BobTheBob

Karma: 38

BobTheBob Jul 8, 2011, 4:31 AM
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in reply to: Peterdjones’s comment on: ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ and Rationality
This is a nice way of putting things. As long as we’re clear that what makes it a prescription is the fact that it is an ideal for the non-ideal agent.

Do you think this helps the cause of naturalism?

BobTheBob Jul 8, 2011, 4:06 AM
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in reply to: torekp’s comment on: ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ and Rationality
I agree that underdetermination problems are distinct from problems about norms -from the is/ought problem. Apologies if I introduced confusion in mentioning them. They are relevant because they arise (roughly speaking) at the interface between decision theory and empirical science, ie, where you try to map mere behaviours onto desires and beliefs.

My understanding is that in philosophy of science, an underdetermination problem arises when all evidence is consistent with more than one theory or explanation. You have a scientist, a set of facts, and more than one theory which the scientist can fit to the facts. In answer to your initial challenge, the problem is different for human psychology because the underdetermination is not of the scientist’s theory but supposedly of one set of facts (facts about beliefs and desires) by another (behaviour and all cognitive states of the agent). That is, in contrast to the basic case, here you have a scientist, one set of facts -about a person’s behaviour and cognitive states- a second set of suppposed facts -about the person’s beliefs and desires- and the problem is that the former set underdetermine the latter.

BobTheBob Jul 8, 2011, 3:14 AM
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in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ and Rationality
This seems reasonable, but I have to ask about “correctly describes”. The statement

“want to eat an apple” implies being in brain state ABC or computational state DEF (or something of that nature)

is plausible to me. I think the reverse implication, though raises a problem:

being in brain state ABC or computational state DEF (or something of that nature) implies “want to eat an apple”

But maybe neither of these is what you have in mind?

BobTheBob Jul 7, 2011, 5:54 PM
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in reply to: timtyler’s comment on: ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ and Rationality
You use a fair bit of normative, teleological vocabulary, here: ‘purpose’, ‘goal’, ‘success’, ‘optimisation’, ‘trying’, being ‘good’ at ‘steering’ the future. I understand your point is that these terms can all be cashed out in unproblematic, teleonomic terms, and that this is more or less an end of the matter. Nothing dubious going on here. Is it fair to say, though, that this does not really engage my point, which is that such teleonomic substitutes are insufficient to make sense of rationality?

To make sense of rationality, we need claims such as,
- One ought to rank probabilities of events in accordance with the dictates of probability theory (or some more elegant statement to the effect).
If you translate this statement, substituting for ‘ought’ the details of the teleonomic ‘ersatz’ correlate, you get a very complicated statement about what one likely will do in different circumstances, and possibly about one’s ancestor’s behaviours and their relation to those ancestors’ survival chances (all with no norms).

This latter complicated statement will not mean what the first statement means, and won’t do the job required in discussing rationality of the first statement. The latter statement will be an elaborate description; what’s needed is a prescription.

Probably none of this should matter to someone doing biology, or for that matter decision theory. But if you want to go beyond and commit to a doctrine like naturalism or physical reductionism, then I submit this does become relevant.

BobTheBob Jul 7, 2011, 3:56 AM
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in reply to: Perplexed’s comment on: ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ and Rationality

I would taboo and translate that use to yield something like “To make sense of rationality in an agent, one needs to accept/assume/stipulate that the agent sometimes acts with a purpose in mind. We need to understand ‘purpose’, in that sense, to understand rationality.”

Thanks, yes. This is very clear. I can buy this.

But I think I understand this kind of purpose, identifying it as the cognitive version of something like “being instrumental to survival and reproduction”. That is, it is possible for an outside observer to point to behaviors or features of a virus that are instrumental to viral survival and reproduction.

Sorry if I’m slow to be getting it, but my understanding of your view is that the sort of purpose that a bacterium has, on the one hand, and the purpose required to be a candidate for rationality, on the other, are, so to speak, different in degree but not in kind. They’re the same thing, just orders of magnitude more sophisticated in the latter case (involving cognitive systems). This is the idea I want to oppose. I have tried to suggest that bacterial purposes are ‘merely’ teleonomic -to borrow the useful term suggested by timtyler- but that human purposes must be of a different order.

Here’s one more crack at trying to motivate this, using very evidently non-scientific terms. On the one hand, I submit that you cannot make sense of a thing (human, animal, AI, whatever) as rational unless there is something that it cares about. Unless that is, there is something which matters or is important to it (this something can be as simple as survival or reproduction). You may not like to see a respectable concept like rationality consorting with such waffly notions, but there you have it. Please object to this if you think it’s false.

