Rebuilding a Ship at Sea
Friday 23 August 2024: The View from Oregon — 303
Last week I took up the need to cultivate novel intuitions and to allow these novel intuitions to supersede older and more familiar intuitions. But mostly our older and more familiar intuitions are bequeathed to us by our biology and our evolutionary psychology, and they are not easily set aside. Thus admonishing them to be set aside sets us up for some bizarre exercises in self-deception, in which we talk ourselves into believing that we have set aside some intuition and are reasoning only with our fresh, new intuitions, but we haven’t ever really set aside the old intuitions. If you’ve read Sartre, you might associate self-deception with the kind of social situations that he describes in Being and Nothingness. I remember in particular how Sartre describes a date, and when the man puts his hand over the woman’s hand, she doesn’t reciprocate the gesture nor does she draw her hand away. She leaves her hand where it is passively. Sartre says that she is acting in bad faith (mauvaise foi), and some translators have preferred to render this as self-deception. This may seem rather distant from formal reasoning, but we are as vulnerable to bad faith and self-deception in formal reasoning as in any aspect of human life.
The result of our retention of familiar intuitions alongside novel intuitions that we have developed in the light of novel experience is the kluge-like character of conceptual frameworks (if you prefer the continental term, you can call our conceptual framework a bricolage), including the conceptual frameworks of formal thought. Here we are not likely to speak of bad faith and self-deception, but we have come to recognize a growing range of cognitive biases, which are pretty much the same thing. I find it interesting that the identification of logical fallacies, both formal and informal, goes all the way back to classical antiquity, but the study of cognitive biases is quite recent. No doubt if we go through the literature with a fine-toothed comb we can find any number of intimations of cognitive biases in earlier thought (Bacon’s four idols in the Novum Organum come to mind), but even if we can find pretty explicit recognitions of individual cognitive biases, the explicit recognition of a class of cognitive biases that interfere with our ability to reason remains recent. Their recognition is perhaps the most important development in philosophical logic in recent times.
The intuitions native to the mind — the old and familiar kind — are the basis of what we may call folk concepts, and folk concepts are the basis of what we may call folk sciences. (I have previously discussed folk concepts in newsletters 175 and 194, and in no. 197 I discussed folk planetology.) “Folk such-and-such” was probably introduced as a term of abuse, but it is a good descriptor of some forms of proto-scientific thought (including proto-formal thought), and we can make use of this without invoking whatever stain is felt to cling to the idea of a folk science. Generally speaking, when one wants to express one’s approval of a folk science, one calls it, “ethno- such-and-such,” as in ethnobotany, but when one wants to express one’s disapproval of a proto-science, one calls it “folk- such-and-such,” as in folkbiology. Since these usages are informal, and no one is going to cop to these subtle usages intended to convey approval and disapproval, I expect some will disagree with me on this, and there probably are exceptions to what I have described.
I don’t know what the first folk such-and-such was to be introduced, but I have read references to folkbiology, folkbotany, folkpsychology, and others. There’s no reason we shouldn’t also posit folkgeology, folkchemistry, and folkphysics. Folkpsychology is especially in common use, and is intended to describe psychological conceptions prior to a supposedly scientific psychology that replaced the concepts of folk psychology with the concepts of a scientific psychology. Researchers in philosophy of mind also invoke folkpsychology, and perhaps this is where I picked up the sense of its being used as a term of a abuse. Eliminative materialists, in particular, do not attempt to conceal their contempt for terms like “mind,” which they believe (if indeed they possessed, or could possess, states of mind like belief, or what other philosophers would call doxastic states) to be a misleading artifact of a pre-modern and now superseded understanding of human beings and their behavior.
