 Hello, good afternoon. Am I on there? I'm John Campbell, a professor in the philosophy department here, and I'd like to welcome you to today's Howison Lecture. And can I say, it's just thrilling to be at an in real life lecture. It's so amazingly invigorating to have real people instead of boxes on the screen there. So hello, I'm glad you could all come. Today's lecture commemorates George Holmes Howison. Howison came to Berkeley in 1884 when he was 50, and he founded the philosophy department here. He was evidently a charismatic and much-loved individual with robust philosophical views which he developed with a great deal of force and exuberance. On his death, his many friends put together a fund, which is what's paying for today's lecture, in order to attract the most significant and influential thinkers of the day out here to the rural wilderness of California. So we're particularly delighted to have Stephen Yablow here today. Professor Yablow did his BSc in Maths and Philosophy at the University of Toronto, and he also spent some time at the University of Pune in India. He did his PhD in philosophy right here at the University of California, Berkeley, and he's living proof that a Berkeley education won't let you down. He went first, if I may say so, he went first to Michigan, and then in 98 to MIT, where he's been to the present day. He's written dozens of sharp, incisive, original articles that have established him as one of the most reliably interesting and significant philosophers alive today. Here's three books. Things are thoughts, and the most recent one, aboutness, develops a theory of the subject matter of a sentence in context. One theme of this book is that truths come to us wrapped in larger falsehoods. So often, I expect that all of us have been in this situation sometimes, often it will happen that you make a large claim, and then someone points out the consequences of what you said, and you say, well, I didn't mean that. I wasn't talking about that. I was talking about something else, and you want to kind of cut away the bit that wasn't what you were talking about. And once it's pointed out, as it hadn't really been systemically pointed out before, it's clear that that's a very important part of ordinary communication, what's going on in an ordinary conversation, but its systematic analysis is very, very difficult. And Yablow's book is, I think, so far as I know, the only, certainly the first and to this day, I think, the only full-scale systematic attempt at giving an analysis of this important subject. His subject today is the demarcation problem in philosophy. This, in contrast, is an old problem, I think, or a tenured by American standards. It goes back to the 1920s, so it's very old. But the problem, as he explained it, is that philosophy doesn't have a distinctive subject matter. I mean, if you're an astrophysics, you can stay, I study the heavens, biology, you can stay, I study cellular organisms. But what is the subject matter in philosophy? You talk to a philosopher, you could find yourself talking about anything. So what is it that's distinctive of philosophical problems? Well, Stephen says it's their genealogy, but what's meant by genealogy, I can't wait to hear. So please join me in welcoming Professor Yablow. Thank you so much. Well, I'm going to be sitting because you don't want to be seeing me try to stand. It's a thrill to be here back in the place that I learned to the extent that I did learn to be a philosopher. That was in the early 1980s back here. In Berkeley, graduate school is kind of like childhood in a lot of ways. On the one hand, it seems unforgettable. At the time, on the other hand, like childhood, it can be very hard to remember exactly what happened. And in some ways, what did they teach us? What was the Berkeley doctrine in those days? There was generally a feeling that we were around. The great things were happening, even if we didn't quite know what they were. And certainly whatever was the Berkeley style of philosophy, I didn't do it when I was a grad student. And I didn't wind up practicing it out in the world. And I haven't done it in my whole life until now. Now I'm going to make sort of a probably misbegotten attempt to sort of come to terms with some of the themes that I encountered in the 1980s, which were probably dimly understood even then. And I might just be putting a nail in the coffin right now. This is kind of like what could have been my qualifying exam. Or it could be my disqualifying exam. We'll see how that goes. Thank you very much for the opportunity. After the thanks, it's always good to move on to the apologies. There's always more of those. There's different kinds of philosophy talks. The usual kind is somebody sort of enunciates a thesis and then kind of gives a long argument for the thesis. There's a second kind where somebody kind of has an idea and they are running up the flagpole to see who salutes, as they used to say in advertising, speak. And then there's a third kind where somebody runs and think of a flagpole to see who salutes. But then they realize they've kind of got it up so high and it's sort of foggy enough that people don't know whether to salute. And they're not even sure they could see the flagpole. And then you kind of bring it down. And people say, why is that thing at half mass? Did somebody die? This will be more the third kind of talk. So I'm just going to be like throwing some stuff against the wall whether it hangs together. If you find anything that you understand, then you have at least that on me and probably on the person sitting next to you. Okay, so let's start. So Carl Popper a long time ago, you mentioned the 1920s. I think I don't know the whole history of this problem. But Carl Popper a long time ago wanted to explain what it was that separated natural science from other areas of inquiry. And the three that he mentioned, I think this is an interesting triple logic, metaphysics and psychoanalysis. I'm not hopefully sure which he had the highest esteem for of those. Scientific claims he thought were falsifiable, at least in principle. He said you couldn't really verify them because they had universal quantifiers in front. You can never verify that everything is a certain way, but you can falsify. It's one of those things that people say you can't prove a negative. Like, I don't know who had that idea. You can't prove a universally quantified claim. But you can falsify universally quantified claim by finding a single counter example. And that's what makes scientific claims special. They're falsifiable. I mean, I really should have researched this, given that I'm leading with it. But here's what I remember hearing about this from Fireop and or somebody in 1981. He's probably not the go-to guy on Popper exegesis. But anyway, that's what I remember. But first of all, it seems wrong in both directions. It seems like you can falsify, he mentions logic as a contrast. You can falsify logical claims if somebody says this is unprovable. That seems like a logical claim. But giving a proof certainly seems like something you can do. And that seemed to falsify the claim that it's unprovable. But more importantly, well, certain scientific hypotheses, those are the forms where everything is A or all A's are B, are maybe falsifiable if B is the right kind of predicate by finding a counter example. If you switch to a slightly different one, like every A will eventually be B. Then it seems like you have to wait until the end of time to find out whether this A will eventually be B. You mentioned Dummit earlier. Dummit's example of this was like, a city will never be built on this spot. It's very hard to falsify because you never know. They might eventually clean up that toxic sludge pit and build something here. Anyway, so another way you might try to characterize science or sciences is via subject matter, say what a scientific theory is about. David Lewis had the idea of analyzing subject matters. I'm going to be using the notion of possible world here as sort of a complete way things could have been. David Lewis had the idea of analyzing subject matters as sort of relations among worlds. Sometimes people speak of logical space as the space of all possible worlds. The idea was that you would count worlds equivalent or similar where a subject matter was concerned. If things are just alike where that subject matter was concerned, take the two worlds. His favorite example was the number of stars. It's a way of grouping worlds. You group them on the basis of how many stars they have. Worlds with zero stars go into the same cell. Worlds with exactly one star go into the same cell, et cetera, et cetera. One might ask, well, can you... He allowed in principle that any way of grouping worlds constitute a subject matter so you could ask, we could say, let's have a subject matter that groups worlds together on the basis of what kind of blows up or lets off a nasty smell if you mix substances together. We'll say worlds are alike if the substances sort of blow up in both or in either when you mix them together. That could be a very kind of primitive conception of what chemistry is. Chemistry tries to enumerate, elaborate, systematize the truths about that subject matter, what blows up when. You could do a similar thing for biology. You know, count worlds similar if they have similar types of living things, operating on similar principles, and biology tries to sort of boil down the most important truths about that subject matter. First sentence to be, I should say, about a subject matter is for its truth value to supervene on how things stand where that subject matter is concerned. So the number of stars is prime is about how many stars there are because you've got two worlds with equally many stars. They agree as well in whether they have primely many stars and that's sort of an idea that applies more generally. We could say, look, biology consists of whatever it might be, the most interesting truths that never change in, or statements that never change in truth value between biologically equivalent worlds. Of course, you'd want to have some notion of what it is for a subject matter to be tractable because not every way of grouping worlds together is going to lend itself to an interesting body of field of inquiry where people say, let's try to get straight on this. And that may be where philosophy comes in because philosophy is not known for its tractability. So what idea you might have is that subject matter is that aren't as amenable to systematic treatment, that aren't as tractable as, say, the subject matter of biology or chemistry. Forgive me, I mean, everything I'm saying is like, I wish it was an excuse to say if I had more time I could make this seem less simple-minded, but no amount of time would make this seem less simple-minded. So chemists find their time as well spent. They try to get straight on this subject matter and they find out we can get a lot of the facts down in fairly short order on the basis of these sort of principles. And that hasn't been at least my experience. I could have had a briefly bad go of it at Berkeley where they kind of prided themselves on that kind of thing. When you came anywhere near solving a problem that was evidence you didn't really understand the problem, which I am somewhat sympathetic to, actually. So you could take the view that there's nothing in the subject matter approach intrinsically but limited to the subject matter of this or that. Science, we might ask, what about philosophy? What's the subject matter of philosophy? And the difference would be maybe that philosophy's subject matter is intractable, but even so there would have to be something we could point to as the aspect or aspects of reality that the discipline tries to get right. I assume that some, not every, philosophers are kind of very ecumenical in the kind of thing they'll take seriously, but mere intractability I think is not sufficient recommendation. Although to read a lot of journals you'd think that might be enough, but mere intractability is not sufficient