I have spent my whole adult life as a libertarian or classical liberal of one kind or another. And throughout this long period—for I am not young—I have been puzzled as to whether I should think of myself as leftwing or rightwing or centrist, or whether I should, like many libertarians, reject the conventional left–right political spectrum altogether. So now, herewith I propose to try to sort this out.
Continue readingAuthor Archives: David Potts
First Thoughts on Pettit’s Republicanism
I want to get some basic thoughts on Philip Pettit’s book, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, on the record. Pettit’s ideas have the virtue of being not so far out in left field (from my own perspective) as to be hopeless, yet strange enough to be difficult to grapple with. What follows really are just some first thoughts, not very elegantly expressed, and not very certain.
Continue readingSunstein versus Hayek on the Rule of Law
We’ve been doing some philosophy of law in the PoT reading group lately, and a recent piece came up by Cass Sunstein on “The Rule of Law.” The abstract claims that “this [Sunstein’s] account of the rule of law conflicts with those offered by (among many others) Friedrich Hayek and Morton Horwitz, who conflate the idea with other, quite different ideas and practices.” This statement caught my attention because Sunstein’s account of the rule of law seems very sensible. It is in fact quite similar to the account given by our current reading group book author Lon Fuller (that’s how Sunstein’s piece came up), which also seems sensible. At the same time, I am a strong admirer of Hayek. So, if the sensible Sunstein/Fuller account of the rule of law conflicts with Hayek’s, what’s the conflict? What “different ideas and practices” does Hayek “conflate” the rule of law with? Essentially none, it turns out. Sunstein’s, Fuller’s, and Hayek’s conceptions of the rule of law are largely the same. Sunstein misunderstands Hayek’s argument that the rule of law requires economic freedom. At least, so I will argue in what follows.
Continue readingConclusion: Three Arguments against Reference, Part 5
If I’ve accomplished nothing else in this series (previous post here), I hope to have somewhat dispersed the intimidating air that surrounds both Putnam’s model-theoretic argument and the current discussion of Newman’s objection. This air has two sources, I think.
First, both arguments make heavy use of formal model theory. Formal logic, model theory, and especially metatheory are imposing bodies of technical knowledge. They are mathematical. Most philosophers are only minimally acquainted with them. Most graduate programs in philosophy today no longer require students to take metatheory, and even in the old days, the requirement was generally limited to a single course. I would imagine that over ninety-five percent of professional philosophers today could not tell you off the top of their heads what the Löwenheim–Skolem theorems even say. The point is that when people like Hilary Putnam and Michael Friedman start talking about Shoenfield absoluteness and ω-models, nearly all their listeners know they can’t talk to them as equals on that subject.
Continue readingStructural Realism and Newman’s Objection: Three Arguments against Reference, Part 4
It’s now time for me to make a small confession, which is that I don’t care very much really about Hilary Putnam’s late-career misadventures with “internalism.” When I first went off to philosophy grad school many long years ago, Reason, Truth, and History was still relatively new and much talked about. I obtained a copy, but I could never get past chapter one. His arguments entailed certain claims that seemed to be just too obviously wrong. They still seem so to me now, and I have emphasized them in previous posts in this series. One is that a brain in a vat would not be able to think about whether it was a brain in a vat, even though the phenomenology of its thoughts would be identical to that of a normal, embodied person thinking (apparently) about being a brain in a vat. That entails that the brain in a vat has no idea what it is thinking about outside its own mind—and by the same token that neither do we. Another is that no natural relation, whether causation or anything else, can determine the referents of our thoughts and percepts, so that—assuming we reject “Platonism”—we have to admit that our thoughts and percepts do not have mind-independent referents. As I say, these claims seemed obviously false, even silly. Neither did it seem like the best use of time to delve deeply into Putnam’s reasoning and try to sort out what was wrong.
On the other hand, I do care about structural realism, which I have come to think is true but which has been bedeviled in recent decades by an argument essentially similar to Putnam’s model-theoretic argument. It has been to better understand and reply to the argument against structural realism that I have at long last performed the examination of Putnam’s model-theoretic argument presented in the previous posts in this series.
In the present post, I explain the argument against structural realism—which by now can be seen in fact to present no great difficulty—and comment briefly on the abysmal state of current discussion of structural realism. (The whole paper on which these posts are based is available here. To return to the third post in the series, click here. To skip to the fifth and final post, click here.)
Continue readingThe Status of the Model-Theoretic Argument: Three Arguments against Reference, Part 3
The previous post in this series presented Hilary Putnam’s “model-theoretic argument” to the effect that no representational system whatsoever, including natural language and mental states such as thoughts and percepts, can refer to anything definite unless the assignment is made externally by an agent outside the representational system or “Platonically” by means of some non-natural access to the domain of reference. For example, the little airplane icons on an air traffic controller’s screen can be assigned to specific planes because one can see both the icons and the planes—sometimes just by looking out of the control tower window—to map the icons to the planes. But when it comes to thought and perception, we have no such independent access to the intended referents. How in that case is any determinate mapping possible? Putnam’s claim, which the model-theoretic argument is intended to establish, is that, barring some “Platonic” cognitive channel to external reality that cannot be explained by natural science, no determinate mapping is possible. Therefore, our thoughts and percepts have no truth conditions that depend on the mind-independent world being any one way rather than any other. This is what Putnam calls “internal realism.”
In the present post, we critically examine the model-theoretic argument. (The whole paper on which these posts are based is available here. To advance to the next post in the series, click here.)
