Can machines beg the question?

I thank Robert Oerter for his further reply to my recent comments (here, here, and here) on his critique of James Ross’s argument for the immateriality of the intellect.  You will recall that, greatly oversimplified, Ross’s argument is: (A) All formal thinking is determinate, but (B) No physical process is determinate, so (C) No formal thinking is a physical process.  You will also recall that Ross makes use of thought experiments like Kripke’s “quus” example to argue that given only the physical properties of a system, there can be no fact of the matter about whether the system is applying modus ponens, squaring, adding, or computing any other function.  That is what he means by saying that “no physical process is determinate.”  Finally, you’ll recall that among Oerter’s criticisms is that he thinks Ross is being inconsistent.  If we consider Hilda, a human being who can add -- or, as Oerter puts it in his latest post, who can ETPFOA (“execute the ‘pure function’ of addition”) -- then Ross’s argument would, Oerter says, apply to Hilda just as much as to a machine.  Yet Ross, Oerter claims, applies it to the machine but not to Hilda.  Hence the alleged inconsistency.

Oerter’s latest post summarizes his point as follows:

The logic of my Hilda example is straightforward. Ross says that humans can ETPFOA. Ross says that  A, B, and C entail that a computer cannot ETPFOA. I claim that A, B, and C are true for Hilda, too. So A, B, and C entail that Hilda cannot ETPFOA.

With this contradiction, the whole argument falls to pieces. Now, you can argue that I am wrong: that A, B, and C are not true of Hilda. Or you can argue that there is some D that I missed that is true of the computer but not true of Hilda. But you can't say this example is irrelevant to the soundness of Ross's argument.

End quote.  The problem, of course, is that Oerter is blatantly begging the question here.  A, B, and C entail that a computer cannot ETPFOA given the further premise that a machine is purely physical.  And that is a premise that both sides agree on.  But A, B, and C would entail that Hilda cannot ETPFOA only given the further premise that Hilda is purely physical.  And that is something both sides do not agree on; indeed, it is the whole point at issue.

The irony is that Oerter accuses Ross (or at least a reader who defends Ross) of begging the question.  But Ross is doing no such thing.  He would be begging the question in a way parallel to Oerter’s blatant begging of the question only if the further premise he needed was the premise that Hilda is not purely physical.  But that is not the premise he appeals to, and it is not the premise he needs.  Rather, what he needs and what he appeals to is the further premise that Hilda engages in formal thinking.  That premise together with A, B, and C is what generates the conclusion -- not a question-begging assumption but rather a demonstrated result -- that Hilda is not purely physical.

A, B, and C are, after all, only the heart of Ross’s position.  A little more fully spelled out, his overall argument essentially goes something like this:

A. All formal thinking is determinate.

B. No physical process is determinate.

C. No formal thinking is a physical process. [From A and B]

D. Machines are purely physical.

E. Machines do not engage in formal thinking. [From C and D]

F. We engage in formal thinking.

G. We are not purely physical. [From C and F]

The argument is valid, so to undermine it Oerter will have to reject at least one of the premises.  Premise A is one that Oerter has so far not challenged, and Ross defends it by arguing that we cannot coherently deny it.  Premise B is one that Oerter has also so far not done much to challenge.  His strategy was, at first, to suggest (wrongly, as we have seen) that the premise was really epistemological rather than metaphysical.  That failed, and Oerter shifted his focus to trying to argue that Ross was inconsistent in not drawing from B the same conclusion about human beings that he drew about machines.  As we have also seen, that would be irrelevant to the question of whether B is true even if Ross was being inconsistent.  But another thing we have seen is that Ross is not being inconsistent.

So, Oerter has given us no reason to doubt B, and thus he has given us no reason to doubt that Ross has established C.  D, as I have noted, is a premise both sides agree on.  Hence Oerter has also given us no reason to doubt that Ross has established E.  F is a premise which is not only agreed to by both sides -- at least, I assume that Oerter will agree that we engage in formal thinking -- but it is another premise we cannot coherently deny.  Since G follows from these premises -- premises which, again, Oerter has so far given us no reason to doubt -- he has therefore given us no reason to doubt G.  Ross, meanwhile, has given us very good reason -- I would say conclusive reason (for reasons I explain at length in my ACPQ article on Ross) -- to affirm his premises.  Hence he has given us very good reason to affirm G.

