Brutal reality?

[Recently posted to my Google+ collection Language, Logic, Life.]

Dan Kaufman recently got a bit of flak (even from his wife apparently) for his energetic critique of the new – or continuing – 'cult of the self'.

"... [T]he old Cult of the Self [the reference here is to the 1970s and '80s and such movements as Werner Erhard's 'est' program] actually may have been slightly less loathsome than its newer, smarmier versions, insofar as it was at least honest, albeit in a brutal, tone-deaf sort of way."

He is saying that the older movements did not really disguise their egoistic nature whereas more recent iterations – while still basically egoistic – present themselves as being driven by humane motives.

"... [T]oday’s Cult of the Self represents itself as being socially oriented, and with social media having trained us to accept the thinnest, most indirect, heavily mediated interactions as constituting real relationships, it’s easy to convince ourselves that seeing others entirely through the lens of our own well-being and virtue constitutes genuine connection and concern, rather than self-absorption masquerading as such.  Gone is the idea that our deepest relationships with and obligations to others are properly self-effacing, and in its place is the notion that the main thing to think about, with respect to other people and what they deserve, is how the way I treat them reflects upon me."

....

I commented (in part) as follows:

"My default position is that something like that "brutal" position is probably 'true' in the sense that it correlates well with reality. But this could be seen as a dangerous idea. It seems to me there is a key divide here on how people see the world (and themselves). I don't know, however, that I would want to push this idea too much: social consequences may not be good. There is no reason to think that just because something is true, it is something one should talk about. I've never liked the 'noble lie' idea, but reticence is slightly different from this. Reticence – like lying, actually – is ... something I am not particularly good at, however."

I also suggested in the comment that Max Stirner's radical egoism – which Leszek Kolakowski saw as prefiguring fascism – was an important precursor to the movements Dan Kaufman was attacking.

In due course I will try to expand on these somewhat cryptic remarks. It could form the basis for a new Electric Agora article (or articles). But let me here and now try to put the core idea more directly.

I am suggesting that the standard way of seeing things involves a lot of self-deception and (to use a loaded term which may or may not be appropriate here) hypocrisy.

Fundamentally the social world works just like the natural world described by biologists. Evolutionary processes are not pretty. Having language and culture adds complexity and richness and gives us freedoms and possibilities which other animals do not have. But it does not allow us to escape this world of deception, manipulation and struggle. A basic kind of ethics and very basic notions of rights and responsibilities make sense: as individuals we survive longer and prosper when we cooperate. But a Christian or socialist-style ethic – based on a kind of generalized altruism (or generosity) mixed with self-denial and deemed to be in some sense obligatory – is problematic, both in terms of its consequences for those individuals (very few, it must be said) who sincerely and seriously try to implement such an ethic in their lives, and in terms of rational motivation.

Still a bit cryptic perhaps. But it is an attempt at least to clarify (in my own mind as well as in a more public sense) the supposedly "dangerous" idea I was talking about not talking about!

The trivial isn't necessarily trivial

[Recently posted to my Google+ collection, Language, Logic, Life.]  At one point in John le Carré's early classic, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Alec Leamas, a British secret service agent, is staying on the Dutch coast, waiting for an important and fateful meeting. His thoughts turn to a woman who had looked after him when he had became ill in a rented room in London. Liz had been a member of the Communist Party in Britain and so technically opposed to Leamas's cause.

"... At about eleven o'clock the next morning [Leamas] decided to go out for a walk along the front, bought some cigarettes and stared dully at the sea.

"There was a girl standing on the beach throwing bread to the seagulls. Her back was turned to him. The sea wind played with her long black hair and pulled at her coat, making an arc of her body, like a bow strung towards the sea. He knew then what it was that Liz had given him; the thing that he would have to go back and find if ever he got home to England: it was the caring about little things – the faith in ordinary life; the simplicity that made you break up a bit of bread into a paper bag, walk down to the beach and throw it to the gulls. It was this respect for triviality which he had never been allowed to possess; whether it was bread for the seagulls or love, whatever it was he would go back and find it ..."

