In order for your map to be useful , it needs to reflect the statistical structure of things to the extent required by the value it is in service to.
That can be zero. There is a meta category of things that are created by humans without any footprint in pre existing reality. These include money, marriages, and mortgages
Obviously these things have a great deal of structure. There are multiple textbooks worth of information about how money works. A human can’t just decide arbitrarily that they want those things to be different, change their usage of the word, and make it so.
Your argument might work better for someone making their own board game, because this is a case where one person really has the ability to set all of the rules on their own.
But even in that case, it seems like words need to reflect statistical structures. If they don’t, then they’re not useful for anything.
It’s just that the structures in question are made up by a human. They can still be described in better or worse ways.
Obviously these things have a great deal of structure.
Obviously they do. There’s no obvious upper limit to the strutural compexity of a human creation. However, I was talking about pre existing reality.
There are constraints on what could be used as money—Ice cubes and leaves are both bad ideas—but they don’t constrain it down to a natural kind.
Money or marriage or mortgages are all things that need to work work in certain ways, but there aren’t pre-existing Money or Marriage or Mortgage objects, and their working well isn’t a degree of correspondence to something pre-existing—what realists usually mean by “truth”—it’s more like usefulness.
It’s just that the structures in question are made up by a human.
Obviously they do. There’s no obvious upper limit to the strutural compexity of a human creation. However, I was talking about pre existing reality.
I question whether “pre-existing” is important here. Zack is discussing whether words cut reality at the joints, not whether words cut pre-existing reality at the joints. Going back to the example of creating a game—when you’re writing the rulebook for the game, it’s obviously important in some sense that you are the one who gets to make up the rules… but I argue that this does not change the whole question of how to use language, what makes a description apt or inept, etc.
For example, if I invented the game of chess, calling rooks a type of pawn and reversing the meaning of king/queen for black/white would be poor map craftsmanship.
Money or marriage or mortgages are all things that need to work work in certain ways, but there aren’t pre-existing Money or Marriage or Mortgage objects, and their working well isn’t a degree of correspondence to something pre-existing—what realists usually mean by “truth”—it’s more like usefulness.
None of these examples are convincing on their face, though—there are all sorts of things we can say about each of these examples which seem to have truth values rather than usefulness values.
There are constraints on what could be used as money—Ice cubes and leaves are both bad ideas—but they don’t constrain it down to a natural kind.
Really though? Grains work much better than root vegetables, and metals work much better than grains. And these sorts of considerations end up being important for how history unfolds.
I question whether “pre-existing” is important here. Zack is discussing whether words cut reality at the joints, not whether words cut pre-existing reality at the joints.
There are wider issues.
Going back to the example of creating a game—when you’re writing the rulebook for the game, it’s obviously important in some sense that you are the one who gets to make up the rule
It’s important in the sense that words can usefully refer to human constructs and concerns.
but I argue that this does not change the whole question of how to use language, what makes a description apt or inept, etc.
It’s not supposed to change the whole issue. It’s supposed to address the inference from “does not reflect reality” to “useless, wrong do not use”.
None of these examples are convincing on their face, though—there are all sorts of things we can say about each of these examples which seem to have truth values rather than usefulness values
In loose and popular senses of “truth”. But reductionist and elimiinativist projects take correspondence to pre existing reality as the gold standard of truth...that narrow sense is the one I am contrasting with usefulness.
Really though? Grains work much better than root vegetables, and metals work much better than grains
To can you also use numbers and algorithms. You’re not going to get a natural kind out of that lot.
It’s not supposed to change the whole issue. It’s supposed to address the inference from “does not reflect reality” to “useless, wrong do not use”.
I think this is the wrong way to think about it. When we play a game of chess, the things we are referring to are still part of reality. This includes the physical reality of the board and pieces, various parts of mathematical reality related to strategies and positions, historical reality of various rules and games, etc.
The map is part of the territory, and so the map will sometimes end up referring to itself, in an ungrounded sort of way. This can create strange situations.