On the other hand, nothing in nature implies that anything matters (etc) to a thing. You can show me all of the behavioural/cognitive correlates of X’s mattering to a thing, or of a thing’s caring about X, and provide me detailed evolutionary explanations of the behavioural correlates’ presence, but these correlates simply do not add up to the thing’s actually caring about X. X’s being important to a thing, X’s mattering, is more than a question of mere behaviour or computation. Again, if this seems false, please say.

If both hands seem false, I’d be interested to hear that, too.

At the level of a bacterium, there are second-messenger chemicals that symbolize or represent situations that are instrumental to survival and reproduction. At the level of the nematode, there are neuron firings serving as symbols. At the level of a human the symbols can be vocalizations: “I’m horny; how about you?”. I don’t see anything transcendently new at any stage in this progression, nor in the developmental progression that I offered as a substitute.

As soon as we start to talk about symbols and representation, I’m concerned that a whole new set of very thorny issues get introduced. I will shy away from these.

Let me try putting that in different words: “Norms are in the eye of the beholder. Natural science tries to be objective—to avoid observer effects. But that is not possible when studying rationality. It requires a different, non-reductionist and observer dependent way of looking at the subject matter.” If that is what you are saying, I may come close to agreeing with you. But somehow, I don’t think that is what you are saying.

“It requires a different, non-reductionist … way of looking at the subject matter.” -I can agree with you completely on this. (I do want however to resist the subjective, “observer dependent” part )

BobTheBob Jul 6, 2011, 4:45 PM
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in reply to: timtyler’s comment on: ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ and Rationality
Thanks for this—I hadn’t encountered this concept. Looks very useful.

BobTheBob Jul 6, 2011, 4:43 PM
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in reply to: Will_Sawin’s comment on: ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ and Rationality

I’m also saying that non-natural “facts” are as easy to work with as natural facts. The issue that they’re not part of natural science doesn’t impact our ability to discuss them productively.

I agree entirely with this. This exercise isn’t meant in any way to be an attack on decision theory or the likes. The target is so-called naturalism—the view that all facts are natural facts.

BobTheBob Jul 6, 2011, 4:30 PM
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in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ and Rationality
I appreciate this clarification. The point is meant to be about, as you say, the empirical sciences. I agree that there can be arbitrarily sophisticated scientific theories concerning rational behaviour—just that these theories aren’t straight-forwardly continuous with the theories of natural science.

In case you haven’t encountered it and might be interested, the underdetermination problem associated with inferring to beliefs and desires from mere behaviour has been considered in some depth by Donald Davidson, eg in his Essays on Actions and Events

BobTheBob Jul 6, 2011, 3:18 AM
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in reply to: Perplexed’s comment on: ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ and Rationality
I appreciate your efforts to spell things out. I have to say I’m getting confused, though

You started by making an argument that listed a series of stages (virus, bacterium, nematode, man) and claimed that at no stage along the way (before the last) were any kind of normative concepts applicable.

I meant to say that at no stage -including the last!- does the addition of merely naturalistic properties turn a thing into something subject to norms -something of which it is right to say it ought, for its own sake, to do this or that.

I also said that the sense of right and wrong and of purpose which biology provides is merely metaphorical. When you talk about “the illusion of teleology in nature”, that’s exactly what I was getting at (or so it seems to me). That is, teleology in nature is merely illusory, but the kind of teleology needed to make sense of rationality is not—it’s real. Can you live with this? I think a lot of people are apt to think that illusory teleology sort of fades into the real thing with increasing physical complexity. I see the pull of this idea, but I think it’s mistaken, and I hope I’ve at least suggested that adherents of the view have some burden to try to defend it.

Do you believe it is possible to tell a teenager what she “ought” to do?

Now that is a whole other can of worms...

At what stage in development do normative judgements become applicable.

This is a fair and a difficult question. Roughly, another individual becomes suitable for normative appraisal when and to the extent that s/he becomes a recognizably rational agent -ie, capable of thinking and acting for her/himself and contributing to society (again, very roughly). All kinds of interesting moral issues lurk here, but I don’t think we have to jump to any conclusions about them.

In case I’m giving the wrong impression, I don’t mean to be implying that people are bound by norms in virtue of possessing some special aura or other spookiness. I’m not giving a theory of the nature of norms—that’s just too hard. All I’m saying for the moment is that if you stick to purely natural science, you won’t find a place for them.