Le Carré seems to be suggesting that the real meaning of life is not to be found in causes and grand designs but in the mundane, apparently pointless details of ordinary life. It is very tempting to go along with this line of thinking.

On reasonableness

Most people don't like being told what they should do or how they should think. Moralizing, in particular, gets under people's skin.

In a recent piece at The Electric Agora, Daniel Kaufman makes the very plausible point that overuse of terms like 'should', far from encouraging people to act in a certain way, often only encourages them to 'hunker down' or become defiant.

But his claim about people losing respect for "reasonableness itself" is not so plausible, I think.

He wrote:

"Just as stupid, petty, and unenforceable laws cause the public to lose respect for law generally, and just as – I think – the wild overuse of ‘moral’ and ‘immoral’ and their cognates has eroded respect for morality, the proliferation of weak, groundless, often self-serving “shoulds,” whether of the moral variety or otherwise, may cause people to lose respect for reasonableness itself.”

Would it not rather be the case that respect would be lost for the person – and by extension the category of person – doing the ‘shoulding’?

I don’t think reasonableness is at risk at all. Reasonableness is and will remain widely respected. It has power and force and always will.

You could say, I suppose, that it is not reasonableness but the appearance of reasonableness that counts. Calm and cool wins arguments. Even Donald Trump strives to appear reasonable at times.

But the thing is, it’s hard to separate reasonableness from the appearance of reasonableness, because reasonableness is not just about reason but also about manners and behaviour.

And if you are giving a good enough impression of reasonableness then you are – for all intents and purposes – being reasonable.

Language and thought

Some people believe that all thoughts and concepts are language-based; others see language as playing a less crucial (or central or primary) role. This issue came up during a discussion of my recent essay at The Electric Agora on Wittgenstein's (mainly non-verbal) antics, though the essay itself was not concerned with this particular question. There are a lot of potential confusions here, a few of which I will try to disentangle as I put my point of view.

How one answers this question depends on how one frames it and what exactly one means by 'thoughts' and 'concepts' (specifically, how broadly or narrowly one defines them). But it also depends on what we mean by language. Are we talking about natural language, that is, human languages as they are in all their complexity? Or are we talking about language in a looser, more general sense?

Wittgenstein, for example, talked about an imagined primitive language that a tribe of builders might use. Clearly he is not concerned directly with actual human languages here (i.e. natural language, as the term is usually understood) but rather with the basis of the meaningfulness of language in general, of any possible language. Whatever he talking about, it is certainly not the complex thing (or set of systems or suite of behaviours) which is normally called natural language and which our brains are specifically primed to acquire. Or, if he is talking about it, it is in very oblique terms: telling a story about an imagined simplified language to demonstrate something about how these actual complex languages came to – or can – have semantic content.

If you wanted to understand how language gets meaning surely you would want to look closely at how children acquire language. Speculations about how language itself developed are something else again. But whatever Wittgenstein is doing, he is not doing science and he is not suggesting an hypothesis about anything.

His general point seems to be that language is a social thing and that meaning arises through social interaction. But who is disputing this? (The main target of Wittgenstein's criticism seems to be certain philosophical ways of thinking, and to some extent his earlier self.)

He is not using the term 'language' in its usual sense to refer to natural language (i.e. to existing human languages). But if – unlike Wittgenstein – you are using the word 'language' in this way, then the idea that all thought and concepts are language-based is very implausible.

As I wrote in a comment...

"The brain’s language modules (contentious term but I am just using it to mean “brain systems involved directly in linguistic processing”) interact with other modules, and constitute only a part of the total cerebral activity which is associated with conscious experience. It seems a bit forced to characterize the multiple and various conscious experiences not associated with linguistic processing as ‘not-thought’.

"[One commenter] talks about “thoughts of a significant kind” [as being language-based]. This needs further unpacking, but at least the qualification is there."

Having language makes us special, that's for sure.

My comment continued:

"... [T]he capacity for complex language changes the nature of ‘thinking’ in radical ways. This relates to the capacity for abstraction. I see a link between natural language and artificial languages (like mathematics). Certain non-linguistic animals can count and maybe subtract in an intuitive kind of way, and may enact certain processes which could be represented in terms of formal logic. But building and using explicit abstract systems can only be done by humans, and I think these formal systems are modelled to a large extent on natural language. Even ordinary natural language involves a high degree of abstraction. It is a big deal and a game-changer.