So, the score so far is still Ross: 1, Oerter: 0.  1s and 0s being fitting, I guess, given that it’s computers we’re talking about. 

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Some varieties of bullsh*t

Harry Frankfurt’s famous essay “On Bullshit” first appeared back in 1986 and was republished a few years ago in book form.  Though it has surely attracted too much attention from people who get an adolescent thrill out of the idea that they can do philosophy in a way that involves repeatedly saying the word “bullshit,” Frankfurt’s thesis is serious and important.  Bullshitting, Frankfurt argues, is not the same thing as lying.  The liar, like the truth-teller, cares about what is true.  The difference is that the truth-teller conveys it while the liar wants to cover it up.  The bullshitter, by contrast, doesn’t really care one way or the other about the truth.  He isn’t using his communicative faculties for the sake of conveying either truth or falsehood, but rather for some other end, such as promoting himself.

Frankfurt writes:

The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.

This is the crux of the distinction between him and the liar. Both he and the liar represent themselves falsely as endeavoring to communicate the truth. The success of each depends upon deceiving us about that. But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor co conceal it.

End quote.  Frankfurt discusses the example of someone who gives a pompous patriotic speech, every word of which the speaker may well believe to be true.  The reason the speech is bullshit is that the reason for the speech is not what the speaker pretends it to be.  The real aim is not to impress upon the listeners the virtues of their country, but to impress upon them the virtue of the speaker himself.  What he wants them to walk away thinking is not “How wonderful our country is!” but “How wonderful he is for describing our country that way!”

Bullshit of this sort is comparable to sentimentality as Roger Scruton understands it.  On Scruton’s analysis (which I discussed in an earlier post), in sentimentality an emotional state becomes an end in itself rather than something tending to get one to act appropriately in response to the situation that prompted the emotion.  For instance, someone who constantly chats up the plight of the homeless, but without any real interest in finding out why people become homeless or what ways of helping them are really effective, might plausibly be described as merely sentimental.  “How awful things are for the homeless!” is not really the thought that moves him.  What really moves him is the thought: “How wonderful I am to think of how awful things are for the homeless!”

Bullshit, or at least some bullshit, is like this.  It is speech pointing back at the speaker rather than at the world, just like sentimentality is emotion pointing back at the one feeling it rather than at the situation that prompted it.  Also like sentimentality, bullshit can serve the ends of a group or a cause rather than an individual.  We can luxuriate in the thought of how wonderful we are for collectively feeling compassionate (or outraged, or patriotic, or loyal, or whatever) just as much as I can luxuriate in the thought of how wonderful I am for feeling that way.  Similarly, bullshit can be directed at getting people to think well of some group, institution, or cause just as much as at promoting oneself.

Meta-bullshit

Here’s one genre of literature that smells to me suspiciously like bullshit: the books aping Frankfurt’s essay, with “bullshit” or other vulgarities or obscenities in their titles, which have appeared since the book version of “On Bullshit” became a bestseller in 2005.  (For some examples, click through the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” section on Amazon’s page for Frankfurt’s book.)  Ostensibly, such books are meant to put forward serious philosophical or cultural analyses of the phenomena named by this or that dirty word. 

Could it be, though, that the motivating thought is not: “This is an important phenomenon that demands a book-length analysis,” but rather: “Maybe I can make myself look like an excitingly transgressive thinker, and earn a few bucks along the way, by spouting some pseudo-philosophical pretentious bullshit about cuss words like ‘bullshit’”?

Just askin’.  If the answer is Yes, we might call this bullshit about bullshit -- meta-bullshit. 

(I just know someone out there is about to jump straight to the combox to label this blog post “meta-meta-bullshit.”  Sorry, just beat you to it.) 

