The randomness argument against compatibilism

The randomness argument insists that if our actions are not determined by our character, then they are a matter of chance and hence not free. This is the most powerful argument against libertarianism. I want to think about whether the argument presents a challenge to the compatibilism. (Compatibilists think freedom is compatible with determinism; libertarians think that (a) freedom is incompatible with determinism, and (b) there is freedom. I shall assume that freedom and responsibility go together, though a more careful examination will require dropping the assumption.)

The compatibilist had better have something to say about how on her preferred view of action the actions do not come out as "a matter of chance". As a warmup, observe that for the purposes of evaluating whether something is "a matter of chance" in our ordinary intuitive sense—which is presumably the sense at play in the argument—the question isn't whether the event is determined or not. We think of coin flips as a matter of chance, and we would think this even if it turned out that the outcomes of coin flips are determined by the precise values of the initial conditions, so a slightly different angle or velocity would produce a different outcome, and we do not have precise enough control over the angle or velocity. If our actions came from a deterministic coin flip in the head, they would be no less objectionably random than if they came from an indeterministic coin flip.

Now, add this observation. People sometimes make seriously responsible decisions where their desires are very close in strength. For instance, no one would get off on a murder charge just because her desire to do the right thing was almost as strong as her desire to inherit the money from her uncle. But when desires are sufficiently close in strength, then which desire is the stronger is "a matter of chance" in exactly the same sense in which a deterministic coin flip is "a matter of chance". What sense is that? It's the sense that when something depends on very fine differences in conditions, too fine for us to discern or control, it's "a matter of chance." Whether one is seriously responsible for murder or not responsible for murder at all shouldn't depend on such tiny differences in desires: if it depends on the fact that one's desire to commit the murder has strength 27.4837 while one's desire not to commit the murder has strength 27.4836, that's just as chance as a truly indeterministic choice would be.

I think three families of answers are available to the compatibilist.

Answer 1: Insist that as the strengths of desires get closer and closer, the degree of freedom and responsibility decreases to zero.

Objection: It doesn't! While perhaps we want to especially criticize the character of the person whose desire for murder was by far the stronger desire, the person for whom the desires were closely balanced, and who agonized over the decision is still seriously responsible, and not merely vanishingly responsible.

Answer 2: Go for Markosian's agent causal compatibilism.

Objection: I have some problems with Markosian's story, but once one goes for agent causation to respond here, one should allow the libertarian the courtesy of relying on agent causation to respond to the randomness argument as well. But if one does that, one loses the strongest argument against libertarianism.

Answer 3: The person whose desire for murder has strength 27.4837 and whose desire not to commit the murder has strength 27.4838 is still a pretty bad person, even if she does not commit murder. Thus, our moral evaluation of the character of the person who in fact commits the murder because her desire strengths are 27.4837 and 27.4836 for and against respectively and the person who does not commit the murder because her desire strengths are 27.4837 and 27.4838 should be very similar, all other things being equal. The latter person does not commit the murder, but that's just her luck, and it is not a very different kind of luck from the luck of a person who does not murder her uncle because he happens to die before she gets around to trying to kill him. In all of these cases, ordinarily, we are dealing with persons with a corrupt moral character, persons who can be appropriately criticized for that character. Largely for pragmatic reasons, however, we do not punish the person who does not commit the murder, whether because her uncle dies on his own or because her desire for murder is slightly the weaker.

Objection: I do not think this fits with how we ordinarily think about the situations. We think there is something significantly praiseworthy when someone with very closely balanced desires for good and evil does the right thing. Yet the difference between the significantly praiseworthy and the significantly blameworthy action shouldn't be "a matter of chance".

Here, the compatibilist pressing Answer 3 might bite the bullet and say that while for pragmatic reasons we praise the person with such closely balanced desires, perhaps in the hope that the balance is shifting in a good direction and our praise will push it further there, she is a really bad person. But I still doubt this: Is she morally really about as blameworthy as an actual murderer? It still seems that the blameworthiness in the action is objectionably a matter of chance, unless one takes Answer 2 as the way out.

In any case, let's explore this compatibilist answer some more. Even if the bullet has been bitten, it's only going to have any hope of working in cases where the person is responsible for her character. For if her character is not something she's responsible for, it might as well be a matter of chance (and indeed may be a matter of chance circumstances and genetics). In particular, it won't work for the first responsible choices a person makes. The story has to be a story of bootstrapping: one has a very low level of responsibility in the initial choices, but then as one's choices build up a character in concert with them, the level of responsibility rises.

