I said, “I am an eliminative materialist about propositional attitudes.” That directly contradicts what you are claiming.
Ooh, you’re absolutely right. I misread you, very careless of me. My sincere apologies. I have edited the posts in question.
Thanks, that helps. So methodological dualism basically says, “Normal science works for the study of objects or people qua objects, but we must treat humans as purposeful agents if we wish to best account for their unpredictable actions.”?
AJ, yeah, the difference between objects and people is that behavior of objects is subject to the laws of physics, while behavior of humans (and animals) is subject to the laws of physics AND whatever (and however) choices coming out of their psyche.
E.g. a snowball vs a human rolling of a mountain side: The snowball will always follow the same path and have same speed etcetera, a human can choose to try to slow down, try to go faster or do nothing at all. His speed and time of arrival is unpredictable.
(Maybe in the future we will be able to predict better or exactly why/when/how humans do what they do i rolling of a mountain, but we can’t today.)
So the scientific method fails because of the noise of the psychological factor involved with humans. Praxeology focuses on logically necessary aspects of human action and thus makes abstraction from the contingent psychological factor.
Liebniz’s appendix seems to present a problem: if the understanding were not in the senses, how would one know one understood it?
Seems like merely linking to a wiki article counts as an argument these days.
Yeah, I also don’t get that. How could the “understanding” and the “senses” be seperate? Wouldn’t the “understanding” determine what you experience as your “senses”? Wouldn’t what your “understanding” is like affect what your “senses” are like?
(I don’t know whether what I am talking about has anything to do with what you are talking about, so can you elaborate on what you think the problem is with that quotation?)
I have a lot more to say about that, but I first want to ask you two questions.
What do you think about the section in Human Action called “The Alter Ego”? Doesn’t the phrase “the alter ego” mean “the other actor”, and isn’t he talking in that section about other people and why we should think of them as actors? Do you think that section is “foreign” to his system? Or do you think that it is possible to define other people as actors by referring to your own action or something like that?
And what do you think about the fact that Mises incorporates certain “empirical” things like the fact that the productive abilities among people aren’t equal, the fact that labor is disutilitious to most people, and so on? Or are you only talking about what I call “pure praxeology” when you say that “[e]mpirical science lies outside the scope of Misesian praxeology”?
Neoclassical: Would you call colors a priori?
That’s a very interesting question, but I don’t know in the exact sense he intends it. And generally “a priori” seems to refer to notions that are truth-apt, so wouldn’t it have to be something like [the notions corresponding to the propositions] “This object is red” or “This sensation is red”?
“Colors” themselves seem to be meaningless unless they either refer to certain wavelengths of light, certain patterns of neural receptors firing, or certain private subjective sensations.
Post by “Jack” from http://lesswrong.com/lw/1bs/how_to_think_like_a_quantum_monadologist/16ta
Or, the troublesome color-word will be buried in a larger phrase, and so all those neural firings are identified with “seeing blue” or “the experience of seeing blue”.
This is a linguistic fact, not a phenomenological one. Our language happens to distinguish verbs by referring to their objects, subjects and using adverbial modifiers. But the language could have just as easily had a one-word verb phrase than means “experience blueness”. Say this word was “bluep”. If this were the case we wouldn’t be asking where the object of blueping was. Rather, we’d see blueping as fundamental and would easily identify blueping with a particular configuration of neural firings.
Since blueness is a phenomenological quality I can’t imagine finding it anywhere except as an object modifier of experience. I don’t see how a monadic interpretation of entanglement changes that fact-- you’re just associating the configurations (or whatever) of monads with the subjective experience of blueness. Blueness itself is meaningless.
In this context I believe “understanding” means “intellect”, “reasoning faculty”, or what Mises refers to as “the logical structure of the human mind”. In fact, that word in that quote is sometimes translated as “intellect” instead of “understanding”.
Grayson’s clarification above may change matters as far as Mises’s conception, although I can’t fathom what the quote means in its entirety if both instances of the word “understanding” are replaced with “intellect” or “logical structure of the human mind.” Anyway here is a fleshing out of my claim that all understanding (meaning comprehension, logical deduction, etc.) is sensations, or at least is only available to one’s subjective consciousness via sensations.
Here’s my line of reasoning. Please stop me where you disagree or don’t know what I might be getting at:
Conscious knowledge of X means current awareness of X
Current awareness of X means current sensory perception of X —because, in what sense can one be aware of something if one does not sense it? (NB: private sensation, not public - “it” may not exist in the real world “out there”)
In essence, to posit that someone can “know something” outside of their senses is to posit extrasensory perception (which would of course just be a sixth sense). So I say all conscious knowledge is (private) sensation.
Hence if I claim to “know I understand,” I am first of all claiming to feel some (private) sensation that signifies to me that I understand. For example, a physical feeling of “setness” in ones temples or chest. I am of course also claiming that I feel some (private) sensations that are that conscious understanding: for example, a diagram-like pattern on my visual cortex showing logical relations between some things, represented by imagined visual objects that signify certain things to me (akin to a “mentalese,” although I find problems with the term as Pinker uses it).