For example, if I say “I welcome you”, then saying so makes the sentence true.
This does not mean the concept of true and false fails to apply to “I welcome you”.
Even though I have complete control over whether to welcome you, the inference from “does not reflect reality” to “wrong” is still perfectly valid.
In loose and popular senses of “truth”. But reductionist and elimiinativist projects take correspondence to pre existing reality as the gold standard of truth...that narrow sense is the one I am contrasting with usefulness.
This seems like a kind of reductive eliminativist approach which would reject logic, as logic does not correspond to anything in the physical world. After all, logic refers to the operations of the map, and we draw the map, so it is not pre-existing...
OK, that’s a bit extreme and I shouldn’t uncharitably put wolds in your mouth. But it seems like this kind of reductive eliminativism would declare sociology unscientific by definition, since sociology studies things humans do, not “pre-existing” reality. Similarly for economics (you’ve repeatedly mentioned money as outside the realm “true” applies to!), psychology, anthropology, etc.
Your reductive eliminativist notion of truth also seems to oddly insist that statements about the future (especially about the speaker’s future actions) cannot be true or false, since clearly the future is not “pre-existing”.
We are self-making maps which sit within the world we are mapping. Truth is correspondence to territory. Not “correspondence to parts of the territory outside of us map-makers”. Not “correspondence to territory so long as that territory wasn’t touched by us yet”. Not “correspondence to parts of the territory we have no control over”.
I think this is the wrong way to think about it. When we play a game of chess, the things we are referring to are still part of reality.
Not in any important sense. Physical instantiations can be very varied..they don’t have to look like a typical chess set...and you can play chess in your head if you’re smart enough. Chess is a lot more like maths than it is like ichthyology.
Even though I have complete control over whether to welcome you, the inference from “does not reflect reality” to “wrong” is still perfectly valid
In that one case.
But it seems like this kind of reductive eliminativism would declare sociology unscientific by definition, since sociology studies things humans do, not “pre-existing” reality.
We already categorise sociology, etc, as soft sciences. Meaning that they are not completely unscientific...and also that they are not reflections of pre existing reality.
Your reductive eliminativist notion of truth also seems to oddly insist that statements about the future (especially about the speaker’s future actions) cannot be true or false, since clearly the future is not “pre-existing”.
Assuming deteminism, statements about the future can be logically inferred from a pre existing state of the universe plus pre existing laws.
Truth is correspondence to territory.
Correspondence-truth is correspondence to the territory. Which is a tautology. Which is another kind of truth .
Not in any important sense. Physical instantiations can be very varied..they don’t have to look like a typical chess set...and you can play chess in your head if you’re smart enough. Chess is a lot more like maths than it is like ichthyology.
Lots of physical things can have varied instantiations. EG “battery”. That in itself doesn’t seem like an important barrier.
>Even though I have complete control over whether to welcome you, the inference from “does not reflect reality” to “wrong” is still perfectly valid
In that one case.
OK, here’s a more general case: I’m looking at a map you’re holding, and making factual claims about where the lines of ink are on the paper, colors, etc.
This is very close to your money example, since I can’t just make up the numbers in my bank account.
Again, the inference from “does not reflect reality” to “wrong” is perfectly valid.
It’s true that I can change the numbers in my bank account by EG withdrawing/depositing money, but this is very similar to observing that I can change a rock by breaking it; it doesn’t turn the rock into a non-factual matter.
We already categorise sociology, etc, as soft sciences. Meaning that they are not completely unscientific...and also that they are not reflections of pre existing reality.
True, but it seems like “soft” is due to the fact that we can’t get very precise predictions, or even very calibrated probabilities (due to a lot of distributional shift, poor reference classes, etc). NOT due to the concept of prediction failing to be meaningful.
As a thought experiment, imagine an alien species observing earth without interfering with it in any way. Surely, for them, our “social constructs” could be a matter of science, which could be predicted accurately or inaccurately, etc?