I doubt this this bootstrapping. If the choice itself does not inject any new responsibility, as I think on a deterministic story it does not since it is simply an outcome of earlier character, then one is no more responsible for the up-built character than for the initial character. But that is a different and independent objection to compatibilism, I think.

In sum, I think the randomness argument isn't so much an argument against libertarianism as an argument against the possibility of freedom: it affects compatibilists and libertarians alike. Oh, and I think it doesn't work, either because of agent causation or because it fails to notice how well indeterministic explanation can be made to work.

Does God choose the reasons he acts on?

Suppose that Sam is dying of cancer and Sally prays for him. God now has two reasons to cure Sam's cancer: (1) cancer is bad; and (2) Sally has asked God to cure the cancer. Simplify by supposing these are the only two reasons God has for curing Sam. And presumably there are reasons against curing Sam, such as that miracles damage the order of the universe or that Sam can learn much from suffering.

So, God has to make the decision whether or not to cure Sam. Question: If God is going to cure Sam, does God always have to make an additional choice whether (a) to cure him only because of (1), or (b) to cure him because of (2), or (c) to cure him because of both (1) and (2)?

I think that supposing an additional such divine choice wherever there are multiple sufficient reasons for acting is not particularly plausible. God then would need further reasons in favor of each of the three alternatives (a), (b) and (c). There may be some logically possible cases where God a reason to cure Sam only because cancer is bad, and not because Sally asked him. Maybe this is a world where God promised to ignore Sally's prayers on that day, to teach Sally a lesson. (I doubt God makes such promises in our world.) But typically, there will be no reasons to prefer (a) or (b) to (c). So, typically, God will only have reason to go for (c), and so he won't have to make the additional choice between (a), (b) and (c), since where all the reasons are seen to favor one option, no choice needs to be made.

This leads to the idea that at least typically, when God does anything, he does this for all the reasons that favor doing it, rather than for some selection of reasons. This is an aspect of what I call "divine omnirationality."

Marital love and death

Scripturally, marriage—and hence presumably also marital and sexual love—stops at death. There is good philosophical reason for this. Sexual love receives its unique identity from the bodies of the two persons. It is plausible that when the body is destroyed at death, the love needs to be transformed. The maximal amount of continuous physical commitment that is possible lasts until the death of one of the parties. Given that romantic love calls for the deepest possible union at all levels of the person, especially including the physical level, it is plausible that romantic love calls for something like this kind of commitment, namely for a marriage “until death do us part.”

Granted, after death, there will be a resurrection of the glorified body, Christians believe. However, marriage is a natural state of human beings, while this resurrection is something supernatural. It is no surprise if marriage does not, then, outlast death.

At the same time, the form of love should always take into account the relevant particularities of the persons’ relationship. One’s love for a deceased spouse, while not a properly marital love, should have a form particular to love for a deceased spouse, a love that differs from the love for a deceased child. In this life, we might call this “widowed love”. We can see that widowed love is not the same as marital love from the fact that widowed love for a deceased spouse can legitimately continue even after the widow or widower remarries. And it is particularly in the case of remarriage that it is essential that the widow love not be a marital love—it is unfortunate to be married to someone who has a marital love for a deceased spouse. The difficulties involved in this change of form in the love help justify the grudging nature of the Church’s traditional acceptance of remarriage after a spouse’s death (e.g., 1 Cor. 7:8-9).

In heaven, the possibility of continuing interaction will presumably transform the widowed love into some other form of love qualified by the shared history of marriage, a form we can only guess at.

Self-love and self-seeking

The following are excerpts from my book manuscript on love, which I am now revising. Comments (whether substantive or stylistic) are welcome. The setting for the puzzle below is Paul's observation in 1 Cor. 13 that love does not seek its own:

There is, however, a special puzzle in the case of love of oneself. The command in Leviticus (19:18) to love one’s neighbor as oneself is a seminal text, including for the Christian Scriptures which quote it frequently (Mt. 5:43, 19:19, 22:39, Mk. 12:31-33, Lk. 10:27, Rom. 13:9, Gal. 5:14, James 2:8). But how can love of oneself not be self-seeking? One answer could be that Paul is giving us a general quality of love: love focuses us on the beloved. In the special case where the beloved is oneself, this calls for a focus on self, but that is not the result of a general quality of love, but of the particularity of the beloved in this form of love. But there may be a deeper way to understand how a love of oneself can be non-self-seeking, and we will come to that in Section 2.9.

...

