Elsewhere I have been casting aspersions on the law of identity, the traditional first law of thought, which asserts that a thing is identical to itself.
It has just been brought to my attention that, in 2002 in Berkeley, California (where else?), Jonathon Keats organized a petition to have the law of identity added to the statutes. The proposed law stated that "every entity shall be identical to itself." Any entity caught being unidentical to itself was to be subject to a fine of up to one tenth of a cent.
The law didn't get up, but it did attract some attention during the 2002 gubernatorial race in Massachusetts, apparently receiving cryptic words of support from the Mitt Romney campaign.
Showing posts with label logic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label logic. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Philosophy's future
I suggested in a previous post that philosophy would not exist today as a scholarly discipline - at least in the form it is in - were it not for a body of practitioners who seek (explicitly or implicitly) to defend an essentially religious or at least anti-physicalist view of the world. It is also clear that academic philosophy has provided a home and a platform for certain secular ideologies (such as feminism, radical environmentalism and leftist politics generally) which flourish widely within the arts and humanities.
I continue, however, to be interested in some of the key questions commonly addressed by philosophers, and have recently been doing some more reading in philosophy-related areas, including some work by Pascal Engel, a French epistemologist and philosopher of logic who is currently based at the University of Geneva. Engel is unusual amongst French philosophers in identifying with the analytic tradition, and he has an interest (as I do) in the logical positivist movement of the early and mid-20th century.
In 2002, Engel engaged in a debate in Paris with the American Richard Rorty. The debate was published in book form in 2007 (the year Rorty died) under the title, What's the Use of Truth? Rorty was a left-wing, secular pragmatist with an unfortunate anti-science streak. Though his writing is lucid and persuasive he is not on my list of favorite thinkers, essentially because of his attitude to science. However, this short review by Rorty of a book about truth by Pascal Engel (in which Engel roundly attacks Rorty's position) is marvellously elegant and restrained, and I am very much in sympathy with Rorty's view concerning the futility of much contemporary philosophical debate.
In fact, it seems pretty evident that philosophy is dying as an academic discipline. Real jobs in the discipline are disappearing. I wrote a piece late last year on City University of New York philosophy professor Massimo Pigliucci's battle against proposed changes to the curricula at his institution which he saw as being part of a nationwide trend to dismantle not just philosophy but the entire liberal arts component of higher education. It is a sign of the times that a philosopher (Peter Ludlow), who is a member of a task force set up to reform the American Philosophical Association (which has both financial and organizational problems), has made a case for the dissolution of the Association.
The travails of academic philosophy may be due in part to its perceived irrelevance to mainstream concerns, or to a general perception that it, like other disciplines within the humanities, has become too closely identified with certain ideological tendencies, or to any number of other factors. But I am more concerned to salvage something from the wreckage than to speculate on the causes of the crash.
First of all, I'm sure that philosophizing (in the sense of scholars and others reflecting on their respective disciplines) will continue. Meta-thinking is just something people do, and always will do.
Secondly, even if much recent epistemology, philosophy of logic, etc. is of little worth, that is not to say that earlier work in these areas was not important and valuable. I personally continue to be fascinated by some 20th century thinkers whom I intend to continue reading and trying to understand better. And people like Pascal Engel may prove to be very useful and valuable guides.
Of course, no one can really foresee whether or not philosophy has a future, much less the nature of any possible future (though I am inclined to think it will involve fragmentation).
I conclude with a couple of personal comments on the discipline known as the history of ideas. I am not really interested, as an historian might be, in seeking simply to understand how certain ideas grew out of other ideas and how they developed, or in how certain thinkers developed their ideas and influenced subsequent thought. I (like many other intellectually curious people) am more interested in the ideas themselves than in the history, even if I always prefer to see ideas within their historical context.
Furthermore, I prefer some ideas to others: I am really only interested in the ideas which are still 'viable'. Or - if you prefer - 'true'.
