Christian List: A Passage

Here's a passage from the book WHY FREE WILL IS REAL by Christian List. of the London School of Economics.

At one point (p. 74) List recommends what he calls the "naturalistic ontological attitude," that is, the view that "our best guide to any questions about which entities, properties, or phenomena exist in any given domain is to be found in our best scientific theories of that domain."

This is why we believe, and rightly, in the reality of gravitational force, electromagnetic fields, and much more recently the Higgs boson. "To follow up by asking whether they are 'really' real would be to ask one question too many."

Likewise it is, he says, with intentional agency -- the fact that some things happen because some human beings want to accomplish something, and have specific enumerable ideas about how those things can be accomplished -- we naturally regard intentional agency as existing because "our best theories in the human and behavioral sciences" invoke such agency.

Thus there is a proper syllogistic chain here.

P1. If our best theories in the proper domain holds that X exists, X exists.
P2. The proper domain in the case of intentional agency consists of the human and behavioral sciences.
Conclusion 1. If our theories in the human and behavioral sciences hold that intentional agency exists, it does.
P3. Our best theories in those sciences do so hold.
Conclusion 2. Intentional agency exists.

The contrary to P1 would be a functionalist understanding of such hypotheses as gravitational force. A positivist might say that the force isn't really real, that only what we directly observe is really real, and gravitational force is only real in that it fulfills a function, it helps us to make accurate predictions, like when high tide (which we CAN observe) will next arrive at a nearby beach.

The functionalist understanding of intentional agency is ... behaviorism. Skinner treated ideas like "intention" or "agency" the way Mach treated gravitational force.

Comments

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog