Can you clarify what you mean by phenomenological and existentialist stances, and what you mean by saying that there is no true ontology? I agree that we could use somewhat different models of the world. For example, we don’t have to divide between dogs and wolves, but could just call them one common name. I don’t see what difference this makes. Dogs and wolves still exist in the world and would be potentially distinguishable in the way that we do, even if we did not distinguish them, and likewise the common thing would still exist even if we did explicitly think of it.
Many opinions that are not normally counted as moral realism are in fact forms of moral realism, if moral realism is understood to mean “moral statements make claims about the facts in the world, and the ones that people accept normally make true claims.” For example, if someone says that saying that it is good to do something means that he wants to do it, and saying that something is bad means that he doesn’t want to do it or want other people to do it, then when he says, “murder is bad,” he is making a true claim about the world, namely that he does not want to murder and does not want other people to murder. Likewise, Eliezer’s theory is morally realist in this sense. However there other opinions which say that moral statements are either meaningless or false, like error theory, which would say that they are false. It was my impression that you were denying moral realism in this stronger sense.
I think that moral realism is true and in a stronger sense than in Eliezer’s theory, but the facts a statement would depend on in order to be true in my theory are very much like the facts that make such statements true according to him.
Pointing to some aspects where my theory is different from his:
in my theory, the universe and life are good in themselves, not indifferent.
“good” is thought of as the cause of desire, not as the output of a function. This of course is a common sense way of thinking about good, but it seems backwards to many people after thinking about it. But it is exactly right: for example, the fact that food is good for us is the cause, over geological time, of the fact that we desire it. Likewise if you are standing in front of an ice cream shop and see the ice cream, it is physically the light coming from the ice cream which begins the chain of physical causes that end in you desiring it.
these things imply that although good is relative in the sense that what is good for me is different from what is good for you, and what is good for humans is different from what is good for e.g. babyeaters, all of those things fall under the concept of good, even as applied by me. I do not say, “This is babyeaterish for babyeaters,” like Eliezer; I say, “this is good for babyeaters, although not for us.” That implies e.g. that I do not want to impose human values on babyeaters, and I think that would be an evil thing.
human life has an objective purpose. Eliezer’s theory sort of has this implication but not in a robust sense, since he thinks it only has that purpose from a human point of view, and babyeaters would not accept it. I think that informed babyeaters would accept my moral theory, and therefore they would agree with us about the purpose of human life.
By the phenomenological stance I mean that I believe the world is only known through experience. This reduces down in terms of physics to something like “all information is generated by observation” where “observation” is the technical term used to mean the sort of physical measurement we encounter in quantum physics where entropy is generated. If there is anything more going on that’s fine, but we still won’t know about it except through the standard process by which classical information is generated.
By the existential stance I mean simply that I believe the world exists first. This seems sort of obvious, but the alternative is essentialism, which assumes there is some structure to the world that determines its existence. The question is which comes first, ontology or metaphysics. Existentialism says ontology comes first, and through ontology we can discover metaphysics. Essentialism says the opposite, that metaphysics reveals ontology (naturally for this reason metaphysics and ontology are often not clearly distinct in essentialist perspectives).
I think it’s worth noting that both these perspectives are often only nominally or shallowly respected. I think a lot of this is because the phenomenological stance implies that we only have an inside view, and any “outside” view of the world we obtain is necessarily an inference from our inside view of the world. But it’s quite easy to accidentally conclude the outside view we’ve inferred is timeless (this is, after all, seen by many as the entire point of philosophy: to discover timeless truths), so there is a risk of short circuiting both phenomenology and existentialism to produce ontological realism and essentialism, respectively.
I believe the combination of these two is necessary. Accepting the phenomenological stance we are forced either into Husserl’s idealism and transcendental phenomenology or realism. Since idealism makes untestable claims, even if it is true I can’t really say much about it, so I must take the realist stance. And based on my knowledge of the world, I’m forced into existentialism because I can find no strong evidence that there is a structure preceding existence and there seems no evidence suggesting a real world does not exist (solipsism). Existentialism is basically what’s left after eliminating the possibilities that don’t fit the evidence.
To summarize, I take the view that things exist prior to knowing about them, and the only way we know about them is through experience.
The consequence of both on my epistemology is that I have no conception of “truth” as the world is normally used. The only recovery for “truth” is something like correspondence theory but through the lens of phenomenology, so I can at most say I have knowledge that leads me to believe a statement has some likelihood of corresponding with reality but only insofar as I can observe the correspondence through experience. We cannot even talk about the “true” probability that a statement corresponds to reality, since doing so introduces a side channel for gaining information that is not through experience.
So where this leaves me with morality is that I must naturally reject moral realism in the sense that there are no true statements, let alone true moral statements. I further don’t find notions of “good” and “bad” meaningful because linguistically they imply a moving of meaning from strictly residing in the ontology to being part of the metaphysics, thus they make poor choices for technical terms for me because of their connotations.
What I can say is that there are intersubjective beliefs about reality and those inform our preferences and it is our collective willingness to hold certain preferences and categorize those preferences under labels like “good” or “bad” that creates “morality”, but this morality is strictly speaking only resident in ontology and seems to imply little about metaphysics.