Then imagine that the alien moves to the shoulder of a human. It could still play the role of an impartial observer. Surely it could still have scientific beliefs about things like how money works at that point.
Then imagine that the alien occasionally talks with the human whose shoulder it is on. It does not try to sway decisions in any way, but it does offer the human its predictions if the human asks. In cases where events are contingent on the prediction itself (ie the prediction alters what the human does, which changes the subject matter being predicted), the alien does its best to explain that relationship to the human, rather than offer a specific prediction.
I would argue that the alien can still have scientific beliefs about things like how money works at this point.
Now imagine that the “alien” is just a sub-process in the human brain. For example, there’s a hypothesis that the cortex serves a purely predictive role, while the rest of the brain implements an agent which uses those predictions.
Again, I would argue that it’s still possible for this sub-process to have factual/scientific/impartial predictions about EG how money works.
Assuming deteminism, statements about the future can be logically inferred from a pre existing state of the universe plus pre existing laws.
Right, agreed. So I’d ask what your notion of “pre-existing” is, such that you made your initial statement (emphasis mine):
In order for your map to be useful , it needs to reflect the statistical structure of things to the extent required by the value it is in service to.
That can be zero. There is a meta category of things that are created by humans without any footprint in pre existing reality.
I understand your thesis to be that if something is not pre-existing reality, a map does not need to “reflect the statistical structure”. I’m trying to understand what your thesis means. Based on what you said so far, I hypothesized that “pre-existing” might mean “not effected (causally) by humans”. But this doesn’t seem to be right, because as you said, the future can be predicted from the past using the (“pre-existing”) state and the (“pre-existing”) laws.
Lots of physical things can have varied instantiations. EG “battery”. That in itself doesn’t seem like an important barrier.
If the question “is thing X an instance if type T” is answered by human concerns, then passive reflection of pre existing reality isn’t the only game in town.
If type T is not a natural kind, then science is not the only game in town.
It’s true that I can change the numbers in my bank account by EG withdrawing/depositing money, but this is very similar to observing that I can change a rock by breaking it; it doesn’t turn the rock into a non-factual matter.
Rocks existed before the concept of rocks. Money did not exist before he concept of money.
As a thought experiment, imagine an alien species observing earth without interfering with it in any way. Surely, for them, our “social constructs” could be a matter of science, which could be predicted accurately or inaccurately, etc?
If the alien understands the whole picture, it will notice the causal arrow from human concerns to social constructs. For instance, if you want gay marriage to be a thing, you amend the marriage construct so that is.
If the alien understands the whole picture, it will notice the causal arrow from human concerns to social constructs. For instance, if you want gay marriage to be a thing, you amend the marriage construct so that is.
The point of the thought experiment is that, for the alien, all of that is totally mundane (ie scientific) knowledge. So why can’t that observation count as scientific for us?
IE, just because we have control over a thing doesn’t—in my ontology—indicate that the concept of map/territory correspondence no longer applies. It only implies that we need to have conditional expectations, so that we can think about what happens if we do one thing or another. (For example, I know that if I think about whether I’m thinking about peanut butter, I’m thinking about peanut butter. So my estimate “am I thinking about peanut butter?” will always be high, when I care to form such an estimate.)
Rocks existed before the concept of rocks. Money did not exist before he concept of money.
And how is the temporal point at which something comes into existence relevant to whether we need to track it accurately in our map, aside from the fact that things temporally distant from us are less relevant to our concerns?
Your reply was very terse, and does not articulate very much of the model you’re coming from, instead mostly reiterating the disagreement. It would be helpful to me if you tried to unpack more of your overall view, and the logic by which you reach your conclusions.
I know that you have a concept of “pre-existing reality” which includes rocks and not money, and I believe that you think things which aren’t in pre-existing reality don’t need to be tracked by maps (at least, something resembling this). What I don’t see is the finer details of this concept of pre-existing reality, and why you think we don’t need to track those things accurately in maps.
