesthetics). 2. That the body responds to many of the mind’s demands (to stand up, walk about, hold one’s breath, etc.) 2. THE ISSUE OF INITIATIVE Consider the following oft-maintained contention: An act can be free only if its productive source is located in the thoughts and deliberations of the agent. But this is never the case because the tight linkage of mind-activity to brain-activity means that the thoughts and deliberations of the agent’s mind are always rooted in and explicable through the processes at work in the agent’s brain.

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To see what is amiss here consider the classic freshman-physics setup of a gas-containing cylindrical chamber closed off by a piston at one end. The temperature inside the chamber is lock-step coordinate to the distance of the piston from the fixed wall of its container: when the piston moves, the temperature changes correspondingly, and conversely when temperature-changes are induced, the piston moving correspondingly. But this condition of functional lock-step correlation leaves the issue of initiative wholly open: one may either be changing the temperature by moving the piston, or moving the piston by changing the temperature. Thus lock-step coordination as such does not settle the question of the direction of determination of which of those coordinated variables is free and which is dependent. The fact that two parameters are lock-step coordinated does not settle—or even address—the issue of processual initiative. Again, consider a children’s teeter-totter or, alternatively, a pulley arrangement as per

Here the up-or-down motion of the one side is inseparably tied to the corresponding motion of the other. And this illustrates the larger point: however tight and rigid the functional coordination between two operative agencies may be, the issue of initiative and changeinauguration is something that yet remains entirely open and unaddressed. Mark Twain’s tendentious question “When the body is drunk, does the mind stay sober?” is perfectly appropriate. But then the inverse question “When the mind panics does the body remain calm?” is no less telling. The crucial thing about a free decision is that it be determined not FOR the agent by forces and factors beyond his control, but BY him, and that this determination proceed from the agent’s motives and beliefs (so that no adequate explanation of its occurrence can bypass these). Moreover, those motives and beliefs themselves must be autonomously formed (i.e., not imposed upon the agent by externally

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manipulated undue influence). Then, too, the outcome of that decision must not be a foregone conclusion at some earlier stage that precludes the prospect of a “change of mind” on the agent’s part. Finally, even though agent-deliberation might possibly be subject to a complete 1-to-1 correlation between brain processes and thought processes, the connection is subject to the further consideration of which is the dependent and which the independent variable in effecting the decision at issue. However, subject to all these conditions, free will is altogether compatible with a coordinative “determinism” of sorts, viz. one in which the agent himself is the crucial inaugurating factor. Consider the following argument. “Our thought-processes correspond to physico-mental processes in the brain which, as such, answer to nature’s laws of cause and effect. Ergo, those fundamental physical-chemical processes of inert extra-mental govern and determine what occurs in the realm of thought as well.” There is a deep flaw in this reasoning—a flaw that lies in a failure to realize that correspondence and correlation neither settles the issue of causation, nor that of initiative. All of those myriad illustrations of an intimate connection of thought to brain activity are simply immaterial to the issue of who is in charge. For connectivity, however close, cannot itself settle the question of whether mind responds passively to brain-states changes or whether it actively uses the brain to its own ends. Coordination as such is no help here. For even with a rigid coordinative correlation between brain-state physiology and mind-state conceptuality, the issue of which variable functions independently and which dependently—which includes changes and which responds—is yet unresolved. Be the coordination or amalgamation ever so tight-woven the questions change—imagination remains open. And there is no reason why this cannot be a two-way street with some transactions going in the one direction and others in the other. Mind-body coordination does not, as such, put the brain in charge. Irrespective of how tightly the operations of the mind are interlinked with those of the brain, this does not settle—or even ad-

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dress—the issue of initiative, the question of whether it is mind or brain that is what Moritz Schlick called the “original instigator.” 2 For the scientistic determinist, to be sure, agents are productively inert—what they do is always the product of what happens to them: they simply provide the stage on which the causality of nature performs its drama. The voluntarist, by contrast, sees intelligent agents as productively active participants in the drama of the world’s physical processuality. And the reality of it is that mind-brain correlation cannot effectively be used against him. It is simply fallacious to think that a lock-step interlinkage between brain activity and thought puts the brain in charge of the mind. Consider the following set-up:

A

↑

B

Now that: a = the number of steps from A b = the number of steps to B Note that inevitably a + b = 10. So once we fix a, we thereby automatically fix b at 10 – a; and once we fix b, we automatically fix a at 10 – b. And now whenever our instructions relate to a as per • Set a at 4! then a is the independent, and b the dependent variable. (And inversely so when the roles of a and b are interchanged.) The variable that responds passively in the setting of a temporal or procedural process is the dependent one, and the active initiation of change in such a process is the active one. And so even in the case of lock-step coordination the question of free vs. bound variables remains. It is not that brain and mind are distinct and competing operators or potencies. Like the teeter-totter in our analogy, they are simply

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two poles or polarities of one connected overall field of processuality with mental activity as its mental side and neurophysiological activity as its physical side. Even as the page now before the reader has its physical aspect (the ink-marks on paper) and its mental aspect (the statements whose meaning is being weighed), so our thoughtactivity has its brain-side in physiological activity and its mind-side in the realm of understanding. The printed words and their meaning are in lock-step coordination and go completely hand-in-hand. But when I read, the mind responds to the body; when I write the body responds to the mind. Of course the mechanics of physical processes cannot be left aside. Take newspapers. They are produced entirely by the operations of mechanisms. Every letter on every paper can be accounted for mechanically. But in tracing back the causal chain of development one will eventually reach a level of extra-mechanical and specifically human inputs. So it is with the operator of brains and bodies (lips and fingers included). Nevertheless, in explaining what those lips say and what those fingers write, one will ultimately come to a point where thought indicates processes within those lock-step coordinated machinations of the brain-mind complex. With any system in which there are functionally coordinated factors (be they temperature/pressure or supply/demand or whatever) a change in the one can engender a reciprocal change in the other. The relationship of lock-step coordination at issue is open to two way implementation, according as it is a change in parameter No. 1 the conclusion in an accommodating change in parameter No. 2 or the very reverse. Lock-step coordination leaves the issue of control—of independent vs. dependent variable—entirely open. And there is no reason to think that the situation at issue with mind-brain interlinkage is any different from the general run in this particular respect. In this perspective, the brain-mind complex is seen as an emergently evolved dual-aspect organization where the impetus to change can lie sometimes on the one side and sometimes on the other. For the direction of determination remains open: given these interlocked variables, the question of the dependent-vs.-independent status is wholly open and the question of initiative unresolved. And the fact

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that mind and brain sail in the same boat is no reason why mind cannot occasionally seize the tiller. What is at issue is a partnership of coordination not a state of inflexible master-servant subordination. In particular situations, the initiative can lie on one side or the other—all depending. But all depending on what? How does it get decided where the initiative lies? Consider once more the freshman physics chamberand-piston set-up. Move the piston and the situation in the chamber changes: pressure and temperature will respond. Conversely, change the situation in the chamber (by modifying its temperature/pressure condition) and the piston will respond. The processual interlinkage is rigorously fixed: pressure and temperature move in lock-step. But the direction of influence remains a wide-open issue whose resolution depends on the overall modus operandi of the set-up. Initiative lies in the systemically developmental issues of how change unfolds. Even if thought processes are in choc-a-bloc alignment with physical processes, as long as the initiative (in the dependentindependent variable mode) is sometimes with the mental rather than physical side we have all that is needed for free will. For the crux here is that sometimes thought can initiate action. Thus, consider once more the aforementioned pulley set-up. When the cube rises, is this because someone is pushing up on it or because a bird has alighted on the sphere? The system itself taken in isolation will not answer this for you, but the wider context—the overall synoptic processual context—will provide the information needed to decide where the initiative lies. Where the activity starts and what stands at the end of the developmental line is all a matter of the order systemic arrangement within the holistic context. And the free will situation is much the same. There is good reason to see the mind-brain interconnection in just such terms. And here, too, the linkage as such does not set a fixed direction to the initiative and control of changes. There indeed is a tight correlation, but productivity functions along a two-way street. The correlation of mind and brain is no more an obstacle to thoughtinitiated physical responses than it is an obstacle to the evocation through thought responses of physical stimuli. My annoyance at the

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Nicholas Rescher • Philosophical Reflection

pin-prick is a triumph of matter over mind; my extraction of the pin a triumph of mind over matter.3 What we have here, then, is a situation of coordination and reciprocity rather than that of a unidirectional dominance/subordination. Being anxious can make the pulse race; but then again, sensing one’s pulse racing can induce anxiety. The interconnection and interaction of mind and body can work both ways. Granted, when the brain is dead the mind no longer works. But then as long as the mind is working the healthy brain responds. On this perspective, thought is not an epi-phenomenon to physical processes, but a co-phenomenon coordinate with certain ones among them. Thinking is not something the brain does: it is done by a mind that uses the brain as its instrument. Perhaps the most cogent recent attempt “to reinstate the spiritual self as the controller of the brain” is J. C. Eccles, How the self controls its Brain (Berlin: Springer, 1994). For present purposes, it need not be argued that this is generally the case, all that need be contended is that it can be and occasionally is so. When my finger wiggles because I decide to move it, for the sake of illustration, then the mind-side of the mind-brain complex sets the brain-side into motion. By contrast, when I hear the alarm clock ring, it is the brain-side of the mind-brain complex that alerts the mind-side to a wake-up call. The interlinkage at issue with the mindbrain amalgamation leaves the issue of the direction of motivation— be it brain-initiated mind receptivity or mind-inaugurated brain responsiveness—as an issue open to further resolution. With agent causation originating in the mind, the agent is active; with physical considerations originating in the brain the agent is passive. Both are perfectly possible. And each happens some of the time with neither enjoying a monopoly. Obviously if the outcome of a decision is the result produced by processes—be they physical or psychological—over which the agent has no control, processes which play themselves out independently of the agent’s wishes, decisions, and motives, then that decision can hardly be characterized as free. But insofar as the world’s processuality includes and encompasses the agent’s witting volitional and motivational states and activities there is not reason to disqualify the

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agent’s decision—however closely coordinated to such factors— from counting as free. This is not the place to articulate a full-scale philosophy of mind. The detail of mind-brain coordination will not preoccupy us here.4 All that is requisite for present purposes is (1) that there is a tight linkage of mind-brain coordination, and (2) that when a state-change occurs in this context the initiative for it can lie on either side. We need not here enter into detail at a level that transcends these rudimentary basics. What matters here is this: Mind clearly cannot do the work of matter: it cannot on its own produce snow or ripen tomatoes. Nor, it would seem, can matter do the work of mind: it cannot read books or solve crosswords. And yet the two are clearly connected. When the mind decides to raise the hand, that hand moves. And on the other side there is Mark Twain’s question “When the body gets drunk, does the mind stay sober?” Clearly there is interaction here: a partnership of coordination in which a process of a change in psychophysical states can be initiated on either side. And this is pivotal in the present contexts, since it opens the way to seeing those free decisions as a crucial productive contribution of mind to the world’s panoply of occurrence. 3. A PIVOTAL DUALITY Doctrinaire materialism views mental action as a systemically subordinate response to the functioning of matter. Doctrinaire idealism views matter as ultimately mind-subordinate—the mere thoughtprojection of a mind. But more realistic than either is a theory of mind-matter coordination that sees the two as reciprocally conjoined functioning as products of a complex, two sided interaction where the ball of change-induction initiation is sometimes in one court and sometimes in the other. On such an approach, the brain/mind complex is seen as an emergently evolved dual-aspect organization whose two interlinked domains permit the impetus to change and lie sometimes on the one side and sometimes on the other. For the direction of determination so far remains open in that dual-aspect perspective. Given the interlocked variables at issue, the question of the

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Nicholas Rescher • Philosophical Reflection

dependent-vs.-independent status is wholly open and the question of initiative unresolved. Both function coordinatively within a naturally evolved agency—the human mind-brain—which evolution has endowed with an ability to operate amphibiously in two contexts of agency-initiation. Mind-body coordination is thus seen not as an externally managed pre-established harmony, but as an internally assured coestablished alignment—a dual-aspect operation if you will. Even as what is for the paper a squiggle of ink is for the reader a meaningful word, so one selfsame psychophysical process is for the brain a signal (a causal stimulus) and for the mind a sign (a unit of meaning). Or again, one self-same process, the ringing of the dinner gong, has one sort of significance for the auditory facilities of the guests and another for their mind-set. Such analogies, while imperfect, should help to convey the general idea of phenomena that have an inherent duality of coordination. The mind, so regarded, is a hermeneutical engine. For only a mind can operate the symbolic process that transforms stimuli into meanings. Those physical inclinations are the occasion and perhaps even in some manner the productive cause of the interpretations at issue, but they are not the bearers of its substantive meaningcontent. For that requires a very different level of understanding and a very different framework of conceptualization. Yet nevertheless, the mind no more functions independently of the brain than the expressive mood of the visage can smile Cheshire-cat-like without the physical face. And yet that physical face will achieve no expression in the absence of there being a psychological mood to express. When thought leads to action it is not that two fundamentally different kinds of potency are at work. The causality of agency (thought control) and the causality of nature (brain control) are two sides of the same coin as it were, two inseparably conjoined aspects of one complexly multifaceted process. The changes at issue flow from one unified agency. It is just that the actuating impetus to those changes in the one case lies at the pole of thought-processes and in the other case at the pole of brain-processes. And so when the mind has the initiative, the brain does not react, it aligns—and conversely when

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mind indicates. So, strictly speaking, it is coordinative rather than causal influence that is at work. In complex systems, there are potentially two sorts of causal processes. First there are those that “move from the bottom up,” so to speak, by determining combinationally the functioning of the whole in terms of that of the parts, thus “reducing” the system’s operations to those of its parts. Second there are those that “move from the top down,” by determining the operations of the parts subsumptively with reference to higher-level processes. Those theorists who want to acknowledge free agency while nevertheless taking a mechanistic view of the modus operandi of the human agent, often assimilate free agency to the second (top-down or holistic) mode of causal operation. By thus construing free agency as a putative mode of (holistic) causality they deem it possible to reconcile free agency with a mechanistic perspective. Such a perspective is not implausible if all that were at issue were an account of agency as such. But something crucial is still missing here. For while holistic causality could be seen as an account of agency as such, it leaves the issue of specifically free agency entirely untouched. The challenging (and perhaps embarrassing) task of distinguishing mere agency from the free agency of intelligent beings—with its legal and ethical ramifications—remains untouched by such an account. To get a grip on what is at issue with freedom, we shall have to dig deeper and look beyond causality. On the issue of who is in charge, mind or brain, thought or matter, traditional philosophizing has almost always taken an all-ornothing approach. Materialistic determinists from classical atomism to the time of Hobbes, La Mettrie, and Laplace put matter in charge; idealists from Socrates to Berkeley and Lotze put mind in charge.5 For some reason, the common-sensical idea that in some transactions the one is in control and in others the other had little appeal for philosophy’s endless succession of absolutists. But in the end, there is really no reason to opt for an all-or-nothing resolution. What is at issue here is, in principle, a two-way street. This issue of initiative points back to the earlier discussion of the difference between the causality of nature and the causality of rea-

