Rorty and James

Earlier this week, an essay collection by the iconoclastic American philosopher Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism. I am still unacquainted with his most thorough exposition of his worldview, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, so I will not attempt to make a statement on Rorty’s thought in general in this post. But I think making it through this shorter and more topically wide-ranging work is enough to give me the privilege of articulating my initial impression of Rorty, and make a comment on one of his recurring refrains.

My free-associative takeaway: a truly painful ambivalence, characterized by alternating hostility and sympathy. I am not technically proficient enough so that my own worldview can rightly be associated with the sophisticated doctrines of professional philosophers, but I am committed to a crude version of the realism and representationalism Rorty attacks. Even so, for the first 100 pages or so, I found Rorty to be wrong in the big picture but full of insightful and valuable observations. But halfway through, he started talking about “texts” and became simply vacuous. And all throughout, I found his writing, despite its unimpeachable lucidity and grace, to be annoying.

His posture towards traditional philosophy is one of unselfconscious condescension; he constantly insults his opponents, but honestly doesn’t seem to realize the flippancy of his tone. Whenever he calls something “uninteresting,” he acts as if he’s proven something. But his most annoying rhetorical habit is writing “The pragmatist believes…” when he means “I, Richard Rorty, believe…” He not only treats his claim to the pragmatic tradition as uncontroversial, but also claims he speaks on behalf of William James and John Dewey*. Some authors take this claim at face value; others do not. I believe the latter camp is in the right. Not only Rorty’s philosophical prescriptions, but the questions he approaches with his method in mind, are alien from those of the classical pragmatists.

Rorty is a thoroughgoing historicist with a strong affinity for Hegel; James was rather famously arch-rival to his Hegelian friend, Josiah Royce, and believed historicism was theoretically untenable and morally abhorrent. Now, Dewey did have much use for Hegel and constructivism—but in this he was opposed for James. How, exactly, Rorty can claim to be heir to both thinkers is beyond me. But for me, Rorty’s most striking departure from the classical pragmatists was his total disinterest in empirical accounts of knowledge, either for phenomenal particulars or metaphysical generalities. James was not a positivist, but certainly an empiricist—in fact a self-described “radical empiricist.” In his hands, it is easy to see how the pragmatic theory of truth, in its simplest form (“The truth is ‘what works’”) was derivative of the ideal of Baconian science. “What works” was understood as “what best accounts for the facts as we find them,” not as mere coherence within the “rules” of the “language game” we happen to be playing at the moment.

Now, Rorty is correct in saying that such an approach to philosophy is anti-Platonic. Instead of trying to arrive at eternal, axiomatic truths a priori, James prescribed philosophizing a posteriori, formulating axioms based on patterns of experience, and leaving those maxims open to revision in the event of contradictory evidence. And Rorty is correct in saying that this approach, especially in light of the additional Jamesian notion that “the difference that makes no difference is no difference” dissolves several philosophical problems.

But this does not mean that James was trying to “transcend” all metaphysics and epistemology, and radically break with all speculation before him, as Rorty claims. James recognized some novelty in his methodology, prescriptions, and beliefs, but saw his project as continuous with antecedent philosophical traditions. Tellingly, he subtitled Pragmatism, his boldest statement of purpose, A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. Much of his work dealt with traditional questions of speculation, like the nature of the mind. Jamesian essays like “Does Consciousness Exist?”  and “Human Immortality,” for example, float various hypothesis on the fundamental nature of mind and the world. The claims are often tentative and noncommittal (though “Does Consciousness Exist?” takes a firmer stance on the nature of mind)—but they do treat the entities mind and world as actual, even if we cannot pin down their precise nature.

Rorty would not allow even this skeptical stance, and condemns any philosophic theory which tries to discuss entities in-of-themselves at all. Rorty recommends to “pragmatists” that when conversational partners begin discussing existential questions, that they “change the subject,” for discussion of existence itself, outside the construction of historically received paradigms, is a futile effort.

Agnostic as he was, I cannot believe James would have submitted to this noncognitivism; philosophy was for him a form of therapy. He believed that even if we cannot make claims with absolute certainty about the existence gods, freedom and immortality, to contemplate them with seriousness gave us some grip on those awe and terror-inspiring concepts. To say not only will we never have an adequate idea of reality, but to deny we can even discuss the idea of “reality” coherently, would likely have seemed to James a form of despair, a surrender to forces beyond our comprehension.

