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lukeprog comments on Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory - Less Wrong
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Some thoughts on this and related LW discussions. They come a bit late - apols to you and commentators if they've already been addressed or made in the commentary:
1) Definitions (this is a biggie).
There is a fair bit of confusion on LW, it seems to me, about just what definitions are and what their relevance is to philosophical and other discussion. Here's my understanding - please say if you think I've gone wrong.
If in the course of philosophical discussion, I explicitly define a familiar term, my aim in doing so is to remove the term from debate - I fix the value of a variable to restrict the problem. It'd be good to find a real example here, but I'm not convinced defining terms happens very often in philosophical or other debate. By way of a contrived example, one might want to consider, in evaluating some theory, the moral implications of actions made under duress (a gun held to the head) but not physically initiated by an external agent (a jostle to the arm). One might say, "Define 'coerced action' to mean any action not physically initiated but made under duress" (or more precise words to the effect). This done, it wouldn't make sense simply to object that my conclusion regarding coerced actions doesn't apply to someone physically pushed from behind - I have stuipulated for the sake of argument I'm not talking about such cases. (in this post, you distinguish stipulation and definition - do you have in mind a distinction I'm glossing over?)
Contrast this to the usual case for conceptual analyses, where it's assumed there's a shared concept ('good', 'right', 'possible', 'knows', etc), and what is produced is meant to be a set of necessary and sufficient conditions meant to capture the concept. Such an analysis is not a definition. Regarding such analyses, typically one can point to a particular thing and say, eg, "Our shared concept includes this specimen, it lacks a necessary condition, therefore your analysis is mistaken" - or, maybe "Intuitively, this specimen falls under our concept, it lacks...". Such a response works only if there is broad agreement that the specimen falls under the concept. Usually this works out to be the case.
I haven't read the Jackson book, so please do correct me if you think I've misunderstood, but I take it something like this is his point in the paragraphs you quote. Tom and Jack can define 'right action' to mean whatever they want it to. In so doing, however, we cease to have any reason to think they mean by the term what we intuitively do. Rather, Jackson is observing, what Tom and Jack should be doing is saying that rightness is that thing (whatever exactly it is) which our folk concepts roughly converge on, and taking up the task of refining our understanding from there - no defining involved.
You say,
Well, not quite. The point I take it is rather that there simply are 'folk' platitudes which pick-out the meanings of moral terms - this is the starting point. 'Killing people for fun is wrong', 'Helping elderly ladies across the street is right' etc, etc. These are the data (moral intuitions, as usually understood). If this isn't the case, there isn't even a subject to discuss. Either way, it has nothing to do with definitions.
Confusion about definitions is evident in the quote from the post you link to. To re-quote:
Possibly the problem is that 'sound' has two meanings, and the disputants each are failing to see that the other means something different. Definitions are not relevant here, meanings are. (Gratuitous digression: what is "an auditory experience in a brain"? If this means something entirely characterizable in terms of neural events, end of story, then plausibly one of the disputants would say this does not capture what he means by 'sound' - what he means is subjective and ineffable, something neural events aren't. He might go on to wonder whether that subjective, ineffable thing, given that it is apparently created by the supposedly mind-independent event of the falling of a tree, has any existence apart from his self (not to be confused with his brain!). I'm not defending this view, just saying that what's offered is not a response but rather a simple begging of the question against it. End of digression.)
2) In your opening section you produce an example meant to show conceptual analysis is silly. Looks to me more like a silly attempt at an example of conceptual analysis. If you really want to make your case, why not take a real example of a philosophical argument -preferably one widely held in high regard at least by philosophers? There's lots of 'em around.
3) In your section The trouble with conceptual analysis, you finally explain,
As explained above, philosophical discussion is not about "which definition to use" -it's about (roughly, and among other things) clarifying our concepts. The task is difficult but worthwhile because the concepts in question are important but subtle.
If you don't have the patience to do philosophy, or you don't think it's of any value, by all means do something else -argue about facts and anticipations, whatever precisely that may involve. Just don't think that in doing this latter thing you'll address the question philosophy is interested in, or that you've said anything at all so far to show philosophy isn't worth doing. In this connection, one of the real benefits of doing philosophy is that it encourages precision and attention to detail in thinking. You say Eliezer Yudkowsky "...advises against reading mainstream philosophy because he thinks it will 'teach very bad habits of thought that will lead people to be unable to do real work.'" The original quote continues, "...assume naturalism! Move on! NEXT!" Unfortunately Eliezer has a bad habit of making unclear and undefended or question-begging assertions, and this is one of them. What are the bad habits, and how does philosophy encourage them? And what precisely is meant by 'naturalism'? To make the latter assertion and simultaneously to eschew the responsibility of articulating what this commits you to is to presume you can both have your cake and eat it too. This may work in blog posts -it wouldn't pass in serious discussion.
(Unlike some on this blog, I have not slavishly pored through Eliezer's every post. If there is somewhere a serious discussion of the meaning of 'naturalism' which shows how the usual problems with normative concepts like 'rational' can successfully be navigated, I will withdraw this remark).
Upvoted for thoughtfulness and thoroughness.
