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.

Isaiah Berlin and passionate thinking

In my latest essay at The Electric Agora, entitled Passionate Thinking [you will find this and more material in my new (May 2016) Google+ Collection, Social and Political Reflections], I deal with the question of social and political values, briefly sketching out my own (changing) attitudes and alluding to the views of Isaiah Berlin.

Interestingly, Berlin started out as an analytic philosopher but was never really at home in that tradition of thought. He tends either to be ignored or scorned by most people I know, and it's entirely possible that he was somewhat overrated during his lifetime.

In a very amusing piece which I link to from my essay, Christopher Hitchens notes that he responded to claims that he was overrated by saying: "And long may it continue."

Good-humoured, witty, self-deprecating, very knowledgeable in certain areas and almost alarmingly articulate, Berlin was certainly a class act.

I think he was more than this, and his characteristic forthrightness was, if not a form of courage then at least the mark of a genuinely passionate thinker.

He was asked about the meaning of life not long before his death. His reply:

"As for the meaning of life, I do not believe that it has any: I do not at all ask what it is, for I suspect it has none, and this is a source of great comfort to me — we make of it what we can, and that is all there is about it. Those who seek for some deep, cosmic, all-embracing, teleologically arguable libretto or god are, believe me, pathetically deluded."

Such forthrightness is refreshing (though I personally don't see where the "comfort" is coming from).

The problem with much discourse in the humanities today is not only that is it not forthright or compelling, but that it is profoundly uncritical and conformist: ideologically driven but not ideologically engaged. Closed off, in other words, to other possibilities.

From my piece at The Electric Agora:

"[A]s there is no privileged cosmic libretto, so there is no privileged social or political one. Berlin's kaleidoscopic vision reflected this conviction also.

He was a complex man and [...] thinker. [...] Always opposed to fanaticism and revolutionary violence, he was fascinated by certain 19th-century radical thinkers (e.g. Herzen, Sorel). He was also a Zionist of sorts, but he distanced himself both from the secular zealots and their Orthodox counterparts. His vision was clearer than theirs, and his loyalty was ultimately to a broader constituency.

Loyalty is at the heart of things, both in personal and political life. The crucial question is: loyality to whom, or to what?

To certain values, first of all, I would say, values which one typically sees as being embodied in certain individuals or groups. What I have realized is the tenuousness of the link between values (which persist) and the individuals and groups with which these values are – often quite arbitrarily – identified.

I'm not saying that social ideals can exist in the abstract, apart from actual individuals and actual groups. But any such identification should never be more than provisional. There is a world of difference between taking sides in an ideologically open manner, which involves keeping one's critical senses alive, and taking sides in a merely political or social way so that the party or the nation or a particular ideology or ideologue becomes the cause."

An exchange with David Ottlinger

In this comment thread there is quite an interesting extended exchange between myself and David Ottlinger in which I am questioning his general approach to how thinking and argument relates to human action. We clearly have very different views on how human beings operate, on freedom, on morality and on philosophical thinking generally.


[A new essay of mine (on intergenerational communication) will appear at The Electric Agora very shortly. I will put up a link from my other blog soon after the article appears.]

My first essay for The Electric Agora

My name has been added to the contributors list at the new site, The Electric Agora, and my first piece – which was prompted by a question raised in a previous essay there as to whether "there really are such things as moral obligations and duties" – is now up. Do have a look.

Anti-naturalism in philosophy (III)

The role and raison d'être of academic philosophy in today's world is far from clear: there is certainly no consensus amongst philosophers regarding what philosophy is or is for. I personally would like to see the discipline become less insular and more engaged with the sciences, and there have been some encouraging moves in this direction. On the whole, however, I think that you would have to say that the discipline has become less rather than more science-friendly or science-oriented over the last fifty or sixty years.

What concerns me here is the general question of metaphysical or religious motivation. Generally the logical empiricists, who dominated analytic philosophy in the mid-20th century, were not well disposed towards traditional metaphysics or religion. But the general climate of opinion within academic philosophy has changed quite a bit since then.

There are (and always have been) overtly religious philosophers, of course. But I am not concerned with them so much as with apparently non-religious (or even atheistic) philosophers who nonetheless seem very uncomfortable with a straightforwardly naturalistic view of the world.