recommendation for a philosophical study. So there's one problem. There may be some ways of carving out logical space or proper objects of philosophical study, and it's hard to say which ones, but you might worry conversely that only some philosophical problems, this is closer to what I'm going to be talking about, correspond to ways of carving out logical space. So take the problem of determinism and free will. What would it even mean for world W to disagree with world W prime on how free will and determinism are to be reconciled or whether they're reconcilable? These two worlds, it plays out exactly the same way in these two, but not in these two. It's just not clear where you would look for guidance on that. What would it mean for worlds to disagree on whether their tables are material, as in lock or collections of ideas, as in Barclay, pun not intended. Okay. There will be some intended puns coming up so I thought I should mention that. But these kinds of questions are premature, you might think, just as you don't know to begin with which subject matters will turn out to be tractable, which lines of inquiry will eventually get spun off as sciences, one doesn't know to begin with, which subject matters will turn out to be genuine, which lines of inquiry will come to seem sort of misguided or spurious. If the dimensions along which worlds can vary is not immediately obvious on, just based on a priori reflection, maybe that's not a bug but a feature, maybe that's sort of the discovery procedure for which questions are spurious and which aren't. So I guess go to the end of page one, I'm already getting five minutes left. No one's quite said that yet, but I realize that I'm going to have to make some choices so if there's anything you don't understand at the end, the explanation is that I wasn't given three hours like the last lecture that I went to was Michael Dummit, who was given, I wouldn't say given, he took three hours. I believe he and I were the only people left in Wheeler Auditorium at the time it was done. I'm just looking through the crowd. Are you the one I'm going to be along with? All right, okay. But that said, we should at least be open to the possibility that philosophy is not happily characterized in terms of the subject matter or subject matters that it tries to get. Right, this wouldn't necessarily make subject matter irrelevant to the philosophical demarcation problem because there's a different role, I'll be arguing that subject matter can play. And we've already hinted at this different role in saying that it's not obvious in advance which topics are worthy of study. That itself has to be studied. And this has to remind us of a famous old paradox, someone's called Mino's paradox, or the paradox of inquiry. If before engaging in inquiry, we needed to settle on the topic of inquiry, which seems like it would be a good idea unless you sort of go off in some crazy direction that it seems like you'd have to be able to be able to find the proper topic for inquiry without having first engaged in any relevant form of inquiry, which seems like it might be a difficult thing to do. So we seem to be caught in a circle. And it seems like the only way out is for at least some topics to be sort of settled in advance, the kinds of things that you know are worth looking into before you've studied much else. And you might think, well, philosophy would be a natural fit for some of those. But now there's a certain kind of tragic possibility that suggests itself, which is that we have to hit in philosophy on a topic of inquiry before we're in a position to tell whether it's really a tenable topic. We might have tied ourselves to the mask, subject matter-wise, in particular areas, before we realize that, uh-oh, you can't help but contradict yourself if you're going to be sticking to this topic and if you're going to take this kind of discussion to be answerable to how matters stand M-wise, where N is the subject matter in question. That, to me, is going to be like the... that's the birth of tragedy. I tried to always get a European... I gather that's an important, deep philosophy book from Europe. Okay. Okay. So, but let's back up a bit. Generality and abstractness is a feature that's often been pointed to as a characteristic of philosophical subject matter. So, Bertrand Russell seems to be speaking to the question of logic subject matter when he says that it's concerned with the real world, just as truly a zoology, though with its more abstract and general features. And I hadn't realized this until just recently reading a book by Dukas from the 1940s about the nature of philosophy. Russell cites the same abstractness in generality and characterizing philosophy at large. So, Dukas says by way of explaining Russell that philosophical propositions may be asserted of each individual thing much as the propositions of logic are asserted of each individual thing. They formulate properties which belong to each separate thing, not properties belonging to the whole of things collectively. Russell used the word any for this. Anything is such and such as opposed to all things are such and such. The properties that apply in a sort of schematic way to any possible thing you could think about. And he says these properties are to be those that belong not only to each separate thing that exists, and this is an important wrinkle we're getting back to teach that may exist. This is in a section Dukas's book called philosophy is identical to logic. So, philosophy on this view has a maximally general subject matter, attributing properties purporting to belong to everything whatsoever. Worlds are philosophically equivalent. I use this equivalent sign with a little 5 for philosophy. If they agree on which fs are such that for all x, fx, you can be sure that any halfway definite sounding idea I put out there is just for purposes of almost immediate ridicule. So, don't worry about trying to say, oh, that could be right. That's never a good thought. Okay. But, you might think, can one always dream up for two worlds, w and w prime? An artificial enough f such that worlds differ on whether everything of that world is f, so let f be the property of there's like over coexists with over a million dogs. You're then going to worlds such that everything is f and that lack that property are basically going to be worlds with over a million dogs that don't have a million. Philosophers aren't interested in the difference between worlds with a million dogs and worlds with fewer or more. So, you might think, look maybe that just shows that some kind of naturalness restriction will be needed on this predicate f. Well, what is it for a natural feature f to hold universally? Well, that might sound like it could be a natural law. Like nothing moves faster than the speed of light. But it doesn't seem to make worlds, first of all, that's not a plausible theory of natural laws at all. And second, it doesn't really make worlds philosophically different if they differ in their natural laws. That would make philosophy too much like science and it's not supposed to be like science. At least around Berkeley, it's not supposed to be like science. Worse, it could hold accidentally in a world that nothing moves faster than the speed of light. And so you'd have two worlds or even a much lower speed. It could be that accidentally nothing goes more than 100 miles an hour, but you don't want to distinguish two worlds certainly not on a philosophical ground on the basis of whether anyone is speedy or not. Okay. Well, what if we broaden the quantifiers? As Russell suggests, to cover each thing that may exist, worlds would be philosophically unalike on this view when they differed on whether necessarily everything is F. But if differing on whether everything is F was too easy without severe constraints on F, any two worlds are going to differ on whether everything is F for some badly enough chosen F. Now it's going to be too difficult for worlds to differ in this respect because necessity claims hold, so it's often thought in all worlds or in none. So you're not going to get two worlds W and W prime and one of them necessarily everything is F and the next world over it's not the case that necessarily everything is F. Again one could try to this is me trying to like trying to win approval from like my former Berkeley and overlords who talk this way. So one could try to spin this as a success. What philosophers are trying to talk about runs too deep to be represented the subject matters we're trying to talk about there's supposed to distinguish worlds but in fact they're so deep that all the worlds are alike with respect to the matter in question. It's the kind of thing that has to be shown rather than said you know mysticism and logic make rather strange bedfellows you might think but around the time that people were speaking of showing versus saying they often appeared together in the titles of books and papers Russell has a paper called Mysticism and Logic Walter Stase has a chapter in his book about the nature of philosophy on mysticism and logic Wittgenstein of course and Tractatus links mysticism with logic part of the reason that the two are grouped together might be that both on the one hand claim to be profoundly informative more informative than anything else and both double down on that claim and it's pointed out that it's very difficult to point out a subject matter that they're both profoundly informative about it's sort of like it's your fault you people in love with old-fashioned ideas of subject matter we're higher than subject matter okay words and things so Russell contrasts the worldly approach with that of what he tells the linguistic philosophy which cares only about language and not about the world he gives a slightly bizarre analogy to bring out this contrast he said he used to have a clock when he was a kid and had a pendulum he found it went much faster if he took the pendulum out of course it didn't tell the time but it went satisfyingly quickly and he thought that was really really cool and so he said linguistic philosophy this is Russell the boy who preferred the clock without the pendulum because although it no longer told the time it went more easily than before and a more exhilarating pace I don't know but this seems to pick up on a passage from Austin so Austin said we need to prize words off the world to hold them apart from it but if that's where Russell got this idea he's got Austin almost completely wrong because the point of pricing words off the world for Austin is quote to realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness so it would be a scandal if words would be arbitrary it seems like it's a problem even for Austin I remember one sort of that Grace used to sell this as a graduate student days about there used to be this discussion group or lunch club where they would talk about like philosophically deep topics which Austin would immediately try to deflate coming up with the most superficial possible example and so at one time they were I was actually going to use this but you didn't use the word pleasure you didn't say it gives me great pleasure to introduce the following speaker but that was the suggestion that Austin made there would be a useful example for a session on pleasure that is the nature of pleasure, he said yes as in it gives me great pleasure to introduce the following speaker and I don't know if Grace made this up but he suggested that for a week and they were going to talk about religious faith that he said yes as in yours faithfully at the end of yeah anyway but anyway Austin's idea is we try to realize the inadequacies and arbitrariness of ordinary words after which he says we're to quote relook at the world without blinkers which is in somewhat you know it's not a very awesome thing to say and then he says when we worry about what we should say when we are looking not merely at words but also at the realities which we use the words to talk about we are using a sharpened awareness of words to sharpen our perception of though not as the final arbiter of the