the broadest possible sense

I hate to blog (that should be another post) but someone asked me some questions in another blog’s comment thread, and I promised I would answer them, so I guess this is the best place.

The name of this blog alludes to Wilfrid Sellars’s definition of philosophy as the attempt “to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” We can debate what philosophy is, but whatever word we choose to refer to the activity he describes is a word that describes what I would like to be up to. “Like to be”, because I have never made much progress at it. I am too scatterbrained, and keep coming back to the same things time after time, year after year, without being able to pull things together and advance.

I feel that I need a program to help me. I would dump a lot of thoughts into it as I thought them or shortly thereafter, as well as quotes and references from other sources, and over time move them around, reshape them, organize them, relate them, in attempting to develop a set of alternative possible worldviews. The organization and classification of these thoughts would not just be a way to find them again, but they would help to guide and create new thought by presenting partially filled contexts with room for further development.

So I am writing a program to support this kind of activity (or so I claim: I have been “doing” this for many years with not much more than a multi-paned outliner to show for it so far).

The program would be something like Lotus Agenda or NetManage’s Ecco (both of which are defunct), except that the individual items would have, where possible, more explicit semantics associated with them and their relations to other items. At the same time it has to allow for half-baked items that cannot be given any rigourous relation to other items. The idea is that over time those items will be firmed up and develop until they can be more cleanly integrated into the entire structure.

The main problem that arises is coming up with a small set of primitive item types and compound items that facilitate this sort of activity. Ultimately, you want to be able to browse through a set of clearly set out general propositions about the nature of reality, how we know about reality, and what we should do about it, and see the main arguments for each of the alternate propositions (the three main components, I think, of any “broadest possible sense” style view). You also want to be able to see what sets of propositions can go together, and what are opposed, and be able to hypothetically “activate” some of the alternatives to further develop the structure of the alternate worldviews that are compatible with the activated propositions.

You want to be able to see “versions” of a given position, including the extreme (often just strawman) versions, and catalog how various arguments against a given position either go through on other versions of it or fail for some reason. In investigating versions of a position, you should be able to fix on the best current position, and have the not-so-good ones drop away, but you should also be able to see a structure showing the differing versions, especially when you are in a mode where you are examining the nature of human error, which would be one special mode of operation of the program. In fact, you should be able to have the the strongest and fairest arguments for all remotely plausible alternate positions all in view (even if all but your favoured position are ultimately not supported) without seeing the misleading, dishonest, deceptive and otherwise ultimately poor arguments as well. But you want to store those poor arguments as data for various positions.

The structure of the total system when viewed from top-down would be appear as timeless and a priori as possible, with empirical consdierations added where necessary. So there would be an attempt to specify the most general philosophical theories about agency, both theoretical and practical, at “upper” levels, but at the same time empirical study about humans in particular would be contained, and would inherit where possible from these upper level accounts of agency. There would also be one way of viewing the system where only theories and the best evidence for them are seen (of course by evidence I mean reasons to accept them, not just empirical evidence), but another one where references from the literature are seen as well, or in fact even more centrally than the theory itself (so that is kind of like a bookmark manager view). The relation between the literature and the evolving timeless structure would allow one to see who first expressed a view, or a view in a similar form that was finally modified, who has expressed the view most forcefully, or is the best current advocate, etc. The literature would even include discussions engaged in by the user of the program, showing where a discussion affected the final result, but this would all be separable from the final result itself.

The program is intended to be mainly for one person to use. The contents of the program are essentially part of a single person’s own extended mind, and they develop as part of a life-long project. However, a person using this program would want to share some of his results with others, and also benefit from having others share their results with him. Still, each person’s own structure in his instance of the program would be totally his own. So there must be a way of sharing the part of the structure that he feels is developed enough with others. So some of the items he would mark as viewable by others. But we have to be careful here, or we will end up with just a bunch of back and forth commentary stored in the structure, which is against the whole point of the structure in each instance of the program being a clean expression of a single person’s ultimate worldview, and extension of their own mind. This bears comparing to historical Wikis, particularly the original Wiki, with the concepts of thread mode and document mode, and also to “social bookmark managers”, and I will try to make comments on this later, but the social aspect of the program is of less interest for me right now.

But I would like to find people willing to discuss the idea of such a program, and maybe give me some useful direction so I have something to use before I am too senile to use it…

Posner seems to be on to something when he complains about what he calls “academic moralists”: the writings of the folk he characterizes in this manner don’t seem likely to have much influence (at least not directly). But I also agree with Dworkin when he suggests that many people want an “inspiring” and “justifying” “vision of how to live”, and that the concern to possess such a vision does naturally lead to the sort of thinking that Posner disparages as “lofty” and “high falutin”. So what is the solution?

One thing, I think, is that we should not attempt to draw such a strong dichotomy between “academic moralists” and “regular folk”. Academic moralists, some of them, are careerists who make things unnecessarily complex with obfuscatory jargon and hair splitting. And ordinary folk, some of them, have no interest in deep moral issues and how they can be understood. But there is still a lot of overlap, and it doesn’t seem like a good idea to artificially reify and then separate these groups even further. Perhaps under the right conditions most ordinary folk have a lot more capacity and interest in these matters than Posner is willing to even contemplate.

Dworkin gives the example of abortion, and suggests that ordinary folk who take a position on abortion may very well ask themselves “whether their views about abortion presuppose some more general position about the connection between sentience and interests or rights”. This seems entirely correct to me, but Posner ridicules it by suggesting that very few people could even understand what Dworkin is saying here, or even know what the word “sentience” means. Is he right, or is he setting bar way too low for some other reason?

Socrates said that “to let no day pass without discussing goodness and all the other subjects about which you hear me talking and examining both myself and others is really the very best thing that a man can do, and that life without this sort of examination is not worth living, you will be even less inclined to believe me. Nevertheless, that is how it is.” To cite this is nothing more than an appeal to authority, of course, but to me the view seems inspiring and also, for the bulk of us, not as impossible or undesirable as Posner seems to believe.

I for one will be taking a look at Posner’s blog, but given his argument in The problematics of moral and legal theory, one wonders why one should bother. After all, there doesn’t seem to be much of a difference between his ethical theorizing and the ethical theorizing of the nasty “academic moralists” he so vociferously complains about in that book.

Is this guy serious?

We now have a nice trackback uri.

The spacing in posts is awkard. Too much space between lines after the char spacing was adjusted to be large enough, but this should be fixable.

Other than that seems to work nicely out of the box. Someday I might actually change the default templates to something personal.

Strangely, here is someone who likes 1and1 and is running wordpress with trackbacks. I wonder how they got past the fact that acceptpathinfo is not allowed in htaccess, as far as I can tell.

If you have principles, you can use them to avoid thinking about hard cases, especially if it is easy to deduce from the principles an answer in each case. How rewarding is that? It depends partly upon your personality.

I guess I can’t really wait until I get my own software implemented in order to start making some comments on the passing show. So I threw up this wordpress instantiation for the time being.

My own software is primarily for personal private use, but it will have a small publishing component to it. It is different from a blog in that it is intended to support the cumultative development of a total worldview, or, more broadly, a set of possible plausible worldviews, or more broadly still, a set of worldview components that can be assembled into plausible worldviews. The intention is that the methodology of wide reflective equlibrium will be employed by the user of this software in order to develop her worldview.
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