Peter over at On Philosophy has a post up on how to avoid writing nonsense. Even though in general I agree with lot of what he says, as you might expect I disagree with a lot as well. Mainly in the details. Of course Peter adopts a lot of positions pretty much completely at odds with my own. So some disagreement isn't that surprising. (I tend towards externalism; he's an internalist for instance) Of course despite these differences I thoroughly enjoy his blog. His interests are nearly the same as mine own (philosophy of mind and physics) even if perhaps his conclusions aren't. But onward to my quibbling as I rise to some of his statements.
First Peter's main claim is one I whole heartedly endorse. Peter puts it as,
...consider[] what the world would be like if the claim being considered was false, and some competing claim was true. If the world would be exactly the same, or the possibility of the claim being false is incoherent, then there is a good chance that the claim in question is nonsense.
This is pretty much akin to one of Peirce's maxims. For a difference to be a difference it has to make a difference. Something the pragmatists among us ought love. Where the problem comes though is in deciding what makes a difference. Consider Peter's example.
...consider the mystical claim that “all is one”. Would the world be different if the opposite, that “all is not one”, were the case? I can’t see how it would be. Thus it appears that the claim that “all is one” is not really claiming anything at all. It is thus nonsense, a non-claim verbally dressed up to seem like a claim.
Now I personally think mysticism is nonsense. But a mystic would quickly reply that if all is not one that then the mystic experience would be impossible. So it makes a difference.
Of course the rejoinder would be to argue that mystic experiences aren't actually due to the unity of existence but due to some cognitive structure in the brain. But that doesn't make the claim nonsensical. It merely involves a dispute in verifying the claim. The mystic (or at least my hypothetical mystic) would still be committed to Peter's principle.
Peter's next example is problematic as well.
...consider the claim that “all successful contemporary societies are virtuous”, where virtuous is defined as the property of not being conquered by an external foe. Considering what the world would be like if the opposite is true is to consider what a successful contemporary society that is conquered by an external foe would be like. But obviously that is a contradiction in terms, because it is impossible to be both a successful society and a conquered one. Thus the claim is revealed as not actually a proper claim.
Now I'm more sympathetic to this one since it is attempting to get at the idea that there is a difference but one that is in principle unverifiable. (Using that term in the broad sense and not the positivist sense) One could argue, for instance that one could be a successful culture but not a virtuous one. Thus, for instance, perhaps the Greeks were successful under Roman occupation even if they weren't virtuous.
But as I said I'm sympathetic to what Peter's trying to get across. One just has to be careful how one treats verification. After all we might end up with a situation like String theory where verification is not available yet and most likely any verification would be decades if not centuries away from being practically possible. But no one would argue string theory is nonsense. (Well, I guess some have...)
I should add that I agree with Peter that the "typical" list of things that are philosophical nonsense is problematic. A lot of important philosophy would be excluded if one took it seriously. Unfortunately a lot of people do take such claims seriously. Which is why so much Continental philosophy gets lampooned by folks who don't even understand the tradition it arises out of.
To add, some very clear writing is nonsense as well. One could well argue that Leibniz and Descartes are adopting nonsensical positions but that's just because our biases of what is "obvious" are so different from theirs. Ditto Plato and so forth.
I should probably note, even though most philosophers don't like to acknowledge it, but plenty of folks think all philosophy is nonsense for reasons not too removed from why some philosophers think Continental philosophy is nonsense.
I wasn't trying to drive at a criterion that was tied to verifiability, but to whether a claim about the world was being made versus a tautalogy or defintion dressed up as a claim. I see the hallmark of a claim as saying that the world is a certain way when it is at least possible for things to be otherwise. That is why I treat "all is one" as nonsense, because there is no clear claim involved, because "one" is so loose an idea as to be meaningless.
I don't think "all is one" is a loose claim. Certainly not in ancient philosophy where it has a fairly precise sense.
It seems the hallmark of senselessness is that one isn't giving a definitional or verifiable claim. Rather one isn't making claims (or analysis) at all but just throwing out words. And certainly I've encountered a lot of that.
I would disagree that it is actually a claim even in acient philosophy. Simply try to understand what it is claiming. That there is some fundamental unity? What is this unity, what difference does it make to the (observable) world? When we start asking questions along these lines the pseudo-claim breaks down. You may think that restricting claims to saying something about the observable world is too strict, but it is pretty easy to argue that claims about a non-observable part of reality that is not tied to observable reality in a way that makes it indirectly observable are meaningless, because it is impossible to sucessfully refer to features of this non-observable world. (at best what you end up talking about is some abstract construction, but that abstract construction as a whole fails to line up to the non-observable world such as to make talk that sucessfully references its parts reference the non-observable world)
I'm not sure what you mean about contesting it being an actual claim in ancient philosophy. Are you denying that Plotinus or others argued for it? Or simply disputing whether it makes any difference?
