aleph_0

One she hated: The Fountainhead

Let's just chalk it up to weakness of will. It would have taken some effort, he knows it would have been worth the effort, but he ultimately just didn't do it even though he thinks he should have or that it would have been better for him if he had done it.

That's a well-considered analysis. While I think about it, though, it leaves me still unclear about some kernel of the issue: suppose the person really wants to and can make more, and the costs of doing so are not too high, but out of weakness of will he chooses not to. But he's still making tons of money and able to live very happily. Has he done something wrong? If he had made the extra money, would he have done something good but not morally dictated by his nature in the way that it is dictated by his nature that it is moral for him to eat life-sustaining food?

Also, some background: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/supererogation/

I've always been of the opinion that there is no such thing as a non-moral norm. The very concept just doesn't make sense to me: That you should be able to say, rationally, that "You ought to do x, and yet if you do x I cannot morally praise you; and if you don't do x, I cannot morally blame you," seems entirely wrong to me. But most philosophers take it for granted that norms of rationality are non-moral: You ought to do them, but only in the sense that it will make you a better rational agent which is a desirable thing. You cannot be morally blamed for being irrational. I suspect Objectivists, especially given this example, will side with me that this is just false--and I think this is supported by the details of Objectivist ethics. Rationality is a tool for man's survival and happiness, and so norms of rationality are norms about the only method of achieving happiness, which is a man's ethical end. I can't think of other norms which I would expect the average philosopher to regard as non-moral. Perhaps norms about feeling pleasure, like "You ought to go to the movies if it makes you laugh," or something, since philosophers are probably going to view pleasure as itself non-moral. But every one of them seems to have an essentially ethical character, and this intuition always seems justified by my analysis of ethics. But rather than proceeding by hearing some example, having an intuition about what is right, and then engaging in analysis, is there a more methodical, principled way of arguing that there are no non-moral norms?

Are there morally good acts that are not morally obligatory? In Objectivism, this concept would have to have special formulation, since at most one can say that a person has moral obligations to him and obligations to others are derivative from that. Still, we can abstract about any particular person, and ask if there is any context in which there is some action which it is not necessary for him to do in order to be moral, but which would be praiseworthy all the same. Since morality in Objectivism is grounded in self-flourishing, the question might be equivalent to asking: Is there a line between living and flourishing, such that when you are within the range of flourishing, there are acts which increase your degree of flourishing? If there is such a line, then it seems like once you are flourishing, it is not morally incumbent upon you (as a moral obligation to yourself, in a sense) to flourish still more since the morality only demands that you flourish, and not necessarily reach some specific degree of flourishing.

I am arguing against unificationism and providing an alternate account which, to my knowledge, is not present in the literature.

Odden: I am not trying to formalize all of explanation. Just a theory of scientific explanation. Do you have some argument against the possibility of the project (more than just reasserting "you must define 'explanation' first") or some argument against the specific account I have given here? Because I find the basic idea perfectly adequate. Phibetakappa: I use variables/constants to economize, like in math. I'd find my ultimate formalization given in the first post exponentially more convoluted if I could not help myself to them. If you dislike the prose, you need not read on, but it is standard in a formal account of explanation--and I think necessary for economy, clarity, and pares down obfuscation. If you're able to write the exact same proposal it in simpler, clearer, shorter prose, through not only the presentation but also responses to objections, I invite you and I will revise. (Certainly one might pick a single sentence and write it in more natural English, compromising a little space and gaining a little more intuitive grasp--but then, when relating these theoretical entities to others, you're going to find your grammar structures massive and complex, far beyond what is necessary if you just symbolized it mathematically.) Yes, explanation is different from an alibi--and from justification, context of discovery, argument to convince, etc. I believe the article I linked at the beginning makes clear the kind of explanation (scientific explanation) that is under discussion. [edit: Everything but the last sentence added in this edit--didn't see the posts that were above the one above this until after I had posted.]

As an additional note, I think it may have cause some confusion for anyone who did not understand the details of the proposal I gave in the beginning that I said "I believe this does not allow one to always explain pi_i and ~pi_i." This is actually a virtue of an explanatory account, not a vice, since you probably shouldn't have the very same explanation explain both why something is the case and why it is not the case. This was a problem that haunted Statistical Relevance models. If a person recovered from strep throat quickly and was given penicillin, they would cite the statistics as an explanation--all fine and good. But if a person did not recover from strep quickly and was given penicillin, or if the person recovered quickly and was not given penicillin, the SR model still pointed to the exact same statistics to claim explanation. This looks bad. We should properly say that we don't have an explanation, unless and until we dig deeper into our collection of facts.