2.9. Love of oneself and self-seeking

We saw that we need to distinguish the reasons for loving someone from the reasons for having a particular form of love for someone. The reasons for loving need not vary from beloved to beloved. My son, my wife, my sister, my father, my friend and my enemy is each a human being created in the image and likeness of God, and this calls out for a response of love. So I can love each of my neighbors for the very same reason. But the different forms that the love should take are each justified by different reasons. I love my son with a paternal love that includes a certain kind of authority because he is my son and because he is young. I love my friend with a friendly love perhaps because of our shared history of companionship.

This offers us a speculative way to see how Paul’s observation (1 Cor. 13:15) that agapê does not seek its own might apply to self-love. Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics IX.4 observes that good people have the same kinds of reasons for loving themselves as they do for loving others: namely, they can love themselves for their character. At same time, Aristotle seems to think that thoroughly corrupt individuals have no reason to love themselves, and indeed do not. Aristotle was wrong in thinking that there was no reason to love the thoroughly corrupt—they, too, are people—but the idea that virtuous persons love themselves for the same reason that they love others is compelling.

This then offers a way in which well-ordered love of oneself is not self-seeking. When Francis virtuously loves himself, i.e., Francis, he does not love Francis because Francis is himself, but he loves Francis because Francis is a human being in the image and likeness of God. Or, at least, he does not primarily love Francis for being himself, but primarily loves him for the attributes that Francis shares with all other humans. Virtuous people love their neighbors as themselves. Conversely, they love themselves as they love their neighbors, namely for the same kind of reason. And in this sense the love is not self-seeking, since although the beloved is oneself, the beloved is loved primarily for reasons for which one loves one’s neighbor rather than for being oneself.

At the same time, love for oneself has a different form from love for another, just as love for one’s friend and love for one’s father have different forms. Perhaps the most important is that one’s relationship with oneself involves a kind of authority that one’s relationship with one’s friend or parent do not have: I can require sacrifices of myself that I have no right to require of a friend or parent. Another is that correlative with this authority over oneself there is a special responsibility for one’s moral development, going beyond that which one has for a friend or parent’s, and more akin to, though perhaps going further than, one’s responsibility for one’s children’s moral development.

Memory, animals and personhood

Consider the following plausible theses:

1. Some non-human animals that are not persons (maybe dogs and maybe even rats) have experiential memories, i.e., memories in which they remember having lived through past events.
2. Human intellectual development is continuous and relatively slow.
3. It is an essential property of me that I am a person. In particular, if personhood begins at some point t after conception, then t is when I come to exist.

Interestingly, we cannot hold on to (1)-(3) as well as this thesis:

4. Personhood requires developed capacities for distinctively personal functioning.

For suppose for a reductio ad absurdum that (4) is true. Then at some point a year or two after conception, just when I developed capacities for distinctively personal functioning, I came into existence. Now imagine me on that first day of personhood and of existence. Because of the continuity of human intellectual development, a day earlier I was also a very sophisticated animal, presumably sophisticated enough to have formed experiential memories. After all, it seems very plausible given (2) that I've gone through all intermediate levels of intellectual development, and those stages, by (1) and (4) (we need (4) here to guarantee for the sake of argument what I ultimately deny, namely that personhood is a level of intellectual development), include a level where there are experiences but no personhood. These memories surely carry over.

So let's suppose that on my first day of personhood I remember myself as playing blocks with my dad a day earlier. But according to (3), I did not exist before personhood, and if I did not exist, I did not play blocks with my dad, either. And hence this experiential memory, inherited from the non-person human animal that preceded me, is incorrect and unveridical. This is absurd enough.

And here is a further, more serious, oddity. That experiential memory was veridical in the human animal a day before personhood came to be. It presumably still is correct in the human animal. So both the human animal and the human person have the same memory, or apparent memory, but it's only correct in the human animal and not in the human person. So the two memories have different content. This is very weird indeed. Furthermore, such formation of animal memories surely continues during personhood. So I have memories of having eaten breakfast and my animal has memories of having eaten breakfast, and these two memories have different content—for one can be correct (if, say, one remembers a breakfast prior to the advent of one's personhood) while the other is not. All this is very weird. (Of course, there is a non-coincidental resemblance here to Olson's arguments for animalism, but I find these versions add something, though maybe not.)

This is all too odd. So we really can't hold on to all of (1)-(4). I think one should deny (4). Some (e.g., Jeff McMahan) will deny (3) instead.

Fetuses and capacity

One of the abortion debates is between those, like Mary Anne Warren, who think that personhood requires a "developed" capacity for distinctively personal functioning (including all or many of features like: self-awareness, general communication, freedom, problem-solving, etc.), or at least that such a developed capacity is needed for the prohibition on killing to apply, and those who think an undeveloped capacity is sufficient, either for personhood or the prohibition on killing or both. Of course, normal fetuses have an undeveloped capacity for distinctively personal functioning.

