Scathing Review of Jonah Lehrer’s Latest

creativity

H/T to Pat Churchland for this in the Guardian:

How did Bob Dylan write “Like a Rolling Stone”? The pop-science writer Jonah Lehrer wasn’t there, but he pretends to know anyway.

Reaching a self-adoring climax, Lehrer writes: “For the first time in human history, it’s possible to learn how the imagination actually works. Instead of relying on myth and superstition, we can think about dopamine and dissent, the right hemisphere and social networks.” We can indeed think about such things, but an explanation of “how the imagination actually works” does not magically fall out of them, and hasn’t done so here.

Hume and Wittgenstein

hume, philosophy, wittgenstein

Born on this day

Hume [O.S.]

The most important philosopher ever to write in English, David Hume (1711-1776) — the last of the great triumvirate of “British empiricists” — was also well-known in his own time as an historian and essayist. A master stylist in any genre, Hume’s major philosophical works — A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740), the Enquiries concerning Human Understanding (1748) and concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), as well as the posthumously published Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779) — remain widely and deeply influential. Although many of Hume’s contemporaries denounced his writings as works of scepticism and atheism, his influence is evident in the moral philosophy and economic writings of his close friend Adam Smith. Hume also awakened Immanuel Kant from his “dogmatic slumbers” and “caused the scales to fall” from Jeremy Bentham’s eyes. Charles Darwin counted Hume as a central influence, as did “Darwin’s bulldog,” Thomas Henry Huxley. The diverse directions in which these writers took what they gleaned from reading Hume reflect not only the richness of their sources but also the wide range of his empiricism. Today, philosophers recognize Hume as a precursor of contemporary cognitive science, as well as one of the most thoroughgoing exponents of philosophical naturalism.

Wittgenstein

Considered by some to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein played a central, if controversial, role in 20th-century analytic philosophy. He continues to influence current philosophical thought in topics as diverse as logic and language, perception and intention, ethics and religion, aesthetics and culture. There are two commonly recognized stages of Wittgenstein’s thought—the early and the later—both of which are taken to be pivotal in their respective periods. The early Wittgenstein is epitomized in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. By showing the application of modern logic to metaphysics, via language, he provided new insights into the relations between world, thought and language and thereby into the nature of philosophy. It is the later Wittgenstein, mostly recognized in the Philosophical Investigations, who took the more revolutionary step in critiquing all of traditional philosophy including its climax in his own early work. The nature of his new philosophy is heralded as anti-systematic through and through, yet still conducive to genuine philosophical understanding of traditional problems.

Animal Mindreading

evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, Kristin Andrews, mind reading, mirror neurons, philosophical psychology, philosophy of mind, philosophy tv, Robert Lurz, social cognition, sociocognition

Kristin Andrews and Robert Lurz discuss animals and mindreading.

EPISTEME: A NEW SELF-DEFINITION

episteme, epistemology, social epistemology

With this issue Episteme makes its debut with Cambridge University Press, after eight successful years of publication at Edinburgh University Press. The journal’s new subtitle reflects a significant expansion in scope and mission. Our previous subtitle, ‘A Journal of Social Epistemology’, reflected our earlier focus on the nascent field of social epistemology. The new subtitle, ‘A Journal of Individual and Social Epistemology’, reflects a new self-definition as a full-spectrum journal of epistemology, including the complete remit of analytic epistemology. Our special interest in social epistemology remains, but it will no longer be our sole or primary mission. We aim to publish quality epistemological work representing the broad tradition of epistemology, using both informal and formal methodologies. We also add a commitment to include a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to epistemology, drawing on such fields as cognitive science, political theory, computer modeling, and linguistics.