I'm not interested in the concept of explanation as a whole--I believe this is an umbrella term which encompasses very different notions of explanation (the mathematical and linguistic are two examples), and which are unified only by sharing some roughly similar features, so nothing deep will come of understanding explanation as a whole first, and perhaps it is even impossible to define it without first defining the parts which constitute it. So I'm not going down that road. This is not relevant to Objectivism more than it is relevant to any other philosophy, but it is relevant to philosophy, which Objectivism is one of many. So I should think that making explicit and clear, concepts to which Objectivism appeals, would be a worthwhile task. On a related note, it is because I take deductivism in explanation to be too Platonic or cognitive, while pragmatism too skeptical, that I think there is need for a theory of explanation which bridges theory and use: a theme in Objectivism. Ultimately, however, what I'm trying to accomplish is a theory of explanation. And while metaphysics is a science, it is not a philosophy OF science (which might more properly be termed the philosophy of scientific practice, which is not metaphysics). I argue that metaphysics is a science only in the same sense that settling scientific methodology is a science. It may not be empirical--yes, I know, here I part company with Objectivism--but it pursues understanding of reality at the higher order by dictating what goes on at the first-order when we go into the field and do research. Now that the ground-clearing is done, let us settle the question. What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for an explanation e to explain a phenomenon p?

To explain being basically to confer understanding, if we assume a good enough sense of what that means, I think we can proceed to scientific explanation.

Here is some background: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Scientific Explanation. My theory of scientific explanation is that a phenomenon pi is explained completely by explanation e if and only if e identifies all and only the independent variables upon which pi depends. pi is minimally explained by e if e identifies at least one independent variable upon which pi depends and no independent variables upon which pi does not depend. A phenomenon pi is explained better by e than e' if both minimally explain pi and the set of independent variables identified by e' is a proper subset of those identified by e. The 'only if' direction is tricky. I want to do two things, though. 1) Give a more rigorous account with this as intuitive motivation. 2) Avoid some of the pitfalls to which the Statistical Relevance models fell. To that end, let X = {x_1, ..., x_n}, and A = {a_1, ..., a_n} a subset of B = {b_r} for all real numbers r. Let A be sets of constants which each member of X might take as values, Pi = {pi_r} for all real r, pi_i be in B, and B a set of (approximately) true propositions. Let p be your probability function, and p_a(pi_i) = p(pi_i | a_1 & ... a_n) = p(pi_i | A). Let A[a_j/b_j] be the result of substituting the element a_j in A with b_j. Then e minimally explains pi_i iff e = <X, A, B, p>, and there is some a_j =/= b_j in B such that p(pi_i | A[a_j/b_j]) < p_a(pi_i). Hm. Thoughts? I believe this does not allow one to always explain pi_i and ~pi_i.

I dated a journalist and she was the smartest girl I ever dated. But she was radio, so that's a little different. Anyway, it's the BBC. The UK still generally hasn't found out about libertarianism, let alone Rand. They might as well be Swaziland. What a useless island.

No time to read it all, but if you get this before passing out notes, it's spelled 'MenCken'. The start of it sounds clear-headed, though.

A very good movie, French animation. The images are fascinating from beginning to end, and it is a story of a woman who grows up during the Iranian Revolution, and her attempt to stay free and maintain integrity in the face of the imposing religious regime that takes power.

Did anyone else notice that he bemoaned the lack of choices in one breath, and in the next bemoaned the fact that he didn't have the choice to get a phone that doesn't do too much?

This is a common critique of capitalism. I suspect less that he doesn't want to have so many choices, and more that he wants to do the choosing in some particular sphere of control. In any case, this just demonstrates that people in a modern age need better, more relevant basic education.

So we see a bunch of things in dynamic relations and that imposes into our consciousness the concept of a causal relation between them?

You observe the ball move through space and as it does, you observe the glass breaking. That doesn't mean, necessarily, that the ball broke the glass. You could have an object that is able to permeate glass and flow through it, or the impression of glass could be an illusion, etc., and the coincidence of the impression of glass breaking while the ball passes through the glass doesn't actually cause the breaking. Now you can then investigate the ball before or after the event to find out whether it's able to permeate solid objects, you could touch the glass to see if it's an illusion, and this will all add increasing evidence to the conclusion that the ball broke the glass. But in your observation, there is only ball and glass--no third thing, the "cause", that pokes up out of the two. So if you had two competing claims--say, all ravens are black, and all ravens are between two and three lbs.--and you had one observations for the first but one million for the second, you wouldn't be more certain of the latter? Suppose you have two hypotheses, A and A', where A & A' is a contradiction so they are mutually exclusive. Yet we don't have any evidence for either. But we know that A entails B and A' entails B'. B & B' is not a contradiction, but B confirms only A and B' confirms only A'. If you observed just one instance of B but one million instances of B', ceteris parabus, you wouldn't be more inclined to believe A'? Perhaps if you were ever to be able to produce perfect evidence for a hypothesis about the cause, but that hypothesis will always require some amount of evidence which might, at some point in the future, fail to obtain--meaning you'd have to scrap the causal law. How about by looking at all black ravens? So when researchers just collect data without yet attempting to make causal hypotheses, they are not doing science? Or when they analyze their data to find patterns (like noting the peculiar fact that, of every raven they observed, it was black--though still invoking no notion of a cause) they are not doing science? I'd disagree, but then, this might just be a semantic difference.