I’m not exactly sure what to call this metaethical stance. It’s not quite moral nihilism or non-cognitivism because I’m not wholly rejecting the notion that we might come to agreement on particular preference norms, but it also seems not moral realism or cognitivism because the place where there is agreement to come to resides in experience, and thus ontology only, not the external reality of metaphysics that exists outside experience.
Perhaps this should be classified as moral realism? Although doing so to me seems to lump it closer to theories it is more dissimilar from, whereas it is fairly close, especially in its application, to moral nihilism, except that it is grounded in the intersubjective rather than simply not in the objective.
I agree with the summary statement that “things exist prior to knowing about them, and the only way we know about them is through experience,” but I probably understand that differently from the way that you do.
I agree that we only know through experience, but your reference to how this cashes out in physical terms suggests that we might mean something different by knowing through experience. That is, I do not disagree that in fact this is how it cashed out. But the fact that it does, is a fact that we learned by experience, and from the point of view that we had before those experiences, it could have cashed out quite differently. From the point of view after learning about this, it is easy to suppose that “it had to be something like this,” but in fact we have no way to exclude scenarios where things would have been radically different. I don’t know for a fact that this means that our position differs: but I would not have mentioned such a physical account, and it seems to me that bringing in that physical account into an account of epistemology will tend to lead people astray, i.e. by judging not from their experience but from other things instead, or to put this in another way, misusing experience, since in one way it is impossible to judge from anything except from experience, even by mistake, since you have no access to anything but experience.
It is obvious that the world exists before we know it. But here I more clearly disagree with you because it seems to me that what you are calling essentialism is simply straightforwardly true. I don’t see the connection with existing before we know it, though, because essentialism does not mean (even as you have described it) that we know the world before it exists, but that the world has a structure that precedes existence, not in time, but logically. You say that you do not accept such a structure because there is no strong evidence for this.
I think there is conclusive proof of such a structure: some things are not other things (take any example you like: my desk is not my chair), and this is a fact that does not in any way depend on me. If it depended on me, then we could say this is my way of knowing, not the structure of the world, and essentialism might turn out to be false. But as it is, it does not depend on me, and this proves that the world has a structure on which its existence logically depends.
In fact, overall you seem to me to be asserting a position like that of Parmenides: being exists, and all apparent distinction is illusion. I very much doubt you will agree that you are in agreement with him, but I don’t know how to otherwise understand what you have said above.
I agree about realism, but I pretty much fully disagree with what you conclude about truth: that is, I accept the prima facie argument that it is absurd to say that there are no true statements, because “there are no true statements” would in this way be a true statement. I also would be surprised if you can find any reasonable number of academic philosophers who would call a position “realist” if it says that there are no true statements. But also your argument does not seem even intended to establish this: it seems at most to establish that we cannot have ultimate and conclusive knowledge, once and for all, that a particular statement is true. I agree, but that is hardly the same as showing that there are not in fact true statements.
As I just said, I agree about not having any ultimate knowledge, and this points to a partial agreement about truth as well: I think the concept of truth, and all human concepts, are intrinsically imperfect ways of knowing the world. Supporting this, I think that e.g. the liar paradox, or even the paradox of the heap, do not and cannot have valid and satisfying solutions. All solutions are artificial, and this is because the paradoxes in fact follow logically from our idea of truth, which only imperfectly points to something in the world.
I don’t think it would be fair to say that your ethical view is non-realist because of your idea about truth except to the degree that someone concludes that your view of the world is non-realist as a whole (and your view does seem suggestive of this but you at least denied it). The question would be about how ethical statements compare to other statements: if there are no true statements about morals in exactly the same way that there are no true statements about cows and trees, then it would not be fair to count that as morally non-realist.
I can’t draw a conclusion about this myself from what you have said: perhaps you could compare yourself e.g. statements about ethics and statements about money, which are clearly intersubjective. I find it hard to imagine someone who is really and truly non-realist about money: that is, who believes that when he says, “I have 50 dollars in my wallet,” the statement is strictly speaking false, because he actually has just a few pieces of paper in his wallet, and much less than 50. But perhaps this is no different from the fact that it is hard to accept that people who claim to be moral non-realists, actually are so.
Hmm, so some of this sounds like I may misunderstand the terminology of academic philosophy. I’m trying to learn it, but I generally lack a lot of context for how the terminology is used so I largely have to go with what I find to be the definitions suggested by summary articles as I find I want to talk about some subject. In many cases I feel like the terminology is accidentally ignoring parts of theory space I’d like to point to, though I’m not sure if that’s because I’m confused or academic philosophy is confused. Yet it seems to be the primary shared language I have available for talking about these subjects other than going “full-Heidegger” and being deliberately subtle to hide my meaning from all who would not bother to do the work to think my thoughts.
On some particular points:
I agree that we only know through experience, but your reference to how this cashes out in physical terms suggests that we might mean something different by knowing through experience. That is, I do not disagree that in fact this is how it cashed out. But the fact that it does, is a fact that we learned by experience, and from the point of view that we had before those experiences, it could have cashed out quite differently.
Sure, I only included the physical explanation because I wanted to be clear that I’m talking about a fundamental kind of thing here by “experience” and not, say, the common use of the word “experience”. Unfortunately existing phenomenology lacks, from what I can tell, a rigorous way of talking about experience as generic information transfer.