I'm using 'definition' in the common sense: "the formal statement of the meaning or significance of a word, phrase, etc." A stipulative definition is a kind of definition "in which a new or currently-existing term is given a specific meaning for the purposes of argument or discussion in a given context."
A conceptual analysis of a term using necessary and sufficient conditions is another type of definition, in the common sense of 'definition' given above. Normally, a conceptual analysis seeks to arrive at a "formal statement of the meaning or significance of a word, phrase, etc." in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.
Using my dictionary usage of the term 'define', I would speak (in my language) of conceptual analysis as a particular way of defining a term, since the end result of a conceptual analysis is meant to be a "formal statement of the meaning or significance of a word, phrase, etc."
I opened with a debate that everybody knew was silly, and tried to show that it was analagous to popular forms of conceptual analysis. I didn't want to start with a popular example of conceptual analysis because philosophy-familiar people will have been trained not to find those examples silly. I gave at least three examples of actual philosophical analysis in my post (Schroeder on desire, Gettier on knowledge, Jackson on morality).
And I do think my opening offers an accurate example of conceptual analysis. Albert and Barry's arguments about the computer microphone and hypothetical aliens are meant to argue about their intuitive concepts of 'sound', and what set of necessary and sufficient conditions they might converge upon. That's standard conceptual analysis method.
The reason this process looks silly to us (when using a non-standard example like 'sound') is that it is so unproductive. Why think Albert and Barry have the same concept in mind? Words mean slightly different things in different cultures, subcultures, and small communities. We develop different intuitions about their meaning based on divergent life experiences. Our intuitions differ from each other's due to the specifics of unconscious associative learning and attribution substitution heuristics. What is the point of bashing our intuitions about the meaning of terms against each other for thousands of pages, in the hopes that we'll converge on a precise set of necessary and sufficient conditions? Even if we can get Albert and Barry to agree, what happens when Susan wants to use the same term, but has slightly differing intuitions about its meaning? And, let's say we arrive at a messy set of 6 necessary and sufficient conditions for the intuitive meaning of the term. Is that going to be as useful for communication as one we consciously chose because it carved-up thingspace well? I doubt it. The IAU's definition of 'planet' is more useful than the messy 'folk' definition of 'planet'. Folk intuitions about 'planet' evolved over thousands of years and different people have different intuitions which may not always converge. In 2006, the IAU used modern astronomical knowledge to carve up thingspace in a more useful and informed way than our intuitions do.
Vague, intuitively-defined concepts are useful enough for daily conversation in many cases, and wherever they break down due to divergent intuitions and uses, we can just switch to stipulation/tabooing.
Yes. I'm going to argue about facts and anticipations. I've tried to show (a bit) in this post and in this comment about why doing (certain kinds of) conceptual analysis aren't worth it. I'm curious to hear your answers to my many-questions paragraph about the use of conceptual analysis, above.
I've skipped responding to many parts of your comment because I wanted to 'get on the same page' about a few things first. Please re-raise any issues you'd like a response on.
You are surely right that there is no point in arguing over definitions in at least one sense - esp the definition of "definition". Your reply is reasonable and I continue to think that the hallmark of rationality is susceptibility to persuasion, but I am not won over yet. I hope the following engages constructively with your comments.
Suppose
Scenario (1): Albert and Barry agree on the standard definition of 'subcompact' - a car is a subcompact just in case 2 407 L < car volume < 2 803 L, but they disagree as to the volume of X. Clearly a factual disagreement.
Scenario (2): Albert and Barry agree on the volume of X, but disagree on the standard definition of 'subcompact' (a visit to Wikipedia would resolve the matter). This a disagreement about standard definitions, and isn't anything people should engage in for long, I agree.
Scenario (3) Albert and Barry agree as to the volume of X and the standard definition, but Barry thinks the standard definition is misguided, and that if it were corrected, X wouldn't be classified as subcompact -ie, X isn't really subcompact, notwithstanding the received definition. This doesn't have to be a silly position. It might be that if you graphed numbers of models of car against volume, using various different volume increments, you would find cars really do fall into natural -if vague- groups, and that the natural cutoff for subcompacts is different than the received definition. And this might really matter - a parking-challenged jurisdiction might offer a fee discount for subcompact owners. I would call this a disagreement about the concept of 'subcompact car'. I understand you want to call this a disagreement about definitions, albeit of a different kind than in scenario (2).
Argument in scenarios 1 and 2 is futile - there is an acknowledged objective answer, and a way to get it - the way to resolve the matter is to measure or to look-up. Arguments as in scenario 3, though, can be useful -especially with less arbitrary concepts than in the example. The goal in such cases is to clarify -to rationalize- concepts. Even if you don't arrive at an uncontroversial end point, you often learn a lot about the concepts ('good', knowledge', 'desires', etc) in the process. Your example of the re-definition of 'planet' fits this model, I think.
This said, none of these scenarios represents a typical disagreement over a conceptual analysis. In such a debate, there typically is not a received, widely accepted analysis or strict definition, just as in meaning something by a word, we don't typically have in mind some strict definition. On the contrary, typically, intuitions about what falls under the concept are agreed by almost everyone, one person sticks his neck out with proposed necessary and sufficient conditions meant to capture all and only the agreed instances, and then challengers work to contrive examples which often everyone agrees refute the analysis. This is how I see it, anyway. I'd be interested to know if this seems wrong.