"I think some philosophers have erred, however, in pushing what I see as an extreme line on the question of language and thought. I am thinking in particular of the views of a couple of my teachers. As an eighteen-year-old undergraduate I was given what I now believe was a false perspective on language and thought in philosophy lectures and tutorials. It took me years to work my way out of it.

"I don’t think I entirely agree with Brendan Larvor’s criticisms of philosophical practice. [Larvor is an academic philosopher working in the U.K. who was cited in my essay and who finds fault with the argumentive practices of philosophers, seeing them as designed primarily to silence opposing voices.] I was not so much bullied as persuaded. But there was a definite sense of cultishness; an unspoken understanding that “We have this special [curiously ineffable] insight which is denied to others.”"

And you'd have to say, I think, that much of this cultishness drew – and continues to draw – on Wittgenstein's later work, including his discussion of imaginary 'languages' and use of the (arguably ill-defined) concepts 'language games' and 'forms of life'.

Philosophical performance

Whether we like it or not – and whether we like to admit it or not – we all too often find ourselves on a communicational battlefield where the performance of bewilderment, contempt and nausea combine with other forms of shaming and ostracism to play a major role in determining who prevails.

My latest piece at The Electric Agora, Wittgenstein's Antics, is about some of the non-verbal methods which people use to promote themselves and their ideas and get their way. The focus is on philosophical head-clutching and similar antics which not just Ludwig Wittgenstein but many other philosophers have been prone to. [That's Karl Popper in the photograph.] The topic is amusing, sure, but serious questions can be asked about the causes, the functions and the consequences of these general patterns of behaviour.

And, by the way, an interesting discussion developed in the latter part of the comment thread on the extent to which thought is necessarily language-based.

Feel free to breathe

[Latest post in my Google+ Collection, Language, Logic, Life.]



Feel free to walk, however, and breathe. (No wonder the sign attracts graffiti.)

Also, the word 'refrain' has a slightly quaint or archaic air. I heard it – usually accompanied by 'please', as here, or by a sarcastic 'kindly' – a lot in my childhood. Even then it sounded a bit old-fashioned.

Beauty, beauty, everywhere...

[My latest piece in the Google+ Collection, Language, Logic, Life.]

"We believe everyone is beautiful." [Beauty salon sign]... Beauty in everyone, maybe, but everyone beautiful?

I could go on about this. If sincere it would suggest a grievous lack of professional judgment; if insincere, an attempt at cynical manipulation. A charitable reading might be that it is an assurance that the customer will be treated with respect no matter how unbeautiful she is.

But the main problem is clearly that such an attitude (or pretended attitude) drains the word of meaning. Not only do good-looking people need ordinary-looking and indeed ugly people around to set off their beauty, they need such people to exist in order for their beauty to have significance or value; or indeed for the word 'beautiful' to have any meaning at all.

Cats and dogs and binary thinking

[This is a slightly modified extract from an essay of mine on attitudes to cats and dogs and binary thinking which appeared last month at The Electric Agora.]

There are cat lovers and there are dog lovers, and there is a widespread assumption that behind this distinction lies something that goes beyond arbitrary preferences and reflects our deeper natures. A temptation to amateur psychologizing kicks in here which I am going to resist. But clearly dogs and cats themselves inhabit quite separate moral universes.

Earlier this year, in a piece in the Washington Post, Gene Weingarten touched on a crucial difference between cats and dogs from a social-interaction-with-humans (i.e. from a psychological or if you like ‘moral’) point of view. He is talking about a stray kitten he adopted:

"I haven’t yet learned how to discipline him effectively, because unlike dogs, who accept punishment with appropriate shame and learn from their errors, cats do not seem to grasp the concept of personal responsibility or atonement. Barnaby does not regard getting yelled at, or being put on timeout, as an occasion for attitudinal adjustment. If anything, he regards it as an opportunity for reprisal."

Weingarten is highlighting here a fundamental difference between cats and dogs in terms of their behaviour. Dogs are eager to please their human overlords. Cats please themselves.