Last week I wrote that I call concepts like the natural numbers intuitive formalisms, because they so nearly perfectly capture our intuitions. This is a wonderful property of some formal thought, but it can also be misleading, as in the discussion last week of non-Euclidean geometry, which seems to capture human intuitions about geometry, but we were eventually forced to recognize that it is materially inadequate to describing the universe and formally inadequate to the great expansion of mathematical knowledge since Euclid’s time. Similar difficulties beset the natural numbers. An instance of this is described by Ian Stewart in The Foundations of Mathematics:
“…our aim is to develop the formal approach as a natural outgrowth of the underlying pattern of ideas. A sixth-form student has a broad grasp of many mathematical principles, and our aim is to make use of this, honing his mathematical intuition into a razor-sharp tool which will cut to the heart of a problem. Our point of view is diametrically opposed to that where (all too often) the student is told ‘Forget all you’ve learned up till now, it’s wrong, we’ll begin again from scratch, only this time we’ll get it right’. Not only is such a statement damaging to a student’s confidence: it is also untrue. Further, it is grossly misleading: a student who really did forget all he had learned so far would find himself in a very sorry position.”
The idea that we can, after years of education in the intuitive formalism of the natural numbers, sweep it all aside and learn it the right way from scratch is ludicrous, which Stewart recognizes, but he wouldn’t have described the experience if it weren’t sufficiently familiar that others would read it and nod along. There is another quote, which I couldn’t find as easily as I found the above Stewart quote, in which a mathematician is looking over some arcane formalization and saying, “That group of symbols over there is the natural numbers.” Even when we rationally reconstruct our knowledge, we continue to interpret it in a way that makes sense to us, and the way that makes sense to us is the way that appeals to our native intuitions.
A hundred years ago, when science, both formal and empirical, was undergoing a great revolution in which more rigorous formulations were demonstrating problems with earlier and more naïve formulations, there was a great deal of discussion about the rational reconstruction of knowledge. Carnap and Neurath (I can’t remember who said it first, though I could look it up) came up with the image of reconstructing a ship at sea: the ship is scientific knowledge, and we have to take it apart board-by-board and rebuild it, but we aren’t in dry dock. We have to rebuild on the open sea, so that each time an old board (a folk concept) is lifted away, we must immediately replace it with a new board (a rationally reconstructed concept, which is not as intuitive as the folk concept it replaced), or we will go down with all hands. Thus, at any one time, the hull with be a kluge of old boards and new.
This image so strikingly resembles the ship of Theseus problem of antiquity that it is remarkable that neither Carnap nor Neurath, to the best of my knowledge, bothered to comment on the resemblance. The ship of Theseus was an ancient riddle about identity. Supposedly, the ship that Theseus used to return to Athens (after slaying the minotaur and finding his way out of the labyrinth with the help of Ariadne) was preserved, but as the ship deteriorated over time, boards were replaced, and philosophers used this to illustrate the puzzle of whether the ship with its boards replaced was the same ship that Theseus had sailed back to Athens. In the early modern period, Hobbes added an additional twist, noting that the old boards taken off the ship could be reassembled into another ship so that there were two ships of Theseus, and there was then a question of which of the two was the real ship of Theseus.
Applied to the rational reconstruction of knowledge in the wake of formalization, and the replacement of intuitive concepts with formal concepts, we have the similar situation of replacing concepts one-by-one, but always needing some kind of conceptual framework, even if it is a kluge, with this conceptual framework at any one time being a kluge of old and new concepts, intuitive and formal concepts, that gets us through the day, one way or another. The science with which we began is like the original ship sailed back to Athens by Theseus, and the science we eventually hope to have from its rational reconstruction is like the later ship with most of its boards replaced, and which now poses the problem of whether or not it is the same science with which we began.
Moreover, we never do quite get to the point where the whole of science is fully rationally reconstructed, i.e., we never get to the point where we have replaced absolutely every plank on the ship of Theseus, so this finished reconstruction remains an ideal, an unrealized telos, and even as we strive toward the fulfillment of this ideal, the ideal itself changes because our conception of formalization changes, our conception of the conceptual capture of intuition changes, and our conception of what the final synthesis of formalized concepts ought to look like changes. So we are rebuilding a ship at sea as our idea of what the final shape of the ship should be changes, and as our destination changes.
