Error Theory vs Intuition?
Вставка
- Опубліковано 27 лип 2024
- It's often said that a major problem with error theories is that they are highly counterintuitive. I'm not so sure.
0:00 - Error theory
2:14 - Intuition in philosophy
5:23 - Ordinary falsehoods
11:35 - What is the content of our intuitions?
17:01 - What is it to vindicate intuition?
I've listened to a lot about intuitions recently, and this is possibly my favorite treatment of the subject. Thanks, as always, Kane.
I think the counterintuitiveness of error theories is not so much that they say all judgments of a certain kind are wrong (error theories about nature spirits or astrology seem perfectly intuitive). I think it's more a matter of what these theories say.
It's particularly apparent with normative/moral error theory and the very underrated modal error theory (though I'm not a modal error theorist myself...).
I think claims like "this event was neither possible nor impossible" are very counterintuitive. People just seem to conceive events as either possible or impossible, I feel like statements like these would be almost unintelligible to many people. The same goes for the famous "torture is neither ok/permissible nor wrong/impermissible", although that strikes me as less counterintuitive.
I also love how error theorists are sometimes the first to admit (if not straight up argue) that their own view is very counterintuitive.
"Torture is not wrong" is counterintuitive, at least for those of us with more liberal moral attitudes, but I think this is only because we're conflating two readings. Usually when somebody says, "torture is not wrong," this would be taken to mean that torture is permissible. In that case, we would have a first-order normative disagreement. But what the error theorist means is that torture does not have the property of wrongness (because there is no property of wrongness, period). When this is clarified, the statement doesn't seem counterintuitive to me.
I also appreciate when philosophers just embrace counterintuitive views. But I still think that the degree to which error theories violate intuitions has been somewhat overstated. You're right about modal error theory, though: that position is crazy no matter what steps we take to clarify what's being said (which is why I love it!)
Great video, really agree with you - for once ;)
I go for a mostly coherency idea of truth, so the whole notion of things being either "true" or "false" falls a bit flat for me. Error theory loses a bit of its counter-intuitive zap if you're already quite relaxed about what "true" and "false" are to begin with.
Propositions either cohere well or not so well with my background beliefs, and as such I'll describe them, in short-hand, as "true" or "false". Outside of maths and logic, I don't see what we'd even mean by "strictly speaking true", so pretty much everything I say, e.g. "it is quarter past 10; the earth is round; I like ice cream (all ice cream?)" is all "strictly speaking" false. And that's fine. We live in a world of coarse-grained emergent phenomena which we navigate by picking out and summarising the things that are useful to us. Why would we want to say things that were "strictly speaking true" anyway? Any effort to do so would prove to be a right ball-ache.
I'm suspicious of intuitions. I don't see why the truth should be intuitive and I've been dissatisfied with any explanation as to why. And what is intuitive or not often depends on what perspective you're coming from. My background is physics, not philosophy, so maybe I'm out of my depth here but many physical concepts are unintuitive, especially the closer you get to the best explanation.
Intuitions have always felt like a lazy way to just accept lots of things as true without sufficient justification. From a practical standpoint , I get it. But from an intellectual one, I don't.
Take something like general relatively and its relationship to time. Or just quantum mechanics in general. Most people find those terribly unintuitive. Though if you understand the math these subjects become significantly more intuitive.
I lean towards error theory. But like you mention, I view it more as a last resort. I also think it's far more important to have an ethical framework than a moral one (though I guess not everyone separates these concepts).
Good video btw. I've always enjoyed your content and it's kind of funny because more times than I can count you'll make a video about a topic I just started reading about.
I would argue your intuition changed based off your life experience.
It’s not that you are going against intuition. It’s that you are going against other more common intuitions.
Because at your base perspective you are categorizing things based on your senses.
And those categorizations could be misleading if you had more precise equipment for your observations or even if you just happened to be thinking differently while making those observations.
Could also be the case that whatever measurements you made could have been done in a different way that was technically just as accurate but gave you a different result which would lead to a different interpretation of that data down the line.
But notice I’m not saying your measurement is different or your interpretation doesn’t match your observations.
From a local observation in physics it’s totality ok to make predictions with the assumption that the earth is flat. Both the earth being flat and round makes no difference in a lot of scientific inquiries.
Counter intuitive may just be different intuition. Or more nuanced intuition. Or inverted intuition
When I was younger, I believed for years that you could catch a cold merely by being cold in temperature. It turns out that that is false: you catch a cold by being exposed to a virus, regardless of temperature. When I first heard that, it was massively counterintuitive, because it contradicted what I very firmly believed. To get rid of that belief meant changing a lot of related beliefs and behaviours as well. I only changed my mind because there is pretty good reason to think that colds are caused by viruses. I don’t think it is any vindication of my initial belief to say “it’s very useful to believe that being cold gives you colds, because believing that motivates you to stay warm”. That doesn’t make me feel any better about my initial belief.
I think this is how some philosophers see error theories. They are counterintuitive because they directly contradict things I believe. The philosopher believes that torture is wrong, and error theory says that belief is false. And it doesn’t make them feel any better to add “all those mistakes you believe are useful for reason X”.
I think the focus on “ordinary judgment” in contemporary philosophy is a mistake in the first place anyway 😅.
Great video - and I completely agree with the reasoning here. There are many situations in life where we no the best we can do is approximations eg what is the value of pi or (after Mandelbrot) how long is the coast of Britain in Angstroms. Why should statements of morality not be similar - they give 'rules of thumb' that are useful and expressible in language even when the absolute truth cannot be captured in words.
Hey, another great one.
The fascination the field has with vindicating our intuitions seems strange to me. If our intuitions were good for very much we wouldn't have need of philosophy. Our intuitions are how things seem, but is it not the role of the noble philosopher to lead us out of the cave of seeming into the unintuitive realm of things as they actually are?
One would have thought. Instead, philosophers have become the gatekeepers, vindicators, and curators of "how things seem."
What's worse, they often are much more concerned about how things seem to themselves, in particular, and have little or no interest in how things seem to anyone else.
The question I would like to ask is “What theory of truth are you assuming when you state an error theory about a particular domain?”
According to the disquotational theory of truth, the propositions “X” and “it is true that X” mean the same thing. Maybe there is a difference of emphasis, but that is all. For a disquotationalist there need be no difference between the intuition that “X” and the intuition that “it is true that X”. However she may say that if you are assuming some other theory of truth then, with that background assumption, she is an error theorist with respect to everything.
This is a question for the success theorist as well, of course. Anyway, here's my view on this. There seems to be a distinction between statements that are just true, and statements that are false but assertable because they are useful or serve some other function. In the former camp will go statements such as:
"I have two hands"
"Water is H2O"
"All species have a common ancestor"
"If I have five books and you have ten books, you have more books than I do"
... or so we usually think. Perhaps none of these statements are strictly speaking true; perhaps nothing is strictly speaking true. Still, these are some examples of statements that most people, if asked to judge whether they are true or false, would label "true" without much difficulty. In the latter camp are statements such as:
"You're the most beautiful woman in the world"
"Our dad is looking down on us and smiling" [said by an atheist, referring to his dead father]
"I was so embarrassed, I wanted to die"
"All the world's a stage"
Again, all of these can be disputed. If we adopt a theory of truth that makes truth cheap enough, no doubt we will judge all of these to be literally true. But note that, even if we accept such a theory of truth, we will probably still want to draw a distinction between the first set of statements and the second. One way to interpret the error theorist about some domain D is that they place the D-statements in the second set. Looking at error theory this way, not much of importance is going to hang on which theory of truth we adopt. If we are deflationists, we get truth on the cheap, and so presumably moral truth is going to come very easily too. Insofar as the moral error theorist says that all moral judgments are false, she is mistaken. But what's important here isn't simply the label "true" or "false". The moral error theorist will: (a) identify a false presupposition of moral judgements, such as that moral judgments involve a commitment to objective values, but there are no objective values, and (b) give an account of the other roles that moral discourse plays, given that it fails to correctly describe the objective values. Going deflationist about truth, so that we can get moral truth on the cheap, doesn't make any difference to (a) and (b). I think the substantive content of error theory survives deflationism.
another banger!!!