BobTheBob Jul 6, 2011, 1:48 AM
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in reply to: Peterdjones’s comment on: ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ and Rationality

Rational-ought beliefs and actions are the ones optimal for achieving your goals. Goals and optimallity can be explained in scientific language. Rational-ought is not moral-ought. Moral-ought is harder to explain because it about the goals an agent should have,not the ones they happen to have.

I’m sincerely not sure about the rational-ought/moral-ought distinction—I haven’t thought enough about it. But anyway, I think moral-ought is a red herring, here. As far as I can see, the claims made in the post apply to rational-oughts. That was certainly the intention. In other posts on LW about fallacies and the details of rational thinking, it’s a commonplace to use quite normative language in connection with rationality. Indeed, a primary goal is to help people to think and behave more rationally, because this is seen for each of us to be a good. ‘One ought not to procrastinate’, ‘One ought to compensate for one’s biases’, etc..

Try somehow to shoehorn normative facts into a naturalistic world-view, at the possible peril of the coherence of that world-view.

Easily done with non-moral norms such as rationality.

Would love to see the details… :-)

Not if you think of purpose as a metaphysical fundamental. Easily, if a purpose is just a particular idea in the mind. If I intend to but a lawnmower, and I write “buy lawnmower” on a piece of paper, there is nothing mysterious about the note, or about the state of mind that preceded it.

I’m not sure I get this. The intention behind drawing the initial distinction between is/ought problems was to make clear the focus is not on, as it were, the mind of the beholder. The question is a less specific variant of the question as to how any mere physical being comes to have intentions (e.g., to buy a lawnmower) in the first place.

That you want to do something does not mean you ought to do it in the categorial, unconditional sense of moral-ought.

I agree, but I think it does mean you ought to in a qualified sense. Your merely being in a physical or computational state, however, by itself doesn’t, or so the thought goes.

BobTheBob Jul 5, 2011, 10:32 PM
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in reply to: Perplexed’s comment on: ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ and Rationality
If I bet higher than 1/6th on a fair die’s rolling 6 because in the last ten rolls 6 hasn’t come up -meaning it’s now ‘due’- I make a mistake. I commit an error of reasoning; I do something wrong; I act in a manner I ought not to.

What about the virus particle which, in the course of sloshing about in an appropriate medium, participates in the coming into existence of a particle composed of RNA which, as it happens, is mostly identical but differs from itself in a few places. Are you saying that this particle makes a mistake in the same sense of ‘mistake’ as I do in making my bet?

Option (1): The sense is precisely the same (and it is unproblematically naturalistic). In this case I have to ask what the principles are by which one infers to conclusions about a virus’s mistakes from facts about replication. What are the physical laws, how are their consequences (the consequences, again, being claims about what a virus ought to do) measured or verified, and so on?

Option (2): The senses are different. This was the point of calling the RNA mistake metaphorical. It was to convey that the sense is importantly different than it is in the betting case. The idea is that the sense, if any, in which a virus makes a ‘mistake’ in giving rise to a non-exact replica of itself is not enough to sustain the kind of norms required for rationality. It is not enough to sustain the conclusions about my betting behaviour. Is this fair?

BobTheBob Jul 5, 2011, 10:14 PM
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in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ and Rationality

Suppose I hear Bob say “I want to eat an apple.” Am I justified in assigning a higher probability to “Bob wants to eat an apple” after I hear this than before (assuming I don’t have some other evidence to the contrary, like someone is holding a gun to Bob’s head)?

I think this question hits the nail on the head. You are justified in assigning a higher probability to “Bob wants to eat an apple” just in case you are already justified in taking Bob to be a rational agent (other things being equal...). If Bob isn’t at least minimally rational, you can’t even get so far as construing his words as English, let alone to trust that his intent in uttering them is to convey that he wants to eat an apple (think about assessing a wannabe AI chatbot, here). But in taking Bob to be rational, you are already taking him to have preferences and beliefs, and for there to be things which he ought or ought not to do. In other words, you have already crossed beyond what mere natural science provides for. This, anyway, is what I’m trying to argue.

BobTheBob Jul 5, 2011, 10:10 PM
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in reply to: Will_Sawin’s comment on: ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ and Rationality
You’re right that I didn’t mean this necessarily to be about a specifically moral sense of ‘ought’. As for the suggested inference about baby-punching, I would push that onto the ‘other things being equal’ clause, which covers a multitude of sins. No acceptable theory can entail that one ought to be punching babies, I agree.