This inaugural issue at Cambridge seeks to exemplify and illustrate our general aims. The issue’s central focus is a three-article symposium on pragmatic encroachment, a topic intensively discussed and debated in contemporary epistemology. Chandra Sripada and Jason Stanley, in one article, and Jeremy Fantl and Matthew McGrath, in another, defend pragmatic encroachment. Jessica Brown, by contrast, is critical of it. The Sripada-Stanley article uses an interdisciplinary methodology, i.e. experimental philosophy, by now a staple of contemporary philosophy. The other full-length paper in this issue, by Richard Bradley and Christopher Thompson, exemplifies an interdisciplinary approach to social epistemology. In the spirit of the epistemic approach to democracy, it advocates a novel approach to voting based (mainly) on its epistemic merits. The Bradley-Thompson paper also exemplifies a formally oriented approach to social epistemology. The final piece in the issue is Mikkel Gerken’s critical review of Sanford Goldberg’s Relying on Others. Goldberg’s book is both a contribution to social epistemology (specifically, testimony) and to the question of how best to conceptualize ‘processes’ when working within the tradition of process reliabilism. So this topic straddles mainstream and social epistemology.

Going forward we are open to epistemological work of many varieties, including the basic epistemology topics of knowledge, justification, skepticism, evidence, rationality, and epistemic value. Approaches of relevance to these topics include (but are not limited to) evidentialism, reliabilism, internalism, externalism, contextualism, invariantism, contrastivism, virtue theory, and Bayesianism. Special domains for epistemic analysis include perception, memory, intuition, belief (categorical and graded), confirmation, modality, mathematics, and language. Within social epistemology topics of interest include testimony, peer disagreement, collective epistemology, judgment aggregation, internet epistemology, expert scientific testimony, epistemic approaches to democracy, and computer simulation of social networks. Our team of associate editors stands ready to oversee the assessment of submissions on these and related topics. The team is composed of Jessica Brown, Igor Douven, Don Fallis, Branden Fitelson, Jennifer Lackey, Christian List, Jack Lyons, Matthew McGrath, Jonathan Schaffer, Frederick Schmitt, Jonathan Weinberg, and Michael Weisberg.

Alvin Goldman

Nick Webb and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Douglas Adams, Nick Webb, philosophical fiction, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Obituary of the exceptional Nick Webb.

Beyond Complexity: Can The Sensory Order Defend the Liberal Self?

Chor-Yung Cheung, complex adaptive systems, complexity, connectionism, consciousness, liberalism, liberty, neurophilosophy, philosophy of social science, spontaneous order

My chum Chor-yung Cheung who like myself is both an Oakeshottian and a Hayekian introduces his paper below:

Friedrich Hayek’s social philosophy is one of the most systematic and sophisticated among the contributions made by 20th-century liberal thinkers. His defense of the free market and individual freedom and his critique of collectivism of various kinds are mainly based on his epistemological theses, which in turn are derived from his social philosophy. Hayek once famously said, ‘‘the differences between socialists and nonsocialists ultimately rest on purely intellectual issues capable of a scientific resolution and not on different judgments of value,’’ and he believes that the doctrines advocated by the socialists ‘‘can be shown to be based on factually false assumptions,’’ and the whole family of socialist thought can be ‘‘proved erroneous’’ (1973, p. 6). One important area contributing to the development of Hayek’s epistemological theses is his works on theoretical psychology, and his book The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology (1952a) plays a crucial role in this since it helped Hayek spell out the logical character of his social philosophy (1952a, p. v). It can be said that The Sensory Order enables Hayek to develop a conception of mind (which is essentially a classificatory and rule constituting complex order of a mental kind) that, on its own, enhances our understanding of cognitive psychology, and, when linked with Hayek’s social and political thought, helps strengthen Hayek’s epistemological defense of the free market and limited government. Although The Sensory Order did not attract the kind of scholarly attention it deserves for decades after its first publication in 1952, the path-breaking quality of the book and the integral part it plays in Hayek’s social philosophy are now widely recognized (see, e.g., Butos & Koppl, 2006; Caldwell, 2004; Feser, 2006; Gaus, 2006; Horwitz, 2000; Marsh, 2010; Rizzello, 1999; Smith, 1997; Weimer, 1982). Admittedly, The Sensory Order is a difficult book since it deals with questions of the most fundamental kind (such as the nature of mind and the limits of explanation). When one tries to relate The Sensory Order to Hayek’s broader defense of liberalism, the task becomes doubly difficult, and different interpretations of Hayek’s position in The Sensory Order may lead to diametrically opposite assessment of his contribution. Scholars who are unsympathetic to Hayek’s social philosophy tend to characterize his explanation of the mental order in The Sensory Order as ‘‘materialistic and naturalistic’’ and wonder how his brand of materialism with its implied physicalist notion of human agency can sit well with the defense of individual liberty. Contrariwise, defenders of Hayek like to stress his idea that the inherent nature of the mind as a classification apparatus sets limits to its capacity for self-explanation. They argue that social interaction in any developed society must involve so great a degree of complexity that no single mind or central planning unit can fully take into account all the respective preferences of, or the dispersed information possessed by, individual actors, making synoptic planning untenable. This chapter is an attempt to offer an interpretation of The Sensory Order in line with Hayek’s supporters. But it would like to go a step further by arguing that a liberal conception of human agency, in which the individual is characterized as distinct, free, evolutionary, creative yet culturally embedded, can be derived from Hayek’s theoretical psychology. In what follows, I outline my interpretation of The Sensory Order and defend Hayek against some major criticisms, including the criticism that his psychological works express or imply a physicalist conception of the mind. Furthermore, I identify some problems with Hayek’s conception of the self: in particular its ‘‘instrumental’’ tendency and corresponding lack of appreciation of the unique value of individual style and imagination.