Here is a line of thought. Imagine an alien species that suffers through a boiling hot season every ten earth years ("The Boiling"). Most species on that planet die off at that time, leaving some hardy spores or seeds. But one species, the cysters, evolved intelligence and an ability to gather experience over a period of time longer than ten earth years. A biological cycle triggered by increased temperatures records one's memories and character traits in a hardy storage module that can survive The Boiling, and the body entirely sheds its brain and other soft tissues, becoming a kind of cyst. When The Boiling passes, the brain and other soft tissues regrow based on the genetic code, in the same way that they grew in the first place, and memories and traits from the storage module are written back into the regrown brain.

We would expect the cysters to have strong prohibitions against destroying normal fellow cysters once they have gone into the cyst stage (say, with a time bomb). And it is intuitively very plausible that these prohibitions would be correct: killing normal cysters in the cyst stage is wrong. Furthermore, it is plausible that a cyster in the cyst stage is still a person, though I am not insisting on this.

But notice that in cyst stage, the cysters do not have a developed capacity for distinctively personal activity. They have no brains! Granted, they have a module that holds memories and character traits. But they no more have developed capacities for distinctively personal activity than an embryonic gecko has a developed capacity for eating insects. The embryonic gecko presumably has genetic information sufficient to produce a vertebrate brain that will guide its eating of insects. All the information is there, just as in the cyster's memory module. But the presence of the information is insufficient for a developed capacity.

Moreover, imagine that Sam is a cyster who has acquired a capacity for distinctively personal activity an hour earlier, and has since had an hour of experiences. Moreover, suppose Sam does not remember anything prior to the acquiring of that capacity and Sam's character's non-genetic development only started when Sam acquired that capacity. And now the signs of The Boiling show up, and Sam goes to cyst. Clearly it's wrong to kill Sam. But it would be weird to think that the hour of experience makes the crucial difference here.

So it is false that the prohibition on killing requires developed capacities for distinctively personal functioning. And it is likely also false that such capacities are required for personhood.

Two questions about identity

Here is an interesting line of thought.

Consider these two questions:

1. What is it for x and y to be identical?
2. What necessary and sufficient conditions can be given for a person to be identical with a person?

These two questions seem respectively exactly parallel to:

3. What is it for an action to be permissible?
4. What necessary and sufficient conditions can be given for a killing of a person to be permissible?

Here, (3) is a metaethics question while (4) is an applied ethics question.

One way to notice the difference I'd like to highlight between (3) and (4) is to consider the kinds of answers one might get. For instance, on a fairly standard natural law theory, the answer to (3) is that an action is permissible if and only if it does not conflict with one's nature, while the answer to (4) is, perhaps, that the killing be a proportionate act of justice or self-defense and not otherwise impermissible. On a Kantian theory, the answer to (3) is that an action is permissible if and only if it treats no person as a mere means. But the answer to (4) may be exactly like the natural law answer. On a divine command theory, the answer to (3) is that what makes an action permissible is its not being forbidden by God, but again the answer to (4) might just like on the other theories.

Observe, thus, what we are very unlikely to get from standard answers to (4): we are very unlikely to find out what the permissibility of a killing consists in. If we want an answer to that question, the natural lawyer will say that the permissibility of a killing consists in its comformability to our nature, the Kantian that it consists in its not treating anyone as a mere means, and the divine command theorists that it consists in its not being forbidden by God. None of these answers will answer the applied ethics question we want, as these answers are at too high a level of generality: we can replace "killing" by any other action type, and they remain applicable.

Now go back to the metaphysics. I have no idea how to answer (1). It's hard to think of anything more fundamental than identity to answer it in terms of. But I think the analogy with the ethics question suggests this. If we can get a substantive answer to (2), it's not going to be an answer to the question of what identity of persons consists in. It's simply going to be an answer as to what interesting necessary and sufficient conditions for identity are in the special case where it is given that the relata are persons.

If we want to know what the identity of persons (or at least finite persons) consists in, the correct answer will not be so informative: what makes person a be identical with person b is that (i) a is a person, (ii) b is a person, and (iii) Iab, where "Iab" is a stand-in for whatever identity in general consists in. I have no idea what "Iab" will say, but I know that it won't say anything about memories, gradual replacement of cells, etc. For, "Iab" is the general account of identity, and that is beyond the details of particular kinds of beings.