I continue, however, to be interested in some of the key questions commonly addressed by philosophers, and have recently been doing some more reading in philosophy-related areas, including some work by Pascal Engel, a French epistemologist and philosopher of logic who is currently based at the University of Geneva. Engel is unusual amongst French philosophers in identifying with the analytic tradition, and he has an interest (as I do) in the logical positivist movement of the early and mid-20th century.
In 2002, Engel engaged in a debate in Paris with the American Richard Rorty. The debate was published in book form in 2007 (the year Rorty died) under the title, What's the Use of Truth? Rorty was a left-wing, secular pragmatist with an unfortunate anti-science streak. Though his writing is lucid and persuasive he is not on my list of favorite thinkers, essentially because of his attitude to science. However, this short review by Rorty of a book about truth by Pascal Engel (in which Engel roundly attacks Rorty's position) is marvellously elegant and restrained, and I am very much in sympathy with Rorty's view concerning the futility of much contemporary philosophical debate.
In fact, it seems pretty evident that philosophy is dying as an academic discipline. Real jobs in the discipline are disappearing. I wrote a piece late last year on City University of New York philosophy professor Massimo Pigliucci's battle against proposed changes to the curricula at his institution which he saw as being part of a nationwide trend to dismantle not just philosophy but the entire liberal arts component of higher education. It is a sign of the times that a philosopher (Peter Ludlow), who is a member of a task force set up to reform the American Philosophical Association (which has both financial and organizational problems), has made a case for the dissolution of the Association.
The travails of academic philosophy may be due in part to its perceived irrelevance to mainstream concerns, or to a general perception that it, like other disciplines within the humanities, has become too closely identified with certain ideological tendencies, or to any number of other factors. But I am more concerned to salvage something from the wreckage than to speculate on the causes of the crash.
First of all, I'm sure that philosophizing (in the sense of scholars and others reflecting on their respective disciplines) will continue. Meta-thinking is just something people do, and always will do.
Secondly, even if much recent epistemology, philosophy of logic, etc. is of little worth, that is not to say that earlier work in these areas was not important and valuable. I personally continue to be fascinated by some 20th century thinkers whom I intend to continue reading and trying to understand better. And people like Pascal Engel may prove to be very useful and valuable guides.
Of course, no one can really foresee whether or not philosophy has a future, much less the nature of any possible future (though I am inclined to think it will involve fragmentation).
I conclude with a couple of personal comments on the discipline known as the history of ideas. I am not really interested, as an historian might be, in seeking simply to understand how certain ideas grew out of other ideas and how they developed, or in how certain thinkers developed their ideas and influenced subsequent thought. I (like many other intellectually curious people) am more interested in the ideas themselves than in the history, even if I always prefer to see ideas within their historical context.
Furthermore, I prefer some ideas to others: I am really only interested in the ideas which are still 'viable'. Or - if you prefer - 'true'.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
An intellectual arms race
From time to time I do some reading in the more technical areas of philosophy (like epistemology or the philosophy of logic) where topics like truth and objectivity are dealt with in what appears to be an intellectually rigorous way. It all looks and feels very scientific, and of course various formal logical and mathematical systems are employed.
I am attracted to this sort of thing, but I keep pulling back from committing myself to it mainly because I keep finding apologists for religion amongst the ranks of philosophers and logicians. (The latest one I stumbled upon was Bas van Fraassen, a distinguished philosophical logician and a Roman Catholic.)
Of course not all logicians and philosophers have a religious or metaphysical agenda, but I tend to think that the whole structure of the discipline is dependent on these people, not because without them there would be fewer philosophers (that's another issue), but because they - the religious ones - are actually setting the agenda.
My suggestion is that if a group of intelligent secularists set out to deal with questions of truth and objectivity they would not feel compelled to elaborate the daunting intellectual theories which fill the bookshelves and the scholarly journals and which help to justify the continued existence of a profession devoted exclusively to these matters.
But, when you have a significant number of religiously-inclined thinkers involved, a kind of intellectual arms race ensues, with the sad, and ultimately truth-obscuring, results we have before us.
