Epistemologicallywise

Several people have recommended to me Richard Nisbitt’s The Geography of Thought:  How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why.   The title is already cringe-inducing. “Asia” is the same as the “Orient,” and as Edward Said demonstrated in his seminal Orientalism, the Orient is a fiction invented by racists and imperialists, particularly in the 19th century.  There really is nothing interesting that people from Afghanistan to Polynesia have in common.  The region spans several major religions, some monotheistic, some polytheistic and some non-theistic.  There is more than one major language family in Asia/the Orient.  There is no common government, or type of government.  There is merely the illusion that “those people” have something in common.  In the book, Nisbett specifies that he has in mind primarily East Asia, but that doesn’t help, because the more than one billion people in those four or five countries (depending upon how you count them) have nothing interesting in common either.

Nisbett’s book is completely vitiated by two major methodological flaws:  (1) he generalizes from small samples to very different populations, and (2) he uses experimental results that test for very different things as evidence for unrelated conclusions.  (1) Nisbitt states explicitly that he wants to generalize over distinctions between the inhabitants of the West (which he states includes “Europeans, Americans, and citizens of the British Commonwealth” [Geography of Thought, p. xvi]) and of Asia (by which he really means East Asia).  However, his experimental populations are in each case very narrow. Sometimes college students in the US vs. college students in the PRC, sometimes “Americans” vs. “Japanese.”  Anyone with passing familiarity with Chinese and Japanese culture knows how very different they are.  (No Chinese or Japanese would think they were the same.)  Europe is also very different from North America, which is reflected in the fact that Nisbitt’s generalizations don’t even hold for Europe (by his own admission [Geography of Thought, p. 84]).  In short, you can’t infer from a difference between college students in Ann Arbor and Beijing what the average person in Seoul or Tokyo thinks.  (2) One conclusion that Nisbit tries to establish is that “Westerners” see a world composed of independent “objects,” whereas “Asians” see a world composed of continuous “substances.”  What is his evidence for this?  Show subjects a pyramid made of cork, tell them, “This is a ‘dax,’” and then ask them to pick out a “dax” from a collection of other things.  The American usually pick a pyramid, while the Japanese usually pick something else made of cork (Geography of Thought, p. 81).   Intriguing, but this does not reveal any difference in assumptions about individualism and holism.  Both the Americans and the Japanese are abstracting from the particular “object” (this cork pyramid) and identifying a general category that it belongs to (being pyramid shaped or being made of cork).  Aristotle would describe these as the material cause and the formal cause of the item in question. In neither case does the process of going from the particular to the category show that one group is less committed to “objects.”

Likewise, it is intriguing that Japanese are more likely to notice background differences between two pictures while Americans are more likely to notice foreground differences (Geography of Thought, p. 95).  But how on earth does this show that the Japanese are more holistic?  Noticing individual objects in the background of a picture is different from noticing individual objects in the foreground, but in each case a person is identifying individual objects.

I could go on indefinitely.  Nisbett’s work consists of page after page of wild generalizations, imprecise characterizations, and non sequiturs.

Descartes makes methodological solipsism almost compulsive for later philosophers. (How is that for opening with a grand pronouncement?)

By “methodological solipsism” I mean an approach to philosophy that claims we have privileged access to our own mental states, we have such access to nothing else, and one of philosophy’s primary tasks is to show how to get from subjective states to whatever else we wish to accept or justify.  Descartes thought he could make the jump from subjective “ideas” to external “substances” by proving that there is an all-good and all-powerful God, who would not allow us to be deceived by our “clear and distinct ideas.”  Philosophers in the empiricist tradition, like Hume, tried to show how our knowledge of the world could be constructed out of our “impressions.” Most philosophers thinks both failed in their respective projects.

Methodological solipsism is a seductive line of thought, and is hard to escape once it ensnares you.  But why should we accept it?  There are at least two ways to argue for it.

(1) Descriptively:  we do, in fact, “start” from subjective experiences.  This seems obviously false, though.  Is the claim that, when I wake up in the morning, I have experiences that are properly categorized as purely subjective, and that I go through a process of gradually inferring the existence of other things?  I don’t do that, and I doubt if others do.  I wake up to what I experience as a world of independent objects, of which I am a part:  alarm clock, bed, wife, my body, etc.  Experiences that we regard as subjective are very special cases.  Perhaps I hear a “ringing” in my ears, and I wonder whether it is a real sound, or just a symptom of an ear infection.  I ask other people whether they hear it, and if they do not I take an aspirin and the ringing goes away.  But certainly looking at my dog and hearing him bark is not like that.