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Nicholas Rescher • Philosophical Reflection

son. With nature-causality the involuntary features that impinge upon the agent determine outcome of a decision because it is the agent’s psycho-physical make-up takes the initiative and the motivation corresponding state determines the outcome. But with agentcausality on the order of implementing reasons, the mind of the agent holds the initiative and the outcome is its work so that it is the agent who effectively determines the outcome. 4. MIND-BRAIN INTERACTION WORKS BY COORDINATION NOT BY THE CAUSALITY OF NATURE Here then lies the key to resolving the paradox of reconciling the two modes of causality that vexed modern philosophers from Descartes to Kant and beyond.6 For we now have a straightforward answer to the questions of how the mind comes to exercise physical causality. When I mentally decide to wiggle my fingers a few seconds hence for the sake of an example, how is it that my body responds to this purely mental transaction? The answer is that it doesn’t because no “purely mental” transaction is at issue. Thought always has its correlative in the domain of brain physiology.7 And so an individual’s so-called “purely mental intention” is not really something purely mental at all because it stands coordinate with a mind-brain amalgamating physico-physiological intention-state in much the same manner at issue with the mood/configuration duality of those smiley/frowny faces considered above. And the physical cause of that wiggling response is not something “purely mental,” but the physical side of that dual-aspect amalgam. It must, however, be reemphasized that what actually occurs in such transactions is a matter less of causality than of coordination. In his classic paper of 1934, Dickinson Miller saw the matter quite clearly: [In choosing or deciding] the mental process is paralleled in the brain by a physical process. The whole [two-sided] psycho-physical occurrence would then be the cause of what followed, and the psychic side of it—the mental struggle proper—a con-cause or side of the [overall,

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two-sided] cause. To-morrow’s configuration of matter [i.e., the physical result of an action] will [then] have been brought about by a material [i.e., physical] process with which the mental process was inseparably conjoined.8

And so, when an agent acts there is no need to dream up a Cartesian category-transcending impetus of thought upon matter. The material eventuations are produced materially, by the physical side of the two-sided mind-matter partnership at issue in psychophysical processes. And the same with thought processes. Each component functions in its own order, but the coordinate linkage of the two moves in lock step, thus automatically answering the Mark Twain question “What the body get drunk, does the mind stay sober?” The one thing this account leaves out—and it is a crucial omission—is the key point that the actuating initiative for change can lie on either side. But what could account for the fact that on one particular occasion the initiative lies with the mind and on another it lies with the brain? Here we need to look to the wider structure of temporal context of occurrence in its more comprehensive Gestalt. If what I do arises in response to drink or drugs, then it is clearly the brain that is in charge. On the other hand, if it is a matter of careful deliberation and in painstaking weighing of alternatives, then it is clearly the mind that is in charge. It all depends on the same sort of contextual analysis that is at issue with the discrimination between dependent and independent parameters in physical-process situations. The causal deliberations of the ancient Greeks were predicated on the idea that only like can cause like. The idea that factors which are as different conceptually as night and day could nevertheless influence on another causally was anathema to them. But the reality of it stands otherwise. Motion creates heat via friction; sounds engender salivation by Pavlonian conditioning). Nevertheless that ancient idea of causal homogeneity continued to exert influence as late as Descartes with his Chinese-wall separation of mind from matter. However, the revolution in causal thinking launched by David Hume changed all that and the idea of cross-category causation no longer seems all that odd to us. We nowadays do not—or should not—see

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any inherent impossibility that in the order of causal production physical processes should engender mental responses—or the other way around.9 Philosophers often see it as an obstacle to theories of mind-brain coordination that the mind functions on the basis of reasons in the psychic order (ψ), while the brain functions on the basis of physicopsychological causes that function in the physical order (φ). For as they see it, reasons are something so radically distinct from cases that “never the two shall meet.” In their haste to get on with their analysis they overlook the fact that the mind’s concern actually is not with reasons themselves, but with what is seen or accepted as such, and that “accepting something as a reason” is just exactly one of those double-aspect ψ-φ amalgamating states around which a theory of mind-brain coordination resolves. That what the mind sees as a reason for something is usually actually the case and is nothing for which individual agents are in any way responsible; it is the consequences of the evolutionary procedure that equips agents with their cognitive resources. Accordingly, the transition from one (internal) psychio-physical state φ1/ψ1 to another φ2/ψ2 can occur along very different pathways. It can be a matter of physical causation where the transition φ1 → φ2 is in control and the ψ-component carried along as an inactive passenger. Or it can be a matter of agent control where the transition ψ1 → ψ2 is paramount and the φ-components is carried along in their wake. The transition in question thus has two very different forms: one of nature-causality and physical necessitation, and the other of agent-causality and thought-control. When I avert my finger from a pin-prick we have the one sort of case; when I wiggle it for the sake of a philosophical example we have the other. And in those φ1/ψ1 to φ2/ψ2 transitions where mind responds to physiological changes it (the mind) can take physical stimuli as inputs and interpreted meanings (messages, information) as outputs. In this way, the mind is a hermeneutical engine. And so regardless of how tight the correlative connection of mind and matter may be, there is no ground for construing this circum-

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stance as precluding the efficacy of mind in effecting change, and no reason to refrain form maintaining that it is sometimes mind rather than matter that affords the independent variable that takes initiative in the inauguration of change. And it is just this that is required for freedom of the will. To be sure, if our mental dealings were “nothing but” the machinations of matter, if brain physiology were all there is to it, and ψ could be eliminated from φ/ψ coordination, then mind would never be able to do this characteristic work of providing a bridge for the domain of physical processes to the domain of ideas. We would never get from here (physicality) to there (thought): all possibility of achieving meaning, significance, information, would be lost. Whoever insists on seeing mind as totally “reduced” to matter— dismissing mental operations as “nothing but” the machinations of matter—thereby excludes himself from the conceptual domain. And at that point, there would be lost not only freedom of the will but a great deal more besides.10 NOTES 1

Honderich 1973, p. 189. However this author emphatically declines to take a position on the issue of whether brain-state causes the mind-state (p. 190), and also passes the reverse idea over in discrete silence. But it is just this prospect—not so much of causation as of state-change initiation—that lies at the heart of the present deliberations.

2

Schlick 1939, Chap. 8.

3

On mind-brain interaction see the contribution of Jürgen Boeckh in Henrich 1982, pp. 9–22.

4

There is a vast number of fine books on the subject. A representative sampling includes Eccles 1994, Honderich 1990, Watson 1982.

5

“Das Verhältnis der Seele zum Leib ist stets das einer Herrschaft,” H. Lotze 1852, p. 289.

6

See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A803 = B831.

7

The reverse will not of course be the case.

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NOTES 8

Hobart/Miller, 1934, p. 17.

9

Mill 1843 is one of the earliest works that is altogether sound on the issues of this paragraph.

10

This essay was originally presented in a talk on freedom of the will presented to the Center of Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh in January of 2007. REFERENCES

Boeckh, Jürgen, “Bietet die Gehirnforschung Einblick in Freiräume menschlichen und tierischen Verhalterns,” in Dieter Henrich (ed.), Aspekte der Freiheit (Regensburg: Mittelbayerische Druckerei- u. Verlagsgesellschaft, 1982) Vortragsreihe der Universitaet Regensburg, pp. 9–22. Eccles, John C., How the Self Controls its Brain (Berlin: Springer, 1994). Henrich, Dieter, (ed.) Aspekte der Freiheit: Vortragsreihe d. Univ. Regensburg (Regensburg: Mittelbayerische Druckerei- u. Verlagsges, 1982). Hobart, R. E., (= Dickinson Miller) “Free Will as Involving Determination and Inconceivable Without it,” Mind, vol. 43 (1934), pp. 1–27. Honderich, Theodore, (ed.) Essays on Freedom of Action (London: Routledge, 1973). Honderich, Theodore, A Theory of Determinism Vol. I: Mind and Brain (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990). Honderich, Theodore, A Theory of Determinism Vol. II: The Consequences of Determinism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990). Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason [1781]. Lotze, Hermann, Medicinische Psychologie; oder, Physiologie der Seele (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1852). Lotze, Hermann, Grundzüge der praktischen Philosophie (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1882, 2nd ed. 1884). Translated by George Trumbull Ladd, Outlines of Practical Philosophy, (Boston: Ginn, 1885). Mill, John Stuart, A System of Logic (1843). [See especially Vol. II, Book VI, Chap 2 (“Of Liberty and Necessity.”).] Schlick, Moritz, Fragen der Ethik (Wien: J. Springer, 1930), translated as Problems of Ethics (New York: Dover, 1939). Watson, Gary, Free Will, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). [Essays by A. J. Ayer, R. M. Chisholm, Bruce Aune, Keith Lehrer, Peter van Inwagen, Peter Strawson, Harry G. Frankfurt. Gary Waston, Charles Tayler, Norman Malcolm, David Dennett, and Thomas Nagel.]

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Chapter Four ON MORALITY AND ETHICS 1. ON THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MORALITY AND ETHICS

M

orality, as generally conceived, is a matter of so acting as to avoid injury to the interests of others. Its crux is inherent in the negative injunction to “harm no-one” (neminem laedere). By contrast, ethics, on the traditional conception, is a matter of positivity. Its crux is embedded in the positive injunction to “do good” (bene facere). The promotion of positivity rather than the avoidance of negativity is the crux. From the ethical point of view, morality is a matter of minimalism that calls merely for “the least that one can do.” Contrariwise, from the moral point of view, ethics looks to be a matter of supererogation—of doing more than that which, at a minimum, is morally demanded of us. But just how far does ethics extend beyond morality? Morality is geared to do’s and don’ts. It is a matter of rules, above all the Golden Rule in its negative form: “Don’t do to others what you would not want them to do to you.” Morality encompasses the sort of business which, like “Play fair” or “Don’t hurt your little brother”, are the sorts of things every child learns at mother’s knee. Ethics is a lot more complicated than that. It encompasses the Golden Rule in its positive form “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It involves the complex balance of claims, entitlements, and obligations that call for decidedly sophisticated judgments. Then, too, there is another complication—that of the beneficiaries at issue. Morality is a matter of doing right by our fellows—the members of Homo Sapiens with whom we are interlinked within the community of mankind at large. By contrast, the boundaries of ethical concern range far more widely. While our moral concerns range no further than humans, the range of ethics goes so far as to include not only our fellow humans but beyond that intelligent beings at large and even more widely to sentient beings. With ethics the salient issue is not “Can they think?” but “Can they suffer?”

Nicholas Rescher • Philosophical Reflections

2. WHY BE MORAL?

Why is it that we do things? For the most part, we do so with a view to benefits, so that motivating considerations can be positioned along a spectrum of decreasing self-centeredness: • One’s narrowly personal benefit: satisfying one’s desires. • One’s larger personal benefit: serving one’s best interests. • The benefit of those in whom one takes an interest: serving the interests of those one holds near and dear. • Universal benefit: “making the world a better place to live in.” As regards ethics, one must move down the scale here. The crux is an expanding range of benevolent concerns. Large and far-reaching matters will be at stake here. With regard to morality, two key questions must be distinguished: (1) what does morality require of us; what must one do to qualify as a morally good person?, and (2) why should we do that which morality requires; why be a morally good person at all? In briefest compass, the answer to the first question is this: what morality asks of us is so to act as to take the best interests of others into appropriate account, and to do this for exactly that reason, i.e., out of a respect for and acknowledgement of their status as persons whose interests warrant and deserve our recognition. And this leads straightaway to the second issue, the sixty-four dollar question of moral theory: Why should the circumstance that something protects your interests afford a reason for me to do it? This question forms the core of the problem of the rationale of moral obligation. In a classic paper of pre-World War I vintage, the Oxford philosopher H. A. Prichard argued that it makes no real sense to ask “Why should I be moral?”1 For once an act is recognized as being the morally appropriate thing to do, there is really no room for any further question about why it should be done. “Because it’s the moral thing to do” is automatically, by its very nature, a satisfactorily reason-presenting response. The question, “Why do the right thing?” is akin to the question “Why believe the true thing?” On both sides the answer is simply: “Just exactly because it is, by

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hypothesis, right/true.” When rightness or truth have once been conceded, the matter is closed. According to Prichard, then, the question “Why should one’s duty be done?” is simply obtuse—or perverse. For duty as such constitutes a cogent moral imperative to action—automatically, as it were, of itself and by its very nature. To grant that it is one’s duty to do something and then go on to ask why one should do it is simply to manifest one’s failure to understand what the conception of “duty” involves. Duty as such constitutes a reason for action—albeit a moral reason. But, clearly, this line of reflection, though quite correct as far as it goes, is probatively unhelpful. Self-support has its limitations as a justificatory rationale. The question still remains: “What makes reasons of moral appropriateness into good reasons?”; “Why should I be the sort of person who accepts moral grounds as validly compelling for his own deliberations?” And so while being moral indeed is the appropriate thing to do, there must be some sort of authentic reason for it—that is, there must be some line of consideration, not wholly internal to morality itself—that renders it reasonable for people to be moral. We must probe yet further for a fully satisfactory resolution to the question “Why be moral?”—one that improves on the true but unhelpful answer, “Because it is the (morally) right thing to do.” There has to be more to it than that. But where are we to look? 3. ETHICAL RATIONALISM

Two seemingly competing theories of ethics and morality are currently fashionable. They are significantly different because they envision the definitive aim of the enterprise in rather different terms: (1) Deontology—to do one’s duty as a rational agent. (2) Rational Egoism—to realize one’s own best interests as a rational agent—such interests being construed via an enlightened hedonism that is based not on pleasure but on well-being (eudemonia). The idea of a single consolidated position that unites the two in a collaborative fusion offers an attractive prospect. This prospect can be realized by