This line of thought is attractive, but resistable. One might instead insist that identity is something different in different types of beings. (This may or may not involve the further step of accepting a relative identity theory.) Here, the "types" could be categories—substances, accidents, relations, etc. Or they could be kinds—dogs, persons, photons, electromagnetic fields, etc. I prefer the first option, but what I say applies in both cases. One way to flesh out such views is with a theory of analogy. There is no one thing that identity consists in: there is a relation between a substance and substance, and a relation between an accident and an accident, and so on, and these are all analogous (maybe one of them is focal?). Or if one prefers the second type of "type", one might say: there is a relation between a dog and a dog, and a relation between a person and a person, and so on, and these are all analogous.

On this kind of view, we might well have something substantive to say about what identity between, say, a person and a person consists in, which does not reduce simply to saying: this is a person, and this is a person, and this equals this. I think very naturally such a view will call for a typed logic. (Query to self: In a typed logic of this sort, should there be a quantification over types of quantification?)

I wonder if the argument of my recent AJP paper on diachronic identity is vulnerable to this sort of view. Quite possibly. But I still think the reduction of diachronic to synchronic identity that I perform in that paper is plausible.

Progress on Christian sexual ethics book

I finally got two referee's reports on my One Body: An Essay in Christian Sexual Ethics book manuscript. They were extremely positive. The publisher's editorial board still needs to make a final decision, but it's looking very promising.

How fat am I?

Suppose I think of myself as shaped like a four-dimensional spacetime worm. We draw diagrams of such things for students—a wide line moving up the board. It is amusing to note that such diagrams are not at all to scale. In a natural unit system, the speed of light will be taken to be c=1. For instance, one might measure time in seconds and distance in in light-seconds. A light second is 299792458 meters long. An average human earthly lifespan is of the order of magnitude of 10⁹ seconds. My largest spatial dimension is about two meters, i.e., about 10⁻⁸ light-seconds. That means that my earthly temporal dimension is of the order of magnitude 10¹⁷ times longer than my largest spatial dimension. This means that I thought of as a spacetime worm, I am an exceedingly thin worm. If this worm were rotated, projected and scaled so as to be a meter long and maximally thick, a hydrogen atom would be ten million times thicker than the worm.

Moreover, this worm is quite straight. The main variation in its shape seems to be a cork-screw shape induced by the earth's orbit around the sun. But the diameter of the spiral is about a thousand light-seconds, which is a millionth of its length.

So a scale drawing of me in my earthly career as a space-time worm would have me be 10¹⁷ times thinner than I am long, and despite a subtle cork-screw, straight to within about one part per million.

Non-causal scientific explanation

Some scientific explanation is non-causal. For instance, we can explain the hyperbolic cosine shape that a rope suspended at both ends makes as the shape that minimizes total gravitational energy subject to the constraints. In some cases, the non-causal explanation can perhaps be turned into a causal explanation: presumably if we model a rope system suspended at both ends, and have some friction to damp things, the causal evolution of the system will eventually lead to a hyperbolic cosine profile. But (a) it is not clear that all cases of non-causal scientific explanation can be reduced to causal explanation, and (b) even when such a reduction is possible, we lose something of explanatory value.

But it is very puzzling how these sorts of non-causal explanations explain. We might invoke laws of nature that say that things behave in such-and-such a manner, but when these laws are non-causal, their explanatory oomph is puzzling. It is interesting that theists can solve this problem, by allowing non-causal explanations to be reduced to causal explanation in terms of God setting up a world where such-and-such patterns will be instantiated, but still allowing the non-causal element—say, the variational principle that says that gravitational energy will eventually be close to a local minimum—to play a genuine role in the explanation. For we may suppose that God intentionally sets things up so that they follow variational principles. Even in cases where the variational principles can be reduced to causal explanations, we can suppose that the causal structure was so set up by God as to make the variational principles true, and hence the variational principles genuinely enter into the explanations.

Unconditional probabilities underdetermine conditional probabilities

Consider two random processes, R₁ and R₂. Process R₁ randomly and uniformly chooses a real number between 0 and 1, with each number being a possible outcome. Process R₂ works as follows. It starts with the result of R₁. If the result of R₁ is other than 1/2, that is also the result of R₂. If the result of R₁ is 1/2, then the result of R₂ is defined to be 1/4.

Observe that for any measurable subset S of the interval between zero and one, the probability that R₁ generates a number in S equals the probability that R₂ generates a number in S. To see this, observe that unless R₁ results in 1/2, R₂ will result in the same thing as R₁. So, the probability that R₁ yields something in S differs from the probability that R₂ yields something in S by at most the probability that R₁ gives 1/2. But the probability that R₁ yields 1/2 is zero, so the probability that R₁ yields something in S does not differ from the probability that R₂ yields something in S.