You can't separate the claims of oneness from the overall metaphysical framework in which one finds it. That's sort of what I was trying to get at by my critique of your mystic example. Certainly given certain frameworks the lack of unity would make a huge difference.
Now if we simply attempt to analyze claims for observable content independent of metaphysics then you might be right. But then isn't that a problem with metaphysics in general? Exactly how does one avoid simply falling prey to the more extreme forms of verificationalism or critiques of meaning that the positivists raise.
I clearly think metaphysics is verifiable even if the arguments for any metaphysical claim are typically extremely weak. Sometimes they move from weakness to strength. (Arguably that's true of most physics - much of which might have been at best metaphysical in the past)
The question is ultimately what is "observable" (scare quotes not as a joke to the original criteria of nonsense but to note that this has a loaded meaning in the history of philosophy of science I'm not necessarily embracing). I don't think metaphysics is a "non-observable world." However I do think we can intelligently talk about theoretical entities as being real without their being observables. (Note the lack of scare quotes)
I'm certainly not denying that ancient philosophers made that claim. But just because someone we recognize as a philosopher makes a claim doesn't automatically make the claim good philosophy.
Secondly I think that claims should be evaluated independantly of context of system. The only way that context make a difference to the content of the claim is if a) the context re-defines the terms in the claim or b) the claim is a defintion. Other than these two points nothing in the context of a claim can affect the content of a claim. Given that I have already admitted that definitions are a special case, and that it doesn't seem to be what you are aiming at, I await a set of defintions of "all" and "one" that give the claim actual content.
As to theoretical entities being real: it only makes sense to posit their reality when they contribute in some way to something you can, at least in principle, observe. Otherwise positing them is epistemologically unjustified. We might make a special exception for the abstract disciplines (math) that don't presume to make claims about the world, but only claims within a completely abstract system, but I presume that you do not wish to claim that philosophy is such a discipline.
*independantly of context or system.
I just don't see how one can verify claims independent of a system of claims. So I simply reject your whole approach. Indeed unless one claims that all claims reduce down to direct "observables" in a fashion a tad uncomfortably close to the positivists, I'm not sure how such a claim is itself sensical.
I certainly agree that just because a philosopher claims something it isn't necessarily so. However to neglect the arguments they put forth seems to me to entail simply being a poor reader of such philosophers. I certainly think Plotinus and most ancient philosophers wrong but I don't think they are speaking nonsense. Although some might be.
Regarding theoretical entities, it simply sounds like you're just rejecting scientific realism or its variants. Which is fine. I just don't have time for that debate. That tends to get us quickly into a discussion of what we mean by "observe" and "observable." I personally don't think such a claim is itself sensical, but I'll not get into that debate. I think we simply see that claims about what is or isn't nonsense themselves depend upon preconceived answers. (If only to what one means by observable)
Paragraph 573 of Hegel's Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences is something I find myself being reminded of more and more often these days. Easily one of the best things he ever wrote. "The All-One Doctrine" is really easy to handle badly.
(If "All is one" is meaningless, then how could anyone feel a need to assert it? For if it is meaningless, it cannot be asserted; it is not an assertable. But then what are they doing, if not asserting that "all is one"? Pointing to a private vision? But then why could they not point to this private vision as well with Orfly gumpol, or any other string of nonsense? (Such as "All is many" perhaps, the apparent reversal of "All is one.") Why are they tempted to use just this phrase? Are there different sorts of private visions? How does one learn what to call each of them? By instruction? But it is just in the nature of these visions that one can never share them; they do not speak of a public realm, but of one that no one else can see (or hear etc.). So then how were they taught? How was the teacher to judge that his pupil was learning rightly?)
I don't think trying to imagine verification-conditions (or the practical implications of what would be the case if p, or if ~p) helps us much in deciding if something is or is not nonsense. (What would it be like if Caeasar would have enjoyed Borges, if he had read him? If he wouldn't have enjoyed him? Keeping in mind that of course Caesar didn't read Borges. What could count as evidence for either case, here?) Trying to link up truth-conditions to so-and-so's ability to imagine things is even more hopeless. (Imagine that you have forgotten some factoid Q, when in actual fact you have forgotten Q. Or ask "How would the world be different if Forsberg hadn't sold his old car?", where Forsberg is someone you've never heard of before.)