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(3) Ethical opportunism—to make the most and best of one’s opportunities for realizing the good. Such a position has it that ethically appropriate action: (1) advantages oneself via the retrospective satisfaction of rational selfcontentment through the realization that one has made the most of one’s opportunities for realizing the good, (2) facilitates meeting one’s obligations—and above all that prime duty of any rational agent to make the most of one’s opportunities for realizing positive goods, (3) makes it needful for a rational agent to take the proper interests of other such agents into account in deciding his/her own courses of action. On this basis, ethical rationalism offers a unified answer to three questions: • Why is it rational for intelligent agents to heed the interests of others? A. Because we are all ultimately in the same boat. • Why is being moral obligatory? A. Because the optimization of opportunity is one of my prime duties. It is my prime obligation as a rational agent and represents the very quintessence of behavioral rationality. • Why is being moral advantageous—what’s in it for me? A. The realization of my opportunities for doing the good constitutes a practical basis for rational contentment. Ethical rationalism accordingly conjoins all of these ethical perspectives on a cohesively integrated unity. It fuses duty and interest under the aegis of satisfying self-development and rational self-interest. 4. THE SOCIAL POINT OF VIEW Might morality be a social construct that inheres in our human conventionalism? For sure, it is strongly in the interests of a society that its members

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should be moral. For once people are so motivated, their actions will proceed along generally beneficial lines by the convenient pathway of inner impetus rather than external constraint. Insofar as society can offload onto individual initiative the canalization of people’s behavior into generally advantageous lines that avert social fictions and dissonance—and can do this without the enforcement measures of agent-external control—the more convenient, efficient, and benign the measures requisite for providing its member with a viable modus vivendi. Society, in sum, does well to operate a system of benefits and penalties—of carrots and sticks—by instituting processes that make generally beneficial moral behaviors thereby also serve the self-advantages of its members. It is, after all, a prime goal of rational social endeavor to create a world-order in which sensible people will be content to live. Nevertheless, the standpoint of morality itself runs in exactly the opposite direction. Self-interest can provide a motive for action—and so do for doing what morality demands—but is cannot provide an appropriate rationale for morality. This is so simply because an act done solely or primarily for self-interested reasons will thereby compromise its moral credentials. For doing the right thing for the wrong reasons—and specifically with a view to selfish advantage just is not to behave morally. As Kant so eloquently argued, it is ultimately the nature of motives that determines the moral worth of actions. To be a moral person is to school oneself to do the right thing for the right reason, i.e., exactly because that is the moral thing to do. 5. RATIONALITY’S IMPETUS TO NORMALITY:

THE MORAL IMPETUS OF RATIONALITY So, what’s in it for me? A good question! And the answer is: that depends. If I am your “average bloke,” “ordinary self-interested person,” “l’homme moyen sensible”, then it will depend on how society has organized itself—i.e., whether it has been successful in achieving the prime object of social organization—viz. to make advantages to the individual that is beneficial for the community. If, by contrast, it were to transpire that I am that rare thing, the “disinterested rational individual,” then as this very sort of person the general benefit will be of concern to me. What then matters to me will be exactly what matters to me as the sort of creature I see myself as being—viz., ra-

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tional creature. In looking for reasons for being moral, I am looking to the sort of grounding of morality that satisfies the demands of a rational being. This issue deserves closer examination. We humans can, do, and should see ourselves as free rational agents. And as such we are in substantial measure self-made: we are the sort of creatures we are by virtue of the sorts of aspirations we have, the sort of creatures we see ourselves as ideally being. What we aspire to is, after all, an important aspect of what makes us what we are: in part, at least, we are what we are because of what we claim to be and what we wish to be. In particular, we class ourselves as members of the special category of persons—of rational agents. Homo sapiens is a creature capable of at least partial self-construction—one able to make himself into the being that he ought (ontologically considered) to be, given the opportunities afforded him in the course of the world’s events. And in this regard, wastefulness is wicked. If we are creatures who have the power and the opportunity to realize certain goods, then we ought, for that very reason, work towards their realization unless this involves foregoing even better opportunities elsewhere.2 Our place in the world’s scheme of things—our status as self-proclaimed rational creatures—imposes upon us the ontologically grounded obligation to confront issues of self-definition and self-determination, to make the most of our opportunities for realizing the good. As rational agents we “owe it to ourselves”—and derivatively to “the world at large” in virtue of our place within it—to achieve our positive potential: to realize ourselves as the sort of beings we indeed are and to take our proper place in the world’s scheme of things. To stint one’s ontological potential for the good through one’s own deliberate action or inaction is not merely foolish but fundamentally wrong. We have only one chance at life and to let its opportunities for the good go by unheeded is a shameful waste— regrettable alike from the standpoint of the world’s interests and our own. After all, what matters for us rational agents is the sort of creature we conceive and believe ourselves to be called upon to be—and thereby the sort of creature we purport ourselves to be. Now as Kant maintained,3 we standardly take ourselves to be free rational agents and, in consequence, must assume the inherent commitments and obligations of such beings. As intelligent beings, we rational agents have no adequate excuse for avoiding the questions: “What sort of creature am I? What possibilities and opportunities does this engender? What should I do to make of myself that which I ought to be? How can I realize my highest potential?” By its very nature as

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such, an intelligent agent who has the capacity and opportunity for valuerealization ought to realize it. The principle at issue is a conceptual one, implicit in the very idea of value. One could not appropriately deem something to be of value if one did not see it as the sort of thing that a rational agent—such as oneself—ought to cultivate. An objector may well, at this point, remind us of Hegel’s well-known complaint that a Kantian ethic of respect for persons is empty and contentless in its abstract generality. But such an objection is not in fact well taken. For respecting people-in-general as free agents with interests of their own also involves respect for their interests and well-being, their aspirations and projects, and even their mere wants and preferences insofar as those do not conflict with larger desiderata. And in particular, the expectations that people form of one another in their reciprocal interactions within a social community give a full-blooded substantive concretization to an otherwise schematic notion of the claims of personhood. To be sure, morality does not inhere in the realization of human potential as such, no questions asked. For every person has a potential for both good and evil—in principle, each can become either a saint or a sinner. The pivotal question for the rational agent is what endows life with worth and value—what are the conditions that make for a rewarding and worthwhile life? Clearly, one of the key obligations of intelligent beings—be they humans or extraterrestrial aliens—is to satisfy the requirement, and indeed the need, to see oneself as something higher and worthier than mere animals—as beings who, equipped with minds and spirits occupy a place of special worth and significance upon the world’s stage. And we do (and should!) incline to see immoral action—as degrading and unworthy, as diminishing us in our own sight. In the face of unethical and unworthy action we can no longer see ourselves as the sorts of beings we prefer to think of ourselves as being. Looking upon oneself with disapproval is something no-one finds anything but distasteful. Psychopaths aside—and being one is clearly not an intelligent option—those who yield to the temptation of unethical, immoral, and antisocial behavior generally devote considerable psychic effort and energy to invent excuses—excuses which, by and large, do not succeed in convincing even themselves.

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6. UNIVERSALIZING RATIONALITY’S VALUE Rational agents are bound by that very rationality to acknowledge that valuing something commits one to seeing it as valuable, as worthy or deserving of being valued—by themselves or anyone like them in the relevant respects. One can, quite properly, like things without reasons, but for a rational agent to value them requires seeing them as having value by generalized standards. And thus to see value in my status and my actions as a rational agent I must be prepared to recognize this as being a merit with others as well. For to see myself in a certain normative light I must, if rational, stand ready to view others of the same sort in the same light. If we indeed are the sort of intelligent creature whose worth in its own sight is a matter of prizing something (reflective self-respect, for example), then this item by virtue of this very fact assumes the status of something we are bound to recognize as valuable—as deserving of being valued. For reason is inherently impersonal (objective) in this sense that what constitutes a good reason for X to believe or do to value something would automatically also constitute a good reason for anyone else who stands in X’s shoes (in the relevant regards). So if I am to be justified in valuing my rationality (in prizing my status as a rational agent) and in seeing it as a basis for demanding the respect of other such agents, then I must also—from simple rational self-consistency—stand prepared to value and respect rationality in others. I may desire respect (be it self-respect or the respect of others) on all sorts of grounds, good, bad, or indifferent. But if I am to deserve the respect of rational beings, this has to be so for good reasons. Respect will certainly not come to me just because I am myself, but only because I have a certain sort of respect-evoking feature (for example, being a free rational agent) whose possession (by me or, for that matter, anyone) provides a warrant for respect. And this consideration must be generic in that all who have this feature merit respect. One can only have worth by virtue of possessing worth-engendering features that operate in the same way when others are at issue. To claim respect-worthiness for myself I must concede it to all suitably constituted others as well. The first-person plural idea of “we” and “us” that projects one’s own identity into a wider affinity-community is a crucial basis of our sense of worth and self-esteem. And so, in degrading other persons—other rational agents—in thought or in treatment, a rational being would thereby automatically degrade itself, whereas in doing them honor it also does so to itself. For in seeing ourselves as persons—as

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free and responsible rational agents—we thereby rationally bind ourselves to a care for one another’s interests insofar as those others, too, are seen as having this status.4 But consider the following line of objection: Let it be that, as you have argued, rationality carries morality in its wake, so that rational people ought, for their very rationality’s sake, enter into the moral enterprise. But this simply carries matters back a step and leaves us with the question: Why be rational about it?

Two sorts of things can constructively be said at this point. The first is that the objection comes too late. For the objection already stands committed to rationality through his demands. After all, what sort of “reason” beside a rationally cogent one could one possibly be after? And a second response comes via the question: Is this a line you really want to take? Are you really prepared to set the enterprise of reason at naught. Are there actually that many—or indeed any—things that you are prepared to value more highly than your reason? Surely the answer is a foregone conclusion here. After all, there is nothing that we, or at any rate the rational among us, can see as a more serious loss than that of reason— we would assuredly “give our right arm” to avert its loss. And if I am (rationally) to pride myself on being a rational agent, then I must stand ready to value in other rational agents what I value in myself—that is, I must deem them worthy of respect, care, etc. in virtue of their status of rational agents. What is at issue is not so much a matter of reciprocity as one of rational coherence with claims that one does (and should) stake for oneself. Accordingly, a genuinely rational being will value—and consequently respect and foster—rationality in others. And this automatically means that the very rationality of such a being will enjoin morality—i.e., acting so as to protect and serve the best interests of other rational beings. The upshot of such considerations is that to fail to be moral is to defeat our own proper purposes and to lose out on our ontological opportunities as rational beings. It is only by acknowledging the worth of others—and thus the appropriateness of a due heed of their interests—that we ourselves can maintain our own claims to self-respect and self-worth. And so, we realize that we should act morally in each and every case, even where deviations are otherwise advantageous, because insofar as we do not, we can no longer look upon ourselves in a certain sort of light—one that is crucial to our own self-respect in the most fundamental way. Moral agency is an essential requisite for the proper self-esteem of a rational being: to fail in this

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regard is to injure oneself where it does and should hurt the most—in one’s own sight. To be sure, prudential considerations do also come into play in the validation of morality. It is a crucial part of the rational cultivation of our own best interests not to deprive ourselves—through our own actions!—of that self-esteem which goes with membership in a group to which we are pleased and proud to see ourselves as belonging. Injury to this sense of self-worth is one of the very worst things that can happen to a person, since it degrades one where it counts for the most—in one’s own eyes. A feeling of self-worth as a rational being is crucial to one’s sense of legitimacy— one’s ability to see oneself as having a worthy place in the world’s scheme of things. Self-interest is indeed at work here—but also something deeper than just that. An ontological obligation to morality is inextricably bound up with a fundamental ontological interest that we have, in virtue of our very nature, in being truly fulfilled as the sorts of creatures that we see ourselves as being—as free rational agents. Morality is accordingly geared to rationality in a dual way: (1) morality is a matter OF rationality—of acting for good reasons of a certain (characteristically moral) sort, and (2) morality is an enterprise that exists FOR rationality—for the sake of protecting the legitimate interests of rational agents. And it is precisely this gearing of morality to the interests of rational agents that renders the validation of morality in terms of the inherent requisites of rational agency completely consonant with the value structure of morality itself.5 NOTES 1

H. A. Prichard, “Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?,” Mind, 21 (1912): 21–37.

2

What is at issue here is not the “Mill’s fallacy” inference from being valued to being valuable, but the unproblematic move from being appropriately valued by a creature of a certain constitution to being something that objectively has value for this creature.

3

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A814/B842.

4

To be sure, someone may ask: “Why think ourselves in this way—why see ourselves as free rational agents?” But of course to ask this is to ask for a good rational reason and is thus already to take a stance within the framework of rationality. In theory, one can of course “resign” from the community of rational beings, aban-

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NOTES

doning all claims to being more than “mere animals.” But this is a step one cannot justify—there are no satisfactory rational grounds for taking it. And this is something most of us realize instinctively. The appropriateness of acknowledging others as responsible agents whenever possible holds in our own case as well. 5

Some further deliberations relevant to the theses of this discussion can be found in the author’s The Validity of Value (Princeton: Princeton University press, 1996).

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Chapter Five QUASI-OBJECTS 1. QUASI-OBJECTS

F

rom the dawn of philosophy in pre-Socratic Greek antiquity, philosophers have inclined to a dualistic ontology of those things that are the work of matters (phusis) and those that are the product of human artifice (nomos). But quasi-objects introduce the embarrassment (or at least complication) of yet another sort of thing altogether. For here we have to deal with a somewhat strange category of “objects,” namely those 1.

to which we allocate a place in reality’s manifold of space, time and causality, but which nevertheless, as everyone recognizes,

2.

do not exist among the world’s physical realities.

