OK, I can't be hedgehogged doing a coherent post today. I'm tired and shagged out after a long talk (lecturing for others who went and had fun somewhere, the bastards!). So instead here are random links and thoughts that happen to be open in my browser right now...
The first is the notion of an "error theory". This is a term derived from the writings of John Mackie, who thinks that objective moral values would be very odd things, and that people who think they are looking for them are just in error (hence "error theory"). This came up because we were doing the Friday evening drinks thing, wondering whether people were properly self-reporting their reasons for believing X, and I suggested that, in matters of justifying behaviours, they took the behaviours for one reason, and then applied the standard templates for justifying such actions afterwards, and that if we did experimental philosophy to poll the "folk" (a sort of philosophical hoi polloi), they would not be able to give you the real reasons why they acted due to false consciousness. Only this time the falsehood would be imposed by society on the biosocial realities rather than Marx's ideology misleading the proletariat. While I wholeheartedly support the move to finding out the actual things people think rather than relying on philosophers' intuitions or published texts, we have to be careful not to fall into the traps the social sciences dragged themselves out of some time back.
Thinking Meat has a nice discussion of whether or not people reject science for social or biological reasons, which segues nicely. He thinks, and I agree, that there is a sense in which intuitive explanations in, say, folk psychology, folk taxonomy, folk physics, and the like are too hard to displace in most people, But I think there are degrees of both embeddedness and also sociality in these supposed "common sense" views. For a start I do not think that psychological dualism is the default view - many older cultures, not least the 8thC BCE Hebrew prophets, had purely physical views of the mind and body. Sure, dualism is a Good Trick, as Dennett might call it, in that it keeps getting invented or spread from culture to culture, but the idea itself is not, I think, universally true of all thinking cultures. On the other hand, essentialism, in one sense, is. Children believe that things have essential properties long before they ever read Kripke. So it is hard to displace that idea. A scientific worldview doesn't come as a nice series of object lessons, but takes a fair bit of effort to achieve. In fact, I think that the cost of overcoming default programming will limit the educability and spread of science indefinitely.
PZ Meyers (that is definitely how you spell it, as we have John Davison's word for it, resolving a long-standing dispute between me and PZ) has shockingly gone into the parable business. You just know it can't be long before he claims to be the messiah. He's just a naughty developmental biologist, though...
Now you just know that there will be something pop up that I want to blog in detail, don't you? But if I hadn't done this miscellany, there wouldn't have been. Or does mentioning that I expect there will be mean there won't? And now that I have noted that, there will? The universe is so hard to second guess.
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I'm not quite sure what you're getting at. But most people in experimental philosophy don't think that social factors explain lack of insight into behavior. Instead, it is the product of the fact that we have no direct access to subpersonal processes (which are perhaps modularised and informationally encapsulated). We come up with some kind of hypothesis to explain our choices, and the content of the hypothesis might be drawn from anywhere (including culture: the evidence is that the content of delusions is culturally variable), but it's not because society is hiding the truth from us. The evidence that we lack insight into a very wide range of behaviors is overwhelming, and comes from every branch of the cognitive sciences.
I've always kind of liked the view that behavior occurs, and "consciousness", or "awareness", or whatever name we give the module that does the talking, is sort of like a public relations manager hovering outside the room where the decisions are made, trying explain the behavior by making up a story out of the fragmentary bits and pieces overheard through the nearly sound-proofed door.
Suppose I ask you why you did not steal that unattended purse. You say, "My mother always taught me that stealing is wrong". But in fact that didn't enter into it - you simply didn't want to get caught, and undergo sanctions, or you could see there was nothing inside it, and so on. The reason why you don't nick the purse is different from the reason you give, and you may not even be aware of it. If you are asking why moral claims have force, it may be that moral claims in fact have no force at all, and are (in an extreme account) merely post hoc rationalisations for actions taken for other reasons (which may not be moral at all). In fact, the moral claims themselves might have purposes that have nothing to do with justification per se.
The metaethical extreme error theory would be that all moral accounts are in error. A similarly extreme error theory for epistemology might be that all [self-reported or introspected] justifications of beliefs are in error. Our hypotheses account for the vera causae, not the proferred reasons.
Mr Wilkins wrote:
In the process of civilization,
From the anthropoid ape down to man,
It is generally held that the Navy
Has buggered whatever it can,
Yet recent extensive researches
By Darwin and Huxley and Hall,
Conclusively prove that the hedgehog
Has never been buggered at all.
We therefore believe our conclusion
Is incontrovertibly shown,
That comparative safety on shipboard
Is enjoyed by the hedgehog alone.
Why haven't they done it at Spithead,
As they've done it at Harvard and Yale,
And also at Oxford and Cambridge,
By shaving the spines off its tail?
There's a predecessor? Wow...
Suppose I ask you why you did not steal that unattended purse. You say, "My mother always taught me that stealing is wrong".[etc.]
I've done this thought experiment myself, and I think you're right. In the moment of temptation, I just don't do it -- almost reflexively, I refrain. There's probably all sorts of unconcious factors from my past playing into the (automatic) decision: parental training, religious strictures (if I'm religious), fear of detection and punishment, a rational understanding that every act of theft weakens the social concensus that protects me from theft, etc. If asked afterwards, I may give any of the forgoing as my reason -- but at the time, all that I was aware of was a sort of "habit" of not stealing stuff.
Shagged out? From a lecture? Now I've got a completely inappropriate vision of what Australians are doing behind those lecterns.
Also, I've been in the parable business for a long time, and I also do the miracles of turning wine into water, and fishes into a loaf. Warning, though: we atheist messiahs do not do the suffering and death martyrdom bit, OK? Not part of the program.
....I also do the miracles of turning wine into water, and fishes into a loaf.
You do? My recollection was that you try to turn water into fishes, while administering wine (some form of ethanol, anyway) to see what happens.
and that with a hedgehog!