(If it is the case that "p" is true, then p. So one can ask "p?" and the answer to this will be the same as the answer to the question of whether "p" is the case. But not knowing how one would tell that p doesn't mean that "p" is true or that "~p" is true. Perhaps one is merely ignorant of the significance of p, for the moment. Even if one remains always ignorant of the significance of p, this doesn't mean that p had no significance.)
(Is "Get me a hamburger while you're out" true, if I want you to get me a hamburger while you're out? Do imperatives take truth-values? Are they nonsense if they don't?)
The bit about all presently-existing societies being "virtuous" (where "virtuous" doesn't mean virtuous at all, but rather "the state of not having been conquered yet") strikes me as not being nonsense, but of merely being trivially true. A state that is around now is one that hasn't ceased to be around yet. That's hardly news, but it's not nonsense.
This all strikes me as just circling around Tractarian doctrines again. With all of the attached problems.
Well, if you believe that you can't verify claims independantly of systems then you have no way of verifying my claims on this very issue. Because my claims on this very issue are tied into a larger system about what philsophy is, what it can say, etc. Much of which I haven't gotten around to putting online yet. So if you think that you need to understand the complete system to understand the claim then you must admit that you don't understand my claims. At which point you are left without the ability to actually oject to them.
But surely that is silly, right? Obviously you can see that there are larger claims about the nature of what is observable and such that might clarify my claims were I to spell out exactly what I meant (which would take a long time). But clearly the gist of what I have said is well defined by the post by itself, because the terms in the post all have well understood meanings. And thus the claims can be understood by virtue of understanding the words that express them, independantly of the rest of the system.
To by into that is to admit that what a claim is claiming is determined by the meaning of the words. Which means that we only need to worry about the larger system only to the extent that it re-defines those words, as I said earlier.
Finally I should like to point out that the argument for a claim is completely irrelevant to the content of the claim, and thus that claims should be evaluated with as little attention to the argument as possible. True claims can be argued for poorly, and false claims can have arguements too detailed to ever fully refute, despite the falsity of the claim. That is ground I covered a few days ago when discussing how to argue against a philosophical claim.
By "rejecting scientific realism" did you mean "restating scientific realism", because that is essentially what I am doing. (Why posit the existence of an atom? Because it explains the results of the following observations: ...)
Peter, do you think the reality or non-reality of virtual particles in Feynman diagrams makes a difference? That is do you think they have observable effects? Exactly how is this different from Plotinus' claim about the One?
But the theory as a whole is motivated by observations and virtual particles are a consequence of that theory. Thus the positing of virtual particles is motivated by observations, indirectly. But why worry about something of such little significance to the topic at hand?
Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect , so they are directly observable too.
And: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation if it is ever confirmed to exist.
But as soon as you say, "the theory as a whole" you concede my point that you don't look at single claims but systems of claims.
So you mean ignoring the two links I posted? But in any case the claim in question is not "do virtual particles exist" but "do particles interact as described by formula X" that is a single claim, and in this case forumula X happens to imply the existence of virtual particles.
Seriously why so hung up on this tiny point? Why not adress the meat of what I have said in response, namely that by insisting that claims can only be evaluated in the context of the entire system we come to the absurd conclusion that you can't in fact evaluate the very claims of mine that you wish to reject, and thus that moving to reject them on such grounds is a self-defeating proposal.
I'm not trying to be unnecessarily abrasive (I think I come off as such, reading my own comments), it is jus that I am genuinely mystified as to how what is claimed might depend on the entire system, outside of the fact that the system might provide defintions for terms involved in the formulation of the claim.
Perhaps one does not need to say "By the way, I believe much the same as the average person on most topics" for this to be a safe assumption. In which case Clark doesn't need your life story to be able to understand your views in the context of your various related views -- he can assume what you haven't made explicit (such that, say, you are writing in English).
Ah, but he is insisting that one needs to understand the entire system, and the peice he is criticising fits into a larger system that includes the following:
http://onphilosophy.wordpress.com/2007/06/03/valuable-explanations/
http://onphilosophy.wordpress.com/2007/05/22/why-causal-explanations-are-good-explanations/
http://onphilosophy.wordpress.com/2007/04/27/good-and-bad-theories/
http://onphilosophy.wordpress.com/2007/04/13/theory-and-philosophy/
http://onphilosophy.wordpress.com/2007/04/19/synthetic-philosophy/
http://onphilosophy.wordpress.com/2007/04/03/definition-and-discovery/
http://onphilosophy.wordpress.com/2007/01/29/constructed-facts-and-philosophy/
(from most recent to oldest) as well as a bunch of stuff that hasn't made it online. If he insists that it is the entire system that makes the claim what it is, well then he doesn't have the entire system, so he can't evaluate the claim. So in this case "I believe much the same as the average person on most topics" is not a safe assumption.