I think there is conclusive proof of such a structure: some things are not other things (take any example you like: my desk is not my chair), and this is a fact that does not in any way depend on me. If it depended on me, then we could say this is my way of knowing, not the structure of the world, and essentialism might turn out to be false. But as it is, it does not depend on me, and this proves that the world has a structure on which its existence logically depends.
This is one such case where maybe the terminology fails me. Perhaps the existentialist/essentialist divide is not the one I mean. I want to separate those theories that conflate ontology, especially teleological aspects of ontology, with metaphysics from those that view them as separate. Once we have them separate, then we seem to be able to talk about idealism and realism from a perspective of structure creates reality or reality creates structure (i.e. ontology determines metaphysics or metaphysics determines ontology). It is this latter latter case I mean to be in: ontology, which is necessarily discovered only through experience) is the lens through which we can try to discover metaphysics, but metaphysics is ultimately about the stuff that exists prior to the understanding of its structure, and that there is literally nothing you can say about reality except through the lens of ontology because you have no other way to know the world and make sense of the experience of it.
In fact, overall you seem to me to be asserting a position like that of Parmenides
I’d say Parmenides has the same flavor as me, although I’d have to do some heavy interpretation to make what evidence we have of his position fit mine.
I can’t draw a conclusion about this myself from what you have said: perhaps you could compare yourself e.g. statements about ethics and statements about money, which are clearly intersubjective. I find it hard to imagine someone who is really and truly non-realist about money: that is, who believes that when he says, “I have 50 dollars in my wallet,” the statement is strictly speaking false, because he actually has just a few pieces of paper in his wallet, and much less than 50. But perhaps this is no different from the fact that it is hard to accept that people who claim to be moral non-realists, actually are so.
I’d say there’s nothing so special about talking about ethics versus money other than they have differences in meaning and purpose for us, i.e. teleological differences. There is a useful sense in which I can say “I have 50 dollars in my wallet” or “murder is bad” but this is also all understood through multiple layers of structure heaped on top of reality that, without interpretation via experience, would have no meaning. Perhaps “truth” has a broader meaning than I think in academic philosophy, but it seems to me if we’re talking about ways of experiencing the experience of reality then we’ve left the realm of what most people seem to mean by the word “truth”. But perhaps this is a definitional dispute?
I think I understand your position a little better now. I still think it is at least expressed in a way which is more skeptical than necessary.
I want to separate those theories that conflate ontology, especially teleological aspects of ontology, with metaphysics from those that view them as separate.
In my theory, the teleological aspects of things are pretty directly derived from metaphysics. Galileo somewhere says that inertia is the “laziness” of a body, or in other words the answer to “Why does this continue to move?” is “Because it continues to remain what it is.” Once you have this sort of thing, it is easy enough to see why you get the origin of life, which seems to have purpose, and then the evolution of complex life, which seems to have complex purposes. In this way, ultimately all questions of final cause, “for what purpose,” reduce to this answer: because things tend to remain what they are. Now maybe we can’t explain the metaphysics behind things remaining what they are, but it is surely something metaphysical.
metaphysics is ultimately about the stuff that exists prior to the understanding of its structure, and that there is literally nothing you can say about reality except through the lens of ontology because you have no other way to know the world and make sense of the experience of it.
I think I mostly agree with that, actually, but I don’t think we should conclude that there aren’t true statements. I’ll say more about this in the context of money vs ethics below.
There is a useful sense in which I can say “I have 50 dollars in my wallet” or “murder is bad” but this is also all understood through multiple layers of structure heaped on top of reality that, without interpretation via experience, would have no meaning. Perhaps “truth” has a broader meaning than I think in academic philosophy, but it seems to me if we’re talking about ways of experiencing the experience of reality then we’ve left the realm of what most people seem to mean by the word “truth”. But perhaps this is a definitional dispute?
Dan Dennett is always arguing against “essentialism,” and I find myself agreeing mostly with his arguments while disagreeing with the anti-essentialist conclusion. Basically his main point, in almost every case, is that things have vague boundaries, not permanent white and black once and for all boundaries. He takes this as an argument against essentialism because he takes essentialism to mean a description of the world where you reduce everything to a complex of “A, B, C, etc.” and A is there or not, B is there or not, C is there or not. Everything is black or white. I agree that the world is not like that, but I disagree with his conclusion about how it is, or rather it seems that he has no alternative—“the world is not like that,” but he cannot say in any sense how it is instead.
I agree that boundaries are vague; in fact, I would assert that all verbal boundaries are vague, including the boundaries of words that we use to define mathematical and logical ideas. If this is so, it follows that these kinds of vague boundaries will come up in everything we talk about, not only in things like whether a person is “tall” or “short.” For example, we may or may not be able to find something which is “kinda sorta” a carbon atom, rather than definitely being one or definitely not being one. But even if we can’t, this is like the fact that we don’t find all of the evolutionary intermediate forms between living things: the fact that we don’t find them in practice does not mean they are impossible. Or at any rate, if there are some boundaries that cannot be vague, we have no way of proving that they cannot be, but we can simply say, “We haven’t found any examples yet where such and such a boundary is vague.”