Now, intuitively the conditional probability that R₁ results in 1/2 given that it results in either 1/2 or 3/4 is a half. But intuitively the conditional probability that R₂ results in 1/2 given that it results in either 1/2 or 3/4 is zero, since R₂ cannot result in 1/2. So, the conditional probabilities for R₁ and R₂ differ, while the unconditional ones are the same. So we cannot define conditional probabilities in terms of unconditional ones (and in particular, we cannot define conditional probabilities for zero-probability events using the Radon-Nikodym theorem or some other limiting procedure) in a way that does justice to our intuitions about conditional probability. This conclusion is of course the central point of Hajek's "What conditional probability could not be."

Of course, to me when wearing my probability theorist's hat, this doesn't matter. When I wear my probability theorist's hat, probability measures are simply measures with total probability one, and everything of significance is defined only up to almost sure equality (X=Y almost surely iff P(X=Y)=1) so the distinction between R₁ and R₂ is irrelevant. Such probability measures need not have any epistemological or physical interpretation. But there is a non-mathematical notion of conditional probability as well, one tied to epistemological and physical applications, and it is that kind of conditional probability that does not supervene on unconditional probability.

Knowledge and too much evidence

I've been musing—nothing I care about rides on this—about this kind of case. Let's say that I have ten independent pieces of evidence that Socrates was killed by the Athenians. They give me knowledge, but it's more evidence than I need—any seven or eight of them would be sufficient. Unbeknownst to me, one of the ten pieces of evidence turns out not to work (maybe it's a complete fraud, maybe it's Gettiered, maybe it doesn't support the claim that Socrates was killed by the Athenians—there are all sorts of ways of filling this one, depending in part on what you think evidence is). The other nine pieces are fine.

Now, if you ask me how I know that Socrates was killed by the Athenians, I will give you all the ten pieces of evidence as my story. But it seems I'll be wrong: it is false that the ten pieces of evidence give me knowledge that Socrates was killed by the Athenians—at best, nine of them do that. Moreover, I am unable to give the correct story about how I know, because I don't know which of the ten is bogus. Do I know that Socrates was killed by the Athenians?

I think so. So it seems that it is not necessary for knowledge that I be able to give a story about how I know. In this case I know, but I don't know how I know. Nothing earthshaking here. But I thought it was an interesting case, and probably pretty common.

Memory theory, fission and faster-than-light influences

Standard memory theories of personal identity says that what is necessary and sufficient for identity is a chain of memories (or, more precisely, quasi-memories) and the absence of fission or fusion of memories. Now suppose:

1. If we keep fixed the laws of nature and miracles don't happen, then what is done five light years from earth at t cannot affect whether I am on earth five minutes after t (keeping a constant reference frame throughout).

Suppose physicalism is true. Then it is in principle possible to perform the following operation: record the state of my memories, freeze me, and send the records to a location five light years from earth. At that location the records can be downloaded into a fresh brain. So, suppose my memories have been recorded, I'm frozen, and the records are five light years from earth, where, at time t, someone is deciding whether or not to download those records into a fresh brain. At the same time (in this frame), I am being thawed. If they download the records into a fresh brain, then at t I will experience fission, and cease to exist according to standard memory theories. But that violates (1): whether they download the records into a fresh brain affects whether I am on earth five minutes after t.

One can get out of this problem, at the cost of other weirdness, by allowing one to survive fission. Another way is to deny physicalism—without physicalism it is not clear that memories can be transfered, as they may not be entirely brain-based.

But one might also try for the following solution. Suppose they do download the memories into a fresh brain. Fission doesn't count as occurring then. After all, reference frames are arbitrary, and so such a "then" would be arbitrary. Fission only counts as occurring when one of my memory-continuants is in the forward light-cone of another of my memory-continuants. And that will happen five years after the operation, and hence will not violate anything like (1). I don't know how attractive this view about fission is. It would be weird to build into a memory view something so tied to the physics of our world. One would need to say something about how the memory view changes in worlds with different physics. I still think a better move is just to deny the memory theory. But this interesting move would be worth thinking about.

Norms, assertion and marriage

Cappelen has recently defended (see a chapter here) a "no-assertion" theory on which there is no special speech act of "assertion' associated with a special norm or set of norms. Rather, there is a multitude of contextual norms that saying can fall under.