Their lack of physical embodiment notwithstanding, we nevertheless concede to such objects a place of sorts among the world’s furnishings. Perhaps the most clear-cut examples of this sort of thing are such geographic features as the North and South Poles, the Equator, the International Date Line, and the like. Then, too, there are the event-complexes singled out by periodization within the world’s processual flow—such as the Ice Age or the Jurassic Era. And along the same postulative lines, coordinate-designated regions in terrestrial or celestial space may also be considered as quasi-objects—for instance, the moon’s orbit around the earth. Or again, consider the trajectory of a bullet. It exists in space-time but is not a spatio-temporal object. Though all these items do not exist as actual parts of physical nature, but we nevertheless acknowledge them as having a reality of sorts and a definite place in the world’s framework of space-timecausality. These quasi-objects are indicated but not created by human conventions. Unlike military ranks or voting ages, they can be seen as integral to the world’s make-up and serviceable (if not indispensable) for understanding its ways. They are like physical objects in that:

Nicholas Rescher • Philosophical Reflections

• they are concrete particulars, • they have a position in space and/or time and even possibly play a role in causal explanation. But they are unlike physical objects in that they lack a material embodiment. Quasi-objects thus represent a distinctive category of ontology. Two sorts of things are thoroughly familiar here: • reals (realia): existing as component parts of the world’s furnishings, • fictions (entia rationis): purely imaginative projections of the mind. Quasi-objects fall in between: they are neither fish (constituents of physical reality) nor fowl (imaginative flights of fancy). They are ontological hybrids. Projection by thought is critical for constituting them in that they would not be there without the operations of mind. A globe shows an Equator line, and this represents something real—the Equator—even as that blue region represents something real, say Lake Baikal. Quasi-objects are not totally imaginary—not entirely the creations of thought. Yet, nevertheless, unlike the Easter Rabbit or the Tooth Fairy, they have a place in the setting of space and/or time, and they would not and could not be there if physical reality took a form different from the actual. Quasi-objects are certainly not mere products of the mind’s creative fancy; yet they could not be what they are if reality did not function the way it does: their very nature reflects reality’s modus operandi. (There could be no North Pole if the earth did not have an appropriately stable axis of rotation.) 2. QUASI-OBJECTS ARE NOT FICTIONS Accordingly, those quasi-objects are something distinctive and constitute an ontological category of their own. The mind is led to contemplate them because they are able to facilitate our operations in the natural world. Yet quasi-objects are not created by thought; they are merely indicated by it (from a certain conceptual standpoint). Man did not make the Equator or the North Pole but only the idea of an Equator or a North Pole. Plans, ideas, utopias, and scientific models are all thought artifacts that help us to canalize our actions and make our decisions. But they are not

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quasi-objects. Nobody thinks of locating them in the real world. They guide our actions and decisions but do this without making any pretense to having a place in the real world, as quasi-objects indeed do. But quasiobjects are just not like that. Those quasi-objects are not mere “useful fictions” because they are not fictions at all. Unlike the “perfectly rational agent” of economic theory or the “ideal gasses” of thermodynamics, they are not intended as putative approximations to reality that have no claim or real existence in the world. They are “really there” alright, but just not in a way that involves physical embodiment. Again, quasi-objects are not the arbitrary fruits of imaginative fancy but carefully devised contrivances that we create because of their utility in serving as means to important ends. They enable us to function more effectively and efficiently in a plethora of activities that we do and must carry on in the real world. The Equator accordingly has a status very different from that of the Easter Rabbit. It is something having a place that can be located in the world so that the item is, for that very reason, able to function more successfully in dealing with undeniably real objects. To put Immanuel Kant’s terminology to work, what such quasi-objects have is certainly not objective reality, but rather objective validity. 3. QUASI-OBJECTS COMPLICATE ONTOLOGY The classic philosophical dichotomy between materialism (which views the world as an aggregate of physical objects) and idealism (which views it as a manifold of mind-made thought-contrivances) is rendered problematic by quasi-objects. For such objects clearly inhabit a halfway house. They provide an instrumentality well-suited for managing the affairs of an amphibious creature that has its foothold at once in the realms of matter and physical reality on the one side and on the other of mind and thoughtengendered fancy. And so while quasi-objects help us to find our way about in a domain of physical reality, they also open up an instructive philosophical window in affording a deeper insight into the complex nature of things. For they thereby impede the pathway alike to a facile materialism that views physical objects as all-sufficient and a facile idealism that has room for nothing but the creations of thought.

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Chapter Six LEGISLATED QUANTITIES 1. CUT-OFFS

I

t would be unproblematically correct to say: “The laws of Pennsylvania have it that a person is eligible to vote at age 18.” But whether someone is actually mature enough to exercise their electoral franchise appropriately will very much depend on the individual. In setting the voting age by fiat, society leaps in where Nature fears to tread. Many quantities that figure importantly in shaping our conduct of affairs are not specified by nature but are artifacts of human contrivance. At what age, for example, is a person old enough to marry, drink alcoholic beverages responsibly, handle fireworks safely, manage their own property, enter into contracts, see a violent movie, serve on a jury, hold a public office? These are not quantities writ large in nature’s impersonal scheme of things but matters of social decision made for reasons of public polity and administrative convenience. They are legislated quantities. How many years of study and learning should be required for a license to practice medicine? We know for sure that two are too few and eight too many. Accordingly, most American states settle for around five, the midpoint of this range. And this is what legislated qualities do—they superimpose social fixities upon nature’s ranges. With respect to kinds rather than quantities, one recent writer has maintained that “the metaphysical nature of artificial kinds [such as pencils] are comprised in the concepts and intentions of [their] makers, a feature that sets them crucially apart from natural kinds [like antelopes].”1 However those legislated quantities are neither fixed exclusively by nature nor exclusively by the fiat of human purpose and intention; rather, their specification is a matter of an interactive negotiation between the two. Such a quantity generally affords a cut-off or a cut-in. It serves as a gatekeeper that it lets some in and keeps some out. Yet this is done not by haphazard but only in the light of a justifying rationale. The ins are supposed to have some specific qualifying feature—vote intelligently, drive carefully, manage money wisely, manage their affairs competently—and the outs lock it.

Nicholas Rescher • Philosophical Reflections

The odds that a person who has dropped from sight for X years is dead are situated along the lines of a continuous curve ranging from probability zero to probability one over the course of time. However, the law transmutes this into a single unit-step at 7 years. Those quantity-legislatings have a way of transforming smooth and continuous distributions into binary on/off-dichotomies. A person’s developmental maturity varies across a wide spectrum, but legally he is either old enough to vote or not, to marry or not, and so on. Those fiat-established determinations are artificially imposed limits that divide a continuous range into a binary IN or OUT. And herein lies an obvious problem. For, given this situation, two sorts of errors can arise: Errors of the 1st kind which keep OUT items that meet the operative criterion and ought to be IN (“improper negatives”). Errors of the 2nd kind which put it IN items that fail the operative criterion and ought to be OUT (“false positives”). Its being done in a way that minimizes error clearly is—or ought to be— the controlling factor in fixing such boundaries. But are those errors created equal? 2. ETHICAL QUANTITIES: THE ROLE OF RATIONALE The specification of a legislative quantity is not an abstract exercise in numerical fabrication. As instruments of social control such quantities are fixed for a reason—the protection of some substantial communal interest (in traffic safety, electoral responsibility, medical competence, consumer protection, or some such). But this being so, where is one to locate such a boundary. By the nature of the case there is really no way to tell. For there is no fact of the matter in this regard: playing fast and loose with fact inheres in the very idea of a cut-off. In actuality there will be three regions: • that of the clearly IN, • that of the clearly OUT, • that of the “grey area” in between.

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But whenever a legislative fiat imposes its cookie-cutter of a fixed cut-off, there are bound to be injustices. And these are of two kinds. Injustice of the 1st kind: kept OUT and yet not clearly unqualified. Injustice of the 2nd kind: Put IN and yet not clearly qualified. Since a justificatory rationale of some sort always underlies legislated quantities, they have a right and wrong about them. Their appropriateness is controlled by their efficacy and effectiveness in serving the purposive rationale that underlies their specification. Take driving age. The age qualification is predicated on the rationale that younger teenage drivers are less careful, less mindful of rules and of others. Underqualified drivers pose a real danger to people and property. But if this is indeed so, then we would want to be careful and deem injustice of the second kind as far more serious. So with drivers, if the range of the clearly OUT ends at say 12 and that of the clearly IN begins at say 20, then the simple solution would put the age of qualification at 16. But one would doubtless want to err on the side of caution, so that a policy of due safety would suggest shifting it upward to 17 or even 18. And much the same can be said for drinking, voting, and marrying. The cut-off point at issue with legislated quantities might accordingly be characterized as an ethical quantity because it is—or should be—so selected as to curtail the extent to which injustice (which in the circumstances is inevitable) is being done to some of the totality interested parties. The problem we face here is clearly a vision of the general perplex of dichotomizing normative traits measured by a parameter that moves sequentially along a natural continuum. For we here confront the problem of vagueness that has been with us ever since the “Heap Paradox” of classical antiquity,2 pivoting on the question of how many sand-grains it takes to make a heap. Philosophers have grappled with this sort of issue for centuries with the bleak upshot that no theoretically compelling resolution exists. The lesson of those legislated qualities that here concern us is simply that the demands of praxis will on occasion mandate an acceptable compromise in circumstances where no “correct resolution” can possibly be identified. From an ontological point of view, however, the matter looks somewhat different. Here there are principally:

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• naturally determined quantities such as the speed of light or the age of the earth and • artificially devised quantities such as the price of wheat. However, those legislated qualities are neither fixed by nature independently of man nor by man independently of nature. They are of a character nature, neither natural nor artificial but occurring in a murky region in between—a mix of social artifice and natural processuality.3 It is clear that the underlying objective situation will in general grossly underdetermine the legislated quantities that can qualify as appropriate, leaving open a substantial grey area. To satisfy the principles involved in (say) the minimal ages for licensing commercial airline pilots, it is clear that 14 would be too early and 30 too late. But various prospect in between—roughly from 18 to 22—are perfectly plausible. Such underdetermination in the negotiation between principles and objective conditions is particularly vivid in the specification of brackets for internal revenue taxation—a circumstance that makes them into something of a bouncing political football. 3. PRAGMATIC COMPROMISES While the limits defined by legislated quantities are contrived and not discovered—made rather than found—it is clear nevertheless that they should not be made and contrived arbitrarily. They function in a setting where certain definite aims and objectives are in play. And they are—or should be— specified in a way that renders the realization of those purposes effective and efficient, something that certainly does not depend on the whim or will of those who are legislating the distinction. Regrettable or not, it is a fact of life that the demands of managerial practicability demand a one-size-fits-all approach. The time and effort needed to operate and to justify a more case-specific way of proceeding is simply unaffordable in the circumstances. The efficiency demands of societal manageability come to the fore to enjoin those problematic dichotomies. Two considerations must accordingly be taken into account with regard to the fiat at issue with legislated quantities:

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• For reasons of the administrative convenience demanded by the public interest it is necessary to fix a definite boundary between IN and OUT. • This cannot be done without sometimes creating injustices in individual cases. As philosophers have noted since classical antiquity, a conflict arises in reconciling the general interest with its demand for administrative viability and the rigoristic demands of personal justice to individuals. After all, there is a teeter-totter relationship of what the physicists call complementarity obtains between the two sorts of injustice at issue with legislated quantities. Reducing the number of Type 1 errors of improper negatives that do injustice to individuals inevitably involves increasing the Type 2 errors of false positives that do injustice to the relevant interests of society. (It is as though there is a value such that the quantity #1 x #2 cannot be reduced.) Juries in criminal trials afford an interesting illustration here. While both British and American law fixes the size of a jury at 12. Scottish law requires 15. Presumably substantially fewer would give more scope to the persuasiveness of forceful personalities and to the impact of bias, while substantially more would make the process unwieldy. So 10–16 looks to be a plausible range. But then there comes an important difference. For in the US all twelve must agree to convict, whereas Scotland allows for what is misleadingly called a “majority verdict” in the face of one or two contrary votes. This diminution looks to be an eminently sensible variation which not only reduces the prospects of bribery or intimidation, but acknowledges that circumstance that virtually any human community will contain some eccentrics. But be this as it may, the reality of it is that an imperfect world demands “pragmatic” compromises in conducting human affairs of the sort at issue with the trades of Type 1 errors that damage individuals (improper negatives) and Type 2 errors that harm the social interest (false positives). To be sure, abstractly put, it sounds simple to say that justice requires an optimal balance between the damage done by improper negatives and that done by false positives. But concretely this is something that is far easier said than done. Importantly, however, the two types of errors are not in general created equal. In each sort of situation one must weigh the gravity of the one

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Nicholas Rescher • Philosophical Reflections

against that of the other. In inflicting criminal penalties, society decidedly prefers letting the guilty get off (improper negatives) to punishing the innocent (false positives). By contrast, in matters of voting qualification, society naturally prefers false positives (letting the unqualified vote) to improper negatives (disqualifying eligibles). The comparative acceptability of the two types of error will in the end be a matter of the purposive context for which those legislated quantities are being instituted. The name of the game is damage control—the minimization of the harm that is in some degree inevitable. Since the classic essay of that title by the young Rawls, many theorists have insisted on seeing “justice as fairness.”4 But due heed of the effective unavoidability in public affairs of a recourse to legislated quantities throws this idea into deep doubt. For legislated quantities serve to establish a potential conflict between egalitarian justice and fairness. After all, the idea of equality before the law with its precept “Treat everyone alike” is fully honored by a policy that systematically excludes those under 35 from serving as U. S. president. For it is arguably unfair—in the sense of the maxim “Treat people in line with their valid claims” (Suum cuique tribue)—to those who—like a young Theodore Roosevelt or John Kennedy (not to mention the younger Pitt)—exhibit unusually political talent at a young age. Problems of justice immediately arise in bifurcating a continuous range of comparative qualification into a dichotomous in/out results in making a mountain out of a molehill. Minute, even infinitesimal differences in input can become transposed into large differences in result. The idea of treating people in due proportion to their claims and qualifications is now impracticable. The ideal of abstract justice is compromised by the realities of a recalcitrant world where perfection is simply not on offer. The choices that confront us are often as not a matter of settling for the least of evils. In the conduct of public affairs we often need to upend the Benthamite dictum and rather than aiming at the greatest happiness of the greatest number strive to minimize the groups of these made seriously miserable. Of course, legislative qualities are not fixed once and for all like the speed of light or other natural constants. Their pragmatic and factual dimension means that they are potentially unstable. For the rationale at issue might well have a changeable bearing under changing condition. Federal regulations mandate a maximum number of passengers for the various types of aircraft. But as Americans have grown heavier in our era of waistline explosion, this number has needed to be reset from time to time. And

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many economists argue that as the health and life-expectancy of Americans have improved over the years, the eligibility age limits for social security support could well warrant a second look. Again, time was, not long ago, when American practice authorized universal mandatory retirement laws, deeming people past 65 or thereabouts incapable of effectively discharging the duties of gainful employment. In this regard there has been a total change of mind—or heart. The stark reality of it is that in many instances full justice to the ideal claims of individuals simply cannot be met. Designing a system that is perfect—exempt from any possible reproach—is flatly infeasible since diminishing errors of one kind means increasing those of another. The choice is not between perfection and imperfection. It is, rather, a matter of the kind of imperfection we are prepared to accept. Inevitably, some degree of injustice in social arrangements that invokes a one-size-fits-all system. There is just no help for this. The larger interest of the community require that some system be in operation notwithstanding the rough justice sometimes dealt out to particular individuals. Society has no choice but to settle for the best option available in the circumstances, and simply has no alternative but to accept the imperfections of this best-available option as the price that must be paid in the interests of the larger good. And so, one lesson of these deliberations is that in matters of this kind perfection is impossible and perfect justice effectively unachievable. 4. LARGER VISTAS Legislated quantities have significant philosophical ramifications. For from an ontological point of view the demarcations they reflect are social conventionalities—irrealities which have no actual existence in physical reality, but rather—like the division of the day into hours and minutes—are projections which human thought imposes upon reality the sake of operative convenience and utility. Still, objectively and realistically considered such legislative quantities have an aura of unrealism. “Pennsylvania authorizes people to vote at age eighteen” is true. But “Pennsylvanians are qualified to vote at age eighteen” is not. What it expresses is not a fact, but a wishful hope which if duly implemented in action, is presumed to have benign results. Those legislated qualities are, in effect, “legal fictions.” One person is responsible and reasonable at age 15; one would not hesitate to see those individuals drive a car or serve on a jury. Another is incompetent and irresponsible at age