The point of my rock example is that the smashed rock did not exist before we smashed it. Or we could say “the rock dust” or such. In doing so, we satisfy your temporal requirement (the rock dust did not exist until we smashed it, much like money did not exist until we conceived of it). We also satisfy the requirement that we have complete control over it (we can make the rock dust, just like we can invent gay marriage).
I know you don’t think the rock example counts, but I’m trying to ask for a more detailed model of why it doesn’t. I gave the rock example because, presumably, you do agree that bits of smashed rock are the sort of thing we might want accurate maps of. Yet they seem to match your criteria.
Imagine for a moment that we had perfect control of how the rock crumbles. Even then, it would seem that we still might want a place in our map for the shape of the rock shards. Despite our perfect control, we might want to remember that we shaped the rock shards into a key and a matching lock, etc.
Remember that the original point of this argument was your assertion:
In order for your map to be useful , it needs to reflect the statistical structure of things to the extent required by the value it is in service to.
That can be zero. There is a meta category of things that are created by humans without any footprint in pre existing reality. These include money, marriages, and mortgages
So—to the extent that we are remaining relevant to the original point—the question is why, in your model, there is zero need to reflect the statistical structure of money, marriage, etc.
The point of the thought experiment is that, for the alien, all of that is totally mundane (ie scientific) knowledge. So why can’t that observation count as scientific for us?
The point is that the rule “if it is not in the territory it should not be in the map” does not apply in cases where we are constructing reality, not just reflecting it.
If you are drafting a law to introduce gay marriage, it isn’t objection to say that it doesn’t already exist.
IE, just because we have control over a thing doesn’t—in my ontology—indicate that the concept of map/territory correspondence no longer applies
I didn’t say it doesn’t apply at all. But theres a major difference between maps where the causal arrow goes t->m (science, reflection) and ones where it goes m->t (culture,construction)
Once you have constructed something according to a map (blueprint), you can study it scientifically, as anthropologists and scociologists do. But once something has been constructed, the norms of social scientists are that they just describe it. Social scientists don’t have a norm that social constructs have to be rejected because they don’t reflect pre existing reality.
This comment just seems utterly wrong to me.
Obviously these things have a great deal of structure. There are multiple textbooks worth of information about how money works. A human can’t just decide arbitrarily that they want those things to be different, change their usage of the word, and make it so.
Your argument might work better for someone making their own board game, because this is a case where one person really has the ability to set all of the rules on their own.
But even in that case, it seems like words need to reflect statistical structures. If they don’t, then they’re not useful for anything.
It’s just that the structures in question are made up by a human. They can still be described in better or worse ways.
Obviously they do. There’s no obvious upper limit to the strutural compexity of a human creation. However, I was talking about pre existing reality.
There are constraints on what could be used as money—Ice cubes and leaves are both bad ideas—but they don’t constrain it down to a natural kind.
Money or marriage or mortgages are all things that need to work work in certain ways, but there aren’t pre-existing Money or Marriage or Mortgage objects, and their working well isn’t a degree of correspondence to something pre-existing—what realists usually mean by “truth”—it’s more like usefulness.
So they are not pre-existing.
I question whether “pre-existing” is important here. Zack is discussing whether words cut reality at the joints, not whether words cut pre-existing reality at the joints. Going back to the example of creating a game—when you’re writing the rulebook for the game, it’s obviously important in some sense that you are the one who gets to make up the rules… but I argue that this does not change the whole question of how to use language, what makes a description apt or inept, etc.
For example, if I invented the game of chess, calling rooks a type of pawn and reversing the meaning of king/queen for black/white would be poor map craftsmanship.
None of these examples are convincing on their face, though—there are all sorts of things we can say about each of these examples which seem to have truth values rather than usefulness values.
Really though? Grains work much better than root vegetables, and metals work much better than grains. And these sorts of considerations end up being important for how history unfolds.
There are wider issues.
It’s important in the sense that words can usefully refer to human constructs and concerns.
It’s not supposed to change the whole issue. It’s supposed to address the inference from “does not reflect reality” to “useless, wrong do not use”.