Another kind of meta-bullshit is common in discussions of politics.  That politicians trade in bullshit has, needless to say, become a cliché.  Indeed, it has become such a cliché that one suspects that the “All politicians are bullshitters” meme is itself a kind of bullshit.  It is often intended to call our attention, not to political reality so much as to the putative moral superiority and sophistication of the speaker.  Many a comedian has built a career on such a pose of knowing cynicism.  Think of George Carlin (who was, to be sure, often very funny), or Bill Maher (not so much) -- people often as “full of it” as the politicians they ridicule. 

This brand of meta-bullshit is especially risible coming from people who profess to be lovers of democracy.  For as any reader of Plato’s critique of democracy in The Republic knows, the democratic ethos -- with its pretence that all the views and ways of life prevalent in a pluralistic society be regarded as worthy of equal respect -- inevitably tends toward bullshit.  A politician who spoke with complete frankness -- who said exactly what he thought about those views and ways of life among his fellow citizens that he didn’t share, which is bound to be most of them -- would never get elected, and would no doubt tick off most of those people who claim they want politicians to speak frankly.

Frankfurt calls attention himself to one way in which democracy breeds bullshit:

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic are more excessive than his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled — whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others — to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. Closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country’s affairs. The lack of any significant connection between a person’s opinions and his apprehension of reality will be even more severe, needless to say, for someone who believes it his responsibility, as a conscientious moral agent, to evaluate events and conditions in all parts of the world.

End quote.  Frankfurt also regards skepticism and “’anti-realist’ doctrines” as sources of bullshit -- and skepticism and anti-realist doctrines like relativism are, as every reader of Plato also knows, fostered by democracy.    Where confidence in our ability to know objective truth wanes, what replaces it, Frankfurt observes, is “an alternative ideal of sincerity.”  Here, as with bullshit and sentimentalism, we see attention turned inward, to the subject and his attitudes toward the world rather than to the world itself.  Sincerity in the expression of one’s views, rather than their correctness or rational justifiability, becomes the watchword.  Thus are we led to a situation in which, as Frankfurt says, “sincerity itself is bullshit.”

To complain, Ross Perot-style, that democracy would be great if only it weren’t for the bullshit of politicians, is like saying that pornography would be great if it weren’t for all the nudity.  You want pornography, you’re going to get nudity.  You want democracy, you’re going to gets lots of bullshit.  That doesn’t mean Churchill wasn’t right that bad as democracy is, everything else is even worse.  But if he was right, it is foolish -- and often just bullshit -- to pretend it could be much better, or that politicians are especially at fault for its being as bad as it is.

Philosophical bullshit

I was trained in analytic philosophy, which, despite the regrettable tendency of some (though by no means all) of its practitioners toward scientism, is not a bad preparation for Scholastic philosophy.  For analytic philosophers, like Scholastics, value conceptual precision, rigorous argumentation, and clarity of expression.  Accordingly, analytic philosophers often regard modern continental philosophers -- the sort who write and argue like Hegel, or Heidegger, or even worse -- as bullshit-peddlers, sometimes with good reason.  

But the methods of analytic philosophy can lend themselves to a different kind of bullshit.  One should at least suspect its presence in an author when symbolism and other formal techniques that could easily be dispensed with without loss of rigor and with a great gain in readability are used anyway; or when paragraph after paragraph is devoted to the tedious examination of variations on variations of implausible views that no one, including the author, actually holds or is ever likely to hold.  One wonders of at least some philosophers who write like this whether they are less interested in facilitating philosophical understanding than in demonstrating their own cleverness or trying to give a banal piece of work the appearance of gravitas. 

I’ll give one example, because it’s someone I otherwise admire.  Plus he’s dead.  Robert Nozick was undeniably brilliant and often very interesting even when he was wrong.  I wrote my first book about him, and while I no longer accept the libertarianism I defended therein, the arguments he gave for that position are serious and worthy of philosophical attention.  So too is much of his other work.  He had a well-known tendency, though, to explore ideas just for the sake of exploring them, even when he was not inclined to take them too seriously.  While there is nothing necessarily wrong with that, the result could sometimes be page after tedious page of explorations of various riffs on ideas that were just non-starters.  The chapter in Philosophical Explorations on why there is something rather than nothing, which I discussed in a post some time back, is like that.  (“Nothingness force” anyone?)  So too, in my view, is the chapter in Invariancesdiscussing various ways a relativist might try to make his position coherent.  One is sometimes tempted to say: “Nozick, I admire your intellect, your breadth of knowledge, your wit.  But come on -- you know this is bullshit!” 

