Performative Contradictions in Reviewing

a companion to michael oakeshott

Eric Schliesser makes a very witty observation about Kekes’ review of Paul and my “Companion” regarding Bob Grant’s biographical piece. It’s especially witty since there are in fact two “companions“.

Kekes’ comments again reeks of sour grapes. Bob makes it quite clear:

Though as my main topic will be his love life, which is not the same as his sex life, though the two are obviously connected. And perhaps both are, more distantly, with his work. Michael in several places says that love was the main business of his life. If we are to take him literally, therefore, his work appears as more of a sideline or an antidote, and even he admits from time to time that he is using it to deaden his sorrows or drive away his demons.

Admittedly this is a tricky undertaking, but its done with aplomb and is hardly sordid. There is no-one better placed to have undertaken such a complex and sensitive theme – there were some half-truths making the rounds and Bob does a fine job of setting things straight. Regards Grant “peddling often malicious hearsay”: for those of us who know Bob and know of his admiration for MO, nothing could be further from the truth. Furthermore, Bob was able to speak to several of the ladies in question and to Simon and more besides. I don’t know why people are troubled by knowing their intellectual hero is no paragon of virtue. “It is not at all inconsistent,”Oakeshott wrote, “to be conservative in respect of government and radical in respect of almost every other activity.” And in this sense, his private life (which NEVER was really a secret) throws down the gauntlet to the “conservatism” characteristic of the fundamentalist Right, that through its moralizing and preachiness, actually blurs the private-public distinction. As Paul and I wrote in our introduction:

Drawing on not only the letters and notebooks in the public archive at the LSE but also private diaries and letters as well as extensive personal interviews with Oakeshott’s friends, family, and lovers, Grant shows just how central erotic love was to Oakeshott’s life and how obsessively, irrationally, selfishly, and often destructively he pursued it. This Dionysiac aspect of Oakeshott’s private life stands in stark contrast to the polished, Apollonian character of his writings and philosophy in general, and it will no doubt shock those who are familiar only with the latter. Nevertheless, it is no part of Grant’s purpose to reduce Oakeshott’s philosophy to his private life or, Nietzsche-like, to see it as a mere rationalization of his personality. Instead, he sees a more complicated dynamic at work: Oakeshott’s anti-utopian politics serve as both a counterweight and a Hobbesian foundation for his erotic utopia.

Gate Swings

music

Clarence “Gatemouth” really does swing on this terrific recording. “Pops” and the “Count” would have been proud. Great to see that trumpeter Jamil Sharif is on the album. If ever you are in NOLA head to the Maison Bourbon where Jamil is resident – a great time guaranteed. I’ve just noticed that Jamil has a new album out (new to me at least) – can’t wait to hear it.

Stigmergic Coverage Algorithm for Multi-Robot Systems

cognitive modeling, cognitive science, cognitive systems, collaboration, collective intentionality, collective knowledge, computational intelligence, stigmergic, stigmergic cognition, stigmergy, swarm, swarm behavior, swarm intelligence

A nice simulation from the Maastricht Swarm Lab

See also the great video posted by Simon Garnier of  The Swarm Lab @ NJIT

C. S. Peirce and F. A. Hayek on the Abstract Nature of Sensation and Cognition

hayek

Here are some extracts from Jim Wibble’s fascinating paper, the full version available here.

When exploring ideas on philosophy of science and economic methodology, one of the most unusual articles that one can encounter is Hayek’s well-known piece, “The Primacy of the Abstract”. In a note in the article, Hayek tells us that he had thought of another title but it would not have had the shock effect which is the merit of the phrase chosen. What Hayek wanted to convey with the title was the intellectual novelty of the positions argued. Without getting into the details of his position, Hayek maintains that all sensation is preceded by mental operations of abstraction. He had expressed his views on the subject nearly two decades earlier in a much larger work. His views on the primacy of the abstract had already appeared in The Sensory Order (1952). In that book, Hayek had taken the position that the abstract nature of sensation and cognition was supported by what we would now call the neuroscience of his time. In other words, Hayek thought that the neurophysiological evidence concerning how human sensation and cognition function provided an empirical basis for questioning prevailing empiricist theories and philosophies of how those functions worked. Various versions of empiricism dominated much of science at that time. Also the empiricist psychology of abstract ideas from the British associationist school was widely known in both early 20th century philosophy and psychology. Among other things, Hayek was conveying his sharp disagreement with the prevailing empiricist conceptions of how abstract ideas were created and how science was understood. Such a different view of how human knowing functions also has profound implications for understanding how society can be governed, for how the economy works, and for understanding the evolutionary limits on human knowing in economic processes.

Since Hayek’s title, “The Primacy of the Abstract”, had its intended shock effect on this author, it created an intellectual sensitivity for like ideas. As it turns out, another intellect had come to a similar position on cognition and abstraction decades earlier than Hayek. The purpose here is not to identify a precursor as such, but rather to acknowledge both the similarities and the differences in their views. The other figure is the American scientist, mathematician, and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. From a couple of references that Hayek has made to Peirce’s writings and the fact that Hayek’s good friend, Karl Popper, also knew of Peirce’s writings, it appears that Hayek must have read some of the volumes of Peirce’s Collected Papers. As quoted at the beginning of the paper, Popper called Peirce “one of the greatest philosophers of all time.” Peirce and Hayek were inquiring minds whose interests seem to range over many of the same disciplines but with varying degrees of intensity. Peirce may have had a greater knowledge of astronomy, mathematics, and philosophy while Hayek had a deeper awareness of economics, linguistics, psychology, and political philosophy. Peirce like his well-known father Benjamin, also had a keen interest in economics, especially mathematical economics. Peirce the son kept in touch with economics through his life-long acquaintance Simon Newcomb whose second discipline of interest after astronomy was economics. Newcomb was a prominent antagonist of the founders of the American Economics Association in the late 1880s. Newcomb, who eventually joined the AEA, opposed the expansive view of government proposed by AEA founders such as Richard Ely and Edmund James. Peirce was also kept aware of developments in psychology by his lifelong friend William James. Hayek certainly seems to have been greatly aware of James’s contributions to cognitive psychology. So here is another avenue of connection between Peirce and Hayek.

Unlike Hayek, most modern economists have always kept their distance from psychology. Both disciplines separated from philosophy as autonomous social sciences in the late 19th century. Even though classical economics is dated from Adam Smith and political economy became a separate subject in its own right late in the 18th century, political economy was most often taught as a branch of moral philosophy until the late 19th century. It wasn’t until the neoclassical revolution and the creation of marginalist ideas that the name of the discipline changed from political economy to economics and it became a separate autonomous discipline. Whether economists agree or disagree with psychologists, it is important to understand the conceptions of psychology that previous generations of economists encountered. In the 19th and early 20th century, higher education was much more general than now and economists would have been much more exposed to the general ideas of psychology and philosophy than they are today. In our present time, it is possible, that someone could now get a doctorate in economics without ever having had any formal exposure to psychology or philosophy in terms of an organized university class. For those so narrowly educated, the intellectual breadth of earlier figures like Hayek and Peirce may be difficult to grasp. And the most important things they have to say could simply be beyond the appreciation of even those who have won Nobel Prizes in economics. With regard to very general psychological ideas, there is a distinction that pertains to cognition that is important to recognize in understanding both Hayek and Peirce. It permeates the outlook of The Sensory Order. That distinction seems to have been forgotten or is very unclear in modern economics. The distinction I have in mind is the difference between higher and lower mental processes. This is an evolutionary distinction that is still widely shared by those in many contemporary disciplines that are concerned with human intelligence and learning. It can be taken as part of the broad conceptual background of previous generations of economists especially those from around 1859 until 1950.