Colour conceptualism seems to be anchored in a lived linguistic community as in for Eskimo’s there are purported to be over 50 shades of coloured snow. A field linguist would require to live with the community to align their ascriptive judgments with general descriptions members use to communicate their intentional states as in to avoiding yellow snow. However this excludes being gaslighted into false beliefs as if a believed confidant places the linguist in an out-group which would mislead the linguists colour conceptual intuitions. So for a research linguist in order to get to community error theory she would be best served to reject error theory given she is an out group or non member. Hence holding the position there are not 50 shades of snow.
Dude i love u
I really miss the text annotations is it possible to combine your beautiful talking head with the notes on the same screen?
There is nothing more annoying - okay there is, but... - than reading a philosophy book/article and seeing a sentence with the word "intuition" in it (especially if it is supposed to include your own intuition). To me it is intuitive that there are no moral truths (in the sense you talked about near the end of the video). Aside; not that long ago I listened to a talk by Jean-Paul van Bandegem (on strict finitism) and he had the audacity (don't get me wrong I like him :D) to say that it is counterintuitive that all integers are small. But as is often - maybe always - the case (this is the claim I'm williing to make at least) the supposed counterintuitiveness of this stems from a few underlying assumptions (in this case those of finitism). Similarly, it is understandable (intuitive even) that moral relativism be at first counterintuitive to somone brought up to think that actions are good or bad in an absolute or purely objective sense. The issue here is that to rely on intuition is to either uncritically rely on the assumptions that supports or induce said intuition or it is equivalent to assuming what you are attempting to prove. Intuition is not an argument against error theory or any other theory or claim - it's simply a statement about something (the thing you claim to be counterintuitive) not following from something else (the often unstated assumptions giving rise to your intuition) stated in an obnoxious way.
BTW I liked the video!
Of course, one could claim that an intuition is magical or distinctly different from an assumption. To which I cannot say anything. Intuition is encoded by the organization of our bodies (primarily our brains) which are "predictions" (assumptions) about the world they exist in.
(Aside: I incidently think reality is funny - I meant to write fundamentally (typing on my phone) - and fundamentally mathematical (or computational) in nature/structure; which I think would explain logical/mathematical or - perhaps rather - computational intuition; our brains cannot be in a way that wouldn't give rise to such intuitions).
What are your thoughts on von Wright's The Varieties of Goodness?
Never read it.
We've all learned in school to be "error theorists" about the sky: we have the intuition that the sun goes around the earth, but have been taught that this intuition misleads us.
Now, consider the statement: "The sun has just set in the west". I am writing this comment minutes after sunset (where I live), so this statement happens to be *true.* It is, of course, possible to invoke our error theory and insist that it is *false,* because the sun doesn't actually rise in the east or set in the west. But this would change the context and criteria of evaluation for the statement's truth value.
The same goes for the red car. To insist that all colour assignments are false misunderstands our use of the labels "true" and "false" in normal discourse. 99.9% of the time, nobody cares about whether or not colour is a true property inherent in objects when speaking about car colours. The error theorist is probably right about colour, but not about our use of colour terms, or indeed about our use of the words "true" and "false".
The same goes for morality. To say that the claim "Torture is wrong" is false implies that torture is right, or at least acceptable. That's not what the error theorist means to say, but that's how s/he will be understood. The error theorist in effect insists on an artificial and pragmatically infelicitous use of the word "false".
If the question is whether error theory is counterintuitive, I think the relevant point about the sunset example is that there is, to my ears at least, nothing strange at all about saying that "the Sun has set in the west" is false; albeit a falsehood that in some contexts is regularly used to implicate truths. The error theorist analysis of this might be mistaken, but if so, this isn't a mistake that's revealed by our intuitions. Rather, we need to get into the details of our substantive theories of meaning and truth.
I'm not so pessimistic about error theory's prospects here. Of course, we will all say things such as "the Sun has set in the west." But what would people say if you then asked the further question: "but is it true that the sun has set in the west?" I don't know; I haven't asked anybody this question before. It wouldn't surprise me at all if many people were to respond with something like: "Of course not! Really, the Earth is orbiting the Sun, such that it appears as if the Sun sets in the west..."