Of course, I am making the assumption that religious doctrines are false, but that's an assumption the truth of which I see no reason to doubt.
I am attracted to this sort of thing, but I keep pulling back from committing myself to it mainly because I keep finding apologists for religion amongst the ranks of philosophers and logicians. (The latest one I stumbled upon was Bas van Fraassen, a distinguished philosophical logician and a Roman Catholic.)
Of course not all logicians and philosophers have a religious or metaphysical agenda, but I tend to think that the whole structure of the discipline is dependent on these people, not because without them there would be fewer philosophers (that's another issue), but because they - the religious ones - are actually setting the agenda.
My suggestion is that if a group of intelligent secularists set out to deal with questions of truth and objectivity they would not feel compelled to elaborate the daunting intellectual theories which fill the bookshelves and the scholarly journals and which help to justify the continued existence of a profession devoted exclusively to these matters.
But, when you have a significant number of religiously-inclined thinkers involved, a kind of intellectual arms race ensues, with the sad, and ultimately truth-obscuring, results we have before us.
Of course, I am making the assumption that religious doctrines are false, but that's an assumption the truth of which I see no reason to doubt.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Meaning and information
I don't remember meeting him, but, when I was a child, we often used to drive past a house belonging to my father's old colleague, 'Sticky' Glew. (My mother had been introduced to him, and had trouble deciding how to address him. She wisely opted for 'Mr Glew'.) It amused my father that his friend had written a dissertation on 'the meaning of meaning'.
"For thousands of years," writes Seth Lloyd (in his book, Programming the universe (Vintage, 2007)), "philosophers have tried to determine what 'meaning' means, with mixed success." (p. 24)
Lloyd's work (in quantum computing and quantum communication systems) is based around the technical concept of information. But strings of bits and so on mean nothing in themselves: they are meaningful only if they can be interpreted. "Meaning is defined only relative to a scheme of interpretation ..." (p. 25)
"Consider the string of bits ... : 1001001 1101110 0100000 1110100 1101000 1100101 0100000 1100010 1100101 1100111 1101001 1101110 1101110 1101001 1101110 1100111. Interpreted as a message encoded in ASCII, this string means 'In the beginning'. But taken on its own, with no specification of how it is to be interpreted, it means nothing other than itself." (p. 25) And, of course, 'In the beginning ...' is interpreted according to the conventions of the English language. As Lloyd points out, natural languages are rich in ambiguity, which is "a key aspect of poetry, fiction, flirting, and plain everyday conversation." (p. 27)
But sometimes, in order to understand basic concepts - like meaning - it is useful to strip away complexities and ambiguities and look at simple models, as Wittgenstein did in his account of language games. Imagine a simple language game in which a builder says "Block" and the assistant hands him a block, or "Slab" and the assistant hands him a slab. The meaning of each expression is to be found in the action the expression provokes.
Lloyd relates Wittgenstein's idea to computers and computing. "The meaning of a computer program written in a particular computer language," he writes, "is to be found in the actions the computer performs as it interprets that program. All the computer is doing is performing sequences of elementary logic operations, such as AND, NOT and COPY ... The computer program unambiguously instructs the computer to perform a particular sequence of those operations. The 'meaning' of a computer program is thus universal, in the sense that two computers following the same set of instructions will perform the same set of information-processing operations and obtain the same result." (p. 26-27)
Meaning, then, is interpreted information. We don't need a theory of meaning such as philosophers have attempted to build. Philosophy (most notably the philosophy of language and metaphysics) has drifted into unproductive areas reminiscent of scholasticism in which intellectual work is done without first ensuring that there is an important intellectual task to address.