Recognizing this, it’s not implausible to think that our preferring one to the other might say something important about us. A good many people (myself included) are tempted to play this game and to see themselves as tending to the feline or alternatively to the canine end of an imagined feline/canine axis.*

Of course, this is just one example of the binary thinking upon which so much human thinking and behaviour is based. The same type of thinking also lies behind all those “there are two kinds of people” sayings, some of which can be quite witty and apparently insightful. (For example, the interestingly self-referential proposition that there are two kinds of people, those who divide people into two categories and those who don’t.)

But, of course, this kind of thinking (based on unconscious, ‘quick and dirty’ brain functions, rather than on conscious reflection) is notoriously crude and inadequate to represent the real nuances and complexities of the social world. In the end, it probably tells us more about how our brains are designed, generically speaking, than about the world in general.

Many philosophers and psychologists have written about binary thinking. Even linguists. In fact it may be that all thinking is binary at some fundamental level. But binary thinking at the level of human judgments is problematic to say the least.

Some of us have this affliction worse than others. I am a pretty bad case, always wanting instinctively to take sides – on anything it is possible to take sides on. For me, all this drawing of lines is about orientation, a kind of mapping of logical space: me, not me; and, beyond that, good and bad forever, ad infinitum. Of course, my critical sense kicks in too – some if not all of the time.


* For what it's worth, I started out as a dog person but drifted catwards over time.

Slowly reorganizing

A new piece of mine on our attitudes to cats and dogs has just appeared at The Electric Agora.

I am slowly reorganizing my internet activity. No drastic changes. This site will continue as usual as will Conservative Tendency, but I have recently set up three Google+ Collections to which I will gradually be posting old (often revised) material from here and elsewhere as well as new material. (The intention is to cross-post most of this material – the new material at any rate – to one or other of my blogs.)

The three Collections are: Social and Political Reflections; Jewish Identity; and – just opened – Language, Logic, Life (https://plus.google.com/collection/A3z7ZB).

Language and manners

Rules and conventions relating to language and to broader aspects of social life sometimes seem arbitrary and trivial. They may be fairly arbitrary but they are not trivial. In my latest piece at The Electric Agora, Linguistic Prescriptivism and Manners, I look at the difference – and continuities – between descriptive and prescriptive approaches to language and manners generally.

In the latter part of the essay I look specifically at dining customs (including some provocative 'rules of eating' suggested by AA Gill). A commenter made the point that – in contrast to non-human social species – fairly strict eating rules have always been a feature of properly-functioning human communities. We know, for example, that hunter-gatherer societies have been characterized by complex food and eating rules involving order and restraint. Unfortunately rules and restraints related to eating are now in disarray in most Western countries. This matters.

Facts and values: a manifesto of sorts

I have previously linked to this piece which was published recently at The Electric Agora, but I think it is worth reposting here in full because it addresses in an accessible way some of the central principles which lie behind a naturalistic and scientifically-grounded view of the world.

My goal is to set out, as concisely and dispassionately as possible, the implications of a particular (and I think perspicuous) view of logic, language and human knowledge. The focus is on a distinction, implicit in ordinary language use, between value-based and other types of claims. There's nothing particularly unusual or original in what I am saying. It's the sort of thing that most non-religious, empirically-minded people would probably just take for granted.

For reasons which I don't fully understand, however, a cohort of later 20th-century and early 21st-century secular (or ostensibly secular) thinkers and polemicists have energetically sought to undermine this important distinction. On the one hand there is a tendency to talk down the objectivity of scientific and factual knowledge; on the other to affirm the objectivity (or something like it) of value claims.

Religious positions I understand and (to an extent) respect. What bothers me is obfuscation and equivocation in matters of belief. All too often (as I see it) some kind of quasi- or crypto-religiosity is brought into play when people start talking about human values. This sort of thing occurs in both academic and other contexts, and I have discussed it to some extent in the past on this site.

Not being sure of one's position is fine; but not being open about or not being interested in exploring or clarifying one's underlying commitments puts an end – as I see it – to serious thought and discussion.