I’m discussing this in relation to the question, “perhaps this is a definitional dispute?” I don’t think there is or can be a rigid line between definitional disputes and disputes about the world. In some cases, we can clearly say that people are arguing about words. In other cases, we can clearly say they are arguing about facts. But this is no different from the fact that we can say that some particular person is definitely bald and some other is not: the boundary between being bald and not being bald remains a vague one, and likewise the boundary between arguing about facts and arguing about words is a vague one.
And unfortunately your question may be very near that boundary. Looking at this verbally, I would say that “it is useful to say this,” and “it is true to say this,” are very close, although not identical. We could put it this way: a statement is true if it is useful because it points at reality. This is to exclude, of course, the usefulness of lying and self deceiving. These things may be useful, but they get their utility from pointing away from reality. If a statement is useful because it points at reality, I would say that to that extent it is true (to that extent, because it might also have some falsehood insofar as it might have some disutility in addition to its utility.)
The statement about money (and about ethics), in my opinion, is useful because it points at reality. Your argument is that it points more directly to our interpretations of reality. Fine: but those interpretations themselves point at reality as well. It isn’t easy to see how you could redescribe this as those interpretations pointing away from reality, which is what would be needed to say that the statement is false.
And unfortunately your question may be very near that boundary. Looking at this verbally, I would say that “it is useful to say this,” and “it is true to say this,” are very close, although not identical. We could put it this way: a statement is true if it is useful because it points at reality. This is to exclude, of course, the usefulness of lying and self deceiving. These things may be useful, but they get their utility from pointing away from reality. If a statement is useful because it points at reality, I would say that to that extent it is true (to that extent, because it might also have some falsehood insofar as it might have some disutility in addition to its utility.)
This, I think, gets at why I don’t want to acknowledge “true” and “false”, because it seems to me the only way to salvage those terms is to make them teleological to the purpose of likelihood of matching experiences of reality. I guess this is fine but it’s not really what most people mean when they say “true” and “false” as far as I can tell, so it seems better to reject the notions of “true” and “false” to avoid confusion about what we’re discussing.
This, I think, gets at why I don’t want to acknowledge “true” and “false”, because it seems to me the only way to salvage those terms is to make them teleological to the purpose of likelihood of matching experiences of reality.
This is at least very close to what I meant. Consider this situation: you are walking along, and you see a man in the distance. “That looks like a pretty tall fellow,” you say. When he approaches you, you can see how tall he is. Was your statement true or false? It is obvious that “pretty tall fellow” does not name a specific height or even give a minimum. So what determines whether your statement was true or not? You will almost certainly say that you were right if you do not find yourself surprised by his height compared to what you expected, or if you find him surprisingly tall, and similarly you will say that you were wrong if you find him surprisingly short compared to what you expected.
I guess this is fine but it’s not really what most people mean when they say “true” and “false” as far as I can tell
But what do you think people really mean instead? I think pretty much everyone would agree with the above example: you are mistaken if you are surprised in the wrong direction, and you are right if you are not surprised, or if you are surprised in the right direction.
I suppose theoretically someone could say that truth and falsity mean that there is a bit somewhere in his metaphysical structure which has the value of 0 or 1, in such a way that “he is tall” is true if the bit is set to 1, and false if the bit is set to 0. But it seems obvious that this is not what people would normally mean at least when talking about this situation, even if they might sometimes say abstract things that sound sort of like this. And people will sometimes explicitly assert that there is something like such a bit in a particular case, e.g. whether or not something is human. This assertion is almost certainly false, but it is not some special kind of falsity about the existence of truth and falsity; they are simply mistakenly asserting the existence of such a bit in roughly the same way someone is mistaken if the person called tall turns out to be 4′11′.
So I don’t see how people mean something different from this by truth and falsity, or at least significantly different.
so it seems better to reject the notions of “true” and “false” to avoid confusion about what we’re discussing.
I think that doxastic voluntarism is true in general, but even if it is not, one aspect of it certainly is: we can use words to mean what we choose to use them to mean. And insofar as this is a matter of choice, practical considerations will be involved in deciding to use a word one way or another. You are pointing to this here: what benefit would we get from using “truth” in the above way, compared to using it in other ways?
I think most people will take the denial of truth to be a denial that the world is real. As I said earlier, if anything seems like a denial of realism, the denial of truth does. And most people, coming to the conclusion that there is no truth, will conclude that they should not bother to spend much time thinking about things. Obviously you haven’t drawn that conclusion or you wouldn’t be spending time on Less Wrong, but I think most people would draw that conclusion. So for someone who thinks that thinking is valuable, rejecting truth does not seem helpful.
In terms of avoiding confusion, you may be seeking an unattainable goal. The ability to understand is in a way limited, but also in a way not. As I said in another comment recently, we can think about anything; if not, just think about “what you can’t think about.” But this means we will always be confused when we attempt to think about the things on the boundaries of our understanding. Your visual field is limited, but you cannot see the edges of it, because if you could, they would not be the edges. In a similar way, your understanding is bounded, but you cannot directly understand the boundaries, because if you could, they would not be the boundaries. That implies there will always be an “edge of understanding” where you are going to be confused.
So I don’t see how people mean something different from this by truth and falsity, or at least significantly different.
Right, I don’t expect my position to make much of a difference to most people most of the time. Perhaps this is a matter of how I perceive the context of my readers, but I generally expect them to be more likely to make the mistake of even accidentally thinking of what I might call “true” and “false” for what we might call the “hard essentialist” version of truth (there are truth bits in the universe) when discussing topics that are sufficiently abstract.
what benefit would we get from using “truth” in the above way, compared to using it in other ways?