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Do machines compute functions?

Robert Oerter has now replied to my most recent post about his criticisms of James Ross’s argument for the immateriality of the intellect.  Let me begin my rejoinder with a parable.  Suppose you presented someone with the argument: All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal.  He says he is unconvinced.  Puzzled, you ask him why.  He replies that he is surprised that you think Socrates is mortal, given that you believe in the immortality of the soul.  He adds that all you’ve done in any case is to make an epistemological point about what we know about Socrates, and not really given any reason to think that Socrates is mortal.  For though the conclusion does, he concedes, follow from the premises, and the premises are supported by the evidence, maybe for all we know there is still somehow more to men than what the premises tell us.

You point out in response that given what you mean by “mortal,” there is no conflict here with the idea of the immortality of the soul, which is in any event completely irrelevant to the subject at hand.  You also point out that the fact that we can raise eccentric epistemological questions about the premises doesn’t entail that the argument is at all doubtful, much less that it is making a merely epistemological point.  And of course, as you also point out in passing, it is at any rate very odd to read the “All men are mortal” argument as epistemological given the way it has always been understood.

He now responds that you have not addressed his objections, since what matters is not that the argument has always been intendedin a non-epistemological way, but whether it really is non-epistemological.  He also suggests that you are employing a double standard insofar as if you were consistent you would say that Socrates’ wife Xanthippe is mortal too, and yet you don’t talk about women but only men. 

You patiently note in reply that you haveaddressed his objections and that the passing remark about how the argument has always been understood was not the main point.  And you also note that there is no inconsistency, since “men” is obviously being used in the inclusive sense, intended to apply to female human beings as well as to male ones. 

His rejoinder is to insist that what the argument says is that all men are mortal, and that it quite clearly makes no reference to women.  Hence you are (he insists) not representing the argument correctly. 

At this point, as the Twilight Zone theme starts to play in your mind, you might have thoughts like the following.  First, none of what your interlocutor has said casts any serious doubt on the validity of the “All men are mortal” argument or on the truth of its premises.  It mostly doesn’t even really address the argument at all but just dances around it.  Hence you might wonder what on earth your interlocutor is going on about, and why he thinks it matters.   For that reason you would be baffled by the fact that he thinks he has somehow “sunk” the argument (as he confidently says he has).  If you were in an uncharitable mood, you might at least be tempted to wonder whether he is, after all, less interested in trying to understand and evaluate the argument than in coming up with ways to resist a conclusion he doesn’t like.  More charitably, you might think he is just confused. 

I must say that thoughts like these are increasingly going through my mind as this exchange continues.  Ross’s basic argument, you’ll recall, is: (A) All formal thinking is determinate, but (B) No physical process is determinate, so (C) No formal thinking is a physical process.  This is greatly oversimplified since Ross says a lot in defense of each premise, but that’s the basic structure.  The argument is valid, so to undermine it a critic would have to show that at least one of the premises is false.   Ross’s main considerations in favor of (A) have to do with the incoherence of trying to deny it.  Oerter has so far offered no response at all to (A) or the arguments for it.  He has focused instead on (B), and his main contention has been that the indeterminacy in question is really epistemological rather than metaphysical.  I have shown that he has not established this at all, and he has failed to respond to my criticisms.  Instead he has turned to questions of Ross exegesis, taking issue with what I said in the following passage from my previous post:

Part of the problem here might be that Oerter is not carefully distinguishing the following two claims:

(1) There just is no fact of the matter, period, about what function a system is computing.

(2) The physical properties of a system by themselves don’t suffice to determine what function it is computing.

Oerter sometimes writes as if what Ross is claiming is (1), but that is not correct.  Ross is not denying, for example, that your pocket calculator is really adding rather than “quadding” (to allude to Kripke’s example).  He is saying that the physical facts about the machine by themselves do not suffice to determine this.  Something more is needed (in this case, the intentions of the designers and users of the calculator). 