In loose and popular senses of “truth”. But reductionist and elimiinativist projects take correspondence to pre existing reality as the gold standard of truth...that narrow sense is the one I am contrasting with usefulness.
To can you also use numbers and algorithms. You’re not going to get a natural kind out of that lot.
I think this is the wrong way to think about it. When we play a game of chess, the things we are referring to are still part of reality. This includes the physical reality of the board and pieces, various parts of mathematical reality related to strategies and positions, historical reality of various rules and games, etc.
The map is part of the territory, and so the map will sometimes end up referring to itself, in an ungrounded sort of way. This can create strange situations.
For example, if I say “I welcome you”, then saying so makes the sentence true.
This does not mean the concept of true and false fails to apply to “I welcome you”.
Even though I have complete control over whether to welcome you, the inference from “does not reflect reality” to “wrong” is still perfectly valid.
This seems like a kind of reductive eliminativist approach which would reject logic, as logic does not correspond to anything in the physical world. After all, logic refers to the operations of the map, and we draw the map, so it is not pre-existing...
OK, that’s a bit extreme and I shouldn’t uncharitably put wolds in your mouth. But it seems like this kind of reductive eliminativism would declare sociology unscientific by definition, since sociology studies things humans do, not “pre-existing” reality. Similarly for economics (you’ve repeatedly mentioned money as outside the realm “true” applies to!), psychology, anthropology, etc.
Your reductive eliminativist notion of truth also seems to oddly insist that statements about the future (especially about the speaker’s future actions) cannot be true or false, since clearly the future is not “pre-existing”.
We are self-making maps which sit within the world we are mapping. Truth is correspondence to territory. Not “correspondence to parts of the territory outside of us map-makers”. Not “correspondence to territory so long as that territory wasn’t touched by us yet”. Not “correspondence to parts of the territory we have no control over”.
Not in any important sense. Physical instantiations can be very varied..they don’t have to look like a typical chess set...and you can play chess in your head if you’re smart enough. Chess is a lot more like maths than it is like ichthyology.
In that one case.
We already categorise sociology, etc, as soft sciences. Meaning that they are not completely unscientific...and also that they are not reflections of pre existing reality.
Assuming deteminism, statements about the future can be logically inferred from a pre existing state of the universe plus pre existing laws.
Correspondence-truth is correspondence to the territory. Which is a tautology. Which is another kind of truth .
Lots of physical things can have varied instantiations. EG “battery”. That in itself doesn’t seem like an important barrier.
OK, here’s a more general case: I’m looking at a map you’re holding, and making factual claims about where the lines of ink are on the paper, colors, etc.
This is very close to your money example, since I can’t just make up the numbers in my bank account.
Again, the inference from “does not reflect reality” to “wrong” is perfectly valid.
It’s true that I can change the numbers in my bank account by EG withdrawing/depositing money, but this is very similar to observing that I can change a rock by breaking it; it doesn’t turn the rock into a non-factual matter.
True, but it seems like “soft” is due to the fact that we can’t get very precise predictions, or even very calibrated probabilities (due to a lot of distributional shift, poor reference classes, etc). NOT due to the concept of prediction failing to be meaningful.
As a thought experiment, imagine an alien species observing earth without interfering with it in any way. Surely, for them, our “social constructs” could be a matter of science, which could be predicted accurately or inaccurately, etc?
Then imagine that the alien moves to the shoulder of a human. It could still play the role of an impartial observer. Surely it could still have scientific beliefs about things like how money works at that point.
Then imagine that the alien occasionally talks with the human whose shoulder it is on. It does not try to sway decisions in any way, but it does offer the human its predictions if the human asks. In cases where events are contingent on the prediction itself (ie the prediction alters what the human does, which changes the subject matter being predicted), the alien does its best to explain that relationship to the human, rather than offer a specific prediction.
I would argue that the alien can still have scientific beliefs about things like how money works at this point.