The picture I want to suggest should be taken seriously is that on one side of the fence are naturalistic properties, on the other are properties such as rationality, having wants/beliefs, being bound by norms as to right and wrong (where this can be as meagre a sense of right and wrong as “it is right to predicate ‘cat’ of this animal and wrong to predicate ‘dog’ of it” -or, “it is right to eat this round, red thing if you desire an apple, it is wrong to eat it if you desire a pear”), oughts, goals, values, and so on. And that the fence isn’t as trivial to break down as one might think.

I’m understanding a utility function is something like a mapping of states of affairs (possible worlds?) onto, say, real numbers. In this context, the question would be giving naturalistic sense to the notion of value -that is, of something’s being better or worse for the agent in question- which the numbers here are meant to correlate to. It’s the notion of some states of affairs being more or less optimal for the agent -which I think is part of the concept of utility function- which I want to argue is outside the scope of natural science. Please correct me on utility functions if I’ve got the wrong end of the stick.

To be clear—the intent isn’t to attack the idea that there can be interesting and fruitful theories involving utility functions, rationality and related notions. It’s just that these aren’t consistent with a certain view of science and facthood.

BobTheBob Jul 5, 2011, 10:08 PM
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in reply to: BobTheBob’s comment on: ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ and Rationality
t may not be great, but I did give an argument. Roughly, again,

a) wants do entail oughts (plausible)

b) wanting = being in unproblematically naturalistic state ABC (from assumption of naturalism)

c) from a and b, there is some true statement of the form ‘being in naturalistic state ABC entails an ought’

d) but no claim of the form ‘being in naturalistic state ABC entails an ought’ is plausible

I infer from the contradiction between c and d to the falsity of b. If you could formulate your dissatisfaction as a criticism of a premise or of the reasoning, I’d be happy to listen. In particular, if you can come up with a plausible counter-example to (d), I would like to hear it.

‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ and Rationality

BobTheBobJul 5, 2011, 3:53 AM

2 points

73 comments6 min readLW link

BobTheBob Jun 7, 2011, 2:57 AM
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in reply to: Garren’s comment on: Pluralistic Moral Reductionism

But we can tell him he did something wrong by the standard against randomly killing people. And we can act consistently with that standard by sanctioning him. In fact, it would be inconsistent for us to give him a pass.

I understand your point is that we can tell the killer that he has acted wrongly according to our standard (that one ought not randomly to kill people). But if people in general are bound only by their own standards, why should that matter to him? It seems to me I cannot provide him compelling grounds as to why he ought not to have done what he did, and that to punish him would be arbitrary. Sorry if I’m not getting it.

I’m not sure I’m following the argument here. I’m saying that all normativity is hypothetical. It sounds like you’re arguing there is a categorical ‘ought’ for believing mathematical truths because it would be very strange to say we only ‘ought’ to believe 2 + 2 = 4 in reference to some goal. So if there are some categorical ‘oughts,’ there might be others.

Is it something like that?

This states the thought very clearly -thanks.

If so, then I would offer the goal of “in order to be logically consistent.”

I acknowledge the business about the nature of the compulsion behind mathematical judgement is pretty opaque. What I had in mind is illustrated by this dialogue. As it shows, the problem gets right back to the compulsion to be logically consistent. It’s possible this doesn’t really engage your thoughts, though.

There are some who think moral oughts reduce to logical consistency, so we ought act in a certain way in order to be logically consistent. I don’t have a good counter-argument to that, other than asking to examine such a theory and wondering how being able to point out a logical consistency is going to rein in people with desires that run counter to it any better than relativism can.

If the view is correct, then you can at least convince rational people that it is not rational to kill people. Isn’t that an important result?

BobTheBob Jun 6, 2011, 3:23 AM
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in reply to: Peterdjones’s comment on: Pluralistic Moral Reductionism
Facts in the disappointingly deflationary sense that

It is a fact that P if and only if P (and that’s all there is to say about facthood).

This position is a little underwhelming to any who seek a metaphysically substantive account of what makes things true, but it is a realist stance all the same (no?). If you have strong arguments against this or for an alternative, I’m interested to hear.

BobTheBob Jun 5, 2011, 7:59 PM
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in reply to: Garren’s comment on: Pluralistic Moral Reductionism

For example, if you and I both consider a practice morally right and we do so because it measures up that way against the standard of improving ‘the well-being of conscious creatures,’ then there’s a bit more going on than it just being right for you and me.