Though we all obviously share a physical environment – a bluish, dirty-watery, middling sort of planet orbiting a medium-sized, middle-aged star – we live in very different worlds in terms of culture and so in terms of group-based and individual values. But what exactly does the existence of these multiple, and often conflicting, perspectives and value systems entail for our general view of the world?

Are there parallel realities here, one related to the physical world and amenable to scientific inquiry, others not? Is there, as it were, a realm of facts and a separate realm (or realms) of human perspectives and values?

You could see things this way, I suppose, but such a view is notoriously difficult to flesh out in a convincing way. My aim here is more modest, and is certainly not to defend a theoretically-based, clear-cut fact/value distinction or dichotomy. Rather I will sketch out a looser, more commonsense and ordinary language-based distinction about different kinds of claims: on the one hand, factual or scientific claims; on the other, value-based claims. Such a loose but significant distinction is implicit, I believe, in normal language use and central to a modern (and non-dogmatic) scientifically-oriented view of the world.

A key element of the distinction I want to make is that on basic value-related questions one can’t really claim to be ‘right’ in an objective sense – as one can about pragmatic, factual or scientific matters.

Sure, natural law theorists or those with Kantian or religious views about morality or Platonistic views about aesthetics will be unlikely to agree; I concede that I am making certain non-religious and anti-Platonistic assumptions. I am also making certain assumptions about science, notably about the lack of any clear-cut distinction between general factual and more specifically scientific claims.

My contention is that (unlike value claims) both ordinary factual and scientific claims can at least potentially be assessed and determined to be provisionally correct or incorrect (or somewhere in between, say partially true or correct, or true in certain circumstances) according to objective criteria involving some kind of observation (empirical evidence) and/or mathematical or logical reasoning. Mathematical claims or purely logical claims can be settled entirely by reference to those disciplines. Most other claims depend largely on a mixture of empirical observation and reasoning.

Many ordinary, non-scientific claims involve what linguists call deixis, that is they involve words or phrases the meaning of which is dependent on contextual information, e.g. personal pronouns like ‘I’ or ‘you’, adverbs of time like ‘now’ or ‘soon’, adverbs of place like ‘here’ or ‘there’ or demonstratives like ‘this’ or ‘that’. But even statements without explicit deictic terms are often hopelessly vague and indeterminate if they are taken out of a specific context or looked at in a non-contextual way.

Take the statement, “The sky is blue.” It could be used in a specific context to mean, “The sky (at the moment) is clear,” i.e. some bad weather or smoke haze or the like has passed or has not yet appeared. But as a general statement of fact it does seem slightly odd, and requires many qualifications.

Certainly the sky does appear to be various shades of what English-speakers call ‘blue’ (which corresponds to a range of frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum) to normal human eyes during daylight hours when there is no cloud-cover or other light-blocking phenomena. And, of course, we are talking not so much about a thing (what is ‘the sky’, exactly?) having a property as an experience a human with a normal visual system might have when they look upwards out of doors from the surface of their home planet.

Actually, of course, people don’t go around saying, “The sky is blue” to make a general claim any more than than they go around insisting (to use a Tarskian example) that snow is white. It is generally known that a clear, daytime sky appears blue and that snow is normally white, but general statements to this effect are not usually made. Why would they be? They are not scientific statements; and in ordinary life one would normally be inclined specifically to comment on the colour only if, say, it was not quite as expected, e.g. if there was an unusual tint in the sky or if the snow in one’s vicinity happened, say, to be especially pristine or especially dirty.

Actual scientific claims take us into a slightly more difficult area. For one thing they are theory-based. You could say that theory constitutes part of their context or background, not unlike the way a particular natural language and its associated culture provides a backdrop for ordinary factual claims.

The parallel is imperfect, however, because, like every human activity, the activity of science – even at its most abstract or theoretical – takes place within and depends upon a broader framework of natural language and ordinary human social life. That said, scientific claims are generally purged of the deictic elements which pervade ordinary linguistic communication. They are not perspective- or context-dependent (cf. Thomas Nagel’s ‘view from nowhere’).