Oerter insists that I am misunderstanding Ross here.  As we will see in a moment, I am not misunderstanding him at all, but it is important to emphasize that even if I were, that would be completely irrelevant to the question of whether the argument for the immateriality of the intellect that we are debating is sound.  For one thing, and quite obviously, whether or not I have gotten Ross right on some exegetical matter is irrelevant to whether premises (A) and (B) of the argument in question are true, and whether the conclusion (C) follows from them.  So Oerter is, whether he realizes it or not, just changing the subject.  For another thing, it is not just Ross’sviews that are in question here, but mine.  And I can assure Oerter that what I am claiming is (2) rather than (1).  So, even if what he had to say in his latest post was relevant to the cogency of Ross’s version of the argument in question, it wouldn’t affect my own version of it.

But as I say, Oerter just gets Ross wrong anyway.  In criticism of my claim that Ross is asserting (2) rather than (1), Oerter cites the following passage from p. 142 of Ross’s article “Immaterial Aspects of Thought”:

If the machine is not really adding in the single case, no matter how many actual outputs seem "right," say, for all even  numbers taken pairwise (see the qualifying comments in notes 7 and 10 about incoherent totalities), had all relevant cases been included, there would have been nonsums.  Kripke drew a skeptical conclusion from such facts, that it is indeterminate which function the machine satisfies, and thus "there is no fact of the matter" as to whether it adds or not. He ought to conclude, instead, that it is not adding; that if it is indeterminate (physically and logically, not just epistemically) which function is realized among incompossible functions, none of them is. That follows from the logical requirement, for each such function, that any realization of it must be of it and not of an incompossible one. [emphasis added]

End quote.  On the basis of this, Oerter triumphantly concludes: “Ross is quite clear: he is not saying (2) at all. Neither is he saying (1). He is saying something stronger than either (1) or (2): the machine does not add - period.”

Pretty damning, huh?  Well, no.  For what Oerter does not do is quote the very next paragraph from Ross’s paper, which completely undermines his interpretation.  Here it is:

There is no doubt, then, as to what the machine is doing. It adds, calculates, recalls, etc., by simulation. What it does gets the name of what we do, because it reliably gets the results we do (perhaps even more reliably than we do) when we add by a distinct process. The machine adds the way puppets walk. The names are analogous. The machine attains enough reliability, stability, and economy of output to achieve realism without reality. A flight simulator has enough realism for flight training; you are really trained, but you were not really flying. [emphasis added]

End quote.  So, Ross plainly does say that there is a sense in which the machine adds -- a sense that involves simulation, analogy, something that is “adding” in the way that what a puppet does is “walking.”  How can that be given what he says in the passage Oerter quotes?  The answer is obvious: The machine “adds” relative to the intentions of the designers and users, just as a puppet “walks” relative to the motions of the puppeteer. The puppet has no power to walk on its own and the machine has no power to do adding (as opposed to “quadding,” say) on its own.  But something from outside the system -- the puppeteer in the one case, the designers and users in the other -- are also part of the larger context, and taken together with the physical properties of the system result in “walking” or “adding” of a sort. 

In short, Ross says just what I said he says.

Evidently the reason Oerter thinks all this is worth spilling pixels over is that he thinks his “Hilda” example shows that Ross is being inconsistent, and he needs for me to have gotten Ross wrong in order to make his “Hilda” example work.  I have already explained, in my previous post, why Ross is not at all being inconsistent.  But even if he were, it wouldn’t matter.  The alleged inconsistency, you’ll recall, is that Ross treats Hilda as adding despite the fact that we can’t tell from her physical properties alone whether she is, whereas he does not treat the machine as adding despite the fact that we can’t tell from its physical properties alone whether it is.  Suppose he really were inconsistent in this way.  How does that show that premise (B) of his argument is false (much less that (A) is false, or that the conclusion doesn’t follow)? 