Of course, a theory’s conduciveness to moral edification counts nothing towards its truth-value. But James’ project was founded on belief in human agency; his philosophical project was always an effort to find on what grounds the beliefs of the average person might be justified that they might command their own fate as far as possible; for him to have engaged in such an undertaking at all, he had to have believed such a thing was possible. (At least, he had to believe it most of the time.) Unfortunately, the essentially hopeful character of James’ project lead him to frequently reject ideas not because they were irrational or unsupported, but because they cast doubt on optimistic accounts of human agency. In The Dilemma of Determinism, for example, he all but admitted traditional accounts of free will were untennable, but neccessary to accept for action and moralizing. So even if James had ran abutt to Rorty’s skepticism and could not find the tools to refute it, it is not difficult to imagine him refusing to submit to it himself.

*Stunningly, Rorty writes Pierce entirely out of the pragmatic tradition, claiming he gave pragmatism “nothing but a name.”

Stock in Spinoza

(above) Unsigned portrait of an anonymous subject in the Herzog August Bibliothek of Wolfenbüttel , Germany. Dated ca. 1665. It is unknown how this picture became associated with Spinoza, as it does not match his physical description, and he is not known to have ever sat for a portrait. The dress suggests a lawyer or law student.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, writing in Prospect:

Thinking of buying shares in a great philosopher? The first question you need to ask is whether you’re interested in long or short-term investment. If you are looking long-term, then prepare yourself for serious scholarship. Alternatively, short-term investment could merely involve comparing the battle over women’s hemlines on catwalks in Milan and New York to Wittgenstein’s language-games. Investors must also keep in mind a philosopher’s obscurity, as this allows room for interpretation. Counter-intuitive shock appeal is also a plus.

These ruminations were sparked by the broadcaster Alan Saunders’s comment that, were he dealing in philosophical shares, he would be selling off Descartes and buying Spinoza. I was surprised Saunders retained any substantial Descartes, which for decades have been rated as junk bonds. But he’s onto something in picking Spinoza as a hot stock.

The 17th-century rationalist, who made every claim for reason that has ever been made, was for many years considered too insignificant to refute (unlike Descartes). Obscure, yes. Counter-intuitive, yes. But there wasn’t fast bidding for a philosopher who argues that there is only one substance, which can be viewed alternatively as God or nature, and from whose essence each and every finite thing, or modification, follows. (As being unmarried follows from being a bachelor.) Those of us in Anglo-American philosophy looked askance at system-builders like Spinoza, setting our sights on more feasible problems (such as showing why, precisely, being unmarried follows from being a bachelor).

But Spinoza’s stock has risen, his symbol emerging in varied markets. Take the movement which calls itself “deep ecology,” distinguishing itself from that “shallow ecology” which seeks to redress pollution and other practices deleterious to humans. Deep ecology rejects this privileging of the human perspective, arguing that all living things, including the biosphere, have equal moral rights. Arne Næss, a founding thinker, embraced Spinoza. Some might argue (I’d be one) that deep ecology misinterprets Spinoza’s deucedly abstract conception of “nature,” which has more in common with a physicist’s theory of everything than with deep ecology’s biosphere, much less with the Norwegian waterfall to which Næss once chained himself to block the building of a hydroelectric dam.

Spinoza did say that, when pondering the problem of evil, we err by judging the universe from the point of view of humans. Unfortunately for the brand of Green Spinoza, he also said that “the rational quest of what is useful to us” (in which he was entirely in favour) “teaches us the necessity of associating ourselves with our fellow men, but not with beasts, or things, whose nature is different from our own.” So it’s dubious that Spinoza would be chained beside Næss and his waterfall. Still, the movement’s use of him does point to his rising stock.

Today, we value any early modern who sides against Descartes’ dualism between mind and body. Spinoza not only rejected such dualism, but also denied the dualism between cognition and emotion. In Looking for Spinoza, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio expresses his amazement that Spinoza reasoned his way to the integration between thinking and feeling, which Damasio has now verified in his laboratory. There’s nothing like the imprimatur of science to increase a philosopher’s price-to-earnings ratio.