Here’s just one possible example of what internal private sensations (in this case all visual sensations, for illustration purposes) for a given person might look like. In this rough diagram I’ve given English labels to “dispute” and “final arbiter” out of convenience, but the person might instead use little pictures, animations, sounds, etc. to represent these elements. Or they might represent the idea entirely in smells - who knows? And they may well not use arrows or red outlines but something entirely different. But one way or the other they have to experience some private sensations in order to experience “conscious” understanding. (Or else what can we possibly mean by the word conscious?)
More explanation below…
Background: A common objection to AnCap, polycentric law, competing courts, etc., is that there has to be a final arbiter for all disputes (i.e., the State).
When people raise this objection, it seems to me they are being fooled by words. They are apparently letting the ambiguity of the English language close their mind to an equally compatible possibility that should have been apparent. I suggest that they may be conceptualizing the situation in their mind (“understanding” it) in some way similar to the diagram on the left.
However, the diagram on the right shows the objection to be confused. One could imagine someone having in their mind some understanding akin to the diagram on the right, then translating those mental sensations into the words, “There must be a final arbiter for all disputes!” They make this translation in order to communicate with others and/or to create an easy internal memory aid for the idea in their own mind (they can just remember the words without having to recall the whole picture every time; it’s convenient).
For both purposes - communication to others and as an internal memory aid - the words are useful. However, they contain a hidden danger because of their ambiguity. The danger is that people have a habit of replacing the conceptual content of their understanding (in this case visual content) with the words that represent it. Then they become vulnerable to the trap. They recall the words, which are designated in their mind as “something that I believe,” and then, fatally, they interpret those words as referring to the set of sensations on the left. They effectively decide they believe the visual representation on the left! (or its equivalent in their internal representational system)
To summarize the process in terms of the example, the person in question at first realized, and decided to believe, something we’d write more clearly in English as, “For any given dispute there must be a final arbiter for that dispute!” They then converted that set of mental sensations (visual sensations in this case) into an ambiguous English sentence, “There must be a final arbiter for all disputes!” Later when referencing that belief, they pulled up the words instead of the original visual representation, re-interpreted it in the sense of the diagram on the left, and ended up deciding they believe something very different. In this everyday process of storing and recalling a belief, they effectively overwrote the original, more detailed, unambiguous conception with a set of less detailed ambiguous words. I suspect most people do this almost every time they think about anything.
This is one reason I’m harping on the difference between words and thoughts, and about how all conscious thought must itself be (private, imagined) sensations - probably for most people visual, auditory, tactile, etc.
Here is Albert Einstein (bold mine):
"The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought.
. . .
The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements of thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be ‘voluntarily’ reproduced and combined . . . The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a second stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will."
My final point was simply this: “causality” is not some neat, self-evident prepackaged idea we all understand instantaneously and apply unproblematically. The Wikipedia article was there simply to address that point, with its multiple understandings of what “causality” actually is. Additionally, there are now realms of empiric science that do not even rely upon the notion (e.g., quantum indeterminancy).
For more on the above theme by a better writer than me, see http://lesswrong.com/lw/o9/words_as_mental_paintbrush_handles/
For much more, see http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/A_Human’s_Guide_to_Words
However, the LessWrong writers are still missing the grand sweep of the problem. For a more complete understanding, I tentatively recommend this. This LvMI thread also discusses these issues in some detail.
I Ryan:
Before addressing your question, I would like to address the OP directly.
For those who have an interest in praxeology, I would like to point out that the argument for methodological dualism (treating the sciences of nature and of human action as methodologically separate) assumes that one has chosen not to conceive the natural sciences as branches of the science of human action.
We’re conducting our discussion on the assumption that there are two options:
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To treat all phenomena as phenomena of natural science.
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To treat some phenomena as the subject matter of the natural sciences, and other phenomena as the subject matter of the human sciences.
But what about the third option of treating all phenomena as phenomena of human action ?
It is fairly easy to see how this would be conceived. If we think of natural science as being concerned with the time and location of a given event’s occurrence, we can think of the sciences of human action as being concerned with whether any given event’s occurrence is satisfactory or dissatisfactory from the point of view of human action. For any event posited or supposed, that event is treated not with respect to it’s time or location in relation to other, similar events, but rather with respect to whether the individual concerned is satisfied or disappointed with the occurrence of said event.
In this view, we can understand natural science as concerned with regularities, not as an “end in itself” (which can be implied by the notion of ‘objective science’), but rather as a means to avoid the dissatisfaction that happens when the event an individual expects to occur doesn’t occur, or as a means for the individual to attain satisfaction by arranging for a wanted event to occur as hoped or expected.