Answer: It doesn’t.  The most such an inconsistency would show is that Ross needs to clarify what is going on with Hilda that isn’t going on with the machine.  And there are several ways he can do this consistent with the argument.  First, he could say what I would say (and what, as I have shown, he does in fact say himself, despite what Oerter thinks) -- namely that the machine does add in a sense, but just not by virtue of its physical properties alone.  There is perfect consistency here -- both systems, Hilda and the machine, add (albeit in analogous senses), but neither does so in virtue of its physical properties alone.

Second, he could opt for a Cartesian view of human nature and say that Hilda’s physical properties are in no sense involved in her adding.  Both the machine and Hilda’s brain are, on this interpretation, utterly devoid, even in an analogous sense, of anything like addition.  The difference is that Hilda’s body is associated with a Cartesian res cogitans that is what is really doing the adding.  There is perfect consistency here too, since Ross would be treating both physical systems -- the machine and Hilda’s body -- exactly alike.  This option might open up the epistemological question of how we can know Hilda’s res cogitans exists, but as I have emphasized ad nauseam, such epistemological issues are irrelevant to the metaphysical issue.  But this is, in any event, not Ross’s view, since his dualism is not of the Cartesian sort but rather of the Scholastic sort.  He makes clear on the very first page of the paper that he holds only that “truth-carrying thoughts cannot be wholly physical (though they might have a physical medium)” [my emphasis] and he adds in footnote 5 that:

But in part [physical], yes, in the sense that my utterances are physical. Moreover, the thought may not even be possible apart from feeling or sense, just as a gesture is not possible without bodily movement. The target in this paper is theories that thoughts are "no more than" physical or functions determined physically; not that, for us, they are "at least physically realized."

Third, Ross could even decide to deny that Hilda, any more than the machine, is adding -- that is to say, he could opt to become an eliminative materialist.  That is, in effect, what writers like Churchland, Rosenberg, et al. do.  They essentially accept the argument from (A) and (B) to (C) and in order to hold on to physicalism just conclude that there is, in the strict sense, no formal thinking rather than that there is formal thinking and that it is immaterial. 

Of course, Ross would not want to take either the second or third option, but the point is that merely to accuse him of inconsistency vis-à-vis the “Hilda” example does nothing to undermine his argument, but at most raises questions about what lessons to draw from it.  And Ross not only has an “out” with the first option -- it is just what he always had in mind all along.

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Oerter on indeterminacy and the unknown

I thank Robert Oerter for his reply to my recent comments on his criticism of James Ross’s argument for the immateriality of the intellect.  Please do go read his reply -- and never fear, he is a much less long-winded fellow than I am -- as well as my own previous post (If you haven’t done so already), before reading the following response.

Oerter repeats his claim that “Ross's argument never gets him beyond epistemological indeterminacy.”  Oddly, Oerter writes: “Oddly, Feser doesn't specifically respond to my criticism.”  What is odd about this is that I did respond quite specifically, and at length, to that criticism, though it appears Oerter has missed the point of what I wrote.  He seems to think that my entire response to the objection in question consists in my calling attention to the fact that Ross, and Kripke (whose work Ross makes use of), explicitly present their arguments as metaphysical rather than epistemological. 

But that was just a passing remark -- rather than the substance of my reply -- and I had a good reason for making it.  Oerter had in his earlier post quite reasonably called attention to comments of Ross’s that seemed to imply that the considerations he was raising really had only epistemological rather than metaphysical import.  Those comments naturally raised questions about how to interpret what Ross was saying, so it was relevant to call attention to passages wherein he and Kripke make clear that they intended a metaphysical rather than merely epistemological reading.
 

But of course Oerter is quite right to insist that what matters at the end of the day is whether their arguments really dohave metaphysical rather than merely epistemological significance, not whether they intended them to have it.  But as I argued in my previous post, the significance really is indeed metaphysical.

