After the Pragmatism and Naturalism workshop

I came back on the weekend from the Pragmatism and Naturalism workshop in Tilburg, Holland. Huw Price was the main speaker and it seemed like every second talk was about the Canberra Plan in one way or another, with Frank Jackson’s From Ethics to Metaphysics being mentioned almost more often than Huw’s work. Given the degree to which his work is a response to the Australian scientific realists, this is not as much a surprise as it might be otherwise. Apart from Huw, there were also a number of other well-known philosophers there as well as a few who are less well-known but doing very interesting work. In particular, I was glad to meet Jim O’Shea whose recent book on Sellars received a very enthusiastic write up on the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (I keep meaning to read up on Sellars and Jim’s book may be just the thing for me to read) as well as Mauricio Suarez who works at the Complutense University, which I am to visit in a couple of weeks, and who has an interesting approach to scientific representation. It is clear that Stephan Hartmann is doing a great job in organising the Tilburg Logic and Philosophy of Science centre as it has only been going for a year and already has hosted a number of very interesting meetings. The only problem for me was that the meeting was more closely focussed upon Huw’s work than I had expected so that my talk, dealing as it did with Herbert Simon, was kind of off in a corner of its own. I ended up making large changes to the presentation the night before so that it would fit more with the overall shape of the workshop. As part of that I removed the section on Goldman and, instead, compared Simon’s ideas to those put forward by Peirce as a number of talks discussed Peirce in one way or another. Certainly, it did seem that the strong realist tenor of both my talk and Peirce’s philosophy was out of tune with the deflationist approach favoured by many of the other participants. It seems that the fundamental difference between the views I argue for and those that Huw prefers is that he does not see reality as playing as much of a constraining role upon our theorising as that played by communication with other people.

I am putting the PowerPoint slides from my talk on the website, as well as a link to the TiLPS website.

Mystery of God

One of the claims I have been arguing for is that religious beliefs can be identified by their practical untestability, caused as much by social attitudes as by their content - the important point being that if a belief is not subject to empirical testing it is much freer to be shaped by its latent function. BBC News has an article on the Archbishop’s of Westminster latest speech in which he seems to pretty much agree with at least the first of these claims:

God is not a “fact in the world” as though God could be treated as “one thing among other things to be empirically investigated” and affirmed or denied on the “basis of observation”, said Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor.

“If Christians really believed in the mystery of God, we would realise that proper talk about God is always difficult, always tentative.

Cephalopod horoscopes

Here’s a quote:

Pisces: You will be busy exchanging ions across your gill membranes today — watch out for predators, and trust your lateral line organs.

Curious? The quote is from the Pharyngula blog run by PZ Myers - a scientific blog that probably needs no introductions. No PZ Myers has not suddenly decided to give up biology for astrology but he is wondering about the financial benefits of doing horoscopes as a side-line. The reason is an article in the Telegraph which discusses recent research that, once again and with ever greater scientific rigour, shows astrology is false and contrasts this research with the piles of money that astrologers make. Of course, neither fact is news but the juxtaposition is quite glaring in this case.

The cephalopod horoscope reminds me of one I read in my university newspaper when I was an undergraduate. It went roughly like this:

Capricorn: You are a rational, hard-headed thinker epitomising Enlightenment belief in the power of reasoning. As such you know far too much too trust pointless horoscopes like this one. Unlike those ditzy, empty-headed Virgos!

The developing Padre Pio phenomenon

One of the things that I find interesting is the cases where superstition and religion meet up. The Catholic miracle sites such as Lourdes, Fatima and Medjugorje, are prime examples of this with each having a large number of superstitious beliefs associated with them, the particular beliefs often appearing to be fairly similar in content. Each of these sites is relatively young when compared to how long Christianity has existed: Medjugorje since 1981, Fatima since 1917 and Lourdes, the oldest, since 1858. This, in itself, suggests an interesting avenue for research into what the ‘developmental path’ of such sites is, the comparison being with much older pilgrimage sites that not longer seem to have such a big focus on local superstitions - Czestochowa in Poland and Santiago de Compostela in Spain, being two.