phenomena this is not the Austin we remember or care to remember so a better term Austin suggests for this kind of philosophy that he's interested in is linguistic phenomenology which is a phrase that Ryle also used with word right because he was actually interested in phenomenology which I don't think Austin was phenomenologists study representational devices with a view to their purport for the world beyond so they want to know what is imagination like because they want to know well what is it purporting to tell us about the larger world so Russell's picture of linguistic philosophers is caring about language and not the world is way off the mark they care about both in fact a fantastic example of linguistic phenomenology here I'm really throwing time consciousness to the wind here Russell himself is this great example he says when we think about like the identity of like is Scott the author of Waverly he says you always tempted to think of it as are these things identical here's one thing Scott and here's this other thing the author of Waverly so you've got these two things identical and he says of course that's nonsense but that's the way he says that's obviously absurd but that is the sort of way what is always tempted to deal with identity and Mark Cremins has a wonderful paper on identity where he suggests that at a certain level that is what you're doing cognitively that you sort of imagine things apart and you treat identity as though it was a promiscuous relation that I could obtain between distinct things but it is interesting and many philosophers have pointed this out but if someone says I wonder if Hesperus is phosphorus that's stupid you're wondering if it's things itself he says no I'm talking about two things Hesperus and phosphorus if you don't get that you don't even start it on this topic it's two things they're wondering if they're identical there's a whole history of ordinary language papers with titles like a curious plural wondering how we get away with using the word they in connection with identity okay knowing what you're talking about so having no idea what you're studying or talking about in a field of inquiry certainly looks like an obstacle to making progress on it it hasn't turned out that way for me actually but I don't know your mileage may vary so but didn't Russell rely on his work in philosophy particularly his work in logic on a view of what he was talking about that is actually not so clear he goes back and forth on this quite a bit well maybe yeah without seemingly realizing it he says some of the time as I just mentioned that logic is about the world and its abstract and general features elsewhere though he says pure mathematics which for him is a branch of logic that it has no distinctive subject matter at all and he goes on and on and on about what's really going on I won't read the whole quote but he has this wonderful thing at the end where he says mathematics may define as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about nor whether what we are saying is true already is sort of ambitious enough but then he says I love this it's on the side people who have been puzzled by the beginnings of mathematics will I hope find comfort in this definition and will probably agree that it is accurate he did not lack for self-confidence so it's beginning to seem based on this absurdly limited survey of attempts to find things for philosophy to be about even looking at particular areas like logic it's not easy to say what those things are that philosophy aims to be getting right maybe we were too quick to assume that subject matter blindness gets in the way of doing philosophy or making philosophical progress it doesn't seem to have gotten Russell's way certainly if a guiding subject matter for a field is a subject matter you have to sort of get in place before you can make progress as opposed to the kind of thing you can be constantly rethinking the Nairat's boat in the Nairat's boat way the boat that you're rebuilding at sea while remaining afloat in it it's not clear philosophy has a guiding subject matter well does it have a subject matter at all even a non-guiding one is there something of which philosophy aims to give an accurate account Bernard Williams for one is the story of this idea one of his worries harks back to something like Russell's distinction between abstract general necessary features and particular local contingent ones the distinction that Williams famously focuses on is between what he calls absolute features of reality and parochial features of reality both are going to get good sense really there but parochial features figure mainly in our conception of the world and that of like-minded creatures generally socialized creatures would not expect them to turn up in the world view of creatures with different sensory or cognitive endowments different sympathies or different living arrangements parochial features drop out as we abstract away from these idiosyncrasies and we are left eventually with a world as it presents itself to God or to a God's eye perspective the features here's the intended pun the features visible from this God's eye perspective are the ones he calls absolute it seems a little bit funny when you're trying to get I mean I think there's something very deep though that but that's not my job to convince you I just say things with a deep tone of voice and you say that must be deep okay now philosophy as befits the majesty of the enterprise starts out thinking that it's trying to get absolute features of reality right as opposed to parochial ones that reflect just the way we happen to to to do things Philip Pettit has a nice old paper where he talks about I don't have no first time knowledge of this you probably do there was like a distinction in the Sloan the Sloan set that Lady Diana came from between things that are Q and things that aren't Q Q is a special way of being really cool that's like highly culturally specific you pretty much have to be like a small group to really get what it is to be Q or not Q philosophers don't well Philip Pettit did worry about what was to be Q but philosophers don't generally worry once it becomes clear that a feature depends on like highly specific unlikely to be repeated social arrangements a lot of philosophers lose interest not necessarily Williamson not necessarily not necessarily me but lots that we're getting to so it starts out we start out thinking as philosophers you want to get the absolute features right on the one hand that seems awfully grand on the other hand it doesn't seem grand enough because you might think the absolute features are the ones that scientists are trying to get right they're trying they're the ones that say don't worry so much about color worry more about mass and charge and so on and so forth William says it is hard to deny that the idea of getting it right which has gone into the self-image of analytic philosophy is one drawn from the natural sciences and that the effects of this can be unhappy the absolute perspective he says even if we could achieve it would not be particularly serviceable to us for many of our purposes such as making sense of our intellectual or other activities are indeed getting on with most of those activities for those purposes we need concepts and explanations which are rooted in our most local practices our culture and our history and these cannot be replaced by concepts which we might share with very different investigators of the world so is William saying goodbye here to the kind of grand scale abstract necessitarian pretentious philosophy that we got from Russell well yes and but in a deeper way no necessity need not always be something that we expect to find out in the world as we sort of conduct like a large scale very general survey of the world it could be something that we and need for human many other you know content many other philosophers something we bump up against in ourselves as we encounter our own limitations when we're conducting that survey that what the way Williams puts it is various of our ideas and procedures can seem to be such that we cannot get beyond them that there is no conceivable alternative there is no alternative seemingly depredicating features of things or tracing objects through space and time or seeing the world as colored or shot through with causal relations or wondering what would have happened if so and so we don't think you know that's getting old let's just give up on that yeah I mean I said we don't think that I mean there are you know very famous metaphysicians around to who do think that this like questions of what would have happened in so-and-so are like and don't really go sufficiently deep probably half of you know how I mean and won't take it as an insult and the other one I can't tell you who I mean because then you might interpret it as as an insult but not everybody thought things modality goes very deep okay so certain ways of thinking force themselves on us not because the world kind of cries out to be conceived in those ways on pain of being misunderstood but because just that's how how we roll maybe in a very deep way because of our physiological endowment or because of deep facts about our culture we can't help but see external objects as colored or valuable we can't help but look for patterns and read significance into them we can't help but form expectations about the future and wonder why things went this way rather than that and what's a fair distribution of goods part of this point is that philosophy wants to get this stuff right too even if certain questions are forced on us more by cognitive social constraints by how we're put together then by the world that isn't a reason to despise them quine has a wonderful sentence about puts this in a beautifully simple way he says to call something a posit is not to patronize it it doesn't make them philosophically uninteresting but Williams is making a deeper point too the capacity to operate in natural seeming ways is mostly a blessing a regress would threaten every procedure that we engage in had to be evaluated on the basis of some other more basic procedure but it's also a curse because if a procedure gets us in trouble but it's also we see no real alternative to it it's not clear how we're to get ourselves out of the trouble because we've got nowhere else to look and the curse and blessing aspects go and in hand the scripts that make life possible in their ordinary application cause trouble when taking too far so ordinarily it makes sense to ask why and to seek causes otherwise if something unexpected happens you say oh that was one of the uncossed ones where you're getting into a sweat about it but again you can take it too far as Kant pointed out you shouldn't keep on pressing the issue of what caused it about the whole history of the world understood to embrace all the possible causes ordinarily it makes sense not to scoff at possible sources of error taken too far though this leads to skepticism and ultimately madness here's an example a much more recent example from Sarah Moss wondering what would have happened if we chosen differently is good policy on the whole that's how you change your sort of ways of behaving but we continue to do it even when there's no possible answer not even a knowable answer and we know that this is the case so if you offer me a bet based on the outcome of indeterminate deterministic coin toss and I don't take the bet for some reason but I can't help wondering would I be rich cause I always pick tails so I wonder would the coin have come up tails well if you think about it if you set things up right there's no answer to would it have come up tails there's not even a definite way you would have tossed the coin and if you specify as indeterministic there's just no answer whether a chance event would have come up this way as opposed to the other still it's a dumb question but you really can't help but wonder if the coin would have come up tails Sarah gives this example I dealt this coin would land heads each time if I were to flip it one million times I