Don't flatter yourself.
I try not to.
Peter, I don't have time to answer right now. Hopefully this evening. I'd just say I don't think one has to verify or falsify a claim in terms of everything. Even Quinn's form of holism seems a tad extreme to me. I do think though that typically there are a set of claims within which one makes a verification. So when you say, "formula X which implies Y" that do me is all I'm saying. That this "implies" entails extra claims.
I think it a rather modest claim on my part but with far reaching implications when attempting to say something like Plotinus is sensical. He may be wrong. He may even be meaningless in some places. But I think we can't just discount it due to the one claim without considering many other claims.
And how exactly am I supposed to know how the world would be if something were not the case?
OK, first sorry for the delay. Blogging's going to be light for the next month. (Even lighter than it has been)
Alex, if one is a scholastic realist or even allows for de facto laws then I think it's not a problem. For instance it seems obvious to be able to state what the effect of some fundamental constant in physics changing would be.
Now some things are more difficult to know how they effect change. We do know by the role they play in some system or subsystem. Which is why I made my claim. i.e. we don't verify or falsify in a vacuum or in terms of observables. It's always in terms of other claims. This is a fairly uncontroversial claim, I thought, in these post-positivist days. So I was actually surprised Peter took exception - although it appears he thought I was embracing a much stronger sense of holism than I claim. I tend to think fundamental claims require more "system" comprehension to determine a difference than simple claims. (i.e. the claim about switching to an other kind of tire involves far fewer commitments than the neoPlatonic claim about oneness)
Peter, to your examples. I was familiar with them. However as I'm sure you know there's a debate about whether any long lived particle (such as in Hawking radiation) would really be virtual at all. When I was talking about virtual particles in Feynman diagrams I was more thinking of say the electromagnetic interaction of two charged particles. Clearly it is meaningful to discuss this but also clearly in terms of physical difference the issue is at best difficult to discuss. Now some (especially Instrumentalists) would of course deny that such questions are meaningful at all. Since you appear to put yourself on the realist camp then I assume you're not sympathetic to that view.
I just don't see the difference between what Plotinus does with the metaphysical notion of The One, required for logical reasons from what Feynman does with virtual particles. The main difference, if there is one, is that Feynman is an instrumentalist who'd find such metaphysical debate silly or unhelpful.
The casimir effect isn't really helpful since virtual particles are one way to argue for what is happening "below the phenomena." But presumably if virtual particles weren't real there would still be a casimir effect.
Now if one is committed to the reality of virtual particles and then asks what would change if they ceased to exist, we'd have something different. There would be no interactions at all since virtual particles are force carriers for most phenomena. In effect most of existence would cease.
But note how this isn't different from the neoPlatonist. The neoPlatonist would simply say that if all wasn't One then time and existence would be impossible. So they'd point to a very important physical difference.
Just as a followup, I recognize that I haven't argued for the claim that verification/falsification (in the broad sense) depend upon multiple claims and never a single claim. I have a post I'm working on for that argument that I hope to have up this evening.
A final point I'd just put up at Peter's blog bug figured I'd put here. Here's my criteria for sense vs. nonsense.
1. If a text can be interpreted charitably it should be. If it can't be then it is nonsense. Now charity is a loose term but would obviously entail close reading of the text, familiarity with the language the text is in and the other texts it refers to either directly or indirectly, as well as a close attention to the context.
2. If a text can be interpreted charitably and the assertions it makes make no theoretically verifiable difference in the world then it nonsense.
Now the criticism will be that "charity" is defined too broadly. I'm suspicious of too narrowly defined versions of charity since I think language is far more ambiguous than some. However even for figures like Derrida one can't read willy-nilly. One has to proceed rationally with close readings and attention to context. I just don't think this results in a determinate reading; although typically we arrive at readings we can agree upon with each other.
The other issue is "theoretically verifiable" which I also intend to be taken loosely. I say theoretically since obviously in most cases we can't observer counterfactuals. Rather we postulate general laws or principles that are in play. This is always a theoretical activity. How we verify theories is always highly fallible but often quite accurate.
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