Other questions arise. Are scientific claims, as a positivist might see them, just predictions about future observations or do they provide explanatory descriptions of a ‘real world’? You could also quibble with my use (above) of the words ‘true’ and ‘correct’. But I really don’t think I need to take a stand on the fundamental nature of science or delineate a ‘theory of truth’ in order to justify the sort of distinction I am making. As I said previously, I think this distinction can be seen to be implicit in the way we use language.

Take value-judgments now, and specifically aesthetic judgments. In contrast to making factual and scientific claims, expressing such judgments typically entails making claims that cannot be objectively assessed. Claims about what certain individuals or groups find beautiful can be checked against empirical reality, but actual claims to the effect that this or that action or thing just is aesthetically appealing can always be denied, whatever the arguments and however many people claim otherwise.

The counterclaim will simply be that the characteristics or features valued by others happen not to be characteristics or features which are valued by this particular individual (in general or in respect of a particular case). A slightly upturned nose (thought to be attractive in a woman) doesn’t appeal to everybody. Likewise skin colour preferences. Similar points can be made about natural objects and landscapes, etc..

Perceptions of physical beauty need to be understood in the the light of our evolutionary history as well as our individual developmental histories. With respect to perceptions of the human body, clearly sexual urges and instincts are involved, but the interplay between biology and environment can produce quite divergent outcomes.

Lorenz Hart summed it up in his lyrics for the song My Funny Valentine (“… Your looks are laughable, unphotographable…”). On the one hand, there is a clear awareness of common standards of beauty (“Is your figure less than Greek? Is your mouth a little weak?”); on the other, a statement of idiosyncratic personal preference (“Don’t change a hair for me, not if you care for me…”).

The fact that this sort of thing is real (and pervasive) is reflected in the common use of expressions like “There’s no accounting for taste”, or talk about people being “wired differently” etc.. (There isn’t and they are.)

People also have strong and highly divergent preferences in entertainment and the arts. But judgments about individual works need to be seen in a broader context of judgments about which general categories (movies, games, fiction, music, etc.) may or may not be of interest and, within these categories, which particular genres or styles or eras might be favoured by a given individual.

Sure, there can be a fair degree of agreement in scholarly circles: literary or musical scholars can rank certain works above others on the basis of technique and relative levels of complexity and sophistication (as well as other factors) but in the end subjective preferences do count, both in terms of judging works of comparable sophistication and in terms of the pleasure the works in question give. No argument, no matter how good, can make someone like a writer or composer they really hate, or hate one they like, though persuasion could raise doubts and questions, and, of course, increased exposure to the work of a given artist will often precipitate a reassessment.

Many divergences of taste clearly relate to individual developmental histories. Musical taste depends in large part on the kinds of music and other basic sound patterns that individuals have been exposed to in the past. For example, I am not musically trained and just like what I like. Avant-garde music doesn’t appeal at all. And yet I see others seeming to enjoy it, presumably hearing harmonies which I (with my more undeveloped set of expectations, etc.) am unable to perceive.

Scientific approaches to aesthetic questions – including attempts to interpret perceptions of beauty or ugliness in the light of our evolutionary history, individual developmental histories, or in more general terms of symmetries and expectations – will inevitably leave a lot out, but certain basic aesthetic perceptions and judgments are at least partially explainable in biological and psychological terms. Our perceptions are subjective but not arbitrary: certain constraints apply. And, while this is most clearly the case in respect of perceptions of the human body and physical objects, it is arguably applicable to all kinds of aesthetic judgment.

Morality is a more difficult topic, partly because it is an intrinsically vague concept. Moral judgments can overlap with aesthetic judgments (courtesy and politeness, for example, have both a moral and an aesthetic dimension) and also, I would claim, with prudential judgments. (My views here are more in line with Classical than Christian thought.)

Prudential claims could be seen to have a greater claim to being objectively true (or false) than purely value-based claims as they relate to observable effects. Consider proverbs, for example, which tend to have a pragmatic and prudential (rather than a strictly moral) focus. “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive.” “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” Pretty vague and sweeping, but you could conceivably finesse these sorts of claims into testable hypotheses. The same goes for other proverbs many of which (helpfully? – well, perhaps not…) even incorporate numerical values. “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” “A stitch in time saves nine.” “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”

By contrast to factual or prudential claims, we have, almost by definition, no way of testing value-based claims. Which human qualities are most to be valued (and encouraged), for instance? Individuals will differ in their views. Do we favour an ethic based on martial values of courage, strength and self-sufficiency; on justice and righteousness; or one based more on compassion and equality (i.e. a commitment to ‘social justice’)?