dealt that too but of course you never know for sure until you try so I know what are you what is the thought there it's very hard to think it's a very natural thought since we didn't do it well it's a fugitive fact forever whether it would have come up a million times in a row it's sort of like as space expands there's certain things that are moving way too quickly for light to make it back if we didn't look in time we would have looked in time we would have seen that phenomenon but now it's too late so we'll never know okay now we're getting closer to the kind of philosophy that a kind of philosophy that isn't there's not primarily about getting things right so a lot of philosophical problems go like this on the one hand we can't help but think that x and yet x cannot be maintained in full generality at least not together with y which seems just as compulsory Kripke I like to think is hinting at this kind of perplexity when he gave his recent book of collected papers the title philosophical troubles you get into these kind of jams the form of interesting philosophy oftentimes isn't philosophical finding there are very few philosophical books my philosophical discoveries that wouldn't sell very well yeah you get into various kinds of jams you get yourself into uncomfortable corners when you're a philosopher and of course this idea goes back to Wittgenstein and much earlier the kind of philosophy that grapples with basic predicaments is not the whole of our field but it seems in many ways the oldest and the deepest and this is a great benefit Davidson used to always say we won't run out of problems very soon this is a great thing he was into a solution he said oh great we're not going to run out of problems the great thing about predicament based philosophy is that you can count on it always to be there our predicaments almost by definition remain as the special sciences are spun off one could call this kind of philosophy the perennial philosophy if that name we're not already taken for well I don't know but I know there's a book by T. H. Huxley with it the perennial philosophy and then I was going to call it problematic philosophy that title is also already taken by Berkson apparently okay see I mentioned various people from the other side of the ocean that's a very Berkeley thing to do so grappling with predicament need not always be a matter of dissolving it or fighting free of it the first step is oftentimes getting some kind of perspective on how it arises how did we get into this jam Leonard Cohen has a line in one of his songs that captures this perfectly he says I've been where you're hanging I think I can see how you're pinned that seems to me a very philosophical thought hermeneutic philosophy I'd love a better name and I'm sure there pretty much has to be one is the kind that offers to hold us up before the mirror so that we can see how we're pinned the possibility or desirability of getting unpinned can then be left as a further question and it might well turn out for reasons we'll discuss that getting unpinned would be even worse so a philosophical intervention has two main parts on this proposal philosopher first presents us with a model of how someone could wind up in a certain sort of jam or perplexity subject matter has a role to play here that's what we're going to get to then we're invited to consider whether we ourselves might not be in this very jammed up position so this distinction that I'm getting at between illustrating how someone could get jammed up and then invitation to ask you to wonder could not might not you be jammed up in that exact way is illustrated by an old Testament parable about King David King David I guess was God's favorite I hadn't realized this entirely until I read around I think somewhere it says he's a man after my own heart or something incredibly like the now thing he liked King David a lot except you know the Leonard there's a Leonard Cron's long hallelujah I heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord apparently if you do a search David please the Lord I think 62 times but here's this I want to talk about this one time he didn't please the Lord really pissed the Lord off and this was the story of David in Bathsheba he obtained Bathsheba has his umpteenth lover by the device in part of getting her husband killed in battle unnecessarily properly displeased the Lord sent down a moral instructor with the unlikely name of Nathan to teach David a lesson so Nathan came down he said this to David there were two men one rich and one poor the first had a very large flock the poor man had only one wee little you lamb I think I just made up the weeds it comes from you one day a hungry traveler came to the rich man but he was loath to take anything from his own flocks to prepare a meal for the guest so he took the poor man's one little lamb which he treated like a child the Bible goes on and on about how much this guy loved his little you lamb when David heard this he flew into a rage the one who did this deserves to die he shall pay four times over because he did such a thing and he showed no pity and Nathan said to David thou art to the man this was a parable for like to illustrate what David himself had done you can connect the dots it actually took me a surprisingly long time to connect the dots but you can see that he who already has much he do more should not be given to he who already has much and he certainly should not be taking more although that seems to be the way increasingly so Nathan helps David to see how he sinned not how he's pinned but the basic idea is the same the philosopher starts by telling a story the philosopher invites us to try it on for size pointing out that we would be confused in much the same way that we are confused if things have played out as in the story I'm going to try to tell that kind of story subject matter has a crucial role to play in it so I think maybe I should just sort of skip a bunch of okay I'm going to do the next section direct a truth so Nelson Goodman in a lovely paper called truth about Jones made an important point about truth telling that someone's testimony is one false into about a certain individual Jones does not mean that the testimony was false about Jones could be the false bits all concerning this other guy Smith he was exactly right about Jones so he's testimony it's false it's about Jones but it wasn't false about Jones this actually came from stuff of Davidson's about the logic of Aburbs you can you you can sing a certain song and you can do it badly without seeing that song badly because what you did that was bad was something that didn't have to do with your rendering of the song but you just stood too far from the mic or something like that yeah okay so the great thing about directed truth truth about a certain subject matter like Jones from a hermeneutic perspective is that let's us tell in some cases a story about how we're pinned how does it come about that we see no alternative to these statements a b and c when we know full well that they can't be true together well maybe it goes like this a b and c are supposed to be about a certain subject matter m that's their intended topic that's what they're supposed to address themselves to they are all true about that subject matter maybe even analytically so truth about that subject matter suffices if they're genuinely about m for truth so you can be forgiven for thinking that statements are true if you're duty bound to regard them as about a certain subject matter about which they're true and what happened is unbeknownst to you they kind of got away from what the subject matter that was assigned to them which is bound to happen if you're not if you don't have this godlike power that we sometimes grant ourselves of deciding what we're going to be talking about in advance so this kind of story if you can tell it does not unpin us we still can see no good alternative to these statements a through c but it shows that our predicament is not just an unforced error so people used to sometimes make fun of Berkeley philosophy by saying it's like a series of unforced error which seem to be even in the battle days when I was here it's no it's a series of forced errors it's not unforced errors philosophical problems are sometimes at least like blind spots reflective of a system that's basically working as it as it should this is how a system that's working properly it will have this exact defect you know it would not be good for our visual systems overall to try to get rid of our blind spots when you think about how the eye works you'll be able to see them less afterwards okay so the question of why our statements can't be holy about their intended subject matter why their truth values have to be sensitive to distinctions not contemplated by M the assigned subject matter is interesting and the short answer is that the world may be unkind it may contain unexpected situations such that the three statements cannot be true about that subject matter together but they each can be true about it apart this situation was not on the cards when the language was introduced and assigned a subject matter so I'm going to skip ahead you're not you're not going to get hear me talking about regulative ideals which is going to be healthy for both of us so I'm just going to go to some philosophical messes where this kind of thing arguably arises I'll go through maybe two of the three messes I've got down here and then I'll conclude so Siraiti's paradoxes so predicates like red are supposed to be applicable on the basis of casual observation observationality means that the look of an object decides its color at least if your eyes are working right with the consequence that any pair of objects indistinguishable in point of color must satisfy the condition I'm quoting Crispin right here that's where there's so many relative clauses in the sentences going on longer than it should must satisfy the condition that any basic color predicate applicable to either is applicable to both and he says this is a very fundamental fact about their senses whose sacrifice will be possible only at great cost so this gives us the crucial premises of Siraiti's paradox X is red because X is say a right tomato and then you have a Siraiti sequence of objects getting slightly closer to orange all the way down the line you say if X is red so is X prime if X is prime if X prime is red so is X double prime if X n minus one is red so is X n and then you have to conclude if by modus ponens X n is red that's false because X n is an orange so these intermediate conditionals cannot all be right because they take us from a truth the clear truth to a false and the hermeneutic problem is to say why they seem so right do existing theories make this comprehensible well on here I'm going to be even more unfair than I've been so far so take epistemicism epistemicism says we can't know any of the premises to be false given a margin for error constraint on knowledge you can never know that you know X 5 is red but X 6 isn't red um um but I don't know about you but the fact that I can't know something to be false really does not go very far towards explaining why persistent insisting despite that contradiction follows that it must be true there's like a lot of things that I have trouble knowing to be you know I have trouble knowing it to be false that they're ever exactly an odd number of dinosaurs but I don't say well therefore there must have been like exactly an odd number of dinosaurs super valuationists uh say that I'll skip them contextualists say the point that the pairs that we're attending to cannot differ in quote unquote color what the word color is in context sort of standing for the word red is in context standing for the switcheroo between the red there has to be a switcheroo between the red and the not red things but it's always elsewhere it's always somewhere that you're not looking but do we really delve the existence of lines that cannot be made salient I'm perfectly willing to grant that there are lines that I mean if that if the fact that I cannot make