Let’s get metaphysical

Recall my point that there is nothing in the physical properties of the symbol Δ that entails that what it represents is a triangle, or black triangles specifically, or a dunce cap, or a triangular UFO, or anything else for that matter; and that neither is there anything in the physical properties of the sequence T-R-I-A-N-G-L-E that entails that it signifies triangles themselves, or the word “triangle,” or a guy who calls himself “Triangle,” etc.  Notice that this is not an epistemological point.  To point out that having the properties being of such-and-such a shape, or being of such-and-such a color, or being written in ink with such-and-such a chemical structure, simply do not entail having the property representing a dunce cap, is precisely to make a metaphysical point.  The claim isn’t: “Given what we happen to know about ink chemistry, color, shape, etc., physical properties of that sort don’t entail this meaning rather than that one.”  The claim is rather: “Given what ink chemistry, color, shape, etc. are, objectively, physical properties of that sort don’t entail this meaning rather than that one.”

Now, Ross’s and Kripke’s point is that the same thing is true of all physical symbols and all physical processes, no matter how complex.  There is in principle nothing in any of them that entails one specific meaning rather than another.  Oerter himself appears to admit this.  He essentially conceded in his original post that none of the past physical properties of a machine (say) by themselves entail that it is computing this specific function rather than that one.  He suggested that the futurebehavior of the machine might tell us, but as I pointed out in the previous post -- and Oerter has not responded to this point -- Ross’s and Kripke’s argument is completely unaffected even if we add not only all future, but all possible, physical behavior of the machine.  Claiming that this is merely an epistemological point is no more plausible than saying that it is just an epistemological point to note that none of the physical properties of Δ entail a particular meaning. 

To see how Oerter’s recourse to epistemology misfires, compare the following: Suppose someone claimed that having the property being under nine feet tall followed necessarily upon having the property being a physicist.  You point out to him that there is nothing in what it is to be a physicist that entails being under nine feet tall, and that to suppose otherwise simply because all actual physicists have been under nine feet tall is to commit a fallacy of accident.  Even if it were someday discovered that it is biologically impossible for a human being to be taller than nine feet, it wouldn’t be the property being a physicist, specifically, that rules this out.  Suppose your interlocutor responded: “Well, sure, but that’s just an epistemological point.  Given everything we know, we can’t deduce just from someone’s being a physicist that he is under nine feet tall.  But maybe there is something about being a physicist that we don’t yet know that entails being under nine feet tall.”

Of suppose, alternatively, that someone denied that the Pythagorean theorem is true.  You point out to him that it has been proven many times over.  Suppose he replies: “Well, sure, but that’s just an epistemologicalpoint.  Maybe, for all we know, all the proofs have been in error and we just haven’t discovered the errors yet.  Hence the supposed proofs don’t really tell us anything about geometry itself, but just about what we know about geometry.” 

Both of these responses would, needless to say, be silly.  Raising far-fetched epistemological questions about a metaphysical claim doesn’t magically transform the metaphysical claim itself into an epistemological claim.  But Oerter’s objection to Ross is no better than the responses given in these imagined scenarios.  It is silly to say: “Sure, I concede that all possible physical facts together do not entail that a machine is computing this function rather than that, but maybe that’s just a fact about our knowledge rather than a fact about reality.”  It is hard to see how this differs from a desperate recourse to skepticism as a way of avoiding falsification.  It’s a ploy that could be used to “refute” anyargument one doesn’t like: “Sure, the evidence entails p, but that doesn’t show us anything about p itself, but only about what we know about the evidence.  It’s really just an epistemological point.”

There’s something about Hilda

Part of the problem here might be that Oerter is not carefully distinguishing the following two claims:

(1) There just is no fact of the matter, period, about what function a system is computing.

(2) The physical properties of a system by themselves don’t suffice to determine what function it is computing.

Oerter sometimes writes as if what Ross is claiming is (1), but that is not correct.  Ross is not denying, for example, that your pocket calculator is really adding rather than “quadding” (to allude to Kripke’s example).  He is saying that the physical facts about the machine by themselves do not suffice to determine this.  Something more is needed (in this case, the intentions of the designers and users of the calculator). 

Perhaps the reason Oerter thinks his “That’s just an epistemological point” response is plausible is that he has examples like this in the back of his mind -- cases where the physical facts alone don’t tell us what function a machine is computing, but where we have other information that does tell us.  What he fails to see is that while this is perfectly true, it doesn’t help his case at all, because the information in question is not information derived from the physical facts about the system itself.  And that’s just Ross’s point.  It is (2), rather than (1), that Ross is arguing for.