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25; or again one may naturally shiver at the thought of a certain individual’s driving a car, let alone marrying someone. But yet the social processes cannot here deal with individuals as individuals. For reasons of administrative practicability and manageability, such limits must be fixed generically by fiat—it would be hopelessly cumbersome to deal with all the relevant individual situations on their case-specific merits. But of course they are not—or should not be—fixed by arbitrary fiat. They do, and should, have an appropriate rational foundation of sorts in reality’s facts of the matter. From the philosophical point of view, those legislated quantities are of interest as clear-cut instances of something significant that manifests a social as contrasted with physical reality. And yet not entirely social! For unlike say, prices or tax brackets, these legislated qualities are not at the disposition of a society’s arbitrary decrees. They thus betoken the insufficiency of a doctrine that would have matters all one way or the other—all natural reality or all social construction. For, notwithstanding their strictly conventional nature, it is clear that those legislated quantities are not purely fictional, because underneath it all there is a background of matter-of-fact reality in nature’s modus operandi that unavoidable canalizes the operation of human artifice.5 Already in pre-Socratic times, philosophers insisted on the important distinction between the originative role of nature (physis) and convention (nomos)—effectively between impersonal reality and human artifice. But this dichotomy oversimplifies the ontological situation. For there is also a middle ground between realism’s physical nature and idealism’s mental realm—a borderland where the two are concurrently and cooperatively interconnected in that thought and artifice here accommodate and adjust themselves to nature’s impersonal realities.6 NOTES 1

Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence, Creations of the Mind: Theories of Artifacts and their Representations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), p. 53.

2

On these issues see Timothy Williamson, Vagueness (London & New York: Routledge, 1994. See also Roy Sorenson, Vagueness and Contradiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), and Roasanna Keefe and Preston Smith (eds.), Vagueness: A Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 265–80.

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NOTES 3

The transmutation of nature’s validation spectrum into the phenomenal color spectrum of natural language is something of the same sort, as is the military’s coordination between functional responsibilities and rank.

4

John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness,” The Philosophical Review, vol. 67, (1958), pp. 164–194.

5

Some recent theorists have it that with artifactual kinds—pencils for example—it is the intention of their instance-makers that is constitutive of the kind at issue, while with natural kinds by contrast (lions, for example) the intentions of their describers is nowise so constitutive. But this binary ontology also overlooks the prospects of hybrid kinds such as racing horses, sheep dogs, carrier pigeons, and fruit trees. See Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence, Creations of the Mind: Theories of Artifacts and their Representation, (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 69.

6

This essay was presented as a Colloquium in the Department of Philosophy of the University of Pittsburgh in October of 2008.

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Chapter Seven TOTALIZATION AND ITS PROBLEMS 1. TOTALIZATION

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he common thought-leap from the description of something as an item of a certain type or kind to the totality of all items of this sort is not as unproblematic as it seems. The idea that once we characterize something in a certain way we can presume a totality for things of this sort has its problems. It is one thing to speak of an apple and something very different to speak of the totality of apples. For a totality is not, of course, a certain familiar object, but rather is yet another and rather strange kind of thing, generally quite different in nature from the items it contains, and possessed a variant ontological status. On a closer view, there is something deeply problematic about the seemingly natural trans-categorical move from descriptivity to ontology, from an item description Dx to a further, and in principle decidedly different sort of thing or item, viz. the totality of everything of this sort {x/Dx}. As Kant observed “allness or totality is just plurality considered as unity,” (CPuR, B111). And as the scholastic dictum has it, ens et unum convertuntur. And as theorists since his day have tended to agree that it is very questionable that such a fundamentally creative move from adjective to substantive—from qualifying descriptivity to ontology—is automatically valid. After all, totalities can have all sorts of problems. Some may be too small for comfort (the totality of unicorns). Some too large (the totality of all totalities). Some may have uncertain boundaries that cannot be located with precision (the totality of sand-heaps). Some may open a doorway to self-contradiction—for example the Russelian totality of all totalities that are not members of themselves. It was, in fact, the prospect of the last sort of case, where one is caught up in logical paradoxes and contradictions, that has especially exercised Immanuel Kant.

Nicholas Rescher • Philosophical Reflections

2. KANT ON TOTALITIES Immanuel Kant was the philosopher who (in his Critique of Pure Reason) first complained about illicit totalization. He rejected any and all openended totalities that thereby become impossible to survey as inappropriate in toto. Maintaining that experience is our only pathway to knowledge about existence, and noting that we almost never experientially survey totalities as such, Kant held that a fundamental fallacy is involved in totalization. As he saw it, all such closure-defying and unsurveyable conceptions as that of the world-as-a-whole—something whose open-ended content reaches beyond the range of that which could ever be given in experience—are to be seen as ill-defined and thereby inappropriate. Only the prospect of experiential interaction can assure the actual existence of authentic objects—discourse alone can never do the job. And experience never presents us with boundless totalities: [It is inappropriate to suppose] an absolute totality of a series that has no beginning or end [such as would be at issue with “the terminus of all successive divisions of a region” or “the initiation of all the causes of an event.”] In its empirical meaning, the term “whole” is always only comparative. The absolute whole of quantity (the universe), the whole division [of a line segment], or of [causal] origination or of the condition of existence in general … along with all questions as to whether this whole is brought about through finite synthesis or through a synthesis requiring infinite extension … [are something altogether inappropriate]. (CPuR, A483–84 = B511–12.)

Kant insisted that totalization that reaches beyond the boards of possible experience is inappropriate and that we can never reify such a totalistic conception into that of an object that has a well-defined identity of its own. Accordingly, such totalizations as “the-physical-world-as-a-whole” represented for Kant an inherently fallacious conception that leads to inconsistency: [As a sum-total of existence] the world does not exist in itself, independently of the regressive series of my representations, it exists in itself neither as an infinite whole nor as a finite whole. It exists only in the empirical regress of the series of appearances, and is not to be met with as something in itself. If, then, this series is always conditioned, and therefore can never be given as complete, “the world” is not an unconditioned whole and does not exist as

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such a whole, either of infinite or of finite magnitude. (CPuR A503–05 = B531–33.)

Against this background, Kant maintained that an endorsement of unsurveyable, unbounded totalizations results in logical self-contradiction. We can generalize over all rocks in the field, but not over all rocks in the world. As matters have eventuated, Kant’s ideas have fallen on fertile ground in ways that he himself never envisioned. 3. CANTOR Georg Cantor argued in 1895 that the main idea of “the absolutely infinite totality of cardinal numbers” involves a contradiction.1 For if there were such an item it would constitute a set whose cardinality could not be exceeded by that of any other set. But the set of all of its subsets would of necessity have to have a larger cardinality which (ex hypothesi) it cannot. And while it may seem that there must be a totality of all facts, a totality of all truths, a totality of propositions, of things, and of sets of things, appearances can be deceiving. And in line with Cantor’s thought it appears that there are insuperable difficulties here—indeed outright contradictions. Thus the notion of a totality of truths, or of all propositions, can be shown to lead to contradiction as well2 and the notion of a totality of all facts or of all states of affairs leads to the same result. Mega-totalities seem to be in deep conceptual trouble. Suppose, for example, that there were a set of all facts F. That set will have a power set PF—the set of all sets of facts. But for each set of facts F in PF, there will be a distinct and specific fact—that F contains precisely the facts that it does, for example. But by Cantor’s theorem, there must be more elements of the power set of any set than there are elements in the set itself. By such reasoning, there will then be more facts than in F. But since F was designated as the set of all facts, this implies a contradiction.3 4. AVERTING DIFFICULTIES There are two ways to approach propositional theses regarding totalities, namely either as stand-alone propositions or as claims made by someone (oneself included). We may thus contrast the theses

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(1) (∀x)CFx “For all x, one can properly claim that Fx obtains” (2) C(∀x)Fx “One can properly claim that for all x, Fx obtains. In (1) that universal operator ∀ is unqualified and categorical. With (2) it is placed within the scope of someone’s claim horizon, someone who thereby bears the responsibility for specifying the range of consideration at issue. Now one way of approaching the issue of illicit totalization would be to take the stance that contentions of form (1) are inappropriate, and that universalization is only legitimate within the scope of a claiming assertion operator C. And one might then go on to hold that contentions of form (2), while in principle appropriate, are nevertheless subject to certain viability conditions. Viewed in this light, the step from the idea (conception) of a totality to the totality itself as a proven object in its own right would require clear boundaries that clearly and precisely determine the contacts of the totality at issue. A totality lies within the reach of a responsible claimant only if that claimant has cogently specified what the assertion horizon is to be. The circumstance that someone, say X, projects the idea of a certain totality no more commits us to accepting its reality than the circumstance that X projects the idea of a certain object (a gold mountain) commits us to accepting its reality. With abstract as with physical objects, the move from conception to actuality always involves further issues. Being an object of thought is no more to be a real object than being a ceramic apple is to be an apple. The basic issue is that with totalization we are caught up in a dilemma. On the one side, we want to generalize about things, and thus make claims regarding all and none. On the other side is the fact that unrestricted totalization can sometimes lead to contradictions. The advantage of the aforementioned tactic of assertoric intermediation lies in its capacity to avert any contradictions or any part with respect to what we say. To maintain that someone else, say X, maintains both p and not-p involves no absurdity on our part. In offloading responsibility for the contradictions that are not other, third-party assertions, it becomes possible to maintain consistency in the face of the kinds of problems to which totalization can give rise. The reality of it is that totalization—the move from descriptive objectification—does not come cost-free. It imposes a certain burden of practicability upon its practitioners. For only if certain conditions of feasibility are fulfilled is it appropriate to take the step to reification (hypostatization) that

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totalization involves. Valid totalization requires that one establishes that the putative totality at issue is well defined, proceeding within wellestablished boundaries and coherently surveyable ranges. And here one must distinguish between “objects” of discussion—where pretty much “anything goes”—and authentic objects that have some claims to qualify as at least possible realties. Talk is cheap; one can discuss things open-endedly, without let or hindrance (not only gold mountains, but also the totality of non-self-maintained sets). However, one can only investigate and elucidate those items that possess a coherently specifiable identity, and there are a good many putative totalities that fail this crucial test.4 NOTES 1

See Georg Cantor “Beiträge zur Begründung der transfiniten Mengenlehre, I” Mathematische Annalen, vol. 46 (1895), pp. 481–512.

2

Just as there may be truths that are never known, there may be truths that can be formulated in no human or finite language. It is this sense of “truths,” akin to facts and propositions in being something beyond linguistic entities, that we use throughout.

3

Patrick Grim, “There is no Set of All Truths.” Analysis, vol. 44 (1984), pp. 206– 208.

4

This chapter originated in a paper prepared as a thought-provocation for a discussion with colleagues.

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Chapter Eight PHILOSOPHICAL COUNTERARGUMENTATION 1. THE ISSUE

T

o argue that a philosophical position is inadequately substantiated is not to refute it. It merely shows that it has been poorly defended, not that it is wrong. All the same, a highly effective way to attack a philosophical position is to indicate the frailty—or, in the extreme, the nullity—of its substantiating grounds. For example, the philosopher who maintains that human actions are always and invariably motivated by self-concern would soon find himself in the uncomfortable position of finding the ground of support sinking beneath his own feet. Solidly established positions require a secure rationale. In electoral politics one has the dictum that “You can’t defeat somebody with nobody.” And analogously, in philosophy one has the dictum: “You can’t defeat a thesis with a mere possibility.” Merely conjectural possibilities lack the traction to refute otherwise plausibly substantiated contentions. Nevertheless, any philosophical position that has no visible—and indeed no solid— means of support is for this very reason in deep difficulty. Philosophical positions are like buildings: they collapse in the absence of a firm footing. But how can one go about refuting a philosophical thesis or contention? There are various possibilities, and a compact survey of them is given in Display 1. One way of looking at these items is as answers to the question: What ways are there to attack the potential points of weakness—the Achilles’ heels, as it were—of philosophical positions? By what means can their claims most effectively be countered as not just inadequately argued, but as actually false? It is interesting to observe how few of these strategies there actually are. Notwithstanding the fact that the field of philosophy is enormously diversified and complex, nevertheless the modes of philosophical attack that are generally employed can be counted on the fingers of two hands.

Nicholas Rescher • Philosophical Reflections

Display 1 MODES OF PHILOSOPHICAL REFUTATION 1. By adducing counterexamples 2. By refuting presuppositions 3. By reductio ad absurdum (exhibiting self-inconsistency) 4. By reductio ad rediculum (noting clearly unacceptable consequences) 5. By destructive analogy—noting the structural similarity to already refuted positions 6. By systemic dissonance (ill-fit) with what is pre-established as acceptable 7. By systemic consonance (smooth-fit) with what is pre-established as unacceptable 8. By cost/benefit comparison showing that a given doctrine involves difficulties and deficits more serious than some of its rivals

Let us briefly consider each of these modes of refuting argumentation, proceeding in the sequence of the Display 1 listing. 2. COUNTEREXAMPLES Counterinstances falsify generalizations. Herbert Spencer said of Henry Buckle (or was it the other way ’round—as it could just as well have been?) that his idea of a tragedy is an elegant theory undone by a recalcitrant fact. Philosophers love to generalize. But generalizations are vulnerable since any universal thesis is refuted by one single convincing counterexample. From Plato on, the ancient Greek theorists taught that democracies are inherently unstable. America’s history since the Civil War casts a shadow of deep doubt across this idea. 3. FLAWED PRESUPPOSITIONS Presuppositions pivot on commitments to the following generic effect:

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If p were not so, then q could not be: (1) true, (2) possibly true, or (3) meaningful.