It's not clear to me either (1) what is "our use" of the terms "true" and "false", or (2) what are the ordinary criteria for evaluating truth and falsehood... at any rate, I don't think the error theorist's view is *obviously* inconsistent with our ordinary concept of truth. Do our criteria of truth entail that our ordinary utterances of "the Sun has set in the west" are usually true, but in some way context-dependent? Or do these criteria entail that such utterances are useful falsehoods? I don't know. Neither option strikes me as counterintuitive, and both options seem to answer to central aspects of our ordinary thinking about truth. (It's very easy to motivate the claim that "the Sun has set in the west" is just false. You probably wouldn't even need to make an argument for this. Just asking the question, "did the Sun *really* set in the west?" with a particular tone of voice would probably be enough to prompt many people to accept its falsehood.)
>> To say that the claim "Torture is wrong" is false implies that torture is right, or at least acceptable.
Sure... if we completely ignore the context in which the error theorist is speaking. Error theorists will usually only assert claims such as "it is false that torture is wrong" when they are debating meta-ethics, and even there, they will usually only do this to illustrate their theory. In that context, "it is false that torture is wrong" does not imply that torture is right, unless the error theorist's interlocutors are completely uncharitable. In more everyday conversations, such as discussing a news report about how the CIA has used torture to extract information, the error theorist will talk in the same way everybody else does. She'll just say: "torture is wrong!" -- without getting into the meta-ethics.
@@KaneB What is really counterintuitive in this entire discussion is the theory of meaning (held as gospel by many philosophers of language, for historical reasons), according to which sentences have a literal meaning, which is what they truly mean, regardless of what people are actually saying by them. You sort-of invoke this theory in the first part of your reply (while rejecting it in the second).
In reality, there is nothing wrong with saying that "The sun is about to rise in the east" is both true (at the time of writing) and false, depending on the context of discussion. If you're talking about astronomy, it may be considered false, but in practically any other context, it is *not* a statement about astronomical matters (but instead about the time of day, weather conditions, lighting conditions, or whatever else may be relevant), and as such a statement it is true.
Similarly, you yourself agreed that "Torture is wrong" may only be false in a meta-ethical discussion, not in other contexts.
Where (some) error theorists, as well as many of their opponents, defy intuition is in their insistence that such sentences have to be "really" either true or false, regardless of context.
The error theorists (as well as some of their detractors) typically also read way too much into people's statements. "My car is white" is, in the overwhelming majority of cases, a statement about how my car would appear to a typical human observer, in normal lighting conditions. "It is true that my car is white", if anyone utters it in real life, may rebut a claim by someone else that it is some other colour. Or I can utter it here, in thiscomment: it is true that my car is white. That is to say, I'm not just making it up for the sake of this example; my actual car is indeed white (it's also false that my car is white, because, while I'm regularly using it, it legally belongs to my partner, so it's not my car; you see, the same statement, both true and false, and you don't even have to be a dialetheist to get that effect!) But either way, it is practically never intended as a metaphysical statement about objects' "real" properties. That (supposedly "literal") reading is basically invented by the philosophers.
@@whycantiremainanonymous8091 >> it is not a statement about astronomical matters (but instead about the time of day, weather conditions, lighting conditions, or whatever else may be relevant), and as such a statement it is true
Why should I believe this? This isn't obvious to me at all. It strikes me as just as plausible that "the Sun is about to rise" is, when spoken in ordinary contexts, a false statement about astronomical matters that is used to implicate a true statement about the time of day or lighting conditions or whatever else. I don't really have a view one way or the other here. Neither position is counterintuitive to me though. (Actually, if you push me on this, I do have an Official Position here. My Official Position is that meaning is thoroughly indeterminate and so there is no fact of the matter which position is correct.)
>> you yourself agreed that "Torture is wrong" may only be false in a meta-ethical discussion, not in other contexts
No, that's not what I said. What I said is that error theorists will usually only say the statement "it is false that torture is wrong" in meta-ethical discussions. In everyday conversations, they may say, "torture is wrong," while thinking of it as perhaps a useful falsehood. On this view, it's not that "torture is wrong" is false in philosophical contexts and true in everyday contexts. It's false in both contexts, it's just that in everyday contexts, we don't usually have any reason to draw attention to its falsehood. (Also, to be clear, I don't myself agree with this. I'm not an error theorist. I just think error theory has more going for it than most philosophers assume.)