OK, but what I want to know is how you react to some person -whose belief system is internally consistent- who has just, say, committed a gratuitous murder. Are you committed to saying that there are no objective grounds to sanction him—there is no sense in which he ought not to have done what he did (assuming his belief system doesn’t inveigh against him offending yours)?

Or, to put the point another way, isn’t having truth as its goal part of the concept of belief? [...] But if this is fair I’m back to wondering where the ought comes from.

Perhaps it comes from the way you view the concept of belief as implying a goal?

Touche.

Look, what I’m getting at is this. I assume we can agree that

“68 + 57 = 125” is true if and only if 68 + 57 = 125

This being the case, if A, seriously pondering the nature of the compulsion behind mathematical judgement, should ask, “Why ought I to believe that 68 + 57 = 125?”, and B answers, “Because it’s true”, then B is not really saying anything beyond, “Because it does”. B does not answer A’s question.

If the substantive answer is something along the lines that it is a mathematical fact, then I am interested to know how you conceive of mathematical facts, and whether there mightn’t be moral facts of generally the same ilk (or if not, why). But if you want somehow to reduce this to subjective goals, then it looks to me that mathematics falls by the wayside—you’ll surely allow this looks pretty dubious at least superficially.

BobTheBob Jun 4, 2011, 3:24 AM
1 point
in reply to: Garren’s comment on: Pluralistic Moral Reductionism
Taking your thoughts out of order,

Would it be fair to extrapolate this, and say that individual variation in value sets provides a good explanation of the pattern we see of agreement and disagreement between individuals as regards moral values—and possibly in quite different domains as well (politics, aesthetics, gardening)?

Yes.

What I was getting at is that this looks like complete moral relativism -‘right for me’ is the only right there is (since you seem to be implying there is nothing interesting to be said about the process of negotiation which occurs when people’s values differ). I’m understanding that you’re willing to bite this bullet.

I think that’s generally the job of normative ethics, and metaethics is a little more open ended than that. I do grant that many people think the point of ethical philosophy in general is to identify categorical imperatives, not give a pluralistic reduction.

I take your point here. I may be conflating ethical and meta-ethical theory. I had in mind theories like Utilitarianism or Kantian ethical theory, which are general accounts of what it is for an action to be good, and do not aim merely to be accurate descriptions of moral discourse (would you agree?). If we’re talking about a defence of, say, non-cognitivism, though, maybe what you say is fair.

No, I wouldn’t say that. It would be a little odd to say anyone who doesn’t hold a belief that 68 + 57 equals 125 is neglecting some cosmic duty.

This is fair.

Instead, I would affirm: In order to hold a mathematically correct belief when considering 68 + 57, we are obligated to believe it equals 125 or some equivalent expression.

This is an interesting proposal, but I’m not sure what it implies. Is it possible for a rational person to strive to believe anything but the truth? Whether in math or anything else, doesn’t a rational person always try to believe what is correct? Or, to put the point another way, isn’t having truth as its goal part of the concept of belief? If so, I suggest this collapses to something like

*When considering 68 + 57, we are obligated to believe it equals 125 or some equivalent expression.

or, more plausibly,

*When considering 68 + 57, we ought to believe it equals 125 or some equivalent expression.

But if this is fair I’m back to wondering where the ought comes from.

BobTheBob Jun 3, 2011, 5:14 PM
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in reply to: Garren’s comment on: Pluralistic Moral Reductionism
Just to clarify where you stand on norms: Would you say a person is obligated by facts woven into the universe to believe that 68 + 57 = 125 ? (ie, are we obligated in this sense to believe anything?)

To stick my own neck out: I am a realist about values. I think there are facts about what we ought to believe and do. I think you have to be, to capture mathematical facts. This step taken, there’s no further commitment required to get ethical facts. Obviously, though, there are epistemic issues associated with the latter which are not associated with the former.

Morality as the expression of pluralistic value sets (and the hypothetical imperatives which go along with them) is a very neat explanation of the pattern we see of agreement, disagreement, and partially successful deliberation.

Would it be fair to extrapolate this, and say that individual variation in value sets provides a good explanation of the pattern we see of agreement and disagreement between individuals as regards moral values—and possibly in quite different domains as well (politics, aesthetics, gardening)?

You seem to be suggesting meta-ethics aims merely to give a discriptively adequate characterisation of ethical discourse. If so, would you at least grant that many see (roughly) as its goal to give a general characterisation of moral rightness, that we all ought to strive for it?