Cappelen's most powerful argument applies to any theory on which being governed by a norm like the ones discussed under the head of "the norms of assertion"—standard proposals include: don't say the false, don't say what you don't believe, don't say what you don't know, etc.—is necessary for a speech act to be an assertion. The argument starts by noting that we can imagine people who engage in a practice that is governed by a different one of the proposed norms of assertion. For instance, instead of having a large number of token speech acts governed by Williamson's prefered "don't say what you don't know" norm, they may have a practice of speech acts governed by, e.g., "don't say what you don't believe." And such a group of people is surely no less asserting than we are, assuming of course there is such a thing as assertion. Moreover, there may be such variation within our very own community, as the apparent counterexamples to particular norms of assertion show.

I want to consider several answers. I think each of them is capable of defense, and then draw some interesting connections with debates on marriage.

1. Family resemblance. On this proposal, while there is no such thing as the norm of assertion, there is a family resemblance between all the proposed norms of assertion, and any practice governed by a norm that sufficiently resembles a member of the family counts as a practice of assertion. This allows that there is such a thing as assertion, but its boundaries are vague. This is a way of partially letting Cappelen have what he wants, but without giving up on assertion altogether. I think solutions like this should be a last resort.

2. The truth norm is triumphant. If we adopt the truth norm as constitutive of assertion, we can give a coherent story about what happens in communities where they have practices governed by other norms. Namely, in those communities, they are making assertions, but the content of their assertion is not the proposition most obviously indicated by their words. For instance, take the community K where there is a common practice participants in which are allowed to say "s" only when they know that s. The truth-normer can say that when a member of K is participating in that practice and says "s", she is in fact asserting the proposition that she knows that s. The move is to reinterpret the content of the speech act, and still make it an assertion, but of a slightly different content. There will of course have to be adjustments made elsewhere, too. Thus when A says "s" and B says "That's false", B is not referring to the content of A's assertion (which on this view is the proposition that A knows that s), but B is referring to the content of what A asserted knowledge of, namely that s. Thus, B is asserting that she knows that what A asserted to have knowledge of is false. Such adjustments are awkward but can be done, and the truth-normer, and only the truth-normer, can reinterpret speech under the other norms as assertion of a more complex content. This makes it easier for her to bite the bullet on Cappelen's objection, because she does not have to say that the members of these other communities are bereft of assertion. She might even say that there can be vagueness as to the proposition that someone is expressing, and that this vagueness may correspond to a vagueness as to what norm the saying is falling under.

It seems that this move privileges the truth norm—only the truth-normer can reinterpret speech acts governed by the other norms as assertions of a different content.

3. Focal meaning. A distinctively Aristotelian view is to accept a version of the family resemblance view, but insist that one norm is focal, and speech acts governed by the other norms are assertions in a derivative sense, in virtue of the resemblance between them and the focal norm. I think working out the details of this view will require something like the "norm magnet" view from below.

4. Natural norm bundles. Consider this hypothesis. Some types of activites are strongly natural to humans, in the sense that engaging in these activities is a constitutive part of natural human flourishing. For instance, while it is possible to lead an on-balance flourishing human life without ever eating (one might always be fed intravenously), such a life would lack an aspect of natural human flourishing (admittedly, not one of the most important ones). Among the strongly natural activities, one may hypothesize, there is the engagement in certain social practices. Perhaps requesting is a strongly natural social practice. A human who never requests anything of another is lacking a constitutive part of natural human flourishing—she is failing to flourish as the kind of dependent rational being she is. Likewise, it is pretty plausible that asserting is a strongly natural social practice. Baseball and asserting-in-English are not—one can live a fully flourishing life without participating in baseball or asserting in English.

How does this help? Well, a lot of people think that to make sense of semantic phenomena, we need the notion of "reference magnets", which are "natural" entities. Rabbits are reference magnets, while undetached rabbit parts aren't, and so saying "Gavagai!" around rabbits, barring some defeating data, refers to rabbits, not undetached rabbit parts. It could be that just as there are reference magnets, there are practice magnets. Reference magnets can be pretty strong. Someone who thinks that our language of mid-sized objects refers to spacetime regions may nonetheless be referring to a rabbit with the word "rabbit", even if she thinks she's referring to a spacetime region. Likewise, a community engaging in a practice that "looks" sufficiently similar to a practice magnet is actually engaging in the practice magnet.

Suppose that the real norm of assertion is the knowledge norm. We might have a community who think that they are engaging in a practice governed by, say, the belief norm, and their censure and praise is in line with the belief norm, but in fact their practice is similar enough to assertion that it gets pulled by the practice magnetism of assertion. Thus, the members of this community are in fact governed by the knowledge norm (assuming that's the real norm of assertion), even though their actions, especially their censure and praise, is a better fit for a different norm.