>> it is practically never intended as a metaphysical statement about objects' "real" properties
The colour error theorist can agree that the statement is not intended to describe objective properties of objects. Similarly, when I say something like, "I was so embarrassed, I wished I was dead," I'm not intending to attribute to myself the desire for the cessation of the biological functions that sustain my life. Nevertheless, that seems to be what I'm saying. I'm using a falsehood to communicate something true: in this case, I'm using the falsehood as a form of hyperbole to emphasize that this was a particularly great degree of embarrassment.
@@KaneB That way lies the madness of (most) Analytical philosophy of language. It leads to claims of the type that if a person asks a co-worker: "Have you eaten?", this is "used" as an invitation to lunch, but what the question *really* means is whether the co-worker has ever, in their entire life, injested food. (That's a real example, regurgitated in a number of papers, around 20 years ago or so). And I see why those philosophers are trying to insist on this absurdity: they have an algorithm for composing something out of the literal dictionary definitions of the words in that sentence, according to the received rules of syntax, to calculate something they were taught *must* be the meaning of that sentence.
Now, that's an understanding of what meaning is that befits a lunatic asylum, because it follows from it that people very rarely ever mean what they say or even realise what the meaning of their utterances is (and, if you ever had a look at a conversation transcript, you'd realise "very rarely" is an overly charitable way of putting it). If you discard this bonkers approach to meaning, the whole debate around the error theorist's claims dissolves into triviality.
@@whycantiremainanonymous8091 First, that theory doesn't seem absurd to me. I'm not sure why it follows from this theory that people do not realize what the meaning of their utterances is, nor why it would be a problem if the theory did entail this. What does follow is that there is a distinction between the literal meaning of the sentence and what the sentence is intended to communicate, and that people very rarely intend to communicate only the literal meaning. But that seems... well, fine. I like it when philosophy is bonkers, but unfortunately I can't see what's bonkers about this.
Second, it strikes me as uncharitable to suppose that my error theorist is committed to this theory of meaning on the basis of what has been said so far. My error theorist appeals to the perfectly commonsensical idea of figures of speech. We can distinguish between:
(1) I was very embarrassed.
(2) I was so embarrassed, I wished I was dead.
The claim is that (2) is false, but the falsehood is used to communicate something true. To be sure, this is a claim that can reasonably be brought into question: there are controversial philosophical assumptions here (as, in my view, is the case for most everyday claims). But I don't see how this claim in itself commits us to a substantive theory of meaning of the sort you describe there. By analogy, it's plausible that when I say, "I have two hands", I am presupposing that perception is veridical; it's not plausible that I am presupposing that, say, perceptual experience consists of sense data and that reliabilist foundationalism is the correct account of how we acquire justified beliefs about the world.
There is no inconsistency in holding both (a) that often we use false statements to communicate truths and also (b) that meaning is thoroughly context-dependent, that there is no underlying "logical form" that is disguised by the surface grammar of sentences, that there is no strict distinction between literal and non-literal meaning, etc. That is, there is no inconsistency in holding (a), and rejecting the assumptions that underly much traditional analytic philosophy of language.
Intuitionism is dumb because results are often unexpected and surprising - counterintuitive.
I am an error theorist about god
Right, there are plenty of error theorists about religious discourse, and this probably doesn't strike most professional philosophers as counterintuitive. But this discourse played a significant role in ordinary speech and thought, at least until the last century or so.
Could you make a video about political philosophy 😁
I don't care so much about political philosophy, so I don't have any current plans for that. I do have some videos on it though.
Libertarianism:
ua-cam.com/video/0aLkSMm9Q0g/v-deo.html
ua-cam.com/video/6q5CEeMbRYk/v-deo.html
Hobbes's political philosophy:
ua-cam.com/video/Aoz-odqoi0s/v-deo.html
Hume's political philosophy:
ua-cam.com/video/2-_av0tw_4w/v-deo.html
Anarcho-primitivism:
ua-cam.com/video/Ex55jjSASHA/v-deo.html
Voting:
ua-cam.com/video/Pa4_qaYsIi4/v-deo.html
Responded!
to your response that is!