“Less Than Human” wins 2012 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award

Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, david livingstone smith, less than human

Here’s a scoop. My chum and colleague David Livingstone Smith’s Less Than Human has been awarded 2012 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for non-fiction. Nice one DLS! Proud to know you (even before the award!)

Mind and Machine

Joel Walmsley

Look out for the this forthcoming book by Joel Walmsley. Joel co-wrote with the one and only Andre Kukla a terrific paper a few years back  for one of the early issues of EPISTEME.

Google as cognitive extension

distributed cognition, distributed knowledge, extended cognitive systems, extended mind, externalism, global brain, google, memory

“Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips” in Science.

The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can “Google” the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue. The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.

Rationalism in Politics

cognition, cognitive ecology, collective knowledge, conservatism, Gene Callahan, liberal education, liberalism, liberty, oakeshott, philosophy of mind, philosophy of social science, political philosophy, rationalism, rationalism in politics, rationality, situated cognition, skepticism, social cognition, social connectionism, social epistemology, social ontology, socialism

In anticipation of a talk I’m giving later on in the week on Oakeshott’s so-called “dispositional conservatism”, here is a nice little piece by my chum Gene Callahan serving as a good introduction to RIP.

The British philosopher and historian Michael Oakeshott is a curious figure in twentieth-century intellectual history. He is known mostly as a “conservative political theorist,” although he rejected ideology and his conservatism was primarily temperamental. Furthermore, his work on politics was only a fraction of his output, which comprised idealist philosophy, aesthetics, religion, education, the philosophy of history, and even horse racing. His popularity reached its zenith in the 1950s and early 1960s, when he was well known on both sides of the Atlantic, appearing on the BBC and becoming the favorite philosopher at National Review. But he never seemed to seek popularity, and did little or nothing to boost his own when it subsequently faded. Today, despite the growing interest in Oakeshott since his death in 1990, even his best-recognized work, his essay “Rationalism in Politics,” is, I contend, not appreciated widely enough—thus, this article.

Lovers of liberty should keep Oakeshott’s work on rationalism in mind for at least two reasons. First, it offers a complementary but still significantly different critique of planning to those of Mises and Hayek. However, at the same time, it provides a warning to the advocates of freedom not to fall into the rationalist quagmire themselves. The relevance of the latter point is demonstrated by, for example, the tendency of many development economists, even those who are “market oriented,” to attempt to impose their theoretical schemes for taking a shortcut to westernization on some Third World country, while running roughshod over all the traditions, customs, and morals native to the place, which, whatever their short-comings, at least managed to sustain the society in question over previous centuries. Freedom cannot be “imposed” on a people according to some preconceived scheme. We all need to watch out for “the rationalist within.”