That is, the natural sciences study regularities in their respective phenomena because human actors, by nature, are satisfied when an event occurs as or when expected, and are dissatisfied when an event occurs not as or when expected. Thus, the natural sciences are, or can be conceived of as, part of the larger science of human action. All these sciences are concerned with improving human well-being by substituting satisfactory experiences with dissatisfactory experiences. They do this by studying and obtaining knowledge about regularities, so that in any given realm of phenomena, individuals know what to expect, and thus how to avoid disappointment, and/or how to arrange things so that the events that occur are satisfactory to them.
Thus, we can argue for at least three different conceptions regarding methodological dualism versus methodological monism. We can argue for a conception of methodological monism that conceives the natural sciences as branches of the science of human action.
Further, I would argue that the import and meaning of Heisenberg’s quantum epistemology was the demonstration that natural science cannot be separated from human choice on a fundamental level, and also that the fundamental subjective categories of human action cannot be removed from natural science to fulfill the goal of classical physics which sought a completely objective science. The meaning of quantum indeterminancy vis-a-vis the science of human action (the idea that there are unobservables whose unobservability is a matter of epistemological principle) is that some “dissatisfactory” category (a category that represents something contrary to our desires) must remain in a consistent scientific-rational scheme. The category cannot be eliminated from a consistent schematic rendering because the observation of the phenomena is inseparable from the “mental categories” “used” in observing the phenomena. The primary categories of human action are the binary pair satisfaction/dissatisfaction.
The mental categories “through” which observations are made, are precisely the categories that Misesian praxeology is concerned with constructing a rational scheme with regard to. Quantum indeterminancy can be understood as the acknowledgement of an irreducible or ineradicable categorical feature of the act of making observations. I would argue that there are two primary categories of action: the category of presence (those things perceptually present to an actor [the actor’s “state of affairs”]), and the category of desire (trying, attempting, striving, etc.), which is a category of the fundamentally non-present (i.e., ends). This means that the category of desire cannot be “sensed” or “perceived,” as anything sensed or perceived is “present” and thus no longer “desired.” (that thing which is present is no longer an “end”)
The main points are that quantum epistemology does not contradict praxeology and that the category of indeterminancy (fundamental nonperceptibility) is also a category of praxeology.
The difference is that praxeology is explicit in being a science of human action and is focussed on human “acts,” whether they be acts of interpersonal exchange or acts of observing physical objects.
Praxeology thus has no tension between subjectivism and objectivism, since acts of choice and the category of that which is fundamentally unobtainable (i.e., ends) are already part of its conceptual scheme.
To answer your question about Mises, and his referring to things such as the alter ego (other minds) and ‘cooperation’ (interpersonal action), we have to keep in mind that Mises is writing when there is still as of yet no inkling of how to treat various forms of human action such as “mental action” (thinking, reasoning, deliberating, etc.) and “political action” or “ethical action” (direct personal interaction) praxeologically. He is referring to these phenomena, but at a time when these realms of phenomena are not comprehended by praxeology in a developed and systematic way. As we know, Mises stressed again and again that only economics was a developed branch of praxeology. He knew that other realms of action were not yet developed.
Thus, we can’t make the mistake of believing that when Mises makes reference to other minds and to acts such as coercion (“alter ego,” “cooperation,” etc.), he is doing so in a scientific way that meets his own standards of formal praxeological knowledge. He refers to these things as a praxeologist, but does not refer to them as praxeologically known. I.e., he is not saying that there are any known praxeological laws of action in these realms.
“Or do you think that it is possible to define other people as actors by referring to your own action or something like that?”
Definitely. The question for praxeology isn’t whether other minds or other consciousnesses “exist” in an ontological sense. The question is how other minds or consciousnesses appear from the point of view of the individual actor. This problem, as all problems of praxeology, is approached by adherence to strict methodological individualism. We do not inquire as to the “existence” of a given thing, we inquire as to how this thing appears in individual action. We do not inquire as to how a given thing relates to other given things. We inquire as to how this thing relates to the individual’s intentions (wants, desires, aims, etc…).
“And what do you think about the fact that Mises incorporates certain “empirical” things like the fact that the productive abilities among people aren’t equal, the fact that labor is disutilitious to most people, and so on? Or are you only talking about what I call “pure praxeology” when you say that “[e]mpirical science lies outside the scope of Misesian praxeology”?”
I’m talking about praxeology as conceived by Mises:
“Praxeology is a theoretical and systematic, not a historical, science. Its scope is human action as such, irrespective of all environmental, accidental, and individual circumstances of the concrete acts. Its cognition is purely formal and general without reference to the material content and the particular features of the actual case. It aims at knowledge valid for all instances in which the conditions exactly correspond to those implied in its assumptions and inferences. Its statements and propositions are not derived from experience. They are, like those of logic and mathematics, a priori. They are not subject to verification or falsification on the ground of experience and facts. They are both logically and temporally antecedent to any comprehension of historical facts. They are a necessary requirement of any intellectual grasp of historical events.” (HA, 3rd Rev. p.32)
"Praxeology is not concerned with the changing content of acting, but with its pure form and its categorial structure. (HA, 3rd rev. p.47)
Great observation. If I revise this to the first-person, i.e., as applying to only this actor (me), I can absolutely agree with this.