I think that colour statements are a little different. Colours and objective ethical propositions are both external objects? Or things? But cars are material so we have the intuition that they are red but we also have the intuition that they are subject to the rules of mathematics. There is a counter intuition that 1+1=2 and if you follow that intuition you find that redness in not an objective property that you can find in a car.
Ethical propositions are abstract objects and aren’t meant to be discoverable by science. The standard for if an ethical proposition is objective is if you can find someone blameworthy for breaking that ought. This is a very different intuition than torture is wrong, the intuition is that I can blame you for torturing someone and carry those implied consequences with it and be justified in doing so. The intuition that all repercussions are arbitrary and are equally justified and unjustified is incredibly unintuitive. And there’s no overriding intuition that we could be wrong like there is for material objects.
The moral error theorist is committed to the claim that all moral judgments are false. That's all. They need not claim that, for instance, "all repercussions are arbitrary and are equally justified and unjustified" -- indeed, I suspect that most moral error theorists would deny that, since most moral error theorists try to vindicate moral discourse as having pragmatic utility. (To be sure, there are some moral error theorists who are more radical, and who favour eliminating moral discourse entirely. But I never claimed that no moral error theories are counterintuitive.)
@@KaneB I guess it depends on how you define justified.
If you define justified as serving some practical utility then sure, you can be justified in driving to the grocers instead of taking the bus.
My intuition is that a justified repercussion means something different. If your child hits another child, you’re justified in taking their Xbox away. Which is not “justified” in the same sense as going to the grocery at all.
The difference in this type of justification it seems to me is tied up to autonomy, and the right to infringe on someone else’s autonomy. Which I feel like you can only do if you believe they did something truly wrong.
When we lock people in jail it’s because they in fact did something wrong, saying it’s because they obstructed the practical ends that we’re trying to work towards? That’s incredibly unsatisfying, and makes us seem like more the bad guys than the criminal. (Mere means issues)
Which just to link it back to intuitions. I don’t think that most people would accept that. That the people in jail or on death row haven’t truly done morally wrong things.
9:40 do you have someone captive in your basement?
well, the moral realists tried to warn you about us...
Hi Kane, trying to reach out via email to reschedule our meeting! I am not sure if my emails are getting to you. Please let me know!
Samee here!!
Sent a response.
@@MochiB4mbi I'm not sure who you are. To be honest, I have lost track of emails and scheduling over the last couple of weeks, partly due to an illness that keeps coming back. Sorry about that.
Response sent to the response!@@KaneB
@@KaneB Hello Kane I have similarly been trying to reach out via email, once you get better, it would be great to hear back from you.
If you genuinely have the intuition that "Torturing children is wrong", then you thereby DO have the intuition that "Torturing children is wrong is true" if the moral semantics of error theory is correct. Those two statements are just truth conditionally equivalent if we accept error theory (and the obviously true T-schema). You cannot just switch to a non-cognitivist semantics, as an error theorist, to explain away your intuition. If the intuition "Torturing children is wrong" just were equivalent to the intuition that "I disapprove of torturing children", then error theory would be false.
The error theorist claims that the judgment "torture is wrong" expresses a false belief. In itself, I don't see why this entails that the intuition that torturing is wrong expresses a false belief. Plausibly, there is a difference between judgements and intuitions. This is going to depend on what exactly our account of intuitions is.
"When we reflect on colour..."
Was that a joke, sir?
In my life I use the word intuition to mean a feeling something is some way, and I'm often wrong. When playing poker I might intuit the next card will be in my favour, but I have to rationally beat back that feeling. When crossing the road I have intuitions about how the cars are going to behave, and I'm sometimes wrong. Mostly my intuitions are my nonverbal thoughts that are predictions.
In moral philosophy intuitions seem to mean something like truth makers, as if a moral proposition refers to an intuition. But these propositions aren't about intuitions, they're about the world and so are the intuitions. It seems to be that intuitions track the truth about the world separate to our rationality. The closest concept I know of to this is conscience is the sense of God putting a moral compass in our head.
If this conscience view is the correct account of intuitions in moral philosophy, then error theory is trivially false. Error theory would simply be misunderstanding what moral philosophers mean by intuition: intuitions are by definition true or truth making.
When will you make a video about nationalism?
You promised😡
That's probably not going to happen.