It seems mostly to matter when I want to give a precise accounting of my thoughts (or more precisely my experience of my thoughts).
I think most people will take the denial of truth to be a denial that the world is real. As I said earlier, if anything seems like a denial of realism, the denial of truth does. And most people, coming to the conclusion that there is no truth, will conclude that they should not bother to spend much time thinking about things. Obviously you haven’t drawn that conclusion or you wouldn’t be spending time on Less Wrong, but I think most people would draw that conclusion. So for someone who thinks that thinking is valuable, rejecting truth does not seem helpful.
This gets at why I feel “in-between” in many ways: rejecting truth the way nihilists and solipsists do is not where I mean to end up, but not rejecting truth in at least some form seems to me to deny the skepticism I think we must take given the intentional appearance of experience. Building from “no truth” to “some kind of truth” seems a better approach to me than backing down from “yes truth”.
This may be because I find myself in a society where idealism and dualism are common and rationalists and other folks who favor realism often express it in terms of strict materialism that often denies phenomenological intentionality (even if unintentionally). Maybe I am too far removed from general society these days, but I feel it more important to accentuate intentionality over the strict materialism I perceive my target readers are likely to hold if they don’t already get what I’m pointing at. You seem to be evidence, though, that this is misunderstanding, although I suspect you are an outlier given how much we agree.
That implies there will always be an “edge of understanding” where you are going to be confused.
Agreed. I expect us all to remain confused in a technical sense of having beliefs that do not fully predict reality. But I also believe it virtuous to minimize that confusion where possible and practical.
This is a response to this comment.
Can you clarify what you mean by phenomenological and existentialist stances, and what you mean by saying that there is no true ontology? I agree that we could use somewhat different models of the world. For example, we don’t have to divide between dogs and wolves, but could just call them one common name. I don’t see what difference this makes. Dogs and wolves still exist in the world and would be potentially distinguishable in the way that we do, even if we did not distinguish them, and likewise the common thing would still exist even if we did explicitly think of it.
Many opinions that are not normally counted as moral realism are in fact forms of moral realism, if moral realism is understood to mean “moral statements make claims about the facts in the world, and the ones that people accept normally make true claims.” For example, if someone says that saying that it is good to do something means that he wants to do it, and saying that something is bad means that he doesn’t want to do it or want other people to do it, then when he says, “murder is bad,” he is making a true claim about the world, namely that he does not want to murder and does not want other people to murder. Likewise, Eliezer’s theory is morally realist in this sense. However there other opinions which say that moral statements are either meaningless or false, like error theory, which would say that they are false. It was my impression that you were denying moral realism in this stronger sense.
I think that moral realism is true and in a stronger sense than in Eliezer’s theory, but the facts a statement would depend on in order to be true in my theory are very much like the facts that make such statements true according to him.
Pointing to some aspects where my theory is different from his:
in my theory, the universe and life are good in themselves, not indifferent.
“good” is thought of as the cause of desire, not as the output of a function. This of course is a common sense way of thinking about good, but it seems backwards to many people after thinking about it. But it is exactly right: for example, the fact that food is good for us is the cause, over geological time, of the fact that we desire it. Likewise if you are standing in front of an ice cream shop and see the ice cream, it is physically the light coming from the ice cream which begins the chain of physical causes that end in you desiring it.
these things imply that although good is relative in the sense that what is good for me is different from what is good for you, and what is good for humans is different from what is good for e.g. babyeaters, all of those things fall under the concept of good, even as applied by me. I do not say, “This is babyeaterish for babyeaters,” like Eliezer; I say, “this is good for babyeaters, although not for us.” That implies e.g. that I do not want to impose human values on babyeaters, and I think that would be an evil thing.
human life has an objective purpose. Eliezer’s theory sort of has this implication but not in a robust sense, since he thinks it only has that purpose from a human point of view, and babyeaters would not accept it. I think that informed babyeaters would accept my moral theory, and therefore they would agree with us about the purpose of human life.
By the phenomenological stance I mean that I believe the world is only known through experience. This reduces down in terms of physics to something like “all information is generated by observation” where “observation” is the technical term used to mean the sort of physical measurement we encounter in quantum physics where entropy is generated. If there is anything more going on that’s fine, but we still won’t know about it except through the standard process by which classical information is generated.
By the existential stance I mean simply that I believe the world exists first. This seems sort of obvious, but the alternative is essentialism, which assumes there is some structure to the world that determines its existence. The question is which comes first, ontology or metaphysics. Existentialism says ontology comes first, and through ontology we can discover metaphysics. Essentialism says the opposite, that metaphysics reveals ontology (naturally for this reason metaphysics and ontology are often not clearly distinct in essentialist perspectives).
I think it’s worth noting that both these perspectives are often only nominally or shallowly respected. I think a lot of this is because the phenomenological stance implies that we only have an inside view, and any “outside” view of the world we obtain is necessarily an inference from our inside view of the world. But it’s quite easy to accidentally conclude the outside view we’ve inferred is timeless (this is, after all, seen by many as the entire point of philosophy: to discover timeless truths), so there is a risk of short circuiting both phenomenology and existentialism to produce ontological realism and essentialism, respectively.