the line between like f and not f salient was enough to convince me that there is no such line then it should seem salient to me that things never differ non saliently but I'm pretty sure I accept that things often differ non saliently so the idea that it's just that if you look at two things that's not where the action is happening that doesn't seem like a sufficient explanation of why these these premises seem sort of undeniable um well I want to say that they seem undeniable because we feel ourselves and we mean to be talking about a subject matter that lies fully open to to view um Lewis calls this subject matter groups worlds together which look the same to casual observers each of the premises all of them are like if this one is read then that one just like superficially indistinguishable from the from the original one is also read um those are by definition true about observation and and and this is so because basically what it is to be true about observation or true about any subject matter is uh a thing is true about a subject matter in our world if even if it's false in our world it's not false because of how our world is where that subject matter is concerned you can find another world that's just like us ours where that subject matter is concerned where it's true subject matter is observation uh I've got these two things that look exactly the same in color they I can certainly find a world where they really are exactly the same in color where that looks exactly like our world just go to a world where they look just the same but they really are the same in color that's enough to show that it's true about observation or about observational read that if the one is uh uh read then the other one uh is read uh and so here's the here's the story uh it's one to four on uh whatever page of the handout we're on uh the conditionals in fact address the issue of things colors that's the only thing that's really around for them to address this is supposed to be the same as the issue of their observational colors there's not supposed to be a difference between color and observational color um this is read there for the next one over is read seems true because it is true about observational colors the intended subject matter this doesn't make it true period because because we live in a fallen world we left Eden color is not observational color I spent a while like looking around for pictures of Eden to make clear that it didn't contain any sorority sequences but even you'd think that would be easy because how big can a painting be but they didn't be full of color I wasn't even sure I could I could determine that there weren't any sorority sequences in paintings of Eden um um okay so each of the premises seems true for the best possible reason it is true of the issue that we understandably take it to address what is not true even about that issue observational color is there a conjunction there's no single observational duplicate of our world in which adjoining color patches really stand or fall together redness wise you have to go to different worlds so to speak to witness the truth about observation in our world of each of those premises and now the tragic aspect if not for sorority sequences these sequences of objects that probably didn't like exist till the industrial age where you couldn't distinguish like pairs of them um I'm a full-blown ludite I mean I really think that was like that's when we that's when things really went bad when you know industrial the science of making color ships developed that's when sorority sequences really became inescapable who knew back in Eden that life would be unkind in this way colors clumped up nicely and observationality seemed like a great constraint only later did the world begin to play tricks on us and even now we are most often in Eden like situations with big gaps between the reds and the oranges lots to gain and little to lose by sticking with the original subject matter okay now I'm gonna skip the other two examples and just go to this very short conclusion so there's time for questions um lessons if any philosophy is as much about seeing how we're pinned as about finding the truth a bonus she has less light than one might have hoped on truth-seeking philosophy philosophy but fortunately that's not the deep Berkeley kind of philosophy so who cares it sheds more light than one might have thought on philosophy seeing how we're pinned side or at least so I'm suggesting we get pinned because we have to tragically commit ourselves at least with regard to very basic subject matters to their being on a certain topic which it turns out they can't consistently be about but no one was in a position to know it at the time when we had to sort of settle what we were talking about um so it's because we live in a fallen world that we wind up contradicting ourselves and we should try to make our peace with that and oftentimes the ways we contradict ourselves are better just like put up with uh the thought is then um done away with by trying to improve a concept in a way that doesn't lose its motivational force then we have trouble even kind of using it a spontaneous way thank you very much something really thrilling about that thank you very much I'm going to stand not because I wish to dominate things but just to make it easier to see who has a question so we're open for questions now but maybe just to get the ball rolling I could ask you a little bit about the view you're developing in the last trunks of the paper so I guess through the middle of the 20th century people would have said I mean particularly later Wittgenstein for example would have said um very much like you I think uh that the philosophical problems are forced on us um we found ourselves pinned just you saying we we can't get out of the fly bottle that kind of language is very familiar from that kind of time and so that's like your picture if I if I'm getting it on the insistence on the inescapability of these errors that we can't see our way out and the diagnosis there was always well there's something about our language that we don't understand we're not finding our way about in our language properly and then as I understand the way the subject philosophy has gone in the meantime um all that stuff about language seemed to get thrown out of the window and the idea was no we are going to address the world well language is a small part of the world we are going to address it directly and then there's always something a little bit mystifying about how do you do that exactly um and uh if I understood what I'm not sure I've understood what you're doing at the end so this is really just to ask for clarification here it seems like you're suggesting a picture where there are similar intractable problems similarly there's an there are these intractable problems but they're coming up because of something about you you didn't use the word representation but if I can something about the representations that we're using to think about the world where we're subject to these errors as to what the subject matter is representations are the same subject matter or not and it doesn't how should I say the vibe is quite different to a Wittgenstein vibe we're not really talking about a natural language like English directly we're talking about I don't know maybe propositions or something like that but something that has a subject matter anyway so it's a little bit like a linguistic approach but there's a suggestion there's something more methodical I mean the whole idea of the 20th century approach was you can't see anything methodical here you can just go case by case but the idea is you could do something a bit more methodical am I getting the the thrust well I just first want to say absolutely charming it is that you chose the word methodical for anything that I can say but no I had not thought about it so I was thinking of this very much in linguistic terms and in terms of like you know subject matter as a feature of linguistic representational items but you're you're right that there might be a version of this where you know you could ask yourself whether you know a certain kind of perceptual system has a subject matter that it's somehow pre-committed to and maybe committed to in a way that it's hard for it to you know like so an example that Ken Walton gives about perception that's kind of interesting is he says you know even after learning relativity theory it's very hard to work it into the content of your perceptions you know that there's no such thing as anything that's absolutely at rest but it's I say to you okay let's just you know perceive this scene just like it is but just subtract out the absolute rest part of it like think of everything just moving relative to everything else it's very hard trick at all and so you know it could be that are you know I'm just saying this to sort of be cooperative I have nothing to like support it but it's an interesting possibility that you know are certain perceptual systems sort of evolved under you know pre-Asthanian conditions I think that's a fairly safe bet and they wound up sort of you know over committing themselves I mean some stuff that you were kind of about individuals in the role that individuals play I mean you could well imagine that our conceptual schemes evolved at a point where it was kind of useful to have individuals sort of be part of like the fundamental structure of the universe and if it later turned out that maybe that wasn't the best way to go well that ship already sailed so so I'm very interested in that I mean that's an interesting possibility I mean there's also I mean I suppose in moral and normative philosophy which I've seen from a distance on different occasions like you know it could be that you know there's something people sometimes say this that you know when you want something unless you're experiencing it as sort of like a fetishistic want where the thing you want has got no more to recommend it than the fact that you for some reason want it you're bound to think there's something worth wanting in the object and you're picking up something valuable about it you know it seems sort of a little bit in the spirit of what this is your idea not mine it wasn't meant to be mine I never called to me until you talked about it yeah can I just ask you one more thing can you just say a bit more about the idea of subject matter and how that comes into your picture of what a philosophical problem is yeah yeah the the idea is is that well you know a subject matter for well a subject matter considered in itself is sort of a way of dividing up worlds worlds are alike or different where that subject matter is concerned subject matter just is that way of dividing up worlds so on the simplest version it just is a way of partitioning all the worlds into different classes which are the ways things can be where that subject matter is concerned and then there's the next question is what is it for a sentence to be about a subject matter the answer that Lewis gave is a sentence is about a subject matter if the sentence can't vary in truth value unless there's variation in how things are where that subject matter is concerned that has the problem that sentences can be about that has the problem that say the sentence I'm hungry is about the subject matter how everything is in every possible respect because you divided things up so finally that that sentence can't differ in truth value without changing how something is in some possible respect whereas the extent that we want to talk about the intuitive subject matters of sentences we want not something that the any old subject matter that the truth value super we want the subject matter that the sentence is exactly about and for me that's something you partition the worlds into the different ways in which that sentence can be true so you don't do so if the sentence is I'm hungry you don't distinguish worlds with like a million dogs versus more dogs because that's got nothing to do with why it's true that I'm hungry so that's the notion of subject matter I kind of left some of