Of course, Ross also thinks what is true of machines is true of human beings.  That is to say, the physical facts about human beings by themselves don’t determine what content their thoughts have, what functions they are computing, and so forth.  But he doesn’t think there is no fact of the matter about what content their thoughts have, what functions they are computing, etc., any more than he does in the case of the calculator.  He thinks, in both cases, that there is a fact of the matter but that something other than the physical facts about the system determines what it is.  In the case of machines, what determines it is human designers and users, who are of course distinct from the machines.  In the case of human beings, it is an immaterial aspect of human nature. 

This brings us to a further claim of Oerter’s, to the effect that Ross is applying a “double standard” insofar as he does not (so Oerter mistakenly thinks) apply to human beings the argument he applies to machines.  Oerter writes:

Note that Ross's argument is just as valid when talking about what another person is doing when (say) adding. That is, when I am trying to determine whether Hilda is actually adding, or merely simulating adding, all I can do is investigate her physical actions and responses. If Ross's argument is correct, then from a finite amount of data such as these I cannot determine whether Hilda is adding or not. So (if Ross is right) I can never know whether another person is capable of addition.

But note that from the above it doesn't follow that Hilda is not adding. It may be that Hilda is in fact doing something perfectly determinate. I just can't know whether she is or not. So it is clear that Ross's argument doesn't get us past the epistemological.

This point ties in with my second complaint about Ross: the double standard. If I can't say for sure that another person is not adding, then by the same token I cannot say for sure that a machine is not adding.

End quote.  The trouble with this is that Oerter implicitly supposes that Ross, to be consistent, would have to say that there is no fact of the matter about whether Hilda is adding.  But that is not the case.  What is true is that Ross, to be consistent, would have to say that whether Hilda is adding cannot be determined from the physical facts about Hilda by themselves.  And that is precisely what Ross does say.  In Ross’s view, something additional to the physical facts must, in Hilda’s case no less than in the machine’s case, determine what function she is computing (even if it is a different “something additional” in each case).  So there is no double standard here at all. 

I leave aside the question of how we, as observers of her actions, can know whether Hilda is really adding -- and is not just a zombie -- which is, of course, a variation on the “problem of other minds.”  That simply isn’t relevant to Ross’s argument.  All that is relevant is that if Hilda is in fact adding, it can’t be the physical facts about her alone that metaphysically determine that she is.  Again, Ross is not talking about epistemology (“How do we know a system is computing such-and-such a function?”) but metaphysics (“By virtue of what facts about a system is it computing such-and-such a function?”).  Here as elsewhere, Oerter can’t seem to see the difference between an epistemological issue and a metaphysical one, and reads his own confusion into Ross, Kripke, and me.

Oerter rightly points out that Kripke’s paradox, unlike Ross’s argument, is supposed by Kripke to entail that there would be no fact of the matter even in one’s own case (forget about Hilda’s case) about what one’s thoughts mean.  But as I explain in my ACPQ article (wherein I discuss this issue in detail), Kripke and others draw this conclusion because they overlook a number of independently-motivated distinctions commonly drawn by Scholastics.  Kripke’s paradox is in any event also metaphysical rather than epistemological.  And since it is (Ross and I argue) incoherent to deny that one’s own thoughts have determinate meaning, and yet this is what would follow if thought were purely material, it follows that thought cannot be purely material. 

Nor, I should add in response to a comment from one of Oerter’s less intelligent readers, does this entail a belief in “ectoplasmic goo” (whatever that is) as an alternative “explanation” of thought.  Of course, neither Ross nor I believe in any such thing, and this is just one of the usual question-begging straw men flung at non-materialists.  It assumes that the dispute between materialism and dualism is a matter of competing “explanatory hypotheses,” and that to affirm the existence of what is immaterial is to posit a kind of “stuff” that is kind of like matter (“goo” or the like) only more rarefied -- all of which evinces a basic ignorance of what philosophical dualists have actually said.  It also reflects an inability to rise above crude imagistic thinking - that is to say, an inability to think, in the strict sense.  But we should not put the foibles of some of Oerter’s readers on his account!

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