Or do we want to refuse to play that game altogether and adopt a ‘non-ethical’ (or amoral) ethic or perspective? (Machiavelli, Max Stirner…).

Politics and religion obviously come into the picture also, but it must be borne in mind that many religious and political claims are not mere value claims. Most traditional religious doctrines, for example, involve (sometimes testable) claims about how the world is. Likewise political ideologies (e.g. the social and economic predictions of various versions of Marxism or classical liberalism). So basic value elements often need to be isolated or disentangled from other elements.

But even if in many instances isolating the value-based elements is a difficult task, my central point stands, I think. We cannot demonstrate that someone making basic value claims which diverge from normally accepted standards is wrong or mistaken. The best we can do is to show them (if they are not already aware of the fact) that they are in a very small minority on the issue.

Of course, in the event of these anomalous views being associated with antisocial actions or behaviours, it is important that social mechanisms be activated to prevent (further) social harm. Nothing I’ve said here should be seen to deny or undermine this. Robust informal regulatory mechanisms exist in every functioning society. And, with respect to more formal mechanisms, it’s quite clear that efficient and equitable systems of law and law enforcement need not be in any way dependent on a commitment to notions of moral realism, natural law or natural rights.

On beauty

In an essay entitled 'Facts and values', recently published at The Electric Agora, I distinguished between, on the one hand, ordinary factual and scientific claims the truth of which can (at least potentially) be objectively assessed and, on the other, value-based claims. I looked briefly at both aesthetic and moral claims – and here is what I said about the former...

In contrast to making factual and scientific claims, expressing aesthetic judgments typically entails making claims that cannot be objectively assessed. Claims about what certain individuals or groups find beautiful can be checked against empirical reality, but actual claims to the effect that this or that action or thing just is aesthetically appealing can always be denied, whatever the arguments and however many people claim otherwise.

The counterclaim will simply be that the characteristics or features valued by others happen not to be characteristics or features which are valued by this particular individual (in general or in respect of a particular case). A slightly upturned nose (thought to be attractive in a woman) doesn’t appeal to everybody. Likewise skin colour preferences. Similar points can be made about natural objects and landscapes, etc..

Perceptions of physical beauty need to be understood in the the light of our evolutionary history as well as our individual developmental histories. With respect to perceptions of the human body, clearly sexual urges and instincts are involved, but the interplay between biology and environment can produce quite divergent outcomes.

Lorenz Hart summed it up in his lyrics for the song My Funny Valentine (“… Your looks are laughable, unphotographable…”). On the one hand, there is a clear awareness of common standards of beauty (“Is your figure less than Greek? Is your mouth a little weak?”); on the other, a statement of idiosyncratic personal preference (“Don’t change a hair for me, not if you care for me…”).

The fact that this sort of thing is real (and pervasive) is reflected in the common use of expressions like “There’s no accounting for taste”, or talk about people being “wired differently” etc.. (There isn’t and they are.)

People also have strong and highly divergent preferences in entertainment and the arts. But judgments about individual works need to be seen in a broader context of judgments about which general categories (movies, games, fiction, music, etc.) may or may not be of interest and, within these categories, which particular genres or styles or eras might be favoured by a given individual.

Sure, there can be a fair degree of agreement in scholarly circles: literary or musical scholars can rank certain works above others on the basis of technique and relative levels of complexity and sophistication (as well as other factors) but in the end subjective preferences do count, both in terms of judging works of comparable sophistication and in terms of the pleasure the works in question give. No argument, no matter how good, can make someone like a writer or composer they really hate, or hate one they like, though persuasion could raise doubts and questions, and, of course, increased exposure to the work of a given artist will often precipitate a reassessment.