that out but it's a potential subject matter is what a sentence is exactly about and sentences about color are supposed to be exactly about something to do with observation yeah even that's a bit too course yeah just one more thing but perhaps I picked you up wrong but I thought that when you're talking about the diagnosis of the psoriasis for example that this was something about subject matter was going to be your diagnosis of where this intractable problem seems to come from yeah so there's the naive use a phrase that Chalmers uses idianic subject matter what we thought we were talking about when living under these sort of ideal conditions where certain problems hadn't yet arisen so we could afford to think we were talking about that and in fact we would still be talking about that if we hadn't run into problematic situations elsewhere so there's the intended subject matter which is what you want the truth's value of the sentence to be at the mercy of and then there's is there anything out there that can play that role so with color maybe not and so if you're going to keep on talking that way either you can stick with the intended subject matter but then you're going to get stuff stuck on your shoe every now and then there's got to be some apologetics that goes with that sort of discourse okay yeah that did happen that came in a bit more clearly with the stuff that I didn't talk about about lyre paradox so certain kinds of talk are supposed to be about this and the truth value of those sentences at the mercy of these distinctions and not those unfortunately there's no consistent way of doing that because the world was unkind so the sentence is going to have a real subject matter in the sense that it exhausts the stuff that the truth value is sensitive to it's going to have to go beyond anything we were prepared for and either someone like the International Bureau of Weights and Measures or someone is going to have to develop a constituency for what this new subject matter is going to be and get everyone to be on the same page or more likely we'll just keep on stumbling along the way we do so the distinction is between subject matter that you wanted and the subject matter the ones that are actually available to consistently speak about that's really helpful thank you okay I think you've been wishing to ask a question thank you so it seems like another way of thinking about this is that it's not in terms of a distinct subject matter as defined by a part of the world that we're trying to cover but maybe based on the way that we relate to the subject matter so at the ground philosophy is really just a bunch of people who discuss things and call themselves philosophers and go to philosophy departments and philosophy talks and could philosophy simply be a study of the things that we don't know how to think about yet like once we know or believe we know how to do something it tends to go into a different field a different discipline and we get a name for it and there seems to be a sociological principle that if we like to talk about we don't know how to turn into sciences then we're almost necessarily stuck on the things I was trying to play it lives a risk to that kind of you early on philosophy is questions that don't haven't got spun off maybe aren't eligible to be spun off into sciences but that doesn't seem to be enough because there's like there's no shortage of such subject matters or questions out there some of them are philosophically gripping and some of them aren't and I was trying to suggest that at least one source of the grippingness is that we can't say goodbye to certain subject matters because it's sort of that would be like saying you know I hate this boat let's burn it and we'll be out at sea and then eventually hopefully some better planks will drift by and we'll find a way to put them together and do a better boat you've got to be a drift in something and what better than philosophy Thank you I just wanted to pick up on what you said to John right at the end there when you said so if we wanted to resolve things in such a way that we weren't in a case of color in such a way that we were not stumbling over ourselves every now and then we would you know maybe leave it to the some international council to decide the matter is that the case in all cases? I was wondering whether another possibility is that the absolute conception of the world Bernard Williams could decide the matter and the question would be how to speak in a way that reflects that were you explicitly wanting to rule that out or maybe leaving it open that different problems might lead to different solutions and I wasn't thinking of those as so oh sorry like in some cases it might be that the absolute conception has determined the right way here's another thing I learned at Berkeley this is like the philosophical error is to think that just because there's the relative distinction between ways of talking and thinking that are more or less reflective of the basic and critical aspects of our the ways we're put together you shouldn't try to build that up into such a thing as the perfect absence of like since we were able to make this tower a little bit taller let's just postulate a maximally tall tower whatever exactly that would be so I guess my thought would be that there's some kind of fetishization there's a negative way of doing the absolute parochial distinction there's a positive way I don't know what Breonna Williams had in mind but I would guess it's more the negative way there's certain ways you could sort of improve your perspective by making it kind of less mucked up with things that we could easily transcend but the idea of you know what I'm tired of transcending everything one by one let's just like take a long weekend just transcend everything and so that's why you might need at a certain point you're going to need sort of social organizations that sort of say you can't just hand over responsibility to the world to solve these sorts of problems for us if you spy a chance to get yourself out of certain jams there might be no alternative but to get a big enough group of people to go to say we'll all try to get out of the jam in that same way without supposing that we'll have got out of all possible you know there'll be later jams 100 years from now but even to get out of the present jam so I've been interested in this stuff about like constantly attempts to sort of revise what a meter means or what a second means and there's a way in which we definitely feel we're getting a better grip on what second talk was about but it's not because once we get away from like human sensibility we'll see what a second really was all along you know arbitrary choices are going to have to be made and constituencies will have to be developed for let's all do it that way yeah right Hannah and then then Lee I wanted to ask about the relation between the points that you make in the Curson Blessing section and the idea of this kind of predicament focused conception of philosophy so the way that you motivate the idea of these philosophical predicaments that we get ourselves into these jams is if I've understood it correctly that there are these ways that we can't help thinking about the world and then we find that when we try to extend these ways of thinking about the world too far we find ourselves getting into conflicts with other ways that we have thinking about the world but I had two related questions about that and one is whether it's necessary for the idea of the predicaments that we get into that we get into them because what gets us into the trouble is our own ways of thinking about the world so in other words could it be part of philosophy that the world itself presents us with predicaments and then the related question has to do with the fact that I was thinking about the sentence that you have at the beginning of the Curson Blessing section where you say certain ways of thinking force themselves on us not because the world cries out to be conceived those ways but because that's how we roll and I was thinking about that sentence and I was thinking I wonder if well I wonder if I agree with that I was thinking maybe some of these ways that you describe as ways that are how we roll are actually ways in which the world cries out to be conceived by us and then I thought that seems like if I'm puzzled about that sentence then it seems like I'm in a kind of philosophical puzzle I'm in a philosophical jam but it doesn't seem like a jam that I'm led into because of conflicts in my different ways of thinking because in a way the conflict is about well is this even the right way to think about these ways of thinking I thought my message was a real downer even worse but I never there's this phrase that people some people here probably know what it means like philosophical pessimism like Schopenhauer or something like that yours seems like potentially more pessimistic so I mean right well so I'm going to throw this right back at you because so I guess I want to say there's only two different like notions of the world that could be in play when you say there's the world throughout this at us so it could be that you don't even have something worth calling the world that sort of repays kind of theoretical attention unless certain things have already been kind of worked over by some aspect of how we're put together which we then sort of stand aside and say who me like I'm just dealing with the world here so it could be I'm certainly willing to say that so the following could be possible that we have to think of the world in causal terms why and then blah blah blah something that you and Kant understand but I don't but then having done so we then say oh my gosh the world sandbagged me here and it's making me do these things it's presenting these problems but whose fault was it really I'm inclined to blame the transcendental self I blame the transcendental self for everything I don't know so you could take the view that if it wasn't for us and the whole project of trying to represent things everything would just take care of itself and you know so it could be the kind of world that does present us with predicaments wouldn't even exist if we were here I don't know that's I'd already gone three steps deeper than I know how to go but you're going two more steps Thanks for that. I wanted to ask about the upshot of your view if you thought about it so it seems like a worry for a lot of approaches to philosophy that conceive it as less in the pursuit of truth and more as like an error discovering type of pursuit run into this problem that it potentially makes philosophy come to an end a little bit sooner than we might expect so it seems like I mean I'm thinking of the color case in particular often the hard part like the feeling that we've run into something and things have become kind of intractable comes fairly soon I mean you think that you have this grip on what the colors are and then you learn some science and then you're puzzled and then philosophers keep talking about what we can make of this for decades and decades and decades John among them and maybe that's just a horrible mistake but maybe there is something to that yeah I'm curious like once we're pinned what do we do is there anything else and I mean I also kind of wondered whether depending on your answer to this question there's something to be said for like a bit of a cultural shift in philosophy towards maybe being more willing to back out or change your mind or start over or something like that these aren't really radical ideas you're suggesting changing your mind like I don't know where that's coming from but yeah I guess I haven't read the book but isn't that like everything must go it's kind of about that philosophers weren't such weren't such babies and we're if we were more willing to grow up we could get past all these problems and there's it's only because of sort of an impotile addiction to the very problematic ways of of thinking that we act all sort of scandalized by and say oh my god how did this happen that yeah so philosophy is sort