Another scientist who was passionately Spinozist (going so far as to write him a gushing poem) was Albert Einstein. In Spinoza’s conception of nature, he recognised intuitions matching his own, concerning the elusive unified field theory. Einstein also relied on Spinoza to get him out of trouble when queried by a rabbi as to whether or not he believed in God, averring that he believed in “Spinoza’s God.”

This introduces yet another reason to consider shares in Spinoza: the heightened public interest in the raucous debates between science and religion. Spinoza’s identification of God with nature, though as subtle as that Lord whom Einstein once invoked, makes an invaluable contribution to this issue—precisely because it’s subtle. As does his attempt to establish morality on the purely secular grounds of the scientific study of human nature.

Any other tips? The rising value of Spinozas indicates that postmodernism, which plays fast and loose with rationality, might be heading for a bear market. I’d advise short-selling Heideggers.

Incidentially, Goldstein’s biography-cum-memoir-cum-intellectual history Betraying Spinoza is one of the books that lead me into my current understanding of the world. So did her book on Godel, Incompleteness, which, with a passing footnote, finally allowed me to grasp special relativity, and also the four-dimensional and A-series/B-series theories of time.

Thinking with your gut

Via Science Daily:

For the first time, researchers at McMaster University have conclusive evidence that bacteria residing in the gut influence brain chemistry and behaviour.

The findings are important because several common types of gastrointestinal disease, including irritable bowel syndrome, are frequently associated with anxiety or depression. In addition there has been speculation that some psychiatric disorders, such as late onset autism, may be associated with an abnormal bacterial content in the gut.

“The exciting results provide stimulus for further investigating a microbial component to the causation of behavioural illnesses,” said Stephen Collins, professor of medicine and associate dean research, Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine. Collins and Premysl Bercik, assistant professor of medicine, undertook the research in the Farncombe Family Digestive Health Research Institute.

The research appears in the online edition of the journal Gastroenterology.

For each person, the gut is home to about 1,000 trillion bacteria with which we live in harmony. These bacteria perform a number of functions vital to health: They harvest energy from the diet, protect against infections and provide nutrition to cells in the gut. Any disruption can result in life-threatening conditions, such as antibiotic-induced colitis from infection with the “superbug” Clostridium difficile.

Working with healthy adult mice, the researchers showed that disrupting the normal bacterial content of the gut with antibiotics produced changes in behaviour; the mice became less cautious or anxious. This change was accompanied by an increase in brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which has been linked to depression and anxiety.

When oral antibiotics were discontinued, bacteria in the gut returned to normal. “This was accompanied by restoration of normal behaviour and brain chemistry,” Collins said.

To confirm that bacteria can influence behaviour, the researchers colonized germ-free mice with bacteria taken from mice with a different behavioural pattern. They found that when germ-free mice with a genetic background associated with passive behaviour were colonized with bacteria from mice with higher exploratory behaviour, they became more active and daring. Similarly, normally active mice became more passive after receiving bacteria from mice whose genetic background is associated with passive behaviour.

While previous research has focused on the role bacteria play in brain development early in life, Collins said this latest research indicates that while many factors determine behaviour, the nature and stability of bacteria in the gut appear to influence behaviour and any disruption , from antibiotics or infection, might produce changes in behaviour. Bercik said that these results lay the foundation for investigating the therapeutic potential of probiotic bacteria and their products in the treatment of behavioural disorders, particularly those associated with gastrointestinal conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome.

The material soul

The body confuses its ideas for sensations, and confuses its sensations for ideas.

Monday Morning Surrealism

My tastes in painting is like onto a hummingbird’s. Many of my favorite painters–Rossetti, Van Gogh, Redon, Magritte, Chagall–are all distinguished by the sheer brightness of their colors. Why my favoritism bends in this direction, I cannot say. Physiology, no doubt, but I won’t speculate on the specifics of the etiology.

Twas the Night before Postmodern Christmas

By Brian Stone of the Boston University School of Theology:

Twas a Postmodern Christmas, when all through the regime
Not a concept was stirring, not even a meme.
Essentialist dogmas were nurtured with care,
And imperialist ambitions still hung in the air

The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While grand narratives of progress danced in their heads.
And mamma in her ‘kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just performed gender before taking a nap.