Decades before Hayek authored The Sensory Order and its reprise, ‘‘The Primacy of the Abstract’’, Charles Sanders Peirce created a similar view of sensation, perception, and cognition. Like Hayek, Peirce emphasized the general, abstract, and relational nature of sensation, perception, and cognition. In the late 19th century, Peirce helped create the new field of mathematical logic and emphasized the logic of relations as one of the key notions of that new discipline. Peirce went on to develop conceptions of logical relations for economics, for metaphysics, for his conception of evolution, and for human perception, sensation, and cognition. Like Hayek, Peirce held that perception, sensation, and cognition were much more abstract than empiricists had ever held. They both criticized the associationistic empiricism of abstract ideas of J. S. Mill. For Hayek and Peirce the processes of human knowing are due to the active application of human cognitive capacities in apprehending relational distinctions picked up through our physiological capacities usually called our senses. The contents of conscious awareness are constructed by these capacities even though this is the opposite of what our common sense seems to imply. Hayek’s views are more physiologically grounded while Peirce’s ideas benefit more from his knowledge of mathematics and logic. Both view human knowing as dealing with the relational properties of their subjects of inquiry. Both criticize the Mills associationistic empirical psychology. Both appeal to topology as a vehicle for understanding the relational logical properties of things, processes, and events as they are apprehended in sensation and cognition. And both view sensation as active relational construction. Thus sensation is predominantly abstract and general. Human cognition, sensation, and perception function like topological relations operators in conveying the most important relational details regarding our subjects of inquiry. For both Hayek and Peirce, the abstract nature of cognition and sensation has important economic dimensions. Other views of sensation and cognition essentially assume the equivalent of much less efficient processes of information search and knowledge acquisition. Humans continually construct abstract ideas making relational comparisons and inferences regarding the phenomena of their current and future circumstances. Humans do not readily waste the relational information regarding their environment.

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Readers may want to know that the author was one of two economics graduate students that attended the Penn State conference on cognitive psychology in May of 1977 where Hayek’s The Sensory Order was given a central place in the sessions and the discussions. William Butos was the other student. We heard Walter Weimer (1982) deliver his long keynote address and appraisal of The Sensory Order and Hayek’s (1982) response. Weimer thought that Hayek’s views were more psychological and thus closer to Thomas Kuhn’s view of science than those of Popper or Lakatos. In the discussion which followed, I asked Hayek whether that was so. His response was I am still a Popperian (Weimer and Hayek, 1982, p. 323). Weimer was a member of the dissertation committees for both Butos and the author.

The Story of Louis Armstrong’s Final Tape

jazz

A lovely piece by the very excellent Ricky Riccardi who tells the story. One could just imagine how big, musical and wild “Pop’s” funeral would have been were it held in NOLA (see the Italian coverage of the Flushing funeral that Ricky has posted).

Butterfly in the Typewriter

philosophical literature

I want to give a plug to the superb biography on JK Toole written by Cory MacLauchlin. He brilliantly marshals the Toole story into a plausible and coherent whole given that much of what we know was severely modulated through Thelma Toole and who along with Robert Gottlieb tend to be cast (for different reasons) as the villains of the tragic real-life drama behind “Confederacy.” MacLauchlin does not fall into that trap – he offers a very fair and balanced assessment of the positive role these two did play, whatever their failings. MacLauchlin is also restrained in making bald claims ascribing a repressed homosexuality to Toole. Though this may well be true, there is little positive evidence for it and a wealth of hearsay against it. At all times MacLauchlin meticulously assesses the more sordid/sensationalist claims that have been made over the years and finds them to be wanting. Regarding the “Confederacy” characters, as MacLauchlin points out, one is somewhat puzzled by the tacit over-sensitivity by some concerning the Jewish characters in the book, namely Myrna Minkoff  and the Levys. It is through Minkoff and Gus Levy that a significant redressing of justice does occur – the former nabbing Ignatius just in time and the latter helping Burma Jones, someone at the very bottom of the social totem pole. Though Mrs. Levy is without doubt the most obnoxious character in the book there is nothing remotely anti-Semitic about these characters. The insight into a writer’s mind (much like Kafka or Musil that is so tightly woven into the writing) is absolutely fascinating and is sensitively and elegantly articulated by MacLauchlin. All would-be writers need to read this book to get a sense of what a profound talent is (Toole) and as an exercise in the art of biography, appreciate MacLauchlin’s good taste and connoisseurship.