Continue readingHilary Putnam’s Model-Theoretic Argument for “Internal Realism”: Three Arguments against Reference, Part 2
The first post in this series examined Hilary Putnam’s famous argument that a “brain in a vat” (BIV) could not know that it was a BIV—or even think or wonder whether it was a BIV—because its words and thoughts would lack the causal-perceptual links to vats and brains in its environment needed for them to refer to those objects. However, as I said in that first post, for Putnam the BIV argument was just a warm-up exercise. He uses the traditional BIV scenario to illustrate what he regards as the key error of “metaphysical realism” (the view that our percepts and thoughts refer to mind-independent things): that it necessarily relies on a God’s Eye perspective from which we can determine what mind-independent things our percepts and thoughts refer to. Of course, there is no God’s Eye perspective available to human beings, and that is why the project of metaphysical realism must end in failure. Thus, Putnam’s real view is that even if the BIV had the same causal-perceptual embedding in its environment that we enjoy, it would make no difference! Its percepts and thoughts would still not refer to mind-independent things. Reference to mind-independent things is impossible in general. The traditional worry about whether you could be a BIV is a useful entrée to these issues because it presupposes metaphysical realism. Only a metaphysical realist would or could worry about being a BIV, because only if the objects of thought were mind-independent would it be possible to be so radically in error about the nature of one’s environment.
Why does Putnam think that only a God’s Eye perspective can determine the reference of our thoughts and percepts? The reason is given in the so-called “model-theoretic argument” that Putnam presents in each of the three works I mentioned in the first post (“Realism and Reason” [R&R], “Models and Reality” [M&R], and Reason, Truth, and History [RT&H]. In the present post, I explain the argument and the “internal realist” view that Putnam advocates on the basis of it. In the next post, we will examine the merits of the model-theoretic argument. (The whole paper on which these posts are based is available here. To skip to the third post in the series, click here.)
Continue readingCould Hilary Putnam Have Been a Brain in a Vat?: Three Arguments against Reference, Part 1
In previous posts (such as this one and this one), I have sometimes alluded to the philosophy of structural realism. Structural realism says that we are unable to know the intrinsic character of the world outside our minds, although we are able to know a great deal about the structure of that world, especially its causally relevant features. Thus, we can know what we need to know to survive and thrive in our environment, we just can’t know what it is like intrinsically. For instance, we cannot know whether the surfaces of objects have the colors they appear to have in our visual perceptions of them or the hot and cold qualities we feel them to have, etc. Even the intrinsic character of spatial relations may not be as it appears to us. Still, the structure and dynamics of all these things is accessible to us—which is fortunate, because that is what matters for successful action.
I think structural realism is true and indeed inescapable. However, discussion of it in philosophy today is blighted by obsession with something called “Newman’s Objection,” after Max Newman, a Cambridge mathematician who published an important critique of Bertrand Russell’s version of structural realism as advanced in Russell’s book, The Analysis of Matter (1927). In my view, Newman rightly identified an important flaw in Russell’s structural realism, but not in structural realism per se, which has many options available for removing the difficulty. Unfortunately, many philosophers today, including many structural realists, treat Newman’s Objection against Russell (and subsequent formulations essentially like Russell’s), unless it can be refuted somehow, as a decisive refutation of structural realism itself. The result has been a lamentable lack of progress in developing the implications and insights of structural realism.
In what follows, I will explain how I think Newman’s Objection should best be handled and why it is a paper tiger. However, I have chosen to do so via an analysis of a much more well-known argument that in its essentials is practically identical with Newman’s, namely Hilary Putnam’s “model-theoretic argument” against the possibility that the terms of natural language or of our thoughts and percepts can have determinate referents in the mind-independent world.
This means that “what follows” is going to be a long haul! If anyone wants to read the whole paper in one fell swoop, it can be found here. Here at PoT, I will send it out in five installments, of which this post is the first. In this first installment, I begin with Putnam’s own warm-up exercise: his argument that a “brain in a vat” would be unable even to think that it was a brain in a vat. (To skip to the second installment, click here.)
Continue readingEstlund’s Defense of Ideal Political Theory
In “Human Nature and the Limits (If Any) of Political Philosophy,” (2011) David Estlund defends what are sometimes called “ideal” or utopian political theories against the charge of being incompatible with human nature. For example, a utopian socialist or egalitarian political theory might require a degree of selflessness from the citizenry that it is entirely unrealistic to expect flesh and blood humans to possess. Therefore, it is said, the political theory is defective and false. To this familiar objection, the familiar reply from defenders of utopian political theory is to claim that human nature is indeed up to the demands of their theory, or at least it will be once the dog-eat-dog pressures imposed by capitalism have been swept away and we enter the New Jerusalem.
But Estlund does not take this tack. What distinguishes his defense of utopian political theory is a willingness to agree for the sake of argument that we can know in advance that people will never bring themselves to act as the theory requires—which means he acknowledges that the theory should never be implemented, since to do so would bring catastrophic social dysfunction. Nevertheless, this does not invalidate the theory! Such a utopian political theory would remain the normative ideal: we ought to rebuild society on the model it prescribes and comply with its moral demands on our personal actions. Only, since we will never so comply, we ought not to rebuild society in the way it prescribes. But that does not mean there is anything wrong with the theory.
In what follows, I will elaborate and critique Estlund’s argument. TL;DR: The main thrust of his argument makes a valid and interesting point, but not one that saves ideal theory’s bacon.
Continue readingGerald Gaus on the Primacy of Individual Moral Perspectives
In “Social Morality and the Primacy of Individual Perspectives” (2017), Gerald Gaus responds to critics of his The Order of Public Reason (2011) as part of symposium on that book. I presume The Tyranny of the Ideal (2016) is a continuation of the ideas earlier and more formally developed in the 2011 book. The 2017 essay is valuable because it aims to “sketch a modest of recasting of the analysis” presented in the 2011 book. That is, more or less the whole argument of 2011 is restated in new terms, and obviously much abbreviated. The following is a brief summary of the argument and one of its implications.
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Policy of Truth 