I believe the combination of these two is necessary. Accepting the phenomenological stance we are forced either into Husserl’s idealism and transcendental phenomenology or realism. Since idealism makes untestable claims, even if it is true I can’t really say much about it, so I must take the realist stance. And based on my knowledge of the world, I’m forced into existentialism because I can find no strong evidence that there is a structure preceding existence and there seems no evidence suggesting a real world does not exist (solipsism). Existentialism is basically what’s left after eliminating the possibilities that don’t fit the evidence.
To summarize, I take the view that things exist prior to knowing about them, and the only way we know about them is through experience.
The consequence of both on my epistemology is that I have no conception of “truth” as the world is normally used. The only recovery for “truth” is something like correspondence theory but through the lens of phenomenology, so I can at most say I have knowledge that leads me to believe a statement has some likelihood of corresponding with reality but only insofar as I can observe the correspondence through experience. We cannot even talk about the “true” probability that a statement corresponds to reality, since doing so introduces a side channel for gaining information that is not through experience.
So where this leaves me with morality is that I must naturally reject moral realism in the sense that there are no true statements, let alone true moral statements. I further don’t find notions of “good” and “bad” meaningful because linguistically they imply a moving of meaning from strictly residing in the ontology to being part of the metaphysics, thus they make poor choices for technical terms for me because of their connotations.
What I can say is that there are intersubjective beliefs about reality and those inform our preferences and it is our collective willingness to hold certain preferences and categorize those preferences under labels like “good” or “bad” that creates “morality”, but this morality is strictly speaking only resident in ontology and seems to imply little about metaphysics.
I’m not exactly sure what to call this metaethical stance. It’s not quite moral nihilism or non-cognitivism because I’m not wholly rejecting the notion that we might come to agreement on particular preference norms, but it also seems not moral realism or cognitivism because the place where there is agreement to come to resides in experience, and thus ontology only, not the external reality of metaphysics that exists outside experience.
Perhaps this should be classified as moral realism? Although doing so to me seems to lump it closer to theories it is more dissimilar from, whereas it is fairly close, especially in its application, to moral nihilism, except that it is grounded in the intersubjective rather than simply not in the objective.
I agree with the summary statement that “things exist prior to knowing about them, and the only way we know about them is through experience,” but I probably understand that differently from the way that you do.
I agree that we only know through experience, but your reference to how this cashes out in physical terms suggests that we might mean something different by knowing through experience. That is, I do not disagree that in fact this is how it cashed out. But the fact that it does, is a fact that we learned by experience, and from the point of view that we had before those experiences, it could have cashed out quite differently. From the point of view after learning about this, it is easy to suppose that “it had to be something like this,” but in fact we have no way to exclude scenarios where things would have been radically different. I don’t know for a fact that this means that our position differs: but I would not have mentioned such a physical account, and it seems to me that bringing in that physical account into an account of epistemology will tend to lead people astray, i.e. by judging not from their experience but from other things instead, or to put this in another way, misusing experience, since in one way it is impossible to judge from anything except from experience, even by mistake, since you have no access to anything but experience.
It is obvious that the world exists before we know it. But here I more clearly disagree with you because it seems to me that what you are calling essentialism is simply straightforwardly true. I don’t see the connection with existing before we know it, though, because essentialism does not mean (even as you have described it) that we know the world before it exists, but that the world has a structure that precedes existence, not in time, but logically. You say that you do not accept such a structure because there is no strong evidence for this.
I think there is conclusive proof of such a structure: some things are not other things (take any example you like: my desk is not my chair), and this is a fact that does not in any way depend on me. If it depended on me, then we could say this is my way of knowing, not the structure of the world, and essentialism might turn out to be false. But as it is, it does not depend on me, and this proves that the world has a structure on which its existence logically depends.
In fact, overall you seem to me to be asserting a position like that of Parmenides: being exists, and all apparent distinction is illusion. I very much doubt you will agree that you are in agreement with him, but I don’t know how to otherwise understand what you have said above.
I agree about realism, but I pretty much fully disagree with what you conclude about truth: that is, I accept the prima facie argument that it is absurd to say that there are no true statements, because “there are no true statements” would in this way be a true statement. I also would be surprised if you can find any reasonable number of academic philosophers who would call a position “realist” if it says that there are no true statements. But also your argument does not seem even intended to establish this: it seems at most to establish that we cannot have ultimate and conclusive knowledge, once and for all, that a particular statement is true. I agree, but that is hardly the same as showing that there are not in fact true statements.
As I just said, I agree about not having any ultimate knowledge, and this points to a partial agreement about truth as well: I think the concept of truth, and all human concepts, are intrinsically imperfect ways of knowing the world. Supporting this, I think that e.g. the liar paradox, or even the paradox of the heap, do not and cannot have valid and satisfying solutions. All solutions are artificial, and this is because the paradoxes in fact follow logically from our idea of truth, which only imperfectly points to something in the world.
I don’t think it would be fair to say that your ethical view is non-realist because of your idea about truth except to the degree that someone concludes that your view of the world is non-realist as a whole (and your view does seem suggestive of this but you at least denied it). The question would be about how ethical statements compare to other statements: if there are no true statements about morals in exactly the same way that there are no true statements about cows and trees, then it would not be fair to count that as morally non-realist.
