Neven Sesardic’s recent book, When Reason Goes on Holiday, provides a detailed account of the morally questionable actions undertaken in the interest of political causes by some of the most important philosophers in the analytic tradition: Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, Imre Lakatos, Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, among several others. Some of their actions were not just questionable from a moral point of view, but outright reprehensible. Yet, as Sesardic points out in the conclusion to his book, the reaction from the philosophical community has been one of utter indifference . . . .
I have never made a budget in my life. Never having made one, I have never had to adhere to one. The budgeter is involved in a negative enterprise: he essays to control and curtail spending. He allocates so much money for this, and so much for that, and strives to stick to his limits. But positive methods are often superior to negative ones. If you want to lose weight, for example, it is better to exercise and burn more calories, while holding your caloric intake constant, than to eat less while holding steady on caloric expenditure. (Aside from the optimal course which is to do both at the same time.) Part of the reason for this is that it is harder to break an old habit than to begin a new one.
Similarly with budgeting. To budget is to approach your personal finances negatively when a positive approach is superior. Instead of setting limits to spending in various categories, specify target savings and investing amounts, and aim high. The Wealthy Barber has a chapter entitled "The Ten Percent Solution." As I recall, the author recommends investing 10% of gross income for long-term growth. That's chickenfeed to my conservative mind. We save and invest far more than this. The best way to do this, of course, is by automatic payroll deduction. You arrange for your employer to direct deposit some percentage of your income into the account of your choice. You then live on what is left over.
Why do you need a budget? If you are self-disciplined you will naturally watch your spending, and of course you will never ever use a credit card for its credit feature. You will use it only for its float, record-keeping, rebate, and convenience features. Allow me to brag so as to make a point that is very important for everyone. I have never paid a cent of credit card interest in my life, and in the last several years, each year I have received $400- $500 cash in rebates for the use of a couple of cards which charge me no fee for their use. The credit lines are huge but I go nowhere near them, and the interest rates I could not care less about. Not only that, but the 'float' makes me even more money. Let's say I have the use of $2,000 for six weeks. During that period the goods are in my possession but the money is at my disposal in a cash reserve account earning interest.
Suppose you are a leftist knucklehead who hates 'corporate America.' What better way to stick it to the credit card companies than by becoming a free-rider?
So I ask again, why do you need a budget? If you are self-disciplined you will naturally watch your spending, and if you are not self-disciplined then you will lack the discipline to adhere to your budget. Or is this a false alternative?
When I was a graduate student, 'back in the day,' I lived on 2-3 K per annum. That was in Boston, one expensive town. And then I got a job which paid for starters the princely sum of 12 K per annum. I said to myself: "Surely, I can save and invest half of that!" But attitude is everything. Attitude and will and good judgment. For example, if you are inclined to become financially independent, then you would be a fool to marry someone whose idea of Nirvana is a wallet full of charge cards with unlimited credit lines.
The moral side of the economic problem is paramount to a conservative like me. Those who can deny themselves and defer gratification can become financially well-off in a stable political and economic environment such as we enjoy in these United States. But of course people will not deny themselves and defer gratification. So they must suffer the consequences. The problem is akrasia, weakness of the will. The fundamental problem is not predatory credit card companies, subprime mortgage scammers, and the payday loan sharks. For if you are self-disciplined, cautious, and diligent, they will not be able to get a handle on you.
Enjoyed your Sunday post on Pyrrhonism. It’s been a while since I worked on Sextus, but it strikes me that your essay on the Skeptics’ route to adoxia passes by an important premise: the attainment of equipoise and proper role of philosophy.
The skeptics don’t depend upon a normative principle like (o), but in fact a (stronger) claim that it is impossible to believe or assent to a proposition for which the evidence is strongly divided. Just as assent to what is evident in experience is involuntary, so lack of assent is an involuntary response, not merely a good policy, in the face of divided evidence. It is psychologically impossible to assent in those circumstances.