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew in a craze,
And incarnated an internalized masculine gaze.

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Hegemonically othered the objects below.
When, what to my binaried eyes should appear,
But a sleigh simulacrum, and virtual reindeer.

With a little old driver who had friends in Havana,
I knew right away it was postmodern Santa.
More rapid than eagles discourses they came,
As he named and destabilized each language game!

“Now Heidegger, Nietzsche! Now, Levinas and Lyotard!
On Derrida, Foucault! On Butler and Baudrillard!
To each modern foundation, to each stucturalist wall!
Now deconstruct! Deconstruct! Deconstruct all!”

His aesthetic was queer, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes juxtaposed with ashes and soot.
A bundle of kitsch he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a pastiche of red, white, and black.

What some crassly call fat, he called “differently weighted,”
The politics of hate in one stroke out-narrated
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,
Intertextual clues I had nothing to dread.

He spoke less in words than ambiguous gestures,
And filled all the stockings with empty conjectures.
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
with critical distance, up the chimney he rose!

He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew heterotopically spatial
But I heard him exclaim, as I stood there half-dreaming,
“Liberation to all, and an excess of meaning!”

For such a clever piece, I hate to nitpick–who am I kidding, if not for nitpicking, I’d have nothing to get up for in the morning–but I’m not aware of the concept of the “meme” having any traction within the critical-theoretic culture. (The word appears in Stanza one, Line two.) The term, used to describe a hypothetical cultural “gene” contained in an idea which compells people to propagate it, was popularized by Richard Dawkins, who  has dismissed critical theory as “daffy.”  Most of the other  researchers to have taken up memetics have either been cognitivist psychologists or philosophers of the analytic tradition, and those two factions as a rule are hostile or indifferent to postmodern projects.

But of course, I don’t read critical theory professionally, nor do I prioritize it in my personal curriculums, so I might be totally off-base in this criticism.

The body’s apprehension of music

The ear and the brain–specifically, the hypothalamus–are not the only parties involved. For some people, the skin is an active participant in appreciating music:

Some of us get the chills when hearing Handel’s exultant “Messiah” this time of year. For others, it’s the simple, yet joyful opening strains of Vince Guaraldi’s music at the start of “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” Or it might be Bing Crosby’s poignant “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” that triggers goose bumps. (Or for the sillier of us, his whimsical “Mele Kalikimaka” might just do it.)Well, it turns out that getting chills upon hearing music is an actual thing, you know, like scientists study. And a new report in the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science says that who gets music-induced chills and who doesn’t might depend on personality.

Musical chills, write the authors, from the University of North Carolina, are “sometimes known as aesthetic chills, thrills, shivers, frisson, and even skin orgasms [who knew?] … and involve a seconds-long feeling of goose bumps, tingling, and shivers, usually on the scalp, the back of the neck, and the spine, but occasionally across most of the body.”

The scientific explanation for chills is that the emotions evoked by beautiful or meaningful music stimulate the part of the brain called the hypothalamus, which controls primal drives such as hunger, sex and rage and also involuntary responses like blushing and goosebumps. When the song soars, your body can’t help but shiver.

Some people report lots of skin orgasms and some people say they never get them, but the personality trait “openness to experience” seems like a good predictor. (By “open to experience” the researchers seem to mean those people who enjoy art, good movies, aesthetic stuff.)

That’s what the North Carolina researchers wanted to test. So they took 196 people and assessed their music preferences; how often they experienced chills, goose bumps, hair standing on end and the like; their engagement with music (such as whether they played an instrument); and their personality types. The only personality trait with a significant impact on music-induced chills was indeed “openness.”

Genre, the style of music people listened to, didn’t seem to matter, though a deeper engagement with music in general did. So “Messiah,” Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” and your child’s rendition of “Oh Christmas Tree” might all give chills (though your kid’s singing might just be scary) if you’re the open type.