Oakeshott and Hayek: Situating the Mind

situated cognition

Below are some excerpts from my paper – the excerpts chosen with a view to addressing the criticisms leveled by John Kekes.

1) Kekes writes:

The third deficient essay is by Leslie Marsh, one of the editors of this volume. He compares Oakeshott and Hayek from the point of view of cognitive science. I find this more than a little odd. Oakeshott and Hayek were strongly opposed to a scientific approach to understanding human beings. Cognitive science is the most recent approach of this kind. To try to understand either Oakeshott’s or Hayek’s work through it is absurd. There is no reason for inserting a discussion of Hayek and cognitive science in the assessment of Oakeshott’s philosophical contribution.

Kekes’ notion of science is characteristic of a philosophy of science that held sway between ’30s and the late ’50s. The cognitive science that I’m concerned with is non-reductionist and non-Cartesian which itself constitutes an acknowledgment about levels of description and bridging laws, not to mention the idea that mind is co-evolved with sociality – i. e. mind is “situated” and knowledge is “distributed.” These notions are fully validated by Hayek and Oakeshott, respectively via the Austrian emphasis on the subjectivity of experience and the Diltheyean hermeneutical tradition, both legitimatly labelled geisteswissenschaft or the human sciences. (Hayek by the way was keenly interested in the “sciences” of the mind – The Sensory Order – an interest that in no way could be deemed scientistic). (Oakeshott himself maintained an interest in philosophical psychology – see his favorable review of Ryle’s The Concept of Mind).

2) Kekes also writes:

The aim of the volume is not mere exegesis, but also critical appraisal, which includes examining reasons for and against Oakeshott’s philosophical views on particular subjects.

Kekes completely overlooks the highly critical and substantial chunk of my paper that deals with MO’s infamous swipe at Hayek, an aspect that surely deserved mention since it is so well-known and is typically uncritically perpetuated.

3) Concluding: Kekes seems to come to my paper as a deer caught in the headlights of the word “science” and a particularly dated conception of it. I’m very much in accord with notion that none of the modes or in Hayek’s case “spontaneous orders” should be imperialistic or be subsumed under science or anything else (the market for one) and there is nothing in my invocation of science that transgresses this. There is no reason why Kekes would be au fait with current non-Cartesian cognitive science (a very loose coalition of research programs I might add) – all the more reason why he should have desisted from making such a bald ascription of scientism to my enterprise.

The doyen of situated theorists to whom I refer to below (highlighted) is Evan Thompson from his Mind in Life: the “absurd” mind behind this quote, has as his AOS – cognitive science, embodied cognition, cognitive neuroscience of consciousness, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind, phenomenology and more besides. Even on territory where Kekes should be sure footed there is no consideration of the cognitive dimension to conservatism. Note especially the complete passing over of Oakeshott’s so-called “dispositional conservatism.” The notion of dispositions is very much a part of philosophical psychology whether Kekes likes it or not. Both Hayek and Oakeshott had the sophistication to factor mind into the mind-sociality equation, as does the cognitive science of which I speak, and so should Kekes.