Take John McDowell. I am not aware that he has any particular religious affiliation, and yet there is something about his approach which seems almost hostile to science and I have trouble trying to figure out what on earth is driving it. It must be more than just a desire to defend his professional turf, I feel sure.

Starting about the 24 minute mark in this interview, McDowell defends himself against accusations by Tyler Burge (who is not featured here) that his approach betrays ignorance of the relevant science, but his defense is not entirely convincing.

Note his curiously unscientific discussion about recognizing Bill Clinton's face (43-45 min.): no reference at all is made to brain processes (and much is known about these sorts of processes). Note also some fairly dismissive remarks about science in general and cognitive science in particular. "What [cognitive science] does," he says (more than once), "is just fine" – but it has little to contribute to telling us about how we can know things, apparently! *

Though he concedes that in order for his views to be acceptable they must be compatible with the relevant science (of perception and cognition, etc.), McDowell's view of the world is clearly not driven by science (which he shows little interest in). He certainly does not have what the logical positivists dubbed a scientific worldview. In fact, he seems to espouse a form of Kantian idealism. He himself notes that he came over time to recognize the importance of Kant's transcendental perspective; and, though this topic is not raised here, McDowell is a defender of moral realism.

The only way I can make sense of an intelligent and obviously serious thinker going on at such length and in such detail about the distinction between the perceived and the seemingly perceived etc. is that something more than just an apparently trivial semantic point about the meaning of the word 'know' and its cognates is (perceived to be) at stake here. What is being obliquely presented and defended in all of this is a particular metaphysic, a fundamentally anti-physicalist, anti-empiricist and possibly anti-naturalist way of seeing the world.

Terms like physicalism and naturalism are awkward to define, but what this philosopher and many like him are claiming is that there is more to fundamental reality than what the various sciences and mathematics can describe or access – and that the philosopher (through pure thought, apparently) has access to it.

This sort of thinking strikes me as being very much in the same category as priestly mystification. And indeed many of today's philosophers, whose discipline in the Western tradition grew out of schools of divinity, could be seen to be competing to fill the same general intellectual, social and economic space as was once occupied (almost exclusively) by clerics.

One last point. When I talk of priestly mystification I don't mean to imply that it necessarily involved or involves deliberate deception or hypocrisy. In many (perhaps in most) cases, the perpetrators are 'true believers' in the doctrines they are promoting.



* In order to understand this discussion fully one would need to read certain texts, by Wilfred Sellars in particular. Sellars was a 20th-century philosopher who is often appealed to by those who seek to make a space for philosophy, a philosophy which is respectful of but distinct from science, in today's intellectual landscape. Daniel Kaufman, with whom I have had some dealings (at Scientia Salon, Apophenia and, more recently, at The Electric Agora), is a great promoter of Sellars' work. The interviewer on this video is also a Sellarsian. But not the interviewee, I would say. For McDowell, Sellars' view of the world is too reductionistic or scientistic apparently and, though he appeals to some of Sellars' ideas (like 'the Myth of the Given'), he "averts his gaze" (a strange – and revealing – phrase) from other aspects of Sellars' thought.

Anti-naturalism in philosophy (II)

Here are a few more notes on the debate between Paul Horwich and Timothy Williamson which I discussed briefly in my previous post on this site.

In the video, Horwich defends his view, based on his reading of Wittgenstein, that much of what goes on under the name of (analytic) philosophy is "irrational". (Williamson calls a spade a bloody shovel and interprets him as saying that it is "rubbish".)

Horwich starts talking about 39 minutes into the video, and a brief statement of his position starts at about the 42-minute mark. His key contention is that the common philosophical supposition that abductive reasoning from intuitive data can reveal fundamental regularities (more or less as science can be seen to reveal fundamental regularities which underlie empirical data) is simply false.

He summarizes the basic argument he makes for his position in five points. Here is my summary of his summary:

1) Our concepts (I assume he means linguistically-based concepts) tend to be messy. They evolved to deal with a wide range of real-world contingencies and are used in a bewildering variety of ways. The intuitive data upon which philosophical reasoning is based is inextricably bound up with such concepts. In fact, many of the key concepts with which philosophers have traditionally been concerned are particularly prone to conflicting understandings and interpretations.