The notion of a practice magnet by itself is enough to show a weakness in Cappelen's argument. But practice magnetism is still a pretty murky idea. The notion of strongly natural practices may, however, help here. It could be that it is strongly natural practices that function as practice magnets. Any sufficiently similar behavior gets pulled in under the governance of the norms associated with the strongly natural practice.

This magnetism seems spooky (though maybe no more so than reference magnetism). Maybe, though, we can somewhat de-spookify it as follows, though to non-Aristotelians what I will say will be just as bad. When we assert, we are engaging in a strongly natural norm-governed social practice. But individually or as a community we need not have much grasp of what in fact are the norms of assertion, and we might in fact have quite mistaken ideas as to what the norms are. What makes it be that the practice has the norms of the practice of assertion is that it is a practice that arises in the right way out of our tendency to fulfill our nature in such-and-such respect (here, ostend to a particular tendency built into our nature). Notice that this suggestion no longer makes the norms be what ultimately constitutes the practice.

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Now, here is something that I find quite interesting about all this. Analogous questions come up for marriage. While Cappelen's "no-assertion" theory is controversial and I suspect very much a minority position among philosophers, analogous views of marriage are, I think, going to be quite common among philosophers and other thinkers. These views will hold that there is no such thing as "the norms of marriage", and that there are simply multiple contextually defined practices. To those in the grip of such a "no-marriage" view, the idea that there is a fact of the matter as whether "the" nature of marriage allows this or that is unintelligible. At most there is a family of social practices, much as in suggestion 1.

The idea that there is such a thing as "the norms of marriage", to be investigated by moral and social philosophers, is intrinsically no more problematic than the idea that there is such a thing as "the norm (or norms) of assertion", to be investigated by philosophers of language and epistemologists. Each of the solutions on the side of assertion that I considered as options 2-4 has an analogue in the case of marriage.

I find particularly plausible the idea that marriage is a strongly natural practice with a strong practice magnetism. This allows someone who thinks that the norm of marriage requires monogamy to say that a man in a polygynous culture erroneously thinks that it is possible and permissible to marry more than one person simultaneously. The potential polygamist really is referring to marriage, even if he gets wrong what the norms are.

It may of course be that if you get the norms sufficiently wrong, the practice magnatism no longer pulls you in. Thus, someone who thought that "marriage" is what happens between people whenever they co-write a physics paper, and that the norms of marriage are the norms of co-authorship, would probably be using the word "marriage" in a different sense from us. And her drive for what she calls "marriage" would not be a species of the drive for marital flourishing.

(I do want to say, however, that in fact one of the norms of marriage is that it needs a commitment that is based upon a sufficient understanding of what norms one will have to live by. What kind of understanding is sufficient is a hard question. So we could have a case of someone whose understanding of the norms is sufficiently defective that unbeknownst to him, he is unable to enter into a valid marriage, as he lacks a sufficient understanding of the norms that is needed for the right kind of commitment to them, while at the same time he really wants to get married. That is a tragic situation.)

The supernatural

J.R.R. Tolkien, in On Fairy-Stories, writes:

Supernatural is a dangerous and difficult word in any of its senses, looser or stricter. But to fairies it can hardly be applied, unless super is taken merely as a superlative prefix. For it is man who is, in contrast to the fairies, supernatural (and often of diminutive stature); whereas they are natural, far more natural than he. Such is their doom.

My first (mis)reading of this passage was that fairies are "supernatural" only in an indexical sense: the fairies can say of us that we are "supernatural", since we go beyond their nature, and thus far we can say of them that they are "supernatural". But this reading would have Tolkien allowing that fairies are in some sense "supernatural", and he doesn't seem to want to do that; moreover, this reading can't make sense of "Such is their doom."

I now think that Tolkien's idea is that fairies are tied to nature in a way in which we are not. Their doom is to be spirits associated with the woods and so on, while man has a doom that goes over and beyond nature--a doom to union with or eternal separation from God.

That said, I think one might want to distinguish the absolutely supernatural from the relatively supernatural. The absolutely supernatural is God and that whose concept includes the concept of God, such as union with God. But maybe there is room for an indexical notion of the relatively supernatural: x correctly says that y is supernatural if y has powers that go beyond a mere intensification and/or recombination of the powers of x. In such a case, one could have a world that has both fairies and humans, where the fairies correctly say of the humans that they are supernatural (e.g., because they can engage in intentional tool-making) while the humans correctly say of the fairies that they are supernatural (e.g., because they can directly transmute one object into another).

The distinction between absolutely and relatively supernatural mirrors that between the absolutely and relatively infinite, which I will try to say something about on a later occasion.