BV: I argued that without the normative principle
0) One ought to withhold assent from any proposition for which the evidence is not demonstrative/compelling
one would not be able to move validly from
1) There is no compelling reason to accept either T or its negation ~T
to
2) One ought to suspend judgment by withholding assent from both T and ~T.
Suppose one is in a state of doxastic equipoise as between T and its negation ~T: one has no evidential grounds for preferring the thesis to its negation. What ought one do? Some say one ought to suspend judgment. My point was that one cannot validily infer the obligation to suspend judgment from the fact that one is in a state of doxastic equipose without assuming the principle of intellectual integrity, (0). I then went on to argue that this principle is a doxastic commitment of the Pyrrhonian skeptic and that therefore the skeptic cannot be said to be free of all beliefs.
Slim's point, I take it, is that the question of either rationally or morally justifying suspension of judgment does not arise for the skeptic since it is psychologically impossible to be in the state of evidential equipoise and not suspend judgment. Just as no one is a doxastic voluntarist with respect to the sensed sweetness of honey, no one is a doxastic voluntarist with respect to suspension of judgment in a state of evidential equipoise.
There are two questions here. One concerns the interpretation of Sextus. The other concerns how things stand in reality. The second is my main interest. I say it is quite possible to be in a state of equipose with respect to a pair of contradictory propositions and to assent to one rather than the other. What is actual is possible, and I actually affirm theism (the proposition that God exists) despite my belief that the arguments for and against balance and cancel. Therefore, it is possible for a person to be in a state of evidential equipose with respect to a pair of contradictory propositions and to assent to one rather than the other. This also shows that equipoise is not the same state as suspension. I suspect that S. S. Slim is conflating the two.
Let us think about this more carefully. What I am concerned to understand is the transition from the state of equipoise to the state of suspension. They are obviously not the same state. Why does the skeptic, when he is in equipoise, suspend belief? I can think of three answers.
a) Because it is psychologically impossible for him to believe once the state of evidential equipoise has been reached. Suspension follows involuntarily upon equipoise.
b) Because conflicting beliefs are disturbing; mental disturbance is incompatible with ataraxia; the latter is required for happiness (eudaimonia); the skeptic wants to be happy. Our skeptic voluntarily chooses to suspend belief for the sake of happiness.
c) Because of a commitment to a principle of intellectual integrity that requires one not to believe beyond the evidence. Our skeptic voluntarily suspends belief in situations in which contradictory claims balance and cancel to satisfy a precept of the ethics of belief.
Ad (a). This is Slim's view. It strikes me as obviously false. Suppose Old Man Clanton has never run a marathon and that the evidence for and against his completing the 26.2 mile course in the allotted time is evenly balanced. What's to stop Clanton from choosing to believe he can do it? Nothing. He voluntarily believes beyond the evidence. There is nothing psychologically impossible about this. What's more, believing beyond the evidence in a situation like this is both rationally and morally justifiable. We all know that effort follows belief: If I believe I can do something, I will make a greater effort, and will be more likely to pull it off.
I am unsure about what Sextus would say, but what I have read of him and his commentators suggests that he too would reject (a)., and that his reasons for suspension are (b) and (c). But I am open to refutation on this point if Slim or anybody can send me some text references.
The skeptics, recall, are zetetics, resolute inquirers into contentious philo questions like the existence of God. A thorough philosophical inquiry, the Skeptics believe, will take us to the point where strong arguments on both sides robustly oppose each other. This is a point of evidential equipoise, and the mind’s innate response to equipoise is to believe in or assent to neither. Equipose is spontaneously both a stable and a tranquil state of mind, free of contentious loyalties and anxious self-doubt.
Would that this were so! And obviously the skeptic is also not free of a whole set of dogmatic beliefs about how the mind must and cannot assent. And desire also follows automatically on assent, so if we believe in God, for example, we must desire a God-pleasing life. But philosophy enables us to escape doubtful, turbulent beliefs and commitments and to control what we believe and desire by taking us to a state of equipoise and so non-assent and tranquility.