There are, accordingly, three modes of presupposition which hinge, respectively, on truth, possibility, and meaning. These can be illustrated as follows: • “Smith is responsible for that crime” has the truth-presupposition that Smith committed that crime. • “Smith committed that crime” has as a possible-truth-presupposition that the act in question was criminal. • “Smith acted criminally” has as a meaningfulness-presupposition that Smith is an agent (i.e., someone who can act). Specifically as regards philosophical theses, refutation can and often does proceed by argumentation to the effect that some presupposition fails to obtain, be it through falsity, impossibility, or meaninglessness. Consider for example the determinist who argues that human actions are materialistically determined because thought is coordinated with brain activity. This involves the decidedly problematic presupposition that because thought is coordinated to brain activity it is therefore caused and controlled by it. 4. REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM When successful, attacking the self-consistency of a philosophical thesis or position is perhaps the most decisive mode of refutation. A position that is inconsistent saws off the limb on which it itself is sitting. Consider, for example, the rather puckish skeptical dictum that: (R) Every rule has its exceptions. This straightaway encounters difficulties. Being itself a rule, it is automatically self-applicable so that it, too, would have exceptions and thereby prove to be self-falsifying. Much the same would be the case with an irrationalism maintaining that any opinion or any issue is every bit as good as any other. Such a position also succumbs to reductio ad absurdum by undermining itself by conced-

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ing its denial to be no less well-qualified. Or consider the solipsist who sets out his position in print for the benefit of others. Or again, in Plato’s Republic, Thrasymachus propounds that thesis the might makes right, a contention readily demolished by Socrates who points out that it leads to absurd consequences, because the several demands of might could well be inconsistent, while what is right must be self-consistent. 5. REDUCTIO AD RIDICULUM A closely related, but milder, version of ad absurdum reasoning is a reductio ad ridiculum, which proceeds by showing that the position in question engenders a conflict with plain common sense. The crass “Material objects don’t exist” sort of idealism that evoked Dr. Johnson’s kicking a stone would be an example. Or again, the radical skeptic who insists that we can know absolutely nothing holds a position ready-made for this mode of refutation. However, the more ham-fisted Nietzschen tactic of sheer invective lacks cogency, since for reduction ad ridiculum argument one cannot simply say that something is ridiculous, but has to do the work of actually showing that something palpably ridiculous actually follows from it. 6. DESTRUCTIVE ANALOGY When a philosophical thesis or position is closely akin in its nature and substance to another that has already been invalidated, then its own claims to acceptability are correspondingly undermined. Thus to the extent that there are already in hand good reasons for rejecting an indifferentist relativism with regard to moral norms and standards, this will thereby ipso facto provide a counter-consideration against relativism with respect to social norms such as justice. Consider, for example, the process of reasoning that seeks to exploit remote possibilities by arguing: • If P were the case, then T would [or: might possibly] be false However, two very different sorts of possibility are at issue, the realistic

and the hyperbolic, and to conflate them in the argumentation is really to “beg the question.”

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7. SYSTEMIC DISSONANCE A thesis or doctrinal position that simply does not fit with what one accept in the rest of one’s commitments cannot be sustained. Thus, someone who operates a thoroughgoing materialism in metaphysics cannot consistently accept an epistemology involving the transmission of ideas by symbolic processes in a way not reducible to mere association. Accordingly, a particularly effective way to exploit systemic dissonance is afforded by the sort of argument which Immanuel Kant called transcendental. Such an argumentation proceeds by establishing that the position to be defended is an indispensible precondition for something that one clearly wants to maintain. Denying the thesis in question would then be direly dissonant from one’s preestablished commitments. For example, denying the thesis that “knowledge must be true” would be seriously dissonant from other commitments one does—or should— hold. For it makes no sense to say “I know that the cat is on the mat, but it might possibly not be.” (To make sense of this we would have to qualify that claim to: “I think that I know …” or “I thought I knew.”) Knowledge proper—anything appropriately characterized as such—must be firmly secure. Denying that thesis is taking a stance totally out of consonance with what we accept elsewhere regarding the proprieties of knowledge talk. After all, where do the raw materials for philosophical reasoning ultimately come from? The short answer is: from outside—from everyday-life common sense, from scientific investigations, from the fundamentals of one’s cultural-context. In philosophy as elsewhere, the mill of reasoning must obtain its grist ab extra. And this has to be supplied by the principal sources of pre- or extra-philosophical cognition. In the final analysis, then, no department of knowledge is totally disconnected from philosophy. And on this basis, any discord with and dissonance from these fundaments of philosophical inquiry provides the materials for counterargumentation. 8. ASYSTEMIC CONSONANCE Asystemic consonance is systemic dissonance in reverse. A thesis or doctrinal position that fits too smoothly with what one rejects in the rest of one’s commitments is for that very reason questionable. The Machiavellian political theorist who sees crass personal interest as the driving force of national polity and international relations cannot convincingly advocate policies to promote human rights in remote and disconnected nations.

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9. COST-BENEFIT COMPARISON No philosophical position is immune from objection. Each alternative issue-resolution carries sure difficulties in its wake—if only in having us forego something we would ideally like to have. Idealism confronts a natural philosophy that sees mind as a Johnny-come-lately in nature. Materialism confronts an ethic of moral responsibility that calls for free will, and so on. The question can never be: is a philosophical theory free from any possible objection. For perfection is not an offer here. The question has to be: which of all the alternative ways of resolving an issue itself raises fewer problems and difficulties? And so one effective mode of attack upon a philosophical position is by way a cost-benefit analysis that shows that the cost of a certain issueresolution is higher than it needs to be because less problematic alternatives are available—one which, while itself not free from difficulties, nevertheless involves them to a decidedly lesser extent. * * * This concludes our brief survey of the modes of counterarguementation in philosophy, which pretty much covers the whole spectrum. For despite the vast proliferation of substantive philosophical issues and doctrines, the procedural strategies for arguing against them can be counted on the fingers of two hands. And notwithstanding the clash of doctrinal positions, the same processes of counterarguementation are equally available to the partisans on every side. The strongholds being assaulted may be radically different, but the weapons available for the task of philosophical refutation are nevertheless comparatively few. In this domain, substantive profusion is counterbalanced by methodological sparsity.

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Chapter Nine ORIENTATIONAL PLURALISM 1. THE CACOPHONY OF OPINION

G

eneration upon generation, philosophers have dreamed of “setting philosophy on the sure road of a science” (as Kant put it). They see philosophical issues as presenting problems about which sensible, wellinformed, reasonable people must eventually reach agreement, and they yearn for a key to unlock the door to those ultimately definitive solutions. Controversy and disagreement are perhaps even a possible means to this end but consensus is the ultimately destined terminus. In just this spirit, A. O. Lovejoy urged the American Philosophical Association to organize its annual programs into structured controversies on well-defined, clearly delineated issues, anticipating that by the end of each convention an agreement would emerge as to the winning side of the debate.1 However attractive this prospect may be, it is doomed to disappointment. For it is based on a profound misunderstanding of the probative situation in philosophy, where the very conditions of rationality themselves admit of rational dispute. Precisely because the issue of the appropriate standards of cogency and acceptability for characterizing good reasons and good arguments in philosophy is an inherent part of philosophy itself—and therefore also a subject for controversy and debate—we are never in a position to enforce rational consensus across boundaries of doctrinal divergence. Abstract rationality cannot resolve the issues on its own, because the very norms and criteria by which we can evaluate arguments—the canons of cogent argumentation—themselves reflect our cognitive-value orientations. They are accepted by cognitive communities and schools of thought) on the basis of potentially variable evaluative postures. (Think of the difference between the analytically, hermeneutically, and existentially minded thinkers among contemporary philosophers.) Yet must their very rationality not engender consensus among rational thinkers? Is rationality not an inexorable constraint to accord? By no means! Rational people need not agree, because:

Nicholas Rescher • Philosophical Reflections

(1) Their basis of judgment—that data and the background information available to them—may well differ. (2) And even when their background information is the same, their cognitive values may lead them to differ in those cases where different values point toward different resolutions. The salient fact is that, in philosophy, rational men can differ in their reactions to the data, both in regard to what they deem cognitively significant and in regard to the plausible inferences they are prepared to draw from this. The force of a philosophical argument is never absolute and objectively compelling. Considerations of strictly evidential tenability are impotent to eliminate conflict by narrowing the range of available alternatives to a single rationally qualified result. The persuasive cogency of a position is of necessity confined to those who accept the fundamental principles on which it rests, principles that ultimately root in matters of cognitive value. Once we recognize that what is to be deemed tenable (valid, appropriate) in philosophy pivots on an appraisal on the basis of cognitive values, we can no longer expect to achieve consensus in philosophy through purely rational constraints on the basis of the objective “facts of the matter.” Substantive commitments that reach beyond pure rational consistency are bound to come into it. Philosophical position-taking is a matter of judgment. Philosophizing is never a matter of determining what is on a strictly evidential basis, but of deciding what is to be done—of undertaking commitments on the basis of adopted values. To accept a philosophical position is to make an ex parte declaration from the vantage point of a particular cognitive value posture. The central role of cognitive values in philosophizing means that learning philosophy is not only a matter of mastering facts but also one of acquiring a “point of view,” of forming cognitive attitudes, of acquiring affinities and allegiances in matters of exploiting “the data.” 2. RELATIVISM AND PLURALISM Is this position not just an espousal of relativism? The Apostle Paul did not think much of the diversity of opinions for its own sake. The Athenian penchant for variety and novelty in matters of thought did not sit well with him, and he had no qualms about telling the

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men of Athens that “in all things ye are too superstitious.” (Acts 17:22). So—where are we to stand on the matter all these centuries later? Relativism which is often disparaged as “facile” or even “freshman” relativism, centers on the contention—it hardly deserves the name of doctrine!—that whatever people believe and accept is simply and purely a matter of opinion. Such a perspective is based on the universally trivializing rejoinder “That’s just your opinion.” For the relativist there is only what I think, and what you think, and what he thinks! Everything that people think is a matter of opinion, all the way through. Nor is the relativist daunted by the fact that, on his own principles, the very relativism that he maintains is no more than just another opinion. He proposes to see this as just another conforming instance of his view rather than an objection to it. Now there is also a cognate doctrine generally designated as pluralism. As pluralists see it virtually every question admits of a variety of possible concerns, and virtually significant issues admits of a variety of possible resolutions. This sort of view is not the same as relativism. For what the relativist maintains comes to an important addition and extension to it, because he holds not just that there are generally various answers and resolutions but that each of them is every bit as good as any other. As the relativist sees it, all those alternatives are created equal. It is all just a matter of arbitrary choice, of individual preference, of personal taste. So what relativism adds to pluralism is something that need not necessarily be there—namely indifferentism. And this is emphatically not the view being espoused here. For what is wrong with this—and seriously wrong—is that it ignores the factor of reason, of grounds or evidence. For people not only have beliefs but also do—or should!—have reasons for them, and these reasons all too clearly come in the spectrum ranging from good to mediocre to really bad. 3. CONTEXTUALISM It is crucial for present purposes that there is yet another pluralistic position that is very different from relativism. For it does not commit itself the idea that the choice among alternatives is a matter of indifference. Instead, it is open to the prospect that evidence matters, plausibility considerations matter, and evaluative assessment matters. And thus contextualism—as it

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might be called—holds that the selection of one alternative among others must be rational—it must align itself to evidence and function under the aegis of cogent standards. It insists, in short, that opting for an alternative that is without visible means of cognitive support, and indeed to do this in the face of evidential counterindications, is simply irrational and therefore inappropriate. But whence do those substantive principles and standards come? Clearly from experience. After all, it is experience that teaches us that seeing is a more reliable source of information than dreaming. It is experience that teaches us about the deceptiveness of rumor and the wisdom of the precept in vino veritas. Granted, experience can also lead us amiss. The Siamese sage who refused to believe that in Northern Europe water turns solid in winter as to support heavy people was not being a narrow-minded fool. This sort of thing went counter to the whole course of his experience. And on the whole we are well advised to heed the teachings of experience. Experience is certainly not failproof. But on the whole we have no better guide. After all, even this very realization that experience can lead us amiss is itself no more than one of the key lessons of experience. The wisdom of hindsight is one of our best teachers. The cardinal precept is: “Align your views with the best available evidence.” And this is a universal and cogent principle. If you are not willing to go along here then whatever virtues you may have, rationality is not among them. 4. ORIENTATIONAL PERSPECTIVISM The position called contextual or orientational pluralism takes just this line. It is doctrinal position (originally in metaphilosophy, but obviously applicable elsewhere) based on the following premises: 1. Virtually every substantial question or issue in human affairs admits various different answers or resolutions. (Pluralism) 2. The choice among these should not be seen as one of random indifference, but should be based on sensible considerations of available evidence deployed via rationally cogent standards. (Evidential Rationalism)

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3. What the available evidence is, and what the secondly applicable standards are, is dependent on the prevailing corpus of experience. (Experiential Contextualism) 4. Different bodies of experience will—and should—orient the judgment of people differently as regards matters of acceptability. And it is only natural and to be expected that the appropriateness of these standards for different people is dictated by their experience. The available information and indications. (Orientational Pluralism) 5. The issue of what it is that gives overall body of experience rationally substantiates (evidentially and anterior logically) is not something variable and idiosyncratic. It lies uniformly in the very concept of rationality. You and I may differ regarding the propositions we accept. But the question of what it is that is supported and substantiated by those propositions is one in which we should be able to agree—baring very moral circumstances. (Experiential Rationalism) These then are the five pillars on which orientational pluralism rests. And what we unquestionably here have is indeed a pluralism. The diversity of values is inherent in the fact that man is not a rigid cognitive automation. Our human emplacement in nature is sufficiently context-variable to permit diverse responses to uniform situations. For our valuations are bound to reflect not the present circumstances alone, but the course of one’s formative past experience as well. To be a person is to be a creature that can to some extent shape its own set of priorities values independently of others on the basis of its own probative course of experience. 5. THE IMPETUS OF RATIONALITY On this basis, the fundamental idea that underpins orientational pluralism is that one cannot consistently both stake a claim to the cogent appropriateness and cogency of one’s views, and at the same time reject all commerce with objective rational standards and criteria. And in this regard, our commitment to our own cognitive position is (or should be) unalloyed. For in making a claim that we deem acceptable we thereby commit ourselves to the effort of ensuring its acceptability. Like everyone else, orientated pluralists are bound to adjudge some alternatives