Of course, the word 'meaning', like many English words, can be used in different ways, and a careful analysis of the context of use will reveal subtle - and not so subtle - differences. One sense of the word - rather different from most of the others is 'general significance' or 'point' or 'purpose', as in the sentence, 'My life seems to lack meaning.' I have not been talking here of this generalized kind of meaning, but of the ordinary - and primary - uses of the word in relation to information and communication. And, understood as interpreted information, it seems to me a perfectly clear and unmysterious concept. Trying - as some philosophers do - to make a big issue of what they call 'aboutness' or 'intentionality' (which doesn't mean what non-philosophers think it means) constitutes unnecessary mystification.*
The remarkable advances in computing and information and communication technologies during the last 70 years have thrown up many real problems of a fundamental nature, but they require scientific knowledge (not just knowledge of formal logic and philosophy) to address. In particular, the parallels between thermodynamics and information theory are clearly rich in new problems which would benefit from informed reflection. For example, all matter and energy is subject to the laws of thermodynamics, but all matter and energy - everything there is - is also subject to the laws of information. Information theory appears to be a more fundamental and all-encompassing theory than thermodynamics (which can now be seen as just a special case of information theory).
Though I doubt the value of much recent philosophical work in the areas of language and meaning, some very important foundational work has certainly been done by philosophers, philosophically-inclined mathematicians and logicians. The key advances were made during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The work of George Boole, Giuseppe Peano, David Hilbert, Bertrand Russell, A.N. Whitehead and many others provided the conceptual tools which made the development of the electronic computer and sophisticated communication technologies possible. Claude Shannon's development of what he called a 'mathematical theory of communication' and which has come to be known as information theory was based largely on the work of George Boole.
Information has come to be seen as physical - it is no longer seen as abstract, disembodied and unquantifiable. It is always tied to a physical representation: a mark on paper, a charge, a spin, a sequence of bases in DNA. Information processing occurs not just in computers and brains but throughout the physical world.
In 1961 Rolf Landauer came up with a principle with (it is said) startling implications: that one essential information processing operation (erasure) cannot occur without causing heat to dissipate into the environment (thus increasing the entropy of the universe). The processing of information is a thermodynamic process (just as thermodynamic processes are informational) and erasure is an irreversible operation. Negation can be reversed by a second negation. Addition can be reversed by subtraction. But erasure cannot be undone.
I will resist the temptation to discuss the implications of Landauer's principle (which I believe are not good!). I am a layman in these matters, but the role that information processing seems to play in every aspect of nature intrigues me. I am trying at least to understand the fundamental principles, and to relate the sort of thing one learns within the context of philosophical logic - e.g. that there are any number of alternative systems of logic - to the apparently more constrained context of real-world information processing.
* Much philosophical work in recent decades in areas such as ethics, metaphysics, the philosophy of language and even logic has been done by people with a commitment to a religious view of the world (or at least with an anti-physicalist orientation), and has been motivated (I believe) by an attempt to undermine physicalism and to save a space for the spiritual (broadly interpreted). Such a motivation does not invalidate the work, but I personally don't think a convincing case against physicalism has been made.
"For thousands of years," writes Seth Lloyd (in his book, Programming the universe (Vintage, 2007)), "philosophers have tried to determine what 'meaning' means, with mixed success." (p. 24)
Lloyd's work (in quantum computing and quantum communication systems) is based around the technical concept of information. But strings of bits and so on mean nothing in themselves: they are meaningful only if they can be interpreted. "Meaning is defined only relative to a scheme of interpretation ..." (p. 25)
"Consider the string of bits ... : 1001001 1101110 0100000 1110100 1101000 1100101 0100000 1100010 1100101 1100111 1101001 1101110 1101110 1101001 1101110 1100111. Interpreted as a message encoded in ASCII, this string means 'In the beginning'. But taken on its own, with no specification of how it is to be interpreted, it means nothing other than itself." (p. 25) And, of course, 'In the beginning ...' is interpreted according to the conventions of the English language. As Lloyd points out, natural languages are rich in ambiguity, which is "a key aspect of poetry, fiction, flirting, and plain everyday conversation." (p. 27)
But sometimes, in order to understand basic concepts - like meaning - it is useful to strip away complexities and ambiguities and look at simple models, as Wittgenstein did in his account of language games. Imagine a simple language game in which a builder says "Block" and the assistant hands him a block, or "Slab" and the assistant hands him a slab. The meaning of each expression is to be found in the action the expression provokes.