A question I would give to you is whether philo inquiry ever takes us to something like equipoise, and if does, is this a stable and tranquil state.
BV: Slim may be conflating the state of equipoise with the state of suspension. But if he isn't, I would grant only that some people suspend belief in evidential equipoise, not all. After all, there are pragmatic and prudential reasons for belief in addition to evidential ones. Does being in equipoise lead to mental tranquillity? Not invariably.
Too many of the academic philosophers of consciousness are overly concerned with the paltriest aspects of consciousness, so-called qualia, and work their tails off trying to convince themselves and others that they are no threat to physicalism.
While man's nobility lies in the power of thought whereby he traverses all of time and existence, our materialists labor mightily to make physicalism safe for the smell of cooked onions.
I am reminded of the Marx Brothers line: “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious—that in consciousness we are immediately aware of real subjective experiences of color, flavor, sound, touch, etc. that cannot be fully described in neural terms even though they have a neural cause (or perhaps have neural as well as experiential aspects). And he asks us to do this because the reality of such phenomena is incompatible with the scientific materialism that in his view sets the outer bounds of reality. He is, in Aristotle’s words, “maintaining a thesis at all costs.”
That's right. When a line of reasoning issues in an absurdity such as the absurdity that consciousness and its deliverances are illusions, then what you have is a reductio ad absurdum of one or more of the premises with which the reasoning began. Dennett assumes physicalism and that everything can be explained in physical terms. This leads to absurdity. But Dennett, blinded by his own brilliance — don't forget, he counts himself one of the 'brights' — bites the bullet. He'd rather break his teeth than examine his assumptions.
Another thing struck me. Dennett makes much of Wilfrid Sellars' distinction between the manifest and scientific images. 'Image' is not quite the right word. An image is someone's image. But whose image is the scientific image? Who is its subject? It is arguably our image no less than the manifest image. Nagel quotes Dennett as saying of the manifest image: "It’s the world according to us." But the same, or something very similar, is true of the scientific image: it's the world in itself according to us. Talk of molecules, atoms, electrons, quarks, and strings is our talk just as much as talk of colors and plants and animals and haircuts and home runs.
The world of physics is the world as it is in itself according to us. Arguably, the 'according to us' gets the upper hand over the 'in itself' relativizing what comes within the former's scope much like Kant's transcendental prefix, Ich denke. Das 'ich denke' muss alle meine Vorstellungen begleiten koennen . . . . "The ''I think' must be able to accompany all my representations." (KdrV, B 131-2)
Arguably, the world of physics is a mind-involving construct arrived at by excluding the mental and abstracting away from the first-person point of view and the life world it reveals. I am alluding to an idealist approach to the problem of integrating the first- and third-person points of view. It has its own problems. But why is it inferior to a view like Dennett's which eliminates as illusory obvious data that are plainly not illusory?
Time was when absolute idealism was the default position in philosophy. Think back to the days of Bradley and Bosanquet. But reaction set in, times have changed, and the Zeitgeist is now against the privileging of Mind and for the apotheosis of Matter. (But again, matter as construed by us. Arguably, the scientific realist reifies theoretical constructs that we create and employ to make sense of experience.) Because idealism is out of vogue, the best and brightest are not drawn to its defense, and the brilliant few it attracts are too few to make much headway against the prevailing winds.
Now I'll tell you what I really think. The problem of integrating the first- and third-person points of view is genuine and perhaps the deepest of all philosophical problems. But it is insoluble by us. If it does have a solution, however, it certainly won't be anything like Dennett's.
Although Dennett's positive theory is worthless, his excesses are extremely useful in helping us see just how deep and many-sided and intractable the problem is.
Federalism is what I recommend to ease tensions and preserve the Union. Patrick J. Buchanan explains it well. His piece concludes:
A new federalism—a devolution of power and resources away from Washington and back to states, cities, towns and citizens, to let them resolve their problems their own way and according to their own principles—may be the price of retention of the American Union.