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as superior to others for good and sufficient reasons. After all, even if we are pluralists and accept that a wide variety of positions is (abstractly speaking) available to people, we still retain the perfectly plausible prospect of evaluating our own particular (carefully deliberated) position as rationally superior. Indeed, if we indeed have a position at all, this lies precisely in the fact that we see it as rationally cogent. The only ultimately tenable form of pluralism is a preferentialistic one geared to a mechanism of rational appraisal on the basis of good reasons— a rationalistic preferentialism that looks to a privileged alternative underwritten by considerations of reason (rather than, say, by merely psychological or social considerations). What we want, after all, is a position that we ourselves can see—and can reasonably expect others to see—as rationally appropriate in our circumstances. And the commitment to rationality is itself an integral part of our best and true interests. No gain in goods or pleasures can outweigh its value for us rational beings. (The “happiness pill” hypothesis suffices to show that it is not pleasure of happiness per se that ultimately matters for us, but rationally authorized pleasure of happiness.) The goods we gain through deception (or other sorts of immoral conduct) afford us a hollow benefit. This is so not because we are too high-minded to be able to “enjoy” illicit gains, but because inasmuch as we are rational thinking beings—creatures committed by their very nature to strive for reflective contentment (as opposed to merely affective pleasure)—it is only be “doing the right thing” that we can maintain our reflectively based sense of self-worth or deserved merit. The imperative “Act as a rational agent ought” does not come from without (from parents or from society or even from God). It roots in our own self-purported nature as rational beings. (In Kant’s words it is a dictamen rationis, a part of what he called the internal legislation of reason: “innere Gesetzgebung der Vernunft.”) Its status as being rationally appropriate roots simply and directly in the fact of its being an integral part of what our reason demands of us. (And because being moral is a part of being reasonable, morality, too, is part of this demand.) 6. A TOUCH OF ABSOLUTISM This chastened version of pluralism is, in effect, a relativistic monism. Relativity obtains, in that different cognitive agents use different standards on a basis that one must regard as appropriate for them. But we ourselves have no alternative but to treat our own—experience-rooted—standards of

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truth and rationality as rationally decisive because this view of the matter is implicit in their serving as standards for self-proclaimed rational agents. The only standard it makes any sense for us to use is the one we endorse. There is no point in my applying someone else’s standard of value or worth or interest or appropriateness or whatever. God’s standard I cannot apply, since I do not have it. Your standard I will not apply, if I do not share it. The standard we have got to use is just exactly the standard that we have got via the course of our experience. And we have no way to evaluate standards save in our terms. Whose superstandard should we use? God’s? Since our expulsion from the Garden of Eden, he is no longer at hand to be asked. Somebody else’s? But if we do not subscribe to it, then how can we rationally use it; and if we do, then we have thereby already made it ours! Thus, even while acknowledging that other judgments regarding matters of rationality may exist, we can, do, and must persist in deeming ours to be the best; their superiority according to our own standards is a foregone conclusion. We have no choice but to see our standards as appropriate for us. (In using someone else’s with “no questions asked” we would, ipso facto, be making them ours!) To use another standard (categorically, not hypothetically) is to make it ours—to make it no longer another standard. Like “now” and “here,” our standards follow us about no matter where we go. These deliberations accordingly lead to what might be characterized as criteriological egocentrism. We can and indeed must see our own standards as optimal with respect to the available alternatives. If we did not see them in this way, they would thereby cease to be our standards. 7. ORIENTATIONAL PLURALISM No doubt experience exerts its rationally restrictive constraints. But the range of personal experience becomes increasingly differentiated in its impact. In particular, there is far more scope for rationally cogent personal inclinations in spiritual than there is in cognitive matters. By contrast, science rests on a relatively narrow basis of experience, namely interpersonally communally shared observations (“regrettabilty of experiments”). But the sort of experience that provides for the priorities that underlie our belief standard in matters of politics and religion is of a different order. Often as not it makes for differences in cogitation rather than observation. And so

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while natural science is pretty much uniform across the range of cultural variations, social ideology—let alone religion—is not. After all, the way in which we conduct our cognitive business reflects the structure of our experience. As experience changes (as between different people or between the different stages of a person’s life) so do priorities and values change, and changes in these cognitive norms will bring changes in philosophy in their wake. There is no prospect of uniformity, of consensus. The biblical story of the Tower of Babel carries a far-reaching lesson. For better or worse, the prospect of homogeneous uniformity across the human scene is unattainable. Philosophers do not and will not agree on cognitive values, because cognitive values emerge from a mixture of nature and nurture, and life inevitably equips different people differently in this regard. Such a view of inquiry is not, however, a matter of anything goes. Instead, it involucrates a kind of enlarged empiricism. Empiricists see our knowledge of the world as ultimately rooted in sensory experience. The present orientational theory sees our cognitive endeavor as rooted in cognitive values, which in their turn reflect the course of ideational experience. And while different people have different bodies of experience, where a given body of experience points is—or should be—a matter of impersonal cogency. It is only reasonable and to be expected that different people adopt different standards in the light of their experience. But nevertheless, it is also only reasonable and to be expected that if that individual’s proceedings are indeed sensible and reasonable then other rational individuals should be able to see that this is indeed so for someone in this circumstance. 8. URBANITY AND ENLIGHTENED SELF TREATMENT So what, in the end, is one to make of the philosophical pluralism inherent in experiential diversity? Science achieves uniformity by narrowing the boundaries of experience to inter-subjectively consensual observation. However, in matters of normative and ideological concern the most promising resolution lies in moving in the opposite direction—to widen those boundaries of experience. Here the course of wisdom is to supplement the invariably limited range of personal experience by enlarging our experiential horizons through the accession of vicarious experience in matters not just of sensation but of affec-

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tivity and evaluations as well. We do well also to appropriate the meaningful experience of others. And such an enlargement of one experiential has important and constructive consequences. Enlarged knowledge brings understanding and appreciation of different points of view in judgmental as well as observational matters. I may be a dedicated Catholic, but the more extensively I study the history and teachings of Islam the less will I be liable to demonize Muslims as just plain perverse. I may be a diet-of-the-month conservative but the more extensively I inform myself about the substance of liberal thinking and its historical development, the less will I be able to discuss those people as pervasive or just plain obtuse. In these matters familiarity counteracts against contempt. Ampler information engenders enhanced understanding and thereby increased sympathy. However, the matter also has a further significant aspect, one that roots by the question: What difference should it make to one’s own views that others think differently about the issues? The first and crucial fact is that it should make no substantive difference to one’s own commitment. If I have been conscientiously careful in forming my own views, the fact that others think differently should not lead me to abandon them. We are under no obligation—moral, social, or otherwise—to agree with others, however much we are duty-bound to respect them. Nor on the other hand should we expect them to agree with us in the face of their variant body of experience. Rationality, urbanity, and common sense alike speak for a policy of live and let live. On this basis, orientational pluralism enjoins the realization that it is a paramount demand of a rational social policy to design social and political mechanisms through which people—even those who disagree on fundamentals—can coexist with one another peacefully.2 NOTES 1

A. O. Lovejoy, “On Some Conditions of Progress in Philosophical Inquiry,” The Philosophical Review, vol. 26 (1917), pp.123–63. See Daniel T. Wilson, “Professionalization and Organized Discussion in the American Philosophical Association, 1900–1922,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 17 (1979), pp. 53–69.

2

Invited lecture given at Duquesne University in October of 2008.

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Chapter Ten ANALYTICITY RECONSIDERED 1. ANALYTICITY SCRUTINIZED

F

rom the very outset, the concept of analyticity was seen as relating neither to the substance (informative content) of true propositions nor to the processes by which we learn or acquire its information. Rather the issue is one of the truth grounding basis (ratio essendi) rather than its epistemic substantiation (ratio cognoscendi in the historical terminology). With an analytical proposition the ground of its truth—its truth-maker— must lie entirely in the realm of strictly linguistic considerations of usage and meaning. Many people would agree that “Every three-angled (linear) figure is a triangle.” For they would plausibly and tacitly assume that that it is closed figures are to be at issue, thus overlooking the non-triangularity of the three-angled figure:

A B

OUT

IN C

With this three-angled figure, there are four boundary line segments at issues (two of them one-sidedly infinite), and these divide space into two sectors, the IN and the OUT, exactly as triangles do. What this goes to show is that the meaning-equivalency of “triangle” and “trilateral” is a tricky business. The crucial point here is that while with many and perhaps most of our statements, verification requires inspecting the world’s things and processes, with others what one must examine is how people use language. And its belonging to this latter category is exactly what makes certain true statements as analytic. Linguistic usage suffices to furnish the basis for their truth. And here we may not require full-fledged definitions, but we certainly do require explanatory specifications for what one is talking about and there will sometimes suffice to establish truth.

Nicholas Rescher • Philosophical Reflections

And here one has a concept of analyticity that survives W. V. Quine’s insistence that experience and observation are ever-requisite for truthdetermination.1 For the basic idea is that while determining the truth-status of a verbally formulated contention indeed always requires some investigation into empirical facts, there will be some propositions for which this is confined entirely to the investigation of the practices and conventions governing the use of words and symbols. And it is just here that those “analytic” truths are at issue. For, so construed, the role of the analytic/synthetic distinction is to distinguish those statements whose truth-status hinges solely on the processes and conventions by which humans communicate and on the other, as combinated with those which truth-determination requires inquiry into the way in which the world works. Thus anyone who proposed to investigate the truth of “Forks have tines” by checking the content of kitchen drawers and the offerings of cutlery department of stores would be foolish indeed. The simple reality is that noone would call something a fork (a complete, unbroken fork) if it didn’t have tines. But of course “Forks determinate with use” is something else again. Such a revised, post-Quinean approach to the analytic/synthetic distinction is able to effect some important philosophical work by serving to indicate that the realm of truth is not all of a piece in its conceptual, methodological, and epistemic regards. For some truths are grounded in human praxis (where we are in control) while others are grounded in nature’s operations (where we are not). Now what about synonymy and equivalence of meaning? Can the truth “Water is H2O” be characterized as analytic?2 It might perhaps be so in the idiolect of professional chemists, who might well use these terms interchangeably. But it is certainly not so in the general usage of other English speakers. For them the chemical composition of water comes as news to most of us, and the validation of the claim at issue calls for a good deal of empirical work going well and beyond the investigation of discourse. Given such an approach, it presumably will be correct to say that all analytical truths: • are necessary, • have self-contradictory denials, • are logically demonstrable from the conventionalities of usage.

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Display 1 SOME SAMPLE SYNTHETIC A PRIORI STATEMENTS •

There are possibilities.

•

There are true statements.

•

There are facts/actualities.

•

There are true existential statements.

•

Red is a color.

•

Color is an abstraction.

•

There are true statements about color.

But none of these contentions are themselves analytic, since none follows from linguistic basics by elemental (“self-evident”) reasoning, but always requires more machinery to be substantiated. 2. ANALYTICITY VIA ENABLING PRINCIPLES: A NEO-KANTIAN APPROACH Any theory of analyticity which is based on presupposing exact definitions for all words and concepts will have its difficulties. For once we concede, as we must, that in ordinary discourse—and thus outside of the formal discipline of mathematics, logic, and formalized language-theory—the meaning of terms is not subject to strict definition but depend on the diversified and complexly nuanced practices of custom and usage, the pivotal fact is that sometimes the truth of our claims is a matter that can be settled entirely by inquiry into the use of words. Can non-analytic truths that fail to hold through mere language-conventions nevertheless be true a priori independently of any possible course of experience? It would certainly appear so. (Some plausible examples would be those listed in Display 1.) Failures of analyticity notwithstanding, the fact remains that whatever course experience may take—and indeed whatever the world may turn out to be like—these propositions will inevitably

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hold good. On this basis, they plausibly instantiate and illustrate the idea of a priori synthetic truths. Now while such propositions are certainly a priori—demonstrably true by their very nature—they are not analytic. Their demonstration always requires the mediation of general principles. And this reliance on extralinguistic considerations means that the theses in question will be synthetic whose establishment can proceed as follows in Kant’s sense of requiring more than definitional substantiation from their substantiation. (See Display 2 which shows how rather different senses are in use.) For, over the years, the concept of analyticity has evolved, moving from establishability via definitional substantiation alone, to logical demonstrability, and finally to validation or logico-linguistic considerations at large. For the sake of an illustration, consider the first: (1) There are no possibilities

By supposition

(2) It is actual that there are no possibilities

From 1 by the principle that facts entail actuality (p → Ap)

(3) It is possible that there are no possibilities

From 2 by the principle that actuality entails possibility (Ap → Pp)

(4) There are possibilities

From 3 by logic: Pp →(∃q)Pq

The negation of (1) thus follows by contradiction ad absurdum. QED. In failing to obtain through meaning-considerations alone, but yet being demonstrable on the basis of substantive (non-analytic) principles such statements will be synthetic in the Kantian sense. 3. IS THERE ROOM FOR A SYNTHETIC A PRIORI? A VARIANT NEO-KANTIAN APPROACH Leibniz thought all of truth necessary to be establishable by subsumptive reasoning from definitions, ruling out the prospect of a priori propositions that are not (finitely) analytic. Kant by contrast left room for non-analytic (synthetic) a priori propositions, and actually included all of mathematics here. But subsequently, Frege and the Logical Positivists returned to the Leibnizian, logicist position and deemed all of mathematics to be analytic.

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Display 2 VERSIONS OF ANALYTICITY •

Leibniz and Kant: A proposition is analytically true if it follows directly from the definitions of the terms involved by definitional substantiation alone.

•

Logical Positivism: A proposition is analytically true if its truth follows from definition of the terms by logical inference.

•

Kant revised: A proposition is analytically true if its truth can be shown by conceptual considerations at large.

A powerful support of the idea of synthetic a priori truth emerged from the work of Kurt Gödel in this crucial testing terrain of mathematics. He showed that even here there are truths (and in the nature of things a priori truths) that are not inferentially demonstrable from the conceptual fundamentals of an axiomatic foundation, so that (on the now usual conception of analyticity) these will have to be accredited as synthetic. In mathematics, for example, such truths are not the definitions but the postulates—and even sometimes “axioms” as per the “axiom of choice.” In natural sciences they are not “laws” but “principles,” as per the “principle of simplicity.” In philosophy they are not doctrines as such but procedural (“regulative”) principles—such as a “principle of noncontradiction” that enjoins coherence among doctrines or a “principle of sufficient reason” that what we maintain has a rationale of justification. There are not theses we establish by observational findings made “in the field,” but precommitments that we bring to our deliberations from the outset. Yet such these are not merely terminological but normatively constitutive of the idea of adequacy with regard to our doctrinal efforts. What we learn from experience about such principles is not that they themselves are true, but rather that accepting them and preceding on the presumption that they are true we can facilitate and improve our grasp upon a relevant body of fact. Consider, for example, the principles registered in Display 3. To all visible appearances, such principles stake conceptual claims that are (1) true, (2) valid independently of experience, and (3) substantively informative beyond the reach of mere terminological explanations. Such theses to the effect that certain ways of proceeding just are not reasonable have a good claim to being synthetic a priori truths. Principles of this kind are

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normatively constitutive for appropriate deliberation and practice in various domains. As such they automatically qualify as synthetically a priori. They serve initially to constitute (rather than subsequently to apply or implement) the appropriate practice of the domain. In being experience constitutive rather than reflective they are indeed a priori. But they are also synthetic in that they are more than mere elaborations of meaning. So approached, we reach the idea of synthetic a priori truths as those that are not the product of experience: they are not so much learned as postulated, not themselves derived from experience, but presupposed in order to facilitate the cognitive procession of experience and the very process of learning from experience. Display 3 Principles of Rationality •

It is unreasonable to accept far-reaching claims in the absence of substantiating evidence.

