USUPhilosophy

Students of mine know that I am very interested in environmental issues and am, by at least some measures, something of an environmental radical.  While I think environmentalism is best understood as a conservative issue, needless to say many of my fellow conservatives (including Dr. Sherlock!) think I am an environmental kook.

That said, I am not a romantic environmentalist and I think obligations to the environment can be best understood only as they pertain to social justice issues.  Here is an amusing but also substantive attack on the romantic environmentalism presented in the film Avatar (which I have not seen since I don’t really go for big box office orgies of spectacle).

It has long been my opinion that you cannot teach teaching, that at least one essential part of being a good teacher is “innate” and cannot be taught.  The modern tendency is to reduce all things to a “method” or technique, but evidence (see article) is now suggesting that those “teaching methods” do little to improve teaching.  See this article on teaching and the decline of American schools.

An excerpt:

“Yet in recent years researchers have discovered something that may seem obvious, but for many reasons was overlooked or denied. What really makes a difference, what matters more than the class size or the textbook, the teaching method or the technology, or even the curriculum, is the quality of the teacher. Much of the ability to teach is innate—an ability to inspire young minds as well as control unruly classrooms that some people instinctively possess (and some people definitely do not). Teaching can be taught, to some degree, but not the way many graduate schools of education do it, with a lot of insipid or marginally relevant theorizing and pedagogy. In any case the research shows that within about five years, you can generally tell who is a good teacher and who is not.”

I don’t think this was ever officially recognized on this blog – so a hearty congratulations to Prof Huenemann who was promoted to full professor.  While I believe the promotion actually happened several months ago, Huenemann was honored last night (read about that here).

I have great respect for psychology (my wife is a psychologist), but the coming revision of the DSM is cause for comment.  I do not doubt that there are real medical psychoses, and that clinical counseling as well as psychiatry can help people.  But we should be careful to not make everything a “clinical disorder”.  Some of what we now call “diagnosable disorders” (and we give a purely medical or psychological account of these things) are what we used to just call “character flaws”.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but sometimes aren’t those who get tagged with “oppositional disorders” (“negativistic, defiant, disobedient and hostile behavior”) really just assholes?  They don’t need medicine or even counseling, they need moral formation (and maybe a spanking).

George Will remarks on all of this here.

There’s been a flurry of posts over on SHAFT’s website, all having some connection to the question of whether science can disprove God’s existence, and I muddied the waters further by bringing up the problem of intentionality. But I did not take the time to explain what the problem is. So I thought I’d make some attempt to do so here.

A cool feature of mentality — and maybe the crucial one — is that ideas can be “about” things. They can be representational. But how does an idea, or a thought, or a word, or a sentence, manage to be “about” something else? That, fundamentally, is the problem of intentionality. (Note: it has nothing to do with “intending to do something,” or having “good/bad intentions.” Different matter altogether.) It’s a question of meaning.

Initially, it seems like intentionality is a problem for materialists. For how does some hunk of matter ever come to be “about” some other hunk of matter? We can complicate the hunks by putting them into activity, and into causal relation with the hunks of matter they are supposed to be about, but it still is initially puzzling how one dynamic system can be about another. It is for this reason that some philosophers have thought materialism can’t handle intentionality, and so they have posited something special (special properties, capacities, or substances) in order to explain aboutness.

In the early 1960s, W.V. Quine worked through a careful thought experiment meant to show that determinate meanings, or intentionality, cannot simply surface out of physical behavior. His thought experiment was about a couple of linguists who confronts a bunch of people speaking a language no one else has encountered before. He argues that these two linguists could come up with two very different translation books, each of which did a perfect job of capturing what the people say and do. (So, for example, the term “Gavagai” could be equally well translated both as “Lo, a rabbit!” and as “Look — undetached rabbit parts!”). But Quine didn’t take the conclusion to be that we need to invent some special stuff to settle the matter, since he was a hard-headed materialist (except when it came to logic). Instead, he concluded that there was no fact to the matter about which translation was right. This result is called “the indeterminacy of translation.”

One may agree or not with Quine’s conclusion. But his thought experiment seems quite sound: no amount of physical behavior can be interpreted in only one way. There are always alternative and equally apt interpretations.

The same goes for computers. You can’t read a unique program off the behavior of the machine. (You can always come up with some program, but you can always come up with more than one.) The question about what the program really is cannot be settled empirically. And the same, it seems, for human beings and their behaviors, which are just like super complicated computers.

This seems like a puzzling conclusion, since don’t we all actually mean something when we say something or think about something? The indeterminacy of translation does not seem to jibe with first-person experience. So how do we get at least the appearance of determinacy of meaning out of a fundamental indeterminacy (if materialism is true, and we don’t call in special stuff to solve the mystery for us)? Indeed: how do we get any appearance of meaning at all?

That’s the question materialists have to answer. I’m not saying they can’t answer it, but I am saying it is a toughie.

The question was dramatized with John Searle’s “Chinese Room” idea. So you are in a room, and your job is to take inputs in the form of written Chinese, look them up in a great big book, where you find an appropriate Chinese response, and return it as output. Anyone outside the room says “Hey! The guy in there understands Chinese!” But there is no real understanding of Chinese anywhere in the room. So, Searle concludes, the behavior of “understanding” does not constitute genuine understanding.

There’s more to say, maybe in a part 2 of this post, but I’ll leave it at that for now.