Another possible interesting comparison, or additional example, might be provided by the cult around Father Pio in San Giovanni Rotondo in southern Italy. It seems that a new church to hold the thousands of pilgrims has been built there and Father Pio’s remains have been dug up and placed within the church to draw in further crowds. A number of studies suggest themselves as to the effect this will have upon the popularity of the cult as well as on the appearance of new superstitions focussed on the dead priest. BBC News has a short article on the recent developments there.

Tilburg meeting programme

The programme for the Pragmatism and Naturalism workshop is now up and is looking very interesting, indeed. Three days of focussed discussion on some of my favourite topics with some of the best people working in the general area. Apart from the series of lectures that are to be given by Huw Price at the same time, I particularly look forward to seeing talks by Horwich, Williams, Knowles and Suarez. At the same time, I am sure that there is bound to be a large number of other interesting talks there by people whose work I have not yet had a chance to become familiar with. And to add to all this good stuff I have just found out that an old colleague of mine, Mark Colyvan, is visiting the Tilburg Centre. I’d be kicking myself for months if I didn’t go.

Poznan Cognitivist Society Conference

I’m on my way back from Poznan where the Polish Cognitivist Society Conference took place. The paper I presented - Racjonalność ograniczona, błędy systematyczne i przesądy - was a Polish language version of one of the talks I gave in Trondheim in January. Most of the talks at the conference were scheduled to be only 20 minutes long. Complete insanity, given that there wasn’t enough time for any questions nor time outside of talks to meet up with the people who gave the talks and to discuss their work with them. To make the problem worse, the schedule had not been made available until a few days before the meeting which meant that the abstracts and the slides were invariably put together on the assumption of longer talks. Having had a fair bit of experience giving talks under various condition I seem to have managed to get through my talk in the allotted time and without completely losing most of the audience but many people seemed to be just rushing to get through their slides at a pace that was impossible to keep up with. As such, the format worked very much against anyone getting anything out of the meeting. It would have been understandable in terms of the organisers wanting to keep everyone together if there had been no simultaneous sessions but this was not the case - there were two different sessions for the length of the meeting, excluding the plenaries. In that situation the obvious solution would have been to go to 4 simultaneous sessions and 40 minutes for each talk and questions. This would have meant some exchange of ideas between the participants instead of this very frustrating rush against the clock. It would have meant fewer listeners at each talk but, given what actually took place, this would have been a relatively minor cost. Conference scheduling is always an art of making compromises and always something doesn’t turn out quite right but this way of setting things up was guaranteed not to work well from the start.

The significant shortcomings of how the meeting was organised meant that, even though I met two people whose work seems to have interesting connections with my own, I did not have the opportunity to discuss our shared interests with them. The most useful result of the meeting for me was seeing an old friend of mine give a talk on philosophy of language after which we decided that we can put some of our ideas together into what should be an interesting paper. Apart from that I got to see several talks which suggested some of the interesting work that is being done around the world, many of the talks really having had the form of something resembling reviews of current literature in a field, and one or two talks about interesting work actually being done in Poland. As it was, the conference dinner also ended up not lasting very long with most people leaving before nine o’clock. Perhaps they had been tired out by the day-long ‘sprint’ through numerous talks.

Updating the Enlightenment

For a couple of years now a quite fascinating conference has taken place at the Salk Institute. I am talking about the Beyond Belief conferences, the latest having dealt with the Enlightenment’s role in the modern world. The conferences are wildly interdisciplinary and attract some of the best known thinkers to participate in what have been lively, valuable debates. Most valuably, the videos of the talks are available on the internet making it possible to spend a couple of days listening in on the proceedings. The video of the last conference begins with the organiser, Roger Bingham, the director of The Science Network, quoting from a certain resident of Basra:

Therefore, the seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency.