I can’t draw a conclusion about this myself from what you have said: perhaps you could compare yourself e.g. statements about ethics and statements about money, which are clearly intersubjective. I find it hard to imagine someone who is really and truly non-realist about money: that is, who believes that when he says, “I have 50 dollars in my wallet,” the statement is strictly speaking false, because he actually has just a few pieces of paper in his wallet, and much less than 50. But perhaps this is no different from the fact that it is hard to accept that people who claim to be moral non-realists, actually are so.
Hmm, so some of this sounds like I may misunderstand the terminology of academic philosophy. I’m trying to learn it, but I generally lack a lot of context for how the terminology is used so I largely have to go with what I find to be the definitions suggested by summary articles as I find I want to talk about some subject. In many cases I feel like the terminology is accidentally ignoring parts of theory space I’d like to point to, though I’m not sure if that’s because I’m confused or academic philosophy is confused. Yet it seems to be the primary shared language I have available for talking about these subjects other than going “full-Heidegger” and being deliberately subtle to hide my meaning from all who would not bother to do the work to think my thoughts.
On some particular points:
Sure, I only included the physical explanation because I wanted to be clear that I’m talking about a fundamental kind of thing here by “experience” and not, say, the common use of the word “experience”. Unfortunately existing phenomenology lacks, from what I can tell, a rigorous way of talking about experience as generic information transfer.
This is one such case where maybe the terminology fails me. Perhaps the existentialist/essentialist divide is not the one I mean. I want to separate those theories that conflate ontology, especially teleological aspects of ontology, with metaphysics from those that view them as separate. Once we have them separate, then we seem to be able to talk about idealism and realism from a perspective of structure creates reality or reality creates structure (i.e. ontology determines metaphysics or metaphysics determines ontology). It is this latter latter case I mean to be in: ontology, which is necessarily discovered only through experience) is the lens through which we can try to discover metaphysics, but metaphysics is ultimately about the stuff that exists prior to the understanding of its structure, and that there is literally nothing you can say about reality except through the lens of ontology because you have no other way to know the world and make sense of the experience of it.
I’d say Parmenides has the same flavor as me, although I’d have to do some heavy interpretation to make what evidence we have of his position fit mine.
I’d say there’s nothing so special about talking about ethics versus money other than they have differences in meaning and purpose for us, i.e. teleological differences. There is a useful sense in which I can say “I have 50 dollars in my wallet” or “murder is bad” but this is also all understood through multiple layers of structure heaped on top of reality that, without interpretation via experience, would have no meaning. Perhaps “truth” has a broader meaning than I think in academic philosophy, but it seems to me if we’re talking about ways of experiencing the experience of reality then we’ve left the realm of what most people seem to mean by the word “truth”. But perhaps this is a definitional dispute?
I think I understand your position a little better now. I still think it is at least expressed in a way which is more skeptical than necessary.
In my theory, the teleological aspects of things are pretty directly derived from metaphysics. Galileo somewhere says that inertia is the “laziness” of a body, or in other words the answer to “Why does this continue to move?” is “Because it continues to remain what it is.” Once you have this sort of thing, it is easy enough to see why you get the origin of life, which seems to have purpose, and then the evolution of complex life, which seems to have complex purposes. In this way, ultimately all questions of final cause, “for what purpose,” reduce to this answer: because things tend to remain what they are. Now maybe we can’t explain the metaphysics behind things remaining what they are, but it is surely something metaphysical.
I think I mostly agree with that, actually, but I don’t think we should conclude that there aren’t true statements. I’ll say more about this in the context of money vs ethics below.
Dan Dennett is always arguing against “essentialism,” and I find myself agreeing mostly with his arguments while disagreeing with the anti-essentialist conclusion. Basically his main point, in almost every case, is that things have vague boundaries, not permanent white and black once and for all boundaries. He takes this as an argument against essentialism because he takes essentialism to mean a description of the world where you reduce everything to a complex of “A, B, C, etc.” and A is there or not, B is there or not, C is there or not. Everything is black or white. I agree that the world is not like that, but I disagree with his conclusion about how it is, or rather it seems that he has no alternative—“the world is not like that,” but he cannot say in any sense how it is instead.
I agree that boundaries are vague; in fact, I would assert that all verbal boundaries are vague, including the boundaries of words that we use to define mathematical and logical ideas. If this is so, it follows that these kinds of vague boundaries will come up in everything we talk about, not only in things like whether a person is “tall” or “short.” For example, we may or may not be able to find something which is “kinda sorta” a carbon atom, rather than definitely being one or definitely not being one. But even if we can’t, this is like the fact that we don’t find all of the evolutionary intermediate forms between living things: the fact that we don’t find them in practice does not mean they are impossible. Or at any rate, if there are some boundaries that cannot be vague, we have no way of proving that they cannot be, but we can simply say, “We haven’t found any examples yet where such and such a boundary is vague.”
I’m discussing this in relation to the question, “perhaps this is a definitional dispute?” I don’t think there is or can be a rigid line between definitional disputes and disputes about the world. In some cases, we can clearly say that people are arguing about words. In other cases, we can clearly say they are arguing about facts. But this is no different from the fact that we can say that some particular person is definitely bald and some other is not: the boundary between being bald and not being bald remains a vague one, and likewise the boundary between arguing about facts and arguing about words is a vague one.