Let California be California; let red state America be red state America.
I don't imagine that Mr. Trump or any of his staff read this weblog, but I have an idea for him.
He ought to announce a moratorium on the building of mosques in the USA until such time as Muslim states permit the building of churches, synagogues, ashrams, and zendos in their lands.
Julie Kelly explains why she decided to break up with Bill Kristol.
Part of my explanation of the meltdown of Kristol, George Will, John McCain and other nattering nabobs of Never-Trumpism is that the Orange Man is an uncouth interloper who crashed their party and consigned them and theirs to irrelevance.
"The era of empty talk is over," Trump announced in his CPAC speech. And with it the era of Kristol and Co. These yap-and-scribble do nothing boys in their bow ties don't like it; hence their steaming and spluttering.
In his many years in office what has Arizona Senator John McCain done to secure the southern border? Praise him for his military valor in the past. What we need, however, is civil courage in the present. Too much go along to get along, senator.
Part of the explanation for the effete establishment conservatives' hatred of Trump has to do with his personal style and lack of 'class.' He's not one of them. As if 'class' trumps sound conservative actions. Hanson:
Even conservatives sometimes seem more bothered by Trump’s raw uncouthness in service to a conservative agenda than they were by Obama’s sautéed orneriness in advancing progressive hope and change. Years of the Cairo Speech, the apology tours, the Iran deal, the Iraq pullout, Obamacare, record debt and low growth — editorialized by chronic attacks on Fox News, along with “you didn’t build that,” “punish our enemies,” and “I won” putdowns from Obama — never prompted calls for the 25th Amendment like those in some anti-Trump tweets. Is the difference predicated on class, accent, education, tone, appearance, tastes, comportment, or the idea that a shared Beltway culture trumps diverse politics?
[. . .]
The final irony? The supposedly narcissistic and self-absorbed Trump ran a campaign that addressed in undeniably sincere fashion the dilemmas of a lost hinterland. And he did so after supposedly more moral Republicans had all but written off the rubes as either politically irrelevant or beyond the hope of salvation in a globalized world. How a brutal Manhattan developer, who thrived on self-centered controversy and even scandal, proved singularly empathetic to millions of the forgotten is apparently still not fully understood.
Some will say that the Lord works in mysterious ways. Of course, Trump might still blow it bigly. (That is indeed a recognized word.) We shall see.
By the way, Obama got away with his "sautéed orneriness" [brilliant phrase, Victor!] because of the black privilege black politicians enjoy and exploit to the hilt: the race card is used to deflect any and all criticisms as originating from anti-black animus alone. That is why no black pol ever leaves home without it. The race card, I mean.
The Trump haters in their furious incoherence oscillate between calling him
. . . an anti-American traitor and Russian plant to calling him a dangerous, fascistic ultranationalist whose relentless hawkishness is bringing us closer to World War Three. Already there are some days when they mount both attacks at the same time: the hawkish traitor whose Nazi style America First ideology leads him to lick Putin’s boots. The media wants to cast Trump as both Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler; but you can’t give the Sudetenland to yourself.
Professor X was a good teacher and colleague. Affable and self-effacing, he was well-liked by all. He was quick with a joke and to light up your smoke — at least back in the good old days when some of us smoked in our offices and the American Philosophical Association hosted a 'Smoker' at their annual conventions. But as the years wore on, Professor X, bereft of the stimulation of first-rate minds, became lazy and given to resting on his laurels. An early book, based on his dissertation, showed considerable promise, but a fair judge would have to conclude that he buried his talents rather than using them. He published nothing in the professional journals, sometimes opining that no one read them anyway. Like many, he became too comfortable. Tenure, often advertised as a bulwark of academic freedom, became in his case, as in so many others, an inducement to inactivity. He never progressed much beyond the level of his dissertation.
His real life was elsewhere, in family and friends and such hobbies as woodworking. Once, emerging from a year-long sabbatical cushioned on both ends by long summers with no teaching, he had nothing to show for his release time except a fine bookcase he had built. Like many of the long-tenured and unproductive, he was given to professional envy. When the distinguished philosopher Y came and read a paper for a paltry $200 honorarium, X questioned whether Y was worth so much especially given that this was a paper Y had read before other departments. X's scholarly inactivity was not for the sake of service elsewhere in the academic community: he had a knack for avoiding administrivia and such other academic chores as commenting on papers at conferences.
But now he has passed from our midst, and who among us does not have faults and limitations? Professor X's kindness and collegiality will surely remain in our memories. He will be missed.
"Pyrrhonism is not a doctrine, but a way of intellectual life, a way of thinking, talking, and acting." (Benson Mates, The Skeptic Way, Oxford UP 1996, p. 66) Mates is a careful writer and his meaning is clear: Pyrrhonism is not a doctrine at all. It involves no beliefs or teachings or doctrines or dogmas. There is no Skeptic credo. The whole point of it is to live without beliefs, belieflessly, adoxastos.
Nice work if you can get it. In these days of bitter controversy and unremitting acrimony, would it not be great to be able to float through life belieflessly?
Before asking whether it is possible to live without beliefs, we should consider why a life without beliefs might be thought to be desirable. But before that we need to understand what the Pyrrhonian skeptic means by 'belief.'
What is belief?
According to Mates, and I follow him on this, belief is "a firmly maintained affirmative attitude toward a proposition purporting to describe some feature of the external world . . . ." (SW, 60) To illustrate, suppose our skeptic tastes some honey. Speaking with the vulgar, he may say 'This honey is sweet.' But he will think with the learned and intend 'This honey is sweet' as elliptical for 'It seems to me at present that this honey is sweet.' Thus he does not go beyond the sensory appearances, nor does he allow himself to fall into dispute with a cantankerous table mate who, tasting honey from the same jar, claims that the honey is not sweet. There is nothing to dispute because there is no one proposition that the skeptic affirms and his table mate denies.
Sticking to the sensory seeming, our skeptic refuses to accept or affirm the proposition that the honey is sweet, a proposition that purports to describe a feature of the external world. Of course, he does not reject or deny this proposition ether. He takes no stand on its truth or falsity. He suspends judgment. He may even take a further step and doubt whether there is any proposition to take a stand on. He may question whether the sentence 'This honey is sweet,' taken at face value and not as elliptical for the modalized sentence above, expresses any proposition. He would then not be suspending judgment as to the truth-value of a proposition, but suspending judgment on the question whether a declarative sentence the constituent words of which possess meaning also possesses a unitary propositional sense or meaning capable of attracting a truth-value. More on this later, perhaps, in a subsequent entry.
As for 'external world,' I take it to refer not only to sense objects as they are in themselves, if there are any, but to any and all objects and state of affairs whose nature and existence are independent of us, whether physical or not. On this use of 'external world,' God and Fregean propositions are in the external world.
Given this understanding of 'belief,' why should living without beliefs be thought to be a good thing?
The beliefless life as the happy life
To put it briefly, the ancient skeptic thinks that belieflessness is the way to happiness. But what is required for happiness? According to the luminaries of late antiquity, ataraxia is at the core of happiness or well-being as a necessary component thereof.
Ataraxia is a concept central to the Skeptics, Stoics, and Epicureans. My concern at the moment is solely with the skeptics, and their main man, Sextus Empiricus. Ataraxia (from Gr. a (not) and taraktos (disturbed)) refers to unperturbedness, freedom from emotional and intellectual disturbance, tranquillitas animi, tranquillity of soul. Thus Sextus (circa 200 anno domini) tells us in his Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Book One, Chapter Six, that "Scepticism has its arche, its inception and cause, in the hope of attaining ataraxia, mental tranquillity." (Hallie, p. 35)
The skeptic's goal is not truth, but eudaimonia (happiness or well-being) by way of ataraxia (tranquillity of mind). The central means to ataraxia and happiness is the withholding of assent from all contents of assertion or belief, including such mundane contents as that honey is sweet, but especially those that transcend the mundane and give rise to contention and bitter strife. To use some contemporary examples, beliefs about abortion, gun control, capital punishment, wealth redistribution, illegal immigration, foreign policy, the nature and existence of God etc. lead to strife and in extreme cases bloodshed. Given the difficulty and seeming irresolvability of the issues, the skeptic enjoins the withholding of assent for the sake of ataraxia. The latter is supposed to supervene upon the practice of epoché, the practice of withholding assent.