The coloring of perception by expectation

Esther-Ingless Arkell breaks down a Journal of Neuroscience paper:

Common sense holds that your brain sees an object, and then recognizes it. But a new study shows that the reality may be the reverse. Your expectations shape what you see.There is an area of every person’s brain, the fusiform face area, that is in charge of recognizing faces. When a complete stranger comes up to you in the street, greets you like an old friend, and engages you in conversation, either your fusiform face area is letting you down or theirs is letting them down. Or you’re being grifted. In any case, hang on to your wallet.

It was thought that the brain processed stimuli the way large companies process orders. Neurons at the bottom of a chain of command bring in data and pass it up the line. The higher level neurons take the raw data and either match it up appropriate responses, or if more work is necessary, add a little more data and pass it higher. The brain responded to external sources of data.

A new study indicates that the brain actually processes stimuli the way large companies implement policies: from the top down. High level brain cells form an expectation of certain data, and hand it down to the lower neurons. The neurons process it dutifully, and only hand it back up if there is some kind of conflict. The response to things are, at least to a certain extent, internally driven.

In an experiment, people hooked up to an fMRI were asked to look at a series of pictures. The pictures were either of faces or of houses. If the responses of the brain were entirely externally driven, the fusiform face area would not respond to the houses the same way it did to the faces. And often, it did not. When the subjects were put in situations where they expected to see a face, however, the FFA responded to houses almost the same way it did to faces. When someone expects to see something, their brains will behave as if they did see it until they get a strong signal to behave otherwise.

“Warmth” and “warmth”

The body, apparently, confuses the personable-metaphorical and physical-literal concepts of the term. Johan Lehrer passes along a study by the Bargh lab which showed subjects displaying more trust in strangers after handling a squishy warm object:

Trust lies at the heart of person perception and interpersonal decision making. In two studies, we investigated physical temperature as one factor that can influence human trust behavior, and the insula as a possible neural substrate. Participants briefly touched either a cold or warm pack, and then played an economic trust game. Those primed with cold invested less with an anonymous partner, revealing lesser interpersonal trust, as compared to those who touched a warm pack. In Study 2, we examined neural activity during trust-related processes after a temperature manipulation using functional magnetic resonance imaging. The left-anterior insular region activated more strongly than baseline only when the trust decision was preceded by touching a cold pack, and not a warm pack. In addition, greater activation within bilateral insula was identified during the decision phase followed by a cold manipulation, contrasted to warm. These results suggest that the insula may be a key shared neural substrate that mediates the influence of temperature on trust processes.

Of metaphors and morals

Neurologist Robert Sapolsky argues “evolution is a tinkerer and not an inventor,” and that the brain grounds it moral thinking in metaphors derived frome experience of the material world:

In a remarkable study, Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto and Katie Liljenquist of Northwestern University demonstrated how the brain has trouble distinguishing between being a dirty scoundrel and being in need of a bath. Volunteers were asked to recall either a moral or immoral act in their past. Afterward, as a token of appreciation, Zhong and Liljenquist offered the volunteers a choice between the gift of a pencil or of a package of antiseptic wipes. And the folks who had just wallowed in their ethical failures were more likely to go for the wipes. In the next study, volunteers were told to recall an immoral act of theirs. Afterward, subjects either did or did not have the opportunity to clean their hands. Those who were able to wash were less likely to respond to a request for help (that the experimenters had set up) that came shortly afterward. Apparently, Lady Macbeth and Pontius Pilate weren’t the only ones to metaphorically absolve their sins by washing their hands.

This potential to manipulate behavior by exploiting the brain’s literal-metaphorical confusions about hygiene and health is also shown in a study by Mark Landau and Daniel Sullivan of the University of Kansas and Jeff Greenberg of the University of Arizona. Subjects either did or didn’t read an article about the health risks of airborne bacteria. All then read a history article that used imagery of a nation as a living organism with statements like, “Following the Civil War, the United States underwent a growth spurt.” Those who read about scary bacteria before thinking about the U.S. as an organism were then more likely to express negative views about immigration.

The most comprehenisve “popular” expositions of neural-metaphoric accounts of reasoning are two collaborations by linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By and Philosophy in the Flesh. The books have their flaws–Lakoff is notoriously thrifty with his citations, and is often accused of hiding his predecessors under a veil of silence, and passing off derivative work as groundbreaking and revolutionary–but they are more accessable to the lay audience than any other books on the topic.