2) Via conjectured theoretical entities, models, etc., the various sciences have developed effective ways of dealing with messy empirical data to arrive at (often) elegant and relatively simple theories which reveal fundamental regularities.

3) The currently dominant strand of analytic philosophy also seeks elegance and simplicity, but any simplicity obtained is generally obtained "on the cheap" by finding a simple regularity that fits most of the (intuitive) data, and counting intuitions or interpretations which do not fit the theory as mistaken or incorrect.

4) This is a distortion of the scientific method.

5) Not all philosophers make this mistake, but a beautifully simple theory will rarely be obtainable. Almost inevitably there will be a profusion of alternative theories and no prospect of convergence. Competing theories of ethics are an obvious example.


My response...

Horwich is basically correct about the problems of philosophy as a theoretical discipline. And I believe his views on this more or less accurately reflect Wittgenstein's views.

But there are a couple of aspects of Horwich's thinking with which I am uncomfortable. Interestingly, these features are also the very features of Wittgenstein's thinking that I reject.

First, the 'scientism' issue. (Horwich uses the word.) Now, it seems to me that the term can used in at least two ways, one quite focussed, the other broader and stronger.

In the narrower sense, the term is used to highlight the inappropriate application of scientific methods or approaches. Horwich, for example, sees philosophy as inappropriately imitating science. I agree with him. This sort of thing happens and it would be better if it didn't. Philosophy (however we understand it) is not science. (Similarly, social science is not physics.)

But 'scientism' also has a broader meaning. On this view, a scientistic outlook involves having a high regard for science coupled with skepticism about other ways of gaining (anything other than commonsense and practical) knowledge.

This broader sense of 'scientism' (which I would embrace) marks a divide between profoundly different views of the world; and, because there is no agreement on basic assumptions across the divide, there is no way of satisfactorily dealing with such differences via philosophical or ordinary reasoning and argument. One set of assumptions or presuppositions will lead to certain philosophical opinions and lines of argument; another set will lead elsewhere.

Closely related to this scientism issue is the question of naturalism. Horwich rejects naturalism, which he sees as the view that every property, object and fact is naturalistic.

Mathematics is often said to involve objects, etc. which exist but do not exist in time and space. If so, then naturalism (as Horwich defines it) is incorrect. This leaves the door open for the similarly real existence of moral properties, for instance.

I haven't looked yet at Horwich's views on ethics. But I am aware of Wittgenstein's (religion-based?) views on these matters.


I am not going to try to deal here with Timothy Williamson's point of view. To do so would mean addressing topics like the dreaded Barcan formula (which was mentioned by Horwich in the video, by the way). The Barcan formula is an axiom (or schema) of quantified modal logic first stated by Ruth Barcan (who became Ruth Barcan Marcus) the acceptance of which apparently enhances and simplifies the workings of formal systems of quantified modal logic. Williamson defends the Barcan formula as being in some sense 'true', and, despite the fact that there is no general agreement on its informal interpretation, seeks to draw metaphysical conclusions from it – something along the lines that everything exists, but some things as actual objects and some as possible objects. This sort of thinking strikes me as being more in line with medieval scholasticism than with modern scientific thinking (and indeed in his writings Williamson refers to Avicenna, claiming that he informally anticipated both the Barcan formula and its converse).

There have been big advances in formal logic over the last century or so, and it would not be surprising if such advances allowed us to see certain general ideas in logic and traditional metaphysics in a new light, validating some old approaches as insightful or prescient and undermining others. But what Williamson is doing strikes me as going well beyond such modest, historical commentary. Though he equivocates about naturalism in this discussion with Horwich, backing away from Horwich's claim that he, like Horwich, is opposed to a naturalistic view of the world, he does seem, in effect, to be rejecting a modern, scientific outlook and attempting to resurrect something like traditional metaphysics.

I am not saying his motivations are religious: they may be entirely intellectual. The realm of formal logic, like the realm of mathematics, has its attractions: it can appear very appealing, especially when contrasted with the messiness and general unsatisfactoriness of mundane reality.

Horwich accepts the messiness, however, and here I am very much on his side.