•

It is reasonable to apportion degree of connection in line with the weight of evidence.

•

It is reasonable to heed the lessons of experience. Probability Principles

•

The world’s occurrences obey the laws of probability theory. Principles of Explanation

•

To achieve equal credibility, stranger claims require ampler evidence. Value Principles

•

Other things equal, harmony is preferable to discord. Ethical Mandates

•

People should not inflict needless pain on others. Prudential Principles

•

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It is not sensible to trust people who have previously betrayed one’s trust.

ANALYTICITY RECONSIDERED

On such a neo-Kantian approach, then, we could appeal to a variety of substantive principles to validate a priori various synthetic claims in a wide variety of contexts of deliberation and discussion. 4. FAMILY CONNECTIONS How is analyticity on this proposed neo-Kantian construction principles related to such cognitive concepts as aprioricity and necessity? For clarification there consider the following explanatory accounts: analytic: true solely through considerations of linguistic/communicative practice. synthetic: not analytically true but substantively so via the presuppositions of our communicative practices. a priori: true through considerations of linguistic/communicative practice and its underlying presuppositionals, and thus demonstrably true without recourse to empirical (extra-linguistic/communicative) premises. necessary: inescapbably true—compatible with every proposition that is compatible with itself. (NOTE: Whatever is a matter of linguistic/communicative practice and its presuppositions is to be seen as “by courtesy” necessary; linguistic/communicative praxis cannot and should not ever stand in the way of substantive truth.) On this basis the following conclusions will obtain: (1) All analytic truth is necessary, while nevertheless (2) Not all necessary truth need be analytic because there may be substantive (non-linguistic, informatively non-vacuous) necessities— truths that root in conceptual principles.3 (3) Whatever is true a priori will be necessary. Moreover (4) Whatever is demonstrably necessary will be true a priori. (But this is not true for necessities in general, not all of which need be de-

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monstrable on general principles but may hold only in particular contexts.) (5) By the very nature of analyticity, whatever is analytic will be true a priori. However— (6) What is true a priori need not be analytic because it may rest on conceptual principles of more than linguistic import. Points (2) and (6) obtain thanks to the consideration that even as in formal logico-mathematical systems there are axioms (substantive stipulations) as well as definitions (linguistic/communicative conventions), so in informal settings there are substantive (non-linguistic) communicative necessities. Thus contrast “Whatever is yellow is colored” with “Whatever is colored is located in space.” The former is pretty clearly analytic, while the latter is a good candidate for a substantive (non analytical) necessity. 5. CAN EXISTENTIAL CLAIMS BE BASED ON ANALYTICAL PROPOSITIONS? Mathematicians designate as a “creative definition” one which renders it possible to prove an existential fact that could not be established in its absence. And they are rightly chary of admitting such definitions into their systems. Should we not all follow their cautious practice? The truth of analytic propositions rests on the conventionalities and presuppositions of language-usage, and analyticity can thereby effect a transit from meaning to truth. Can it also bridge the gap between meaning and existence? Can merely linguistic practices engender the existence of things? The answer here has to be a cautious one—“yes and no,” as it were. Presumably “by definition” the (geographic) North Pole is the northern extremity of the Earth’s axis of rotation. And to use the expression as we do is to commit to the existence of such a point on the Earth’s surface. Is not this proceeding a clear illustration on “defining something into existence?” For sure, matter of actual existence in the world cannot be based on a priori considerations regarding conceptually analytical matters. But where conceptual matters themselves are concerned, the situation is quite different. Thus consider such items as:

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There are statable claims. These are true sentences (or statements). Some sentences state falsehoods. Some truths do not relate to fish. These claims are clearly a priori, with observational experience being altogether dispensable. But at the same time more than the mere meaning of terms and concepts is at issue here, and the claims in question are synthetic a priori. They are not analytic in the sense that their truth inheres in the meanings—let alone the formalized definitions—of the terms at issue. Instead, their truth inheres in the basic principles of the range of discussion at hand and reflect the fundamental presumptions and precommitments regarding the concepts at issue in this domain of discussion and deliberation. 6. CONCLUSION Overall, one thing is clear: the question of the existence of a priori truths— and subsidarily the question of whether such truths can be synthetic—that will depend in a crucial way on just exactly how those conceptions of “analyticity” and “syntheticity” are going to be understood. Here, as elsewhere, the issue hinges crucially on just what it is that is being claimed which in turn depends crucially in what is being said by means of the terms of reference at issue. The Kant of his own time as well as the Kant of contemporary revisionism both construe “analyticity” in a way that differs decidedly from that envisioned by positivism-sufficient twentieth-century critics such as W. V. Quine. APPENDIX: THE PARADOX OF ANALYSIS One of the great red herrings of twentieth-century philosophy was dragged across the philosophical landscape by G. W. Moore.4 Characterized as “The Paradox of Analysis” it is conveyed by reasoning along the lines of the following example: (1) The term brother can be analyzed into, and thus means the same as male sibling.

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(2)

Expressions that have the same meaning can be substituted for one another without affecting the information conveyed.

(3)

Statement (1) conveys (some) instructive information.

(4)

The term brother can be analyzed into and thus so means the same as brother. (This follows from (1) via (2).

(5)

The statement at issue in (4) is—if not outright false, then— ultimately trivial and uninformative.

(6)

(5) contradicts (3).

On this basis Moore concluded that the entire business of language analysis is highly problematic and its potential informativeness in serious question. The idea that analysis is an informatively useful procedure in linguistics and philosophy would accordingly be cast into deep doubt. However, the trouble with G. E. Moore’s argumentation is that it overlooks a basic and essential distinction. For the reality of it is that there are two importantly different sorts of propositional contexts. Thus consider and contrast • A brother is a male sibling. • In the U.S.A., one black man will often refer to another as a brother. There is a striking difference here. The first sentence uses the expression brother substantively, but the second does not, for here it functions only expressively (and in this particular case figuratively). Talk about things is substantive while talk about expressions and their usage is something rather different. It is, or should be, clear that meaning-equivalency assures only substantive uniformity, but not expressive uniformity. And the same substantive information can be conveyed in very different expressive forms, as is clear by contrasting Snow is white. and

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Schnee ist weiß. Both sentences/statements convey exactly the same substantive information, but expressively there is a decided difference. Now the crux to resolving that “paradox” of analysis is that what an analysis-established equivalency does is to recast the same substantive item (“brother”) in a variant expressive format (“male sibling”). And the intersubstitution of meaningequivalents will only be appropriate in substantive and not in expressive contexts. With these deliberations in mind, it becomes clear that the reasoning at issue is that above-cited Morrean argument will unravel once one observes that its crucial premise (2) is fatally flawed. For the intersubstitutions of “synonymous” equivalents (like “brother” and “male sibling”) holds only for substantive context and not for expressive ones. Accordingly one cannot reason: Only figuratively are all blacks brothers Brothers = male siblings Therefore: only figuratively are all black male siblings And so Moore’s supposedly analysis-defeating paradox is overcome by the classic device of heeding needed distinctions. NOTES 1

W. V. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in his From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 20–46.

2

See Hilary Putnam Mind, Language, and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), especially Chapter 2, “The Analytic and the Synthetic”.

3

Such necessities would hold not in every logically possible world, but only in every metaphysically possible world.

4

G. E. Moore, “Reply to my Critics,” in The Philosophy of G. E. Moore, ed. by P. A. Schlipp (Evanston, Chicago, Northwestern University, 1942). See p. 663.

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Chapter Eleven ON ISSUES OF EXPONENTIAL GROWTH 1. THE IDEA OF EXPONENTIAL GROWTH

A

quantity Q is said to grow exponentially over time when it increases proportionately with the t-th power of the elapsed time, t. We thus have it that Q grows exponentially when: t

Q(t) ∝ a , for some given quantity a. This situation is mathematically equivalent with: log Q(t) ∝ t. Such a formulation puts the matter in starkly mathematical terms. Just exactly what does it mean? To appreciate this, it is helpful to contemplate some of the salient and characteristic features of experiential growth: • Acceleration: the rate of growth of Q(t) is ever-increasing over time. In fact, (d,dt)Q(t) is itself a quantity that grows exponentially, and indeed does so in lock-step with the growth of Q(t) itself so that we have: • Cumulativity: The greater Q(t) already is, the faster it will increase. In fact the rate of increase is proportional to the size that has already been attained: (d,dt)Q(t) ∝ Q (t) • Percentage Increase Constancy. With the time scale for t divided into n successive units of equal length the percentage of growth during the nth period will be equal for all n.1 • Multiplitive Increase Constancy. Each successive time period sees Q(t) increase by a constant multiplicity factor k, with Q(n + 1) = kQ(n) throughout.

Nicholas Rescher • Philosophical Reflections

• Limitlessness: As t moves on, Q(t) will increase beyond any specified amount, growing beyond any given limit at an ever-accelerating pace. These, then, are some of the principal characteristics of exponential growth. They render it transparently clear that such growth will be difficult to sustain indefinitely. 2. TYPICAL EXAMPLES OF EXPONENTIAL GROWTH It warrants stress that exponential enlargement instantiates altogether free and unfettered growth: it is the natural way in which things grow when they can have everything their way. It is instructive to consider some typical examples of this phenomenon. A. Cosmic Expansion. The rate of expansion of the cosmos is such that its proportionate diameter-increase over fixed timespans is constant. B. Unchecked Population Growth. In circumstances where the parents of a type of organism give birth to what is, on average, a fixed number of reproductively successful offspring (at a rate yielding more than mere replacement), the population at issue will grow exponentially. C. Orgasmic Growth can occur even at the level of individual organisms such as spiral shells, for example.2 D. Atomic Fission. When the members of a mass of unstable atoms decay in a way that engenders fission products which themselves set further such fissions into play at the same rate, these products increase exponentially. E. Compound Interest. Money that earns a fixed rate of compound interest increases exponentially. F. Knowledge and Information. Throughout modern history the volume of scientific information available via printed media has been increasing exponentially.3

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ON ISSUES OF EXPONENTIAL GROWTH

G. Fractal Configurations are such that in regression to the small each fractal configuration reduplicates the entire structure of its predecessors. And in the progression of a fractal configuration to the larger each successive stage encompasses everything that has gone before. In consequences, the progression of fractal configurations to the large also instantiates exponential growth. There is thus no shortage of examples of developmental processes that exhibit exponential growth—at least for a time. 3. KNOWLEDGE AS AN EXAMPLE: ADAM’S THESIS Knowledge is one of those very rare commodities that are not diminished but rather amplified through consumption. And the expansion of knowledge is a particularly interesting example of the phenomena of exponential growth. This makes the growth of knowledge a potentially explosive process, and by the end of the nineteenth century no clear-eyed observer could fail to remark the striking pace of scientific advance. Among the first to detail this phenomenon in exact terms via mathematical formulation was Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918), the American scholar, historian, and student of cultural affairs. (He was a grandson of President John Quincy Adams, and great-grandson of John Adams, George Washington’s successor as President.) Noting that scientific work increased at a rate fixed by a constant doubling time so that science has an exponential growth-rate, Adams characterized this circumstance as a “law of acceleration” governing the progress of science. He wrote: Laplace would have found it child’s play to fix a ratio in the progression in mathematical science between Descartes, Leibniz, Newton and himself. … Pending agreement between … authorities, theory may assume what it likessay a fifty or even a five-and-twenty year period of reduplication … for the period matters little once the acceleration itself is admitted.4

Roughly speaking, Adams envisioned science as doubling in size and content with every succeeding half-century, producing a situation of exponential growth. And Adams did not stand alone here, seeing that an anticipation of his idea occurring in an obiter dictum in the 1901 Presidential Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science by William Thomson (Lord Kelvin):

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Nicholas Rescher • Philosophical Reflections

Scientific wealth tends to accumulate according to the law of compound interest. Every addition to knowledge of the properties of matter supplies the naturalist with new instrumental means for discovering and interpreting phenomena of nature, which in their turn afford foundations for fresh generalizations.5

The position of Adams and Kelvin amounts to the claim that the percentagerate of the per annum increase in the levels of scientific effort and quantitative productivity remains constant with the passage of time.6 Adams characterized his principle as “law of acceleration, definite and constant as any law of mechanics [which] cannot be supposed to relax its energy to suit the convenience of man.”7 And the historical facts bear Adams out in this regard. For irrespective of whether S represents scientific literature or manpower or information, the growth of the enterprise has been exponential throughout recent history.8 When Henry Adams enunciated his “law of acceleration” regarding man’s productive power, he did so on the basis of shrewd perception and hunch based on informal insight into the historical course of things. Only a few scattered fragments of statistical information needed to substantiate the historical reality of this phenomenon were available in his day. However, the situation in this regard is nowadays greatly improved. The continued data-gathering effort of statisticians, sociologists, historians of science, science-administrators provide impressive documentation of the phenomenon discerned by Adams.9 4. AN END OF THE ROAD: THE S-CURVE AND ASYMPTOTIC LIMITS Of course exponential growth will not generally continue ever onwards along its unfettered path. For nature is a thing of complexity and diversity: on its stage, things of different kinds must make room for one another. And so in general exponential growth can only continue up to a point. It encounters limits. This line of thought leads back to Thomas Malthus who insisted that the unfettered growth of human population is destined to be checked by limited resources. And in general those who have sought to discern exponential growth in various ranges of phenomena have generally accepted that this sort of thing cannot endure—that growth at this phenomenal pace must run out of steam. And when exponential growth comes up against a natural

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ON ISSUES OF EXPONENTIAL GROWTH

barrier there is bound to ensue a deceleration to the point of effective stabilization. We thus arrive at the idea of what might be called a normal course of exponential growth in nature, a circumstance represented by an S-curve in which an initial phase of accelerative exponential growth is succeeded by an eventual phase of exponential deceleration. (See Display 1) What we have here is effectively an approach to an asymptotic limit in exponential steps: the inverse process with exponents