A quick illustration. Suppose a political conservative maintains the thesis T that capital punishment is morally justified in some cases, while his liberal opponent maintains the opposite (the contradictory proposition, ~T): in no case is capital punishment morally justified. The propositions maintained cannot both be true given the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC). Each side is passionately convinced of the truth of his thesis and each side marshals arguments in support of it. But the best arguments on either side 'cancel out.' Or so the skeptic claims. Upon careful examination of the arguments for and against T, he finds no compelling reason to take one side over the other. This puts him in a state of doubt with respect to T and its negation. He then takes a further step: he suspends judgment about T. This further step is not logically required because one who has no compelling reason to accept one or the other of a pair of contradictory propositions might decide to accept one or the other for no reason at all, or for prudential reasons. Let's think about this.
Is suspension of judgment rationally motivated by lack of demonstrative evidence?
The following is a non sequitur:
1) There is no compelling reason to accept either T or its negation ~T. Therefore:
2) One ought to suspend judgment by withholding assent from both T and ~T.
The inference is invalid, moving as it does from 'is' to 'ought.' Why must I suspend judgment when I can plump for one or the other of the contradictories? An auxiliary premise, however, will validate the inference:
0) One must withhold assent from any proposition for which the evidence is not demonstrative/compelling.
In the presence of (0), the inference from (1) to (2) goes through.
Is the principle of intellectual integrity a belief?
Call (0) the principle of intellectual integrity. It seems that this principle is a doxastic commitment of the skeptic. In plain English, it seems that this is a belief of his. But then he has beliefs after all, which gives the lie to his claim to live adoxastos, belieflessly. Our skeptic obviously needs the principle of intellectual integrity, and I don't think I am dogmatizing if I call it a belief.
We agreed with Mates that, for a skeptic, a belief is " "a firmly maintained affirmative attitude toward a proposition purporting to describe some feature of the external world . . . ." (SW, 60) It seems obvious that (0) is a proposition and that the skeptic has an affirmative attitude toward it. That is, he accepts or affirms it. He believes it. You might object that this proposition does not describe anything. But I think it does. It describes an ideal of human behavior. It describes what a person of intellectual integrity is like. Such a person withholds assent to the non-evident. He doesn't dogmatize in the manner of the Platonist or the Stoic or the Christian.
Our Pyrrhonian skeptic, then, firmly maintains, over time, an affirmative attitude toward a proposition that describes something transcendent of his fleeting sensory states, namely, the person of intellectual integrity, the man who apportions his assent to the evidence and does not irresponsibly affirm beyond the evidence. With respect to (0), the Pyrrhonian is not merely saying how things seem to him at present. He is holding before us an ideal of the sage or wise man that is external to our fleeting mental states.
After all, a way of life cannot be founded upon a subjective seeming that might be overturned tomorrow by a contrary seeming. The skeptic's commitment to his way of life transcends the moment and what seems to him to be the case in the moment.
Interim conclusion
Pyrrhonism, while obviously not merely a doctrine, rests on doctrines. Others of these I will discuss later. So it is false to say that Pyrrhonism is not a doctrine. It is also false that we can live without beliefs. If anyone can, it is the Pyrrhonist. But we have just seen that he needs beliefs too.
Since it is not possible to live without beliefs, it cannot be desirable to live without beliefs. One cannot rationally desire the impossible.
