Options & Alternative Possibilities

Posted on February 20, 2009
Filed Under Free Will, Philosophy | 3 Comments

Philosophical Pontifications has up a post on whether options are the same as alternative possibilities. I think we have to distinguish the ontological from the physical issues. However I think our common linguistic concepts are designed to pick out the physical issues but not the ontological ones.

Put an other way I think our instincts and language are tied to a vague understanding of the world such that one shouldn’t read too many philosophical commitments into them. Much of philosophy since the linguistic turn is doing just that. Now in one sense that makes complete sense. After all our philosophical questions are made within language. If those questions have ontological aspects we have to make sense of them in terms of the language. Yet if the language is simply indeterminate on ontology then there’s inherently a problem. In effect we’ve created a revisionist account of the terms by creating a new extension they don’t have in common vernacular.

Of course the easy and obvious way out of this is to accept we have a revisionist account based upon what armchair philosophers mean by the terms and then proceed as normal. The other alternative is to do what the Experimental Philosophers are doing and ask various poll questions to try and figure out how average people (or at least college students) would apply the terms in various thought experiments. Those thought experiments may have ontological or related commitments.

My complaint with both these approaches is that while they establish something it isn’t entirely clear what they establish. For instance the problem with the armchair philosopher is that they may have a particular vernacular but then one has to be very careful moving from the philosophical jargon to the common speech even when the words are the same. That is we have to recognize that it is jargon. I’m not sure this is always done. The problem with the EP approach isn’t quite a pronounced but is a worry as one can always ask why a lay person picks out the use they do. That is does that use actually say anything terribly profound about philosophy? In other words is it really giving us any insight into the philosophical problems? Or is it just an other (perhaps inconsistent) way of creating a new jargon? After all the thought experiments designed to elicit philosophical meaning are odd enough that they don’t reflect normal use. (One could argue that they are just testing what normal use in unusual circumstances is: but I think that this is undefined and that we’re merely creating new usage)

I bring all this up relative to Jason Zarri’s post because it seems clear that ontological options and alternative possibilities aren’t the same. Options deal merely with what seems physically open in a weak sense. Alternative possibilities includes what is physically open in a strong sense and what is ontologically open. That is alternative possibilities (AP) demand an answer to the questions of determinism, to the question of a block universe, and so forth. I distinguish between the physically weak sense and physically strong sense in terms of whether the environment allows the options to occur without considering the physical state of the agent. I then additionally add in the question of whether the agent is functioning normally. (Itself a vague notion, but one that I think is clear enough and is designed to deal with mental illness and the like but take no position on whether the brain is practically deterministic)

Given those distinctions and the language distinctions I made earlier we have the following. First in terms of many philosophical questions it is alternative possibilities that the are of concern. Yet in terms of normal language use it is options that is of concern. To switch between the two is to make a mistake of language. That is to assume that the philosophical question tells us something about regular language. That’s simply because the language in common use is more vague than the narrower philosophical uses.

Note that this is not to say that discoveries in philosophical use can’t impact regular language use. It may be, for instance, that some term has the same extension in both philosophical and common vernaculars. So it may turn out that questions of responsibility in philosophy affect questions of responsibility in common usage. (I’m not yet convinced it is, but I certainly think there’s pima facie reason to think that is an example)

Comments

3 Responses to “Options & Alternative Possibilities”

1 Jacob J on February 20th, 2009 5:12 pm

Very good post Clark. I agree with your comments about the vagueness of the vernacular vs. the philosophical jargon. However, I continue to feel that you can’t jettison intuition (which seems to be what the EP folks are after) to the degree you want to. I think a general sense of plausibility guides a large percentage of our philosophical conclusions and ultimately I don’t know that this can be avoided.

2 Clark on February 20th, 2009 5:43 pm

I think intuitions tell us what we believe. But it is at best a first rather than last step. That is I think our intuitive capacity is how abductive logic works. However abduction often gives wrong answers which is why we have the scientific method or hermeneutic circle. The problem I have with intuition is that it is made the last word which ends up cutting off inquiry.

3 Mark D. on February 20th, 2009 6:31 pm

One other thing worth mentioning. Generally speaking, statements about possibility are made in the context of a certain time and relative to the information that is practically available to the observer. Possibility in this sense is subjective in the same sense that both Bayesian probability and statistical thermodynamics are subjective.

I.e., Such and such a state of affairs is possible because one is not in the possession of the information necessary to rule it out. In determinism of course, possession of perfect information about any temporal state of affairs would rule out all possibilities and all options for any past or future time save one only.

In other words, once the universe is instantiated, there are no real options or real possibilities in determinism, for the same reason that entropy is a fictive construct in classical statistical thermodynamics – they are functions of the information available to any macroscopic observer.

That doesn’t mean that the subjective concepts of possibility and entropy aren’t useful, however. Entropy, in particular, seems to benefit from what one might call “standardized subjectivity”. Paraphrasing Donald Rumsfeld, it is a “known unknown”.

So I would say that any discussion of this subject should start with the clarification of whether one is talking about subjective possibility, quasi-subjective possibility, or absolute possibility. Failure to make such a distinction is usually fatal to the validity of even the most casual argument about the subject.

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