(2) Prescriptively:  although we normally experience what we take to be a world of independent entities of which we are a part, all we are entitled to accept as starting points of warranted reasoning are our subjective experiences. But what is inferentially special about our subjective experiences?  Descartes said that we cannot be deceived about the fact that we are thinking.  But I certainly can be deceived about the content of my ideas.  Descartes likes to talk about dreams.  The content of dreams is notoriously inchoate, though.  Did I dream that I held a cat?  Or was it a skunk?

“So much the worse!” crows the skeptic.  “You see that you cannot even be certain of the content of your subjective experiences.”  True, but this just raises again the issue of why the methodological solipsist insists that we privilege them.  Our subjective experiences are one particular kind of our experiences, and they are often very difficult to single out and identify.  I’m looking at a computer screen now.  It requires a lot of mental discipline to focus on my subjective experience of the screen, rather than the screen itself. Why not take for granted my belief that I am looking at a computer screen, unless a specific concern leads me to doubt this particular belief.

So why not conduct philosophy the way we conduct ordinary conversations?  We are fellow humans who share a common world.  We sometimes discover that what we see in the world is different.  And that leads us to talk about why we see the world that way.  Philosophy is that conversation about what and why we see in the world.

Of course, you can disagree with me, but if you’re a methodological solipsist you’re just disagreeing with a disagreeable subjective experience.  Just take an aspirin and maybe I’ll go away.

A student pointed out to me Gary Gutting’s recent article for the NY Times philosophy column, “The Stone.”  Previous installments of “The Stone” have come under fire for what some professional philosophers regard as inaccurate claims and sloppy reasoning.  Gutting’s article addressed the question of what the point or purpose of philosophy is.  I think some of his observations are very helpful.  For example, philosophy helps us to “clarify what our basic beliefs mean or entail.”

Let me illustrate Gutting’s point with an example of my own.  In my intro to philosophy class, we discuss what makes an act of violence (like the 9/11 attacks) terrorism.  They usually zero in on the fact that terrorism is violence that targets innocent civilians.  Then I ask them to consider the US bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Those cities were chosen as targets in large part because they were untouched by previous bombing.  (Dropping an A-bomb on Tokyo wouldn’t show too much, because Tokyo, the center of the Japanese military and government, had already been destroyed by US bombing.)  Why had Hiroshima and Nagasaki been spared previous bombing?  Not out of humanitarian reasons.  They simply weren’t particularly valuable as military targets.  However, there were lots of civilians waiting to be killed (pardon the gruesome expression) in both cities, so they were “good” targets for the A-bombs.  The obvious question students have to wrestle with is whether the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were acts of terrorism because they targeted civilians.  If not, why not? And what implications does this have for whatever will be the next use of the US military force?  Hardly moot questions, I think.

But philosophers like to disagree, so I have some nits to pick with Gutting’s piece.  He castigates Descartes for trying to “provide a foundation for beliefs that need no foundation,” and praises Hume for “rejecting…the foundationalist conception of philosophy.”  Descartes is a foundationalist, but I think it is worth stressing that he does not ask us to entertain the possibility that a deceitful demon is tricking him into believing in an illusory world because he likes abstract philosophical puzzles.  Descartes lived in the aftermath of the schism between Catholicism and Protestantism, the furious debates between Ptolemaic and Copernican astronomers, as well as revolutionary changes in politics, the arts, etc.  He, like so many thinking people in his era, was unsure what the truth was.  It won’t do to say, “Tut, tut, Rene!  You hardly need a justification for the belief that you have a soul separate from your body.  Why bother to argue for it!  As if any of us doubted that.”  Well, people questioned the existence of the soul back then as they do now.  Descartes tried the method of radical doubt in order to see what, if anything, survived the process of doubt, hoping that he could find a firm foundation for knowledge.  Did he succeed?  Almost no one thinks so, but you won’t understand what he is doing unless you see why he is doing it.  In addition (although this is too much to go into here), many students and even professional philosophers who deny Descartes “thrice before the cock crows” accept many of Descartes’ basic presuppositions, whether they know it or not.

