Cheryl Misak on Ramsey’s pragmatism
Wittgenstein had argued (in Ramsey’s words) that a logical truth ‘excludes no possibility and so expresses no attitude of belief at all’. From here, Ramsey arrived at one of his most fruitful insights. Beliefs exclude possibilities, and that is how we can tell one belief from another. What it is to believe a proposition is, in large part, to behave in certain ways, and to take various possibilities as either alive or dead. It is of the essence of a belief that it has a causal impact on our actions, and we evaluate beliefs in terms of how well they work. In a paper written at the same time, ‘Truth and Probability’, he went on to argue that some habits are a better basis for action than others. Truth is linked to usefulness.
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Ramsey was interested in how we use something, not in pure metaphysics — he was interested in a ‘human logic’ that tells us how we should think. Such a logic ‘is not merely independent of but sometimes actually incompatible with formal logic’.
As Ramsey put it in a 1929 draft paper titled ‘Philosophy’, one method, ‘Ludwig’s’, is to:
construct a logic, and do all our philosophical analysis entirely unselfconsciously, thinking all the time of the facts and not about our thinking about them, deciding what we mean without any reference to the nature of meanings.
Ramsey’s method, in contrast, directed us to the human facts, not the facts somehow abstracted from our understanding of them. He admitted to having once been under the sway of Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy:
I used to worry myself about the nature of philosophy through excessive scholasticism. I could not see how we could understand a word and not be able to recognise whether a proposed definition of it was or was not correct. I did not realise the vagueness of the whole idea of understanding, the reference it involves to a multitude of performances any of which may fail and require to be restored.
He now thinks that we will often run into terms ‘we cannot define, but … can [only] explain the way in which they are used’. Ramsey thought that the ideal language Wittgenstein was trying to construct was mere scholasticism, ‘the essence of which is treating what is vague as if it were precise and trying to fit it into an exact logical category’.
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Ramsey’s approach, and his rebellion against Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, were starting to become fully formed. He summed it up perfectly in another note:
We cannot really picture the world as disconnected selves; the selves we know are in the world. What we can’t do we can’t do and it’s no good trying. Philosophy comes from not understanding the logic of our language; but the logic of our language is not what Wittgenstein thought. The pictures we make to ourselves are not pictures of facts.
Ramsey was the bridge between 20th-century pragmatism and analytic philosophy, and when he died, that route was obscured.
https://aeon.co/essays/what-is-truth-on-ramsey-wittgenstein-and-the-vienna-circle
David Pearce on natural conception
Critics of transhumanism decry the risks of reckless genetic experimentation: a brave new world of “designer babies”. Yet with the exception of child-free anti-natalists, we’re all implicated in the creation of suffering to gratify our craving to reproduce and pass on our genes. All children born today are untested genetic experiments—endogenous opioid addicts born with a lethal genetic disease (aging), and prone to a lifetime of physical and psychological distress.
https://sentience-research.org/the-imperative-to-abolish-suffering-an-interview-with-david-pearce/
When we read someone else thinks for us
When we read someone else thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. […] Accordingly in reading we are for the most part absolved of the work of thinking. […] It stems from this that whoever reads very much and almost the whole day, but in between recovers by thoughtless pastime, gradually loses the ability to think on his own — as someone who always rides forgets in the end how to walk. […] For constant reading immediately taken up again in every free moment is even more mentally paralysing than constant manual labour, since in the latter we can still muse about our own thoughts. But just as a coiled spring finally loses its elasticity through the sustained pressure of a foreign body, so too the mind through the constant force of other people’s thoughts.
Schopenhauer, A. (1851). On reading and books.
The atrocious fact of wild animal suffering
Most wild animals die of starvation, disease and predation.
The suffering involved in these deaths is often extreme and long-lasting.
There are a lot of wild animals.
This atrocious fact is important and underrated 1.
writing moral philosophy animals religion crucial considerations
Blogging every day is hard
After a month of “blog every day no matter what” I can say: this is hard.
But, I have enjoyed this commitment, so I’m going to do another month.
Since I’ve allowed myself to post quotations, I’ve felt a pull to do a lot of these, since they are much easier than original writing 1.
For one thing, I find it easier to “see” where the bar is for posting a quote, than for posting original writing.
With quotes: if a passage makes me sit up straight, and I want to return it several times in the future—it’s a contender. The intended audience is clear: future me! The purpose: bring these pearls back to my attention.
With writing: my purpose is much less clear. The word “blog” is a misnomer: this is largely a study journal, made semi-public in the spirit of “garage door up” (or maybe: “see inside the sausage factory”). For the most part, “future me” is the only person who should read these posts, and even he probably shouldn’t read many of them.
If and when I write things I actually want more than 3 people to read, I will post them elsewhere. I will make this clearer on the blog header, somehow. Ceveat lector.
I also face the issue that I’m trying to write about things I’m learning about, and quite often, 1-2 hours is not enough to go from a topic I don’t understand to a post on the topic that I’m reasonably confident isn’t badly confused.
For example: today I drafted a post on the dipositional account of belief, which Cheryl Misak finds at the heart of pragmatism. Doing so raised questions that showed I didn’t understand it to my satisfaction. That realisation, plus the publication deadline, was mildly stressful. What to do? Flag the uncertainties and publish anyway? Or publish later, but then… what do I publish today?
In setting up this experiment, I made what is probably a rookie error: I planned to go from “blank page” to “published” in a single 1-2 hour work session, or at least within the space of a day. I can do this, but my drafts get way better if I have a chance to “return fresh” and do a good round of editing. I also like crafting prose, but I rarely make the time to do it—I’d like to have more of that in my days.
So, starting today, I’m going to switch to a “draft today, edit and post tomorrow” pattern.
I will also aim to build up a backlog of drafts, so that on days where I show up to morning writing, but am unusually slow, I do not end up immediately in trouble. The daily commitment to “show up” will be hard and consistent, the outputs will vary a bunch.
I will also experiment with posting different kinds of original writing, in different formats, and different lengths. Book reviews, interview summaries, posts-that-could-be-tweets. This could get pretty messy. But whatever. People shouldn’t be reading this anyway.
In the back of my mind: what level of urgency is desirable? I think stress and challenge and stretch is valuable. Training should not be a walk in the park. But I worry about the thought-narrowing effects of urgency and stress. And… I want this to be a commitment I love (although presumably it’s fine to hate it sometimes, and in those moments, the thing to do is show up anyway).
Structuring commitments are powerful. But pitching them “just right” is a delicate matter. I am in the very early days of this. This second month is about experimentation and refinement.
C. Thi Nguyen on clarity
Think about bounded rationality: we’re limited beings, we can’t think about everything. We need to know when to cut off our investigation. We need to manage our efforts. The empirical literature suggests we use a heuristic: if things feel clear, we’re done.
My suspicion is that if we’re using that heuristic, we should expect malicious actors to try to exploit it. To present us with things where that feeling of clarity has been amped up. My worry is that the feeling of clarity can come apart from actual understanding and outside actors can game it.
We should watch out for “cognitive yumminess”. Whenever I read something on Twitter I’m like… wait wait wait. Is this actually right, or does it just feel good to believe this?
Our sense of clarity, and its absence, plays a key role in our cognitive self-regulation. A sense of confusion is a signal that we need to think more. But when things feel clear to us, we are satisfied. A sense of clarity is a signal that we have, for the moment, thought enough.
This shows why, say, manipulative interests might be particularly interested in aping clarity. If the sense of clarity is a thought-terminator, then successful imitations of clarity will be quite powerful. If somebody else can stimulate our sense of clarity, then they can gain control of a particular cognitive blind spot. They can hide their machinations behind a veil of apparent clarity.