A plethora of presentations

It looks like the next couple of months, and May in particular, will be inordinately busy for me. I have made it an aim to present some of the ideas I wish to contain in the book before writing the final version and it seems I will get what I hoped for. Unfortunately, the result is likely to be that I will be exceedingly pressed for time. This is particularly true given the various projects I have to finish before starting on the round of talks. Here’s the, hopefully complete, list of them:

April 18-19 Cognitivist Society meeting, Poznan, Poland - Racjonalność ograniczona, błędy systematyczne i przesądy

May 7-9 Pragmatism and Naturalism, Tilburg, Netherlands - Simon’s heuristics, reliabilism and habits

May 15-17 Argumentation as a Cognitive Process, Torun, Poland - Arguing with limited beings (us, that is)

May 25-28 Naturalism and Bounded Rationality, Granada, Spain - Good habits, better heuristics

May 29 Complutense University, Madrid, Spain - Good habits, better heuristics

June 2-4 Pragmatism meeting, Murcia, Spain - The fixation of superstitious beliefs

That’s six talks in seven weeks. I do not expect to be able to do much more than prepare for the talks during May. After I finish I will probably need some more time to rest and think about everything I’ve learned.

Another talk on Simon

I have been accepted to give a talk at the Pragmatism and Naturalism workshop in Tilburg next month. It’ll be closely related to the “Good habits, better heuristics” paper that I’m to give in several places but, due to the focus of the meeting, will also deal with Herbert Simon’s relation to pragmatism:

Simon’s heuristics, reliabilism and habits

It is not an original claim to say that Herbert Simon, the American polymath scientist, has also made a highly significant contribution to philosophical pragmatism and naturalism. Much the same has been claimed by Stephen Stich. However, rather than pursue Stich’s somewhat superficial analysis of what Simon achieved in his empirical work, I would rather take a different tack and examine Simon’s central concept - heuristics. My contention is that with heuristics, Simon has formulated an account of rationality that is profoundly naturalist and pragmatist. That this is the case can be understood once some of the characteristics of heuristics are considered.

The first of their simplicity. Heuristics are simple rules of thumb in order that limited cognisers such as human beings may use them to make decisions quickly enough to react to their changing environment. This care for the reality that human (or indeed any imaginable) rationality is bounded should clearly be a part of a naturalist account.

The second is their context-dependence. The simplifying assumptions that heuristics make about the context they will be used in can turn out false, in which case the heuristics will not provide even approximately correct answers. This, in effect, means that heuristics can only ever be justified a posteriori - in line with the rejection of the a priori that is common to many naturalist positions.

The third is their systematic bias. Even within their appropriate contexts-of-use heuristics, again due to their simplifying assumptions, make systematic errors. However, this bias is not a problem so long as the results provided by a heuristic are good enough for the particular purpose to which that heuristic is being employed. Indeed, the whole point of using heuristics is not to get the best possible result but one that is satisfactory. This choice of satisficing various (not necessarily epistemic) values over optimising a single value such as truth seems be to deeply in tune with many pragmatist accounts of reason.

Something of the way that Simon’s heuristics help to fill out other naturalist and pragmatist accounts can be seen by comparing them to just two important examples: Goldman and Hume.

In the case of Goldman, Simon’s heuristics can be understood to be the reliable methods he advises us to use. Importantly, where Goldman to a certain degree eschews too much talk about what the precise methods are, his reticence can be understood very well in contrast to Simon’s empirical project of identifying and inventing heuristics. The reticence can be seen as appropriate to a philosophical account that aims to work hand-in-hand with the empirical approach - as such objections to Goldman that he ‘leaves out’ what is most important come to be seen as misplaced.

In the case of Hume, Simon can be seen as spelling out the habits that Hume recognises as part and parcel of the normal way people go about thinking. Given that Quine has expressed the naturalist project as trying to explain how we manage to come to grips with our world without solving Hume’s problem, this is perhaps the best context in which to understand what Simon has achieved.

When it rains in Spain (on the plain) it pours

And, in continuing Spain-related news, I am going to also present “Good habits, better heuristics” in Madrid at the Complutense University. Given that I am supposed to present the paper in several places, I just hope that it isn’t deeply flawed in some way that has not become obvious to me as that would make for several occasions for me to make a fool of myself.