Many divergences of taste clearly relate to individual developmental histories. Musical taste depends in large part on the kinds of music and other basic sound patterns that individuals have been exposed to in the past. For example, I am not musically trained and just like what I like. Avant-garde music doesn’t appeal at all. And yet I see others seeming to enjoy it, presumably hearing harmonies which I (with my more undeveloped set of expectations, etc.) am unable to perceive.

Scientific approaches to aesthetic questions – including attempts to interpret perceptions of beauty or ugliness in the light of our evolutionary history, individual developmental histories, or in more general terms of symmetries and expectations – will inevitably leave a lot out, but certain basic aesthetic perceptions and judgments are at least partially explainable in biological and psychological terms. Our perceptions are subjective but not arbitrary: certain constraints apply. And, while this is most clearly the case in respect of perceptions of the human body and physical objects, it is arguably applicable to all kinds of aesthetic judgment.

[...] We cannot demonstrate [however] that someone making value claims which diverge from normally accepted standards is wrong or mistaken. The best we can do is to show them (if they are not already aware of the fact) that they are in a very small minority on the issue.

Frege on natural language

There was a discussion recently at The Electric Agora about Gottlob Frege's famous paper, 'On sense and reference', which brought home to me just how little progress has been made in the last century or so on this and other topics in an area often designated as the philosophy of language.

In fact, rereading Frege's piece, I was greatly impressed not only by its seriousness and intellectual fecundity but also by the careful and respectful way Frege – who was basically a philosophically oriented mathematician and logician – dealt with issues of natural language.

He did not draw easy conclusions but was often content simply to sketch out the semantic complexities involved in certain kinds of syntactic contexts, for example in relation to reported speech or subordinate clauses involving the subjunctive mood.

What has always been clear to me (and which this recent discussion only confirms and underscores) is that aspects of Frege's work have been appropriated and incorporated into a (philosophical) project and a narrative which is quite alien to what Frege – who identified as a man of science – saw himself to be doing.

The comment thread is interesting for a number of reasons but particularly perhaps for the contribution towards the end by someone who has recently translated some early work by Frege and who suggests – as I am suggesting here – that Frege would have been quite out of sympathy with most late-20th century philosophers of language, even those who claim him as a precursor.

I don't want to suggest that the science/non-science distinction is clearcut. It's not. For one thing, there are obviously huge differences between empirical work in different areas (between empirical work in physics and the study of natural language, for example); and also an important distinction between empirical work in general and the building of mathematical or logical or conceptual structures which may be intended (as Frege's were) for basically scientific applications.

But clearly certain kinds of discourse, such as aesthetic, moral and ideological discourse, while they may draw on scientific knowledge to a greater or lesser extent, are not scientific – and (contingent of course on one's conception of philosophy) not necessarily 'philosophical' either.

My first comment on the thread (which I quote here in a modified form) touched on this point.

[Quoting another commenter] "... So it seems Frege is really excluding discussions that clarify or debate sense [as distinct from reference] ... from logical analysis. (This is certainly in keeping with the agenda of Logical Positivism that followed after, which held that topics in aesthetics, religion, politics, etc., were philosophically moot.)"

Yes, this is a very important point. The references to Homer's Odyssey etc. in the Frege's paper seem to confirm what you are saying. Frege obviously respected poetry and fiction etc. but took discourse relating to these things, other hypotheticals and also political rhetoric as being in a very different category or set of categories from the kind of discourse and inquiry (scientific, philosophical) in which he saw himself to be engaged...

Frege's attitude to signs which have a sense but not a reference, which of course include not only the names of fictional characters like Odysseus but also many other kinds of expression and which he tentatively refers to as 'representations', is ambivalent. He accepts that they are an essential element of natural language-based communication, but sees them as operating beyond the scope of science and the sort of logical enquiry he is interested in, except in the sense that the latter may provide certain salutary lessons.

In the vast majority of cases the use of such 'representations' is perfectly fine, but sometimes problems can arise which the logician may be able to diagnose or at least see in a perspicuous way. Frege warns, for example, about political contexts in which expressions like "the will of the people" – which have a sense but not a reference (or at least not any clear or agreed one) – are used rhetorically for purposes of social or political manipulation.