of a make work project for for philosophers I guess I mean I guess I think people are like way too optimistic on the possibility of in the same way as like you know in political philosophy there's this sort of debate between a certain kind of conservative and a certain kind of progressive both probably exaggerated but you know I'm a certain kind of conservative says you progressives kind of just think you can just like go into the lab and make up some you know cleverer form of social arrangement and then if everybody just goes to sleep tonight and then you give them the drugs they stop caring about their children or who knows everything will be great in the morning you know and I guess I don't have that I'm not conservative about many things but I do have a little I guess I think the idea that we can just sort of build up we'll just set up a shop on the next island where there aren't as many like you know termites or something that's going to work I mean you know Paul Churchill used to talk this way in like a long time ago in scientific realism in the plasticity of mind it will stop talking about colors and we'll just or mental states will talk about sort of vectors in a 79 million dimensional neural net kind of vector representation of well yeah I mean I mean I assume it's not like a coincidence it isn't because like philosophers were sort of being sticks in the mud that that hasn't happened I mean it's just like it's like there are certain things that in some ways you know put it the other way around the goal of everything isn't to find like an all-purpose way of thinking that never lets you down in every setting that would be horrible you want to have you know you want to successfully satisfy you want to find ways of thinking that work in almost all settings sort of knocked off your intellectual predilections by the fact that some philosopher thought I like some stupid case that never you know I mean the example that I often that I go back to is like this idea that people sometimes have like about twin earth cases you can say oh well you know we're thinking about water here but a molecule for molecule duplicate of us is thinking about twin water over there and oh my gosh you know this is like a huge challenge to ordinary ways of understanding the contents of of mental state and to fight back we have to like carve out some super subtle notion of narrow content as like a function from context and so it seems like people are very happy taking this like thing that has never happened like there's this planet where people are exact same brains as like a reason to totally redo our ways of conceiving mental states but a thing that always happens every day all the time that people think of water in slightly different ways that would already kind of maybe motivate you to not assign so much importance to narrow content is it nobody says oh maybe we should privilege that one I mean there's like a huge range of predicaments and it's like people who do like scientific modeling don't look for the same model for every problem that might arise and there's certain problems that arise among normal people and you know we work with models that work for most purposes and the idea that will come up with like a super model that God would be happy to work with in all cases you know that's just sort of like why why would you want especially if you're like your species evolved to find certain ways of thinking about things natural yeah the microphone people in the back will want to hear you thanks yeah so this question goes a little little bit back to the beginning so you were talking about like what's the subject matter of philosophy and you talked about some problems of construing it and I was just wondering whether a lot of the problems that you pointed out are also like problems for what's the subject matter of normative inquiry more broadly like inquiry about you know what we should do or what we should think and stuff like that yeah and I was just wondering what you think about that and yeah I guess I'm thinking like maybe there's like an important connection also between philosophical inquiry and normative inquiry one might even think that like a big chunk of philosophical inquiry is sort of like normative it's not about like curving you know orienting ourselves in the logical space of all possible worlds but like you know what should we do how should we think anyways no no that makes perfect sense and the whole there is a section of this that never made it in that said like you know maybe there already was a mistake you know in thinking of of you know philosophy as as truth seeking even if you know in a second go around you can reconceive questions about what to do as questions about like what's the true answer to like should I do this or that or something that that's you know really we shouldn't be talking about worlds as you know things that verify or don't verify descriptive statements so you should really be talking more generally about you know choices that we might be faced with and there's different possible answers and who cares if there's some sort of metaphysical do-dad that witnesses the difference between these and that's fair enough and I mean I think there's a risk of getting like super deflationary about what the subject matter is because subject matter is then kind of being kind of like questions you know and then the subject matter it's sort of like what are you studying in philosophy what we're asking about well yeah so maybe it's too much to hope for a single field of play in which you can sort of like against which you can calibrate the different parts of philosophy you're about because they do seem sometimes to sort of taking each other's wash and so on but I may have gone too far in that direction that's a good point oh sure I'm an econ major I'm not very familiar with any of the jargon in philosophy we all end with you oh you said econ but I was under the impression that the kind of unifying factor between philosophy and the sciences and why I couldn't very much assume that if somebody told me that they were an anti-moral realist but they believed that mathematics is like some kind of objective truth I would say that's probably inherently incorrect because of the direct link that philosophy and math both have just in their origin so I kind of my question is like couldn't isn't the very beginning of philosophy and let's say something like mathematics which is we would you know want to be a science that origin basically means necessitates their similarity because like in mathematics you know as soon as we head into second order logic it's like okay well now you're just defining axioms and postulates and from there you're making proofs and some of them happen to be objective because physics and engineering proves that these things work in real life right and then in philosophy it's like well now we're going to start with these random assumptions we're making and then from there we're going to build a constructive argument but whether or not we're discussing the meta of that argument well that's a whole other story so couldn't we just look at like the very beginning of both fields I suppose and say like yeah because we both are having to make assumptions or axioms they inherently are similar in that aspect yeah I almost think I understood that which means I have to pretend to answer it so I mean in the previous question I mean if both math and morality there's a question maybe more gripping in the case of morality about I mean everybody agrees that there's like better and worse answers to the questions and then that both fields raise and then there's a second issue of whether the betterness and worseness is to be conceived as the world being a certain way as opposed to another way or say in the case of morality some people say well no it's really this is getting back to what you were saying I mean it's really there's better and worse procedures there's you know there's there's proper ways to reach decisions morally that aren't sort of happily conceived as ways that are better tracking what the moral facts are out there now it's not as common in the case of math but there's that view as well in math you know that that ultimately the real difference between good and bad mathematical theories well I mean at least one important difference is I mean you can do math well or badly it's a it's a procedural difference and then there's still a question why some mathematical theories like caught on like not any old random set of axioms that you would write down would catch on well that might have something to do with which bodies of sort of procedures actually are useful in dealing with the world we find ourselves in so like arithmetic is really good because you can move like huge numbers of steps in a given direction I'm sure you know you've noticed that that's why arithmetic is good whereas if we have in a world where motion was rotational say and after like six steps you're back where you started from then this other variant of arithmetic modular arithmetic where you know arithmetic mod 6 you know 2 plus 3 is still 5 but 2 plus 5 is 1 you go back to 1 you know it's like you know modular arithmetic is really important but mostly because for the light it sheds on regular arithmetic it's not like necessarily the thing that you directly apply and so one could take the view that in the case of morality and math both it's really correct incorrect it's really like to be drawn at a procedural level and then there's a further question which procedures doesn't make sense for creatures like us to be applying given the situations we find ourselves in that's not really an answer it's just to say there are the same kinds of questions whether to look for truth in mathematics as there are in morality and as there are in philosophy then this thank you for your talk so the talk is called the demarcation problem for philosophy but I'm wondering does that mean then that we should think that other disciplines aren't doing this kind of pointing out where we're pinned thing and that's how we demarcated philosophy from other disciplines or is it that maybe when some problem arises in another discipline that sort of shows where you're pinned that's when they're actually doing philosophy there or is it well that's interesting yeah I mean certainly philosophers have encountered the market on being pinned on other fields and there are parts of I don't know anything about this myself this time I really mean it as opposed to the other times I said I didn't know about stuff like in physics people get pinned in various ways I think on the whole they tend not to sort of glory in it the way philosophers do and maybe even rightly do it's sort of like I mean it's sort of like what the human condition is to a certain kind of literature you know high flown literature you know getting in predicaments is to philosophers whereas physicists you know they did anything we're going to have to deal with this at some point but maybe we can sort of field it out to like that guy like super I mean there are to the very few physicists who actually care about those questions but most physicists can safely ignore where philosophers don't say oh that's too hard let's field it out to the guys we like to deal with the hard stuff and we're going to continue with like whether it's better if people have enough to eat that's like so I don't think there's the same like love of predicaments but I could be wrong yeah and then gentlemen so it seems that there's some question these days about whether it's helpful to gatekeep philosophy and it also seems as though there are a lot of people in philosophy departments who aren't doing this and I'm curious about whether you think that this is the only real philosophy and the rest of what we are doing who aren't doing this are not doing real philosophy actually there's a cancellation letter in the mail to people I think everyone here will understand if I refuse to answer that I'm more like trying to find a there in a place where it once seemed like a particularly deep kind of philosophy