Lloyd relates Wittgenstein's idea to computers and computing. "The meaning of a computer program written in a particular computer language," he writes, "is to be found in the actions the computer performs as it interprets that program. All the computer is doing is performing sequences of elementary logic operations, such as AND, NOT and COPY ... The computer program unambiguously instructs the computer to perform a particular sequence of those operations. The 'meaning' of a computer program is thus universal, in the sense that two computers following the same set of instructions will perform the same set of information-processing operations and obtain the same result." (p. 26-27)
Meaning, then, is interpreted information. We don't need a theory of meaning such as philosophers have attempted to build. Philosophy (most notably the philosophy of language and metaphysics) has drifted into unproductive areas reminiscent of scholasticism in which intellectual work is done without first ensuring that there is an important intellectual task to address.
Of course, the word 'meaning', like many English words, can be used in different ways, and a careful analysis of the context of use will reveal subtle - and not so subtle - differences. One sense of the word - rather different from most of the others is 'general significance' or 'point' or 'purpose', as in the sentence, 'My life seems to lack meaning.' I have not been talking here of this generalized kind of meaning, but of the ordinary - and primary - uses of the word in relation to information and communication. And, understood as interpreted information, it seems to me a perfectly clear and unmysterious concept. Trying - as some philosophers do - to make a big issue of what they call 'aboutness' or 'intentionality' (which doesn't mean what non-philosophers think it means) constitutes unnecessary mystification.*
The remarkable advances in computing and information and communication technologies during the last 70 years have thrown up many real problems of a fundamental nature, but they require scientific knowledge (not just knowledge of formal logic and philosophy) to address. In particular, the parallels between thermodynamics and information theory are clearly rich in new problems which would benefit from informed reflection. For example, all matter and energy is subject to the laws of thermodynamics, but all matter and energy - everything there is - is also subject to the laws of information. Information theory appears to be a more fundamental and all-encompassing theory than thermodynamics (which can now be seen as just a special case of information theory).
Though I doubt the value of much recent philosophical work in the areas of language and meaning, some very important foundational work has certainly been done by philosophers, philosophically-inclined mathematicians and logicians. The key advances were made during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The work of George Boole, Giuseppe Peano, David Hilbert, Bertrand Russell, A.N. Whitehead and many others provided the conceptual tools which made the development of the electronic computer and sophisticated communication technologies possible. Claude Shannon's development of what he called a 'mathematical theory of communication' and which has come to be known as information theory was based largely on the work of George Boole.
Information has come to be seen as physical - it is no longer seen as abstract, disembodied and unquantifiable. It is always tied to a physical representation: a mark on paper, a charge, a spin, a sequence of bases in DNA. Information processing occurs not just in computers and brains but throughout the physical world.
In 1961 Rolf Landauer came up with a principle with (it is said) startling implications: that one essential information processing operation (erasure) cannot occur without causing heat to dissipate into the environment (thus increasing the entropy of the universe). The processing of information is a thermodynamic process (just as thermodynamic processes are informational) and erasure is an irreversible operation. Negation can be reversed by a second negation. Addition can be reversed by subtraction. But erasure cannot be undone.
I will resist the temptation to discuss the implications of Landauer's principle (which I believe are not good!). I am a layman in these matters, but the role that information processing seems to play in every aspect of nature intrigues me. I am trying at least to understand the fundamental principles, and to relate the sort of thing one learns within the context of philosophical logic - e.g. that there are any number of alternative systems of logic - to the apparently more constrained context of real-world information processing.
* Much philosophical work in recent decades in areas such as ethics, metaphysics, the philosophy of language and even logic has been done by people with a commitment to a religious view of the world (or at least with an anti-physicalist orientation), and has been motivated (I believe) by an attempt to undermine physicalism and to save a space for the spiritual (broadly interpreted). Such a motivation does not invalidate the work, but I personally don't think a convincing case against physicalism has been made.
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