You may think it's obvious, but I don't see you've shown any of these 3 examples is silly. I don't see that Schroeder's project is silly (I haven't read Schroeder, admittedly). Insofar as rational agents are typically modelled merely in terms of their beliefs and desires, what desires are is important to our understanding of ourselves as rational. Testing a proposed analysis by seeking to contrive counter-examples -even far-fetched- helps illuminate the concept - helps us think about what a desire -and hence in part a rational agent- is.
As for Gettier, his paper, as I know you are aware, listed counter-examples to the analysis of knowledge as justified true belief. He contrived a series of cases in which people justifiedly believe true propositions, and yet -we intuitively agree- do not know them. The key point is that effectively everyone shares the intuition - that's why the paper was so successful, and this is often how these debates go. Part of what's interesting is precisely that although people do share quite subtle intuitions, the task of making them explicit - conceptual analysis - is elusive.
I objected to your example because I didn't see how anyone could have an intuition base on what you said, whereas clear intuitions are key to such arguments. Now, it would definitely be a bad plan to take on the burden of defending all philosophical arguments - not all published arguments are top-drawer stuff (but can Cog Sci, eg, make this boast?). One target of much abuse is John Searle's Chinese Room argument. His argument is multiply flawed, as far as I'm concerned -could get into that another time. But I still think it's interesting, for what it reveals about differences in intuitions. There are quite different reactions from smart people.
This gets to the crux. We make different judgements, true, but in virtue of speaking the same language we must in an important sense mean the same thing by our words. The logic of communication requires that we take ourselves to be talking about the same thing in using language -whether that thing be goodness, knowledge, planethood or hockey pucks. Your point about the IAU and the definition of 'planet' demonstrates the same kind of process of clarification of a concept, albeit informed by empirical data. The point of the bashing is that is that it really does result in progress - we really do come to a better understand of things.
As I see it, your central point is that conceptual analysis is useful because it results in a particular kind of process: the clarification of our intuitive concepts. Because our intuitive concepts are so muddled and not as clear-cut and useful as a stipulated definition such as the IAU's definition for 'planet', I fail to see why clarifying our intuitive concepts is a good use of all that brain power. Such work might theoretically have some value for the psychology of concepts and for linguistics, and yet I suspect neither science would miss philosophy if philosophy went away. Indeed, scientific psychology is often said to have 'debunked' conceptual analysis because concepts are not processed in our brains in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.
But I'm not sure I'm reading you correctly. Why do you think its useful to devote all that brainpower to clarifying our intuitive concepts of things?
I think that where we differ is on 'intuitive concepts' -what I would want to call just 'concepts'. I don't see that stipulative definitions replace them. Scenario (3), and even the IAU's definition, illustrate this. It is coherent for an astronomer to argue that the IAU's definition is mistaken. This implies that she has a more basic concept -which she would strive to make explicit in arguing her case- different than the IAU's. For her to succeed in making her case -which is imaginable- people would have to agree with her, in which case we would have at least partially to share her concept. The IAU's definition tries to make explicit our shared concept -and to some extent legislates, admittedly- but it is a different sort of animal than what we typically use in making judgements.
Philosophy doesn't impact non-philosophical activities often, but when it does the impact is often quite big. Some examples: the influence of Mach on Einstein, of Rousseau and others on the French and American revolutions, Mill on the emancipation of women and freedom of speech, Adam Smith's influence on economic thinking.
I consider though that the clarification is an end in itself. This site proves -what's obvious anyway- that philosophical questions naturally have a grip on thinking people. People usually suppose the answer to any given philosophical question to be self-evident, but equally we typically disagree about what the obvious answer is. Philosophy is about elucidating those disagreements.
Keeping people busy with activities which don't turn the planet into more non-biodegradeable consumer durables is fine by me. More productivity would not necessarily be a good thing (...to end with a sweeping undefended assertion.).
OTOH, there is a class of fallacies (the True Scotsman argument, tendentious redefinition, etc),which are based on getting stipulative definitions wrong. Getting them right means formalisation of intution or common usage or something like that.
To point people to some additional references on conceptual analysis in philosophy. Audi's (1983, p. 90) "rough characterization" of conceptual analysis is, I think, standard: "Let us simply construe it as an attempt to provide an illuminating set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the (correct) application of a concept."
Or, Ramsey's (1992) take on conceptual analysis: "philosophers propose and reject definitions for a given abstract concept by thinking hard about intuitive instances of the concept and trying to determine what their essential properties might be."
Sandin (2006) gives an example:
This is precisely what Albert and Barry are doing with regard to 'sound'.
Audi (1983). The Applications of Conceptual Analysis. Metaphilosophy 14: 87-106.
Ramsey (1992). Prototypes and Conceptual Analysis. Topoi, 11: 59-70.
Sandin (2006). Has psychology debunked conceptual analysis? Metaphilosophy, 37: 26-33.