A response to reddit comments on "All I see are eyes!"

Update #1:
[5/8/2024] Edited to add: for my reddit guests who may be reading this, I also have a video where I reviewed the Harris’s latest morality podcast episode here. If any of you would like to discuss either of my critiques on my YouTube channel or comment on my blog, you are welcome to do so. I’d be happy to host you on my channel, especially if you think I’ve made mistakes in my critiques of Harris and you want to discuss what you think those mistakes are]

Update #2:
[5/9/2024] I no longer endorse my interpretation of Harris described below. Given that many of my remarks turn on those mistakes, consider this entire post retracted. I am preserving the post both to maintain a record of those mistakes and because the comment section here is ongoing at the time of writing and because it is also an important element in the record of my recognizing those mistakes and correcting them.

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Someone posted my critique of Harris, “All I see are eyes!” over on reddit. You can find the discussion here. 

Let’s have a look at the replies. 

Here’s the first:

This guy says that Harris is confused, then he proceeds with a confusing argument that makes it look like he just doesn’t understand what Harris is saying. Harris is clear at least. This guy isn’t. 

I don’t know which argument they’re referring to, so it’s hard to respond to this. I have more than one objection (if you want to call those “arguments”). As is typical of critics of Harris, they’re not simply mistaken, but usually told that they don’t understand what Harris is saying.

I agree with these critics. 

I don’t understand what Harris is saying. Neither does Harris. And neither do they. And that’s because much of what Harris is saying is muddled and confused and doesn’t make much sense. 

The next person says:

The author is understandably confused, because Sam made an ambiguous claim:

They go on to quote Harris:

Science is fully committed to epistemological objectivity. That is, to analyzing evidence and argument without subjective bias. But it is in no sense committed to ontological objectivity. It isn’t limited to studying objects, that is, purely physical things and processes. We can study human subjectivity, the mind as experienced from the first person point of view objectively, that is, without bias and other sources of cognitive error. 

They then continue:

On its own, the bolded bit is ambiguous. Saying "science isn't committed to x" can mean (a) science doesn't concern itself with x at all, or (b) science does not only concern itself with x.

The author seems to think Sam means (a), but Sam actually means (b). So, everything else in the essay that follows from this (a) interpretation is confused. 

No, the bolded bit was not ambiguous. Saying that science is “in no way” committed to ontological objectivity means that it isn’t committed to it at all. It is not ambiguous between science not being concerned with ontological objectivity, and science not only being concerned with objectivity. For comparison, if I said “there is no sense in which I like the taste of pineapple on pizza” it would be ridiculous to interpret this as an ambiguous remark that could mean:

1. I really don’