was I definitely don't want to gatekeep being ill suited by nature to keeping anyone out of anything thanks so much for the interesting talk I guess I take it one feature of Williams distinction between the absolute or God's eye perspective and the parochial one that we just can't escape it's supposed to be that the former is in some sense third personal and theoretical while the latter is in some sense first personal and practical and I guess I was wondering if those features of that contrast were important for your use of Williams or if yeah or if they weren't meant to be playing a role in the argument well the pun that was sort of intended this is me relates to Hannah's question earlier I mean it's true that that the absolute conception is often identified with like as Thomas Nagel puts a related idea the view from nowhere but I mean it's interesting that you still say the view in other words it's kind of like there's a thing there's a kind of thing you're trying to get at that seems like it's naturally put perspectively and and you try to sort of make that the perspective less and less idiosyncratic but it's hard to completely cure yourself to get it out of the out of the picture entirely which I thought was part of Williams's point that there's something sort of ironically self undermining about you could never complete this project of trying to clean up perspectives so they stop being perspectives you know you know but so but your real question was is the kind of is the little bit the little kind of frog peering up from the bottom of a well or the mug or whatever the metaphor is that I'm seeing like where maybe there's a place for old-fashioned deep philosophy to be is that always going to have a practical aspect is it like going to be like are trying to deal with a situation that arises for us maybe that's also related to another part of honest question yeah maybe the way maybe the way I put it made it sound that way but it would be practical understood in a very kind of embracing sense where something counts as practical if the only ways we have of deciding what's really true in the world which is like supposed to be like what contrasts with the practical question nevertheless raised this sort of issue for us so if you count kind of theoretical quandaries so to speak quandaries that attend our best efforts to figure out what the world is like quandaries aside so to speak as as practical but maybe there always would be something practical left I don't know yeah yes please I haven't had a philosophy class in 60 years I don't understand a lot of what you said here today but my impression is the purpose of philosophy is to try to come to some objective truth as is the purpose of religion, science or art but it seems like philosophy just wallows in the intellectual mud so much that I would think a lot of philosophers would say I'm sick of being in this mud let me try religion or let me try something but those are so limited too I mean my question is do you think you think humans can wake up you know do you think that's possible to any kind of objective reality well your question kind of has the form isn't everybody when is everyone going to like go to the best place why are we all staying here well we all agree what the best place is I mean everyone is like discomfort you know feels discomfort with different aspects of the way we approach things but it's not like if we thought it was just like oh my god why am I why am I wearing these shoes with the laces are tied together I mean if it was that if a localized thing you could fix it and then the door would be open you know that would that would be one thing but everyone's you know doing their best to make sense of questions that matter to them the best way they know how and if they were aware of a better place to all go together they would do it so you know some parts of intellectual life are more frustrating than others and philosophy certainly takes a good bit of blame for some of the frustration but I don't really your question makes it sound as though it's like there's this unforced error that everybody's making but I don't think there's an unforced error I think you know can I ask you something maybe following up on that a little bit that you didn't say very much explicitly about the value of philosophy but just to give a little bit of friction to the question I teach a class with a physicist and a social psychologist and it took me two or three times of doing this class to realize there was a big difference between what they were doing in their lectures and what I was doing in my lectures that in their lectures they were typically saying here's the area and here's what we think is going on whereas in my lectures I was never telling them here's what's going on I've heard that about your lectures I may get a bit deeper into this but it seemed to me that what I was doing in my chats was saying here's a puzzle and what I want to do is to get each lecture I want to get the puzzle sufficiently wedged into everybody's head that they can go away and think about it and the theories you know I tell them some theories but really they're all very unconvincing and I usually I'll tell you what I think but really nobody else is convinced so the important thing is the puzzle that's the thing that seems valuable getting it in your head sharply articulated so you can think about it and there's something kind of puzzling about that because on the one hand you think well what's going to be valuable is the solution you know a puzzle isn't of any intrinsic importance it's solution it's a very important thing it's just instrumental to getting the solution but it doesn't feel like that to me in philosophy it feels to me more like the value is in the puzzle and there's something disturbing about that I just wish to go to any free association that was like one aspect of that's sort of like the evil twin of Berkeley philosophy of the sense that as I was thinking of it that's what I've been wrestling with all these years that you don't want to just be like fetishizing puzzles and where they have nothing to recommend them beyond that oh like people much smarter than you used to fetishize these same puzzles you know and so I was trying to I'm more attracted to the idea that maybe this is a bit related but given that we kind of of our nature have to be sort of operating with principles that their ecological niche so to speak is only so big there's got to be debugging procedures there's got to be things you've got to learn how to do when that happens when you get cornered like that you stop like saying why again and again or something like that so there's this nice book by Dennett and somebody else I can't remember called Inside Jokes that has this story about what humor is about that kind of brings out how many people commented on affinity between humor and philosophy and lots of philosophy can be funny some even intently so and their idea is like well you're operating with all these sort of sub personal like fast and dirty mechanisms but those are going to misfire a lot of the time and so and you don't want to wait until the last possible minute you want to you want to sort of like set up these artificial situations where things that you're spontaneously and kind to think you catch yourself in the act of thinking of them and you think oh that's funny that's a weird thing like I mean I find it funny like how I keep on wondering whether the coin layer come up heads even if I know that there's no nothing there to really be wondering about and so I kind of think the one value of philosophy can have it can have like an apologetic value in that it tells you you shouldn't don't need to apologize for like trying to to certain principles if the replacement principles would actually if life goes better if you try to have some immeasurable principles then if you like really do you to these like weaker principles that are like more consistent or you know so so I mean I think there's this sort of apologetic aspect you can look yourself in the mirror and say you know this is actually okay that you're using fallible procedures and then a more positive part of philosophy would be you know develop like a bunch of tools for how to deal with the there's a slapstick aspect to philosophy when you find yourself like out on a ledge you think oh my god like I followed all the rules and I it's a way of leading yourself back in off the ledge that reminds me of this philosophically interesting joke I think I don't know what it has to do with the ledge you know I was walking my dog last night around the building like on the seventh floor along the ledge and he says some people are afraid of heights it's not me I'm afraid of wits absolutely the last call be quick there's certain subject matter in philosophy where if you ask anybody they would say that this is like philosophy yes for example like what is justice where you ask someone is this philosophy they would say yes philosophy if you ask them oh is distinguishing belief versus knowledge is philosophy they would say yes and so the natural thing to ask is well why do we say yes to both of these subject matter right and the natural thing to do is to construct some kind of system as to distinguishing what is philosophy versus not philosophy but my thought is that is it possible that these are just kind of atoms like you know just by atom I mean like it's a statement where you just say yes and there's no reason for why you say yes this is coming from the idea of say like Michael Humer I wonder if you can say ethical intuitionism right there's certain things that you say moral statements are just morally good statements yeah yeah right well I mentioned the paradox of inquiry briefly you know if you didn't already in this context if you didn't already know what philosophy was then you wouldn't even understand the question supposedly being posed when you say well what's philosophy what's a philosophical problem and one answer that's been given and maybe it's a bit like what Michael Humer says is that well you might have like recognitional ability with respect to certain things and you're wondering what the deeper principle is you know you can say like so most of us are you know very few people will say I wish I could tell the difference between good jokes and bad jokes it just really eludes me people are very like Descartes says you know common sense must be of all things the most equally distributed and everyone is so well satisfied with their own share so people kind of think they can tell what makes sense and what doesn't make sense people think they can tell like what's a philosophical question and what isn't you might grant them that but it's why wouldn't you there's a fair amount of non-collusive agreement on the topic it's not like you constantly have to like browbeat people stop calling that philosophy I mean one of the things that Sally spends a lot of time doing is trying to get people to stop saying that's not that's not philosophy she even tried to stop me knowing that it's hopeless but so it could be that the answer to your question is people know the difference in the sense that they can recognize the difference and then and then it could be that they're wondering what they're really picking up on is it just like you know people can also recognize during the stream what's cool and what isn't cool in a certain high school and probably you're not wondering let's get a big grant so we can figure out what they're really picking up on at bad high school when they call things cool or not cool and so there's a bit of a bet here like so people these things you recognize as philosophical questions and then there's this bet hopefully it isn't all just a complete cultural artifact that's completely path dependent like a bunch of people like Aristotle asked a bunch of questions some of them end up being good they were taken over by scientists some of them we just can't give up on that so hopefully that could turn out to be okay well that was a thrilling talk so thank you and for a fascinating and generous discussion