I’m also not happy with Gutting’s characterization of Hume as an anti-foundationalist.  Hume does have a famous response to skepticism in the Treatise, where he recommends  doing some everyday things (go for a walk, play some backgammon) until your skeptical concerns start to seem unreal and irrelevant.  However, Hume is ultimately as much of a foundationalist as Descartes.  Hume’s foundation, that which he thinks cannot be doubted, is immediate sensory experience.  The “impressions” of our senses are the basis of our “ideas” (the latter being merely faint copies of them), and all our mental content is derived from them.  Hume’s empiricism doesn’t succeed either.  But, once again, we need to see that he is a foundationalist, and recognize how latent empiricism lurks in the “common sense” of most college-educated people even today.

Of course, it is hard to write a brief editorial about philosophy and be precise.  Perhaps Gutting would have made all these qualifications and more if he had more space, or were directly addressing other philosophers.  (I sometimes simplify positions myself when trying to explain them to beginning students.)  And perhaps I really have misread Descartes and/or Hume myself.  But, as I sometimes tell my students, how will you know whether what you are saying makes sense or is defensible unless you discuss it with someone else?

I am blessed with outstanding junior colleagues working in a variety of sub-fields of philosophy.  One of them gave a presentation the other day on how to handle vague terms.  The talk was impressively precise, and I think I will fail to do justice to it here.  But allow me to try and give the gist.

“Salty” is a vague term.  If I start with water with no salt in it, it clearly is not salty.  If the water has 10% salt, it is definitely salty.  But what if it is somewhere in the middle?  Suppose I am unsure whether to apply the term “salty” to a given sample of water.  Since I am conflicted, I might say that I should be 50% confident that the water is salty and 50% confident that it is not.  However, this turns out to give results that are implausible for technical reasons.  Instead, my colleague proposes a particular function that maps interpretations of “salty” onto a confidence range.  I might end up with something like, “I have no lower than  35% confidence that the water is salty, but no more than 65% confidence that it is salty.”

Again, I’m not sure I’ve done justice to the talk (which was, to some extent, over my head because of the technicalities involved).  However, I do have a couple of observations.  (1) The talk illustrates a style of “analytic philosophy” that uses examples that are far removed, sometimes intentionally, from ordinary experience.  As I noted in the discussion period after the talk, no chef or foodie would simply say “This is salty” and not have a more specific meaning in mind.  They might mean, “This is TOO salty for the kind of dish it is,” or “The salt overwhelms the taste of the potatoes.”  As a result of (1), I think (2) the particular analysis given does not provide useful information.  If someone tells me that “The likelihood that you will complete your inside straight on the river is only 8%,” they have given my useful information that I know how to act on.  However, a chef or gourmet who is told (or determines herself) that “my confidence that this is salty is in between 35% and 65%” does not have a premise of practical reasoning.

I should note that all my junior colleagues seem much smarter and more energetic than I am.  Consequently, if you are unsure whom to believe, they are probably a better bet.  Nonetheless, when sending my steak back, I refuse to say simply, “It’s salty.”

Aristotle said that virtues are means between extremes.  He is not saying that everyone should strive to be mediocre and emotionally tepid in everything that they do.  The mean is relative to each situation.  So sometimes you are following the mean by being distraught (like when a loved one passes away), while other times you are following the mean by being joyful (like when your child is born).  The person of virtue consistently responds with the “mean” reaction in a particular sphere of experience.  In the sphere of experience relating to dangers, courage is the mean between “rashness” (a tendency to not fear what is fearful, or to rush in to face foolish dangers) and “cowardice” (a tendency to fear too much, or to give in to fear too easily).

This account is not unproblematic.  And it certainly needs to be supplemented to be fully adequate.  (Aristotle and later Aristotelians have done some of that supplementing, but not all that is needed.)  But it is often a good starting point when thinking about virtues and vices.

Consider two extremes: naivete and cynicism.  I’m not sure we have a generally accepted name for the mean state between these extremes.  “Realism” is tempting, but that’s already a technical term in philosophy.  Perhaps “reflectiveness”?  Although they are opposite extremes, naivete and cynicism are very similar.  Both the naive and the cynical assume that their prejudgments are accurate; each is disposed to a particular kind of prejudgment of the motives of others; neither is sufficiently responsive to evidence that their prejudgments are wrong.  The naive person assumes that person A is motivated by kindness and integrity. He will cling to this assumption in the face of behavior from A that makes this incredibly implausible.  The cynical person assumes that person B is motivated by selfishness.   He will attribute to B the most unusual beliefs, for which there is no evidence, and invent complicated variations of self-interest, in order to maintain his presumptions.

Ironically, both the cynical and the naive person tend to assume that humans are rational.  They are blind to the all-too-common cases of the basically kind person taking exactly the wrong means to help others, or the self-interested person acting self-destructively.