You'll probably be best prepared for the LSAT and law school by majoring in philosophy. I haven't found bias too crippling in my studies.

So if I claim that the path of light is bent by gravity, it is not confirming evidence to observe an instance of the path of a light wave being bent by gravity? I have to establish some causal relationship between the two? Or if I claim that all of the apples in the basket are red, it is not confirming evidence to produce evidence of seven of them being red and there are eight apples in the basket? Would it not be confirming evidence to demonstrate that eight of the eight apples are red? I would somehow have to give a causal explanation as well? Also, the correlation of non-black things being non-ravens is also entailed by the hypothesis. There was nothing in the hypothesis that expressed a causal relationship, as far as I can tell. You might think that causality explains the correlation between ravens and being black, but it is not necessary for confirmation. The claim was just that the set of all ravens is a subset of the set of black things. Now whether modus tollens works might not be at issue. Forgetting the formalism and any correlation to natural English language that you might have with a material conditional, if it is claimed that all P are Q, can it be that some non-Q is P? I take it that it's important to note that causation cannot be sensed, since what we are talking about is what evidence can count toward confirming a hypothesis. So if you have evidence for a causal relationship, and this causal relationship bears on the likelihood of a hypothesis, then that evidence confirms the hypothesis. So to be precise, the causal relationship does not confirm, but rather it implies (or necessitates, or makes likely), and the evidence confirms--but a causal relationship isn't need for confirmation. For instance, the relationship of confirmation might involve non-causal statistical laws. [Edit: Made the last paragraph readable.]

I think there's a general equivocation on the use of the term "confirm", which I should make precise. To confirm a hypothesis, in the sciences, does not mean to prove conclusively but merely to lend evidence to. So the observation that the planets obey Newton's laws of gravity confirms but does not prove his hypothesis that all celestial bodies obey them.

Fair enough, you're a Hemplean bullet-biter. I might be too. But I'm not sure I understand what you mean when you say a cause confirms a hypothesis. Usually we take it that observations confirm or disconfirm and you can never observe a cause. You can observe evidence that supports the claim that A caused B, but you can never observe the cause itself. For instance, I may claim that the ball broke the glass, and cite as evidence that the observation that as the ball passed through the glass, it broke. But there all I have is the observation of the event: the ball passing through the glass, and it breaking. I don't observe the causal relationship between the two.

Here's a paradox presented by Carl Hemple, pretty famous, wondering what everyone thinks: Take the scientific hypothesis that all ravens are black. We intuitively take the existence of a black raven to confirm this sentence, the existence of a red raven disconfirms, and that all other evidence is irrelevant (so for instance, it should be irrelevant that there is a non-black non-raven like a yellow pen, or that there is a black non-raven like a black dog). However, any sentence of the form "All P are Q" is logically equivalent to the sentence "All non-Q are non-P." I.e. these two sentences should be true in exactly the same situations. For instance, the first one is true if you check every P and see that it's a Q. Likewise, if you check every P and see that it's Q, and then find something which is not Q, then it can't be P (i.e. it turns out that all non-Q are non-P). If it were P, then you'd have an instance of a P which is non-Q, which is impossible in light of the already verified fact that all P are Q. Also, the first sentence is false when there is some P which is non-Q. The second sentence is false when some non-Q is P, but this is exactly the same situation as described in the previous sentence. So in some sense, these two sentences should express the same proposition, just with different words. They share the same "truth-conditions" (which is just a fancy way of saying they are true and false in the same situations, as I described above). Yet if the existence of a P which is Q confirms the hypothesis that all P are Q, then by the same rule, the existence of a non-Q which is non-P should confirm the second hypothesis. Yet the two hypotheses are logically equivalent! To use our example, the existence of a non-black non-raven would confirm the hypothesis that all ravens are black. Thus the existence of a yellow pen would confirm the hypothesis. Ach! I'm all verklempt! Talk amongst yourselves. I gave you a topic. [Edit: for further completeness on describing the logical relation. I note here that I know I have only shown the entailment in one direction, for anybody sufficiently sophisticated. I leave it as a homework exercise to demonstrate the contrapositive.]

Well, formal logic doesn't deal with truth but with truth-preservation through deductions. So there is a use for it when you are concerned with truth. For example, it is at least useful for understanding how arguments in mathematics go, when they say "Here is a proof that ___ if and only if ____..." or "Here is a proof that if something is ___ then it is ___..." I've found that I am better equipped than most other students in my undergraduate math classes because I've had this formal logic training, and I am better at LSAT logic games. The material conditional might not be the English "if", but it is something. It's just a set theoretic relation of inclusion, for truth of propositions.