And unfortunately your question may be very near that boundary. Looking at this verbally, I would say that “it is useful to say this,” and “it is true to say this,” are very close, although not identical. We could put it this way: a statement is true if it is useful because it points at reality. This is to exclude, of course, the usefulness of lying and self deceiving. These things may be useful, but they get their utility from pointing away from reality. If a statement is useful because it points at reality, I would say that to that extent it is true (to that extent, because it might also have some falsehood insofar as it might have some disutility in addition to its utility.)
The statement about money (and about ethics), in my opinion, is useful because it points at reality. Your argument is that it points more directly to our interpretations of reality. Fine: but those interpretations themselves point at reality as well. It isn’t easy to see how you could redescribe this as those interpretations pointing away from reality, which is what would be needed to say that the statement is false.
This, I think, gets at why I don’t want to acknowledge “true” and “false”, because it seems to me the only way to salvage those terms is to make them teleological to the purpose of likelihood of matching experiences of reality. I guess this is fine but it’s not really what most people mean when they say “true” and “false” as far as I can tell, so it seems better to reject the notions of “true” and “false” to avoid confusion about what we’re discussing.
This is at least very close to what I meant. Consider this situation: you are walking along, and you see a man in the distance. “That looks like a pretty tall fellow,” you say. When he approaches you, you can see how tall he is. Was your statement true or false? It is obvious that “pretty tall fellow” does not name a specific height or even give a minimum. So what determines whether your statement was true or not? You will almost certainly say that you were right if you do not find yourself surprised by his height compared to what you expected, or if you find him surprisingly tall, and similarly you will say that you were wrong if you find him surprisingly short compared to what you expected.
But what do you think people really mean instead? I think pretty much everyone would agree with the above example: you are mistaken if you are surprised in the wrong direction, and you are right if you are not surprised, or if you are surprised in the right direction.
I suppose theoretically someone could say that truth and falsity mean that there is a bit somewhere in his metaphysical structure which has the value of 0 or 1, in such a way that “he is tall” is true if the bit is set to 1, and false if the bit is set to 0. But it seems obvious that this is not what people would normally mean at least when talking about this situation, even if they might sometimes say abstract things that sound sort of like this. And people will sometimes explicitly assert that there is something like such a bit in a particular case, e.g. whether or not something is human. This assertion is almost certainly false, but it is not some special kind of falsity about the existence of truth and falsity; they are simply mistakenly asserting the existence of such a bit in roughly the same way someone is mistaken if the person called tall turns out to be 4′11′.
So I don’t see how people mean something different from this by truth and falsity, or at least significantly different.
I think that doxastic voluntarism is true in general, but even if it is not, one aspect of it certainly is: we can use words to mean what we choose to use them to mean. And insofar as this is a matter of choice, practical considerations will be involved in deciding to use a word one way or another. You are pointing to this here: what benefit would we get from using “truth” in the above way, compared to using it in other ways?
I think most people will take the denial of truth to be a denial that the world is real. As I said earlier, if anything seems like a denial of realism, the denial of truth does. And most people, coming to the conclusion that there is no truth, will conclude that they should not bother to spend much time thinking about things. Obviously you haven’t drawn that conclusion or you wouldn’t be spending time on Less Wrong, but I think most people would draw that conclusion. So for someone who thinks that thinking is valuable, rejecting truth does not seem helpful.
In terms of avoiding confusion, you may be seeking an unattainable goal. The ability to understand is in a way limited, but also in a way not. As I said in another comment recently, we can think about anything; if not, just think about “what you can’t think about.” But this means we will always be confused when we attempt to think about the things on the boundaries of our understanding. Your visual field is limited, but you cannot see the edges of it, because if you could, they would not be the edges. In a similar way, your understanding is bounded, but you cannot directly understand the boundaries, because if you could, they would not be the boundaries. That implies there will always be an “edge of understanding” where you are going to be confused.
Right, I don’t expect my position to make much of a difference to most people most of the time. Perhaps this is a matter of how I perceive the context of my readers, but I generally expect them to be more likely to make the mistake of even accidentally thinking of what I might call “true” and “false” for what we might call the “hard essentialist” version of truth (there are truth bits in the universe) when discussing topics that are sufficiently abstract.
It seems mostly to matter when I want to give a precise accounting of my thoughts (or more precisely my experience of my thoughts).
This gets at why I feel “in-between” in many ways: rejecting truth the way nihilists and solipsists do is not where I mean to end up, but not rejecting truth in at least some form seems to me to deny the skepticism I think we must take given the intentional appearance of experience. Building from “no truth” to “some kind of truth” seems a better approach to me than backing down from “yes truth”.
This may be because I find myself in a society where idealism and dualism are common and rationalists and other folks who favor realism often express it in terms of strict materialism that often denies phenomenological intentionality (even if unintentionally). Maybe I am too far removed from general society these days, but I feel it more important to accentuate intentionality over the strict materialism I perceive my target readers are likely to hold if they don’t already get what I’m pointing at. You seem to be evidence, though, that this is misunderstanding, although I suspect you are an outlier given how much we agree.
Agreed. I expect us all to remain confused in a technical sense of having beliefs that do not fully predict reality. But I also believe it virtuous to minimize that confusion where possible and practical.