Now imagine that the “alien” is just a sub-process in the human brain. For example, there’s a hypothesis that the cortex serves a purely predictive role, while the rest of the brain implements an agent which uses those predictions.
Again, I would argue that it’s still possible for this sub-process to have factual/scientific/impartial predictions about EG how money works.
Right, agreed. So I’d ask what your notion of “pre-existing” is, such that you made your initial statement (emphasis mine):
I understand your thesis to be that if something is not pre-existing reality, a map does not need to “reflect the statistical structure”. I’m trying to understand what your thesis means. Based on what you said so far, I hypothesized that “pre-existing” might mean “not effected (causally) by humans”. But this doesn’t seem to be right, because as you said, the future can be predicted from the past using the (“pre-existing”) state and the (“pre-existing”) laws.
If the question “is thing X an instance if type T” is answered by human concerns, then passive reflection of pre existing reality isn’t the only game in town.
If type T is not a natural kind, then science is not the only game in town.
Rocks existed before the concept of rocks. Money did not exist before he concept of money.
If the alien understands the whole picture, it will notice the causal arrow from human concerns to social constructs. For instance, if you want gay marriage to be a thing, you amend the marriage construct so that is.
The point of the thought experiment is that, for the alien, all of that is totally mundane (ie scientific) knowledge. So why can’t that observation count as scientific for us?
IE, just because we have control over a thing doesn’t—in my ontology—indicate that the concept of map/territory correspondence no longer applies. It only implies that we need to have conditional expectations, so that we can think about what happens if we do one thing or another. (For example, I know that if I think about whether I’m thinking about peanut butter, I’m thinking about peanut butter. So my estimate “am I thinking about peanut butter?” will always be high, when I care to form such an estimate.)
And how is the temporal point at which something comes into existence relevant to whether we need to track it accurately in our map, aside from the fact that things temporally distant from us are less relevant to our concerns?
Your reply was very terse, and does not articulate very much of the model you’re coming from, instead mostly reiterating the disagreement. It would be helpful to me if you tried to unpack more of your overall view, and the logic by which you reach your conclusions.
I know that you have a concept of “pre-existing reality” which includes rocks and not money, and I believe that you think things which aren’t in pre-existing reality don’t need to be tracked by maps (at least, something resembling this). What I don’t see is the finer details of this concept of pre-existing reality, and why you think we don’t need to track those things accurately in maps.
The point of my rock example is that the smashed rock did not exist before we smashed it. Or we could say “the rock dust” or such. In doing so, we satisfy your temporal requirement (the rock dust did not exist until we smashed it, much like money did not exist until we conceived of it). We also satisfy the requirement that we have complete control over it (we can make the rock dust, just like we can invent gay marriage).
I know you don’t think the rock example counts, but I’m trying to ask for a more detailed model of why it doesn’t. I gave the rock example because, presumably, you do agree that bits of smashed rock are the sort of thing we might want accurate maps of. Yet they seem to match your criteria.
Imagine for a moment that we had perfect control of how the rock crumbles. Even then, it would seem that we still might want a place in our map for the shape of the rock shards. Despite our perfect control, we might want to remember that we shaped the rock shards into a key and a matching lock, etc.
Remember that the original point of this argument was your assertion:
So—to the extent that we are remaining relevant to the original point—the question is why, in your model, there is zero need to reflect the statistical structure of money, marriage, etc.
The point is that the rule “if it is not in the territory it should not be in the map” does not apply in cases where we are constructing reality, not just reflecting it.
If you are drafting a law to introduce gay marriage, it isn’t objection to say that it doesn’t already exist.
I didn’t say it doesn’t apply at all. But theres a major difference between maps where the causal arrow goes t->m (science, reflection) and ones where it goes m->t (culture,construction)
Once you have constructed something according to a map (blueprint), you can study it scientifically, as anthropologists and scociologists do. But once something has been constructed, the norms of social scientists are that they just describe it. Social scientists don’t have a norm that social constructs have to be rejected because they don’t reflect pre existing reality.