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It’s a hazardous enterprise contrasting two figures such as Friedrich August von Hayek (1899–1992) and Michael Joseph Oakeshott (1901–1990)––similarities are often superficially drawn; divisions tend to be overstated. But if one understands both men to be centrally concerned with the social nature of mind and with the distributed nature of knowledge, then this confluence of interest dissolves the somewhat rigid ideological lines that both followers and uninformed critics attribute to these two thinkers. Admittedly, these divisions are engendered by the misunderstandings and terminological confusion that the two thinkers themselves generate. Oakeshott and Hayek were both in the business of “situating the mind,” that is, both understood rationality to be culturally saturated and modulated. For both Oakeshott and Hayek, customs, practices, and traditions are the fundamentum and the residua of practical reasoning. Oakeshott was inspired by the Diltheyan hermeneutic tradition; Hayek was schooled within the Austrian hermeneutic tradition emphasizing the lived subjectivity of experience. Both traditions take individuals to draw their self-understanding from what is conceptually to hand, a preexisting and dynamic web of linguistic, technological, social, political, and institutional constraints. The embedded mind does not merely respond to a given world; it is enacted through a particularized history of socioenvironmental coupling. This dynamic conception of cognition is manifest as the exercise of skillful know-how. This externalist view of mind is in sharp contrast to the Cartesian tradition that both Oakeshott and Hayek took to task—a chauvinistic and imperialist apriorism they diagnosed as corrosive of sociopolitical and ultimately moral freedom. It may appear eccentric to approach Oakeshott and Hayek from the perspective of cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, given that their reputations were established as social theorists. This said, if one is to do justice to their explicitly anti-Cartesian stance, then mind and sociality—Janus-like— cannot be pried apart. The situated stance subscribes to the proposition that mind can coherently exist only at the nexus of the embodied, the social, and the artifactual. With this firmly in place, my motivation is to show that Oakeshott and Hayek:

1. Offer a more sophisticated account of sociality than traditional sociology. They do not dispense with the vital methodological principle that retains the individual as a locus of cognition within a wider system—unlike a tradition of sociological theorizing that posits an inflated social ontology that makes no concessions to the mechanics of the mind and individualized learning patterns.

2. Have a great deal of relevance beyond their usual sociopolitical constituencies— indeed, they are right at home in the non-Cartesian wing of cognitive science. As heretical as it might first sound, Oakeshott’s and Hayek’s hermeneutical stance is compatible with a nonreductive naturalism as espoused by non-Cartesian cognitive science.

3. And that (1) and (2) jointly inform their notion of epistemic modesty: that is, the recognition that the individual is necessarily subject to cognitive—and therefore epistemic—constraint, which manifests itself as their critique of rationalism in matters of sociality. Therein lies their distinctive brand of liberalism, a liberalism that tends to get lost in the intellectual crosscurrents that can be found in Oakeshott and Hayek.

Consider this extract from the doyen of situated theorists—it expresses the very insights that Hayek and Oakeshott demand of theorizing sociality:

This power of culture and language to shape human subjectivity and experience belongs not simply to the genetic constitution of the individual, but to the generative constitution of the intersubjective community. Individual subjectivity is from the outset intersubjectivity, as a result of the communally handed down norms, conventions, artifacts, and cultural traditions in which the individual is always already embedded. Thus the internalization of joint attention into symbolic representations is not simply an ontogenetic phenomenon, but a historical and cultural one.

A situated cognitive science is not trying to sideline what has been disparagingly termed as folk psychology by reducing all experience to the level of physics. On the contrary, it accepts that a theory of mind has to accommodate our perceptual, conceptual, and emotional experiences—and as a nonreductive science it acknowledges that there are different levels of description appropriate for differing subject matter.

Elsewhere I argued that there is a tension in Oakeshott: he accepts all of the philosophical preconditions of constructivism, yet he cannot accept its natural conclusion. The problem is that writers in the social constructivist tradition by their own admission tend to be reformist and would thus qualify as rationalistic in Oakeshott’s (and Hayek’s) terms.

Quite how Oakeshott came to view Hayek as such a caricature is puzzling: even the most charitable of interpretations of The Road to Serfdom doesn’t support his famous swipe at Hayek.

Assuming it was in the version of The Constitution of Liberty that Oakeshott first came by, it is most odd that Oakeshott did not pick up on Hayek’s explicit acknowledgment of the “rationalistic laissez faire doctrine” if taken literally and pushed to its logical conclusion. Clearly, there is no attribution of the fetishism that Oakeshott earlier ascribed to Hayek.

Human Stigmergy: Theoretical Developments and New Applications

complex adaptive systems, complexity, computation, computational intelligence, computational psychology, computer science, connectionism, stigmergic, stigmergic cognition, stigmergy

Stay tuned for details about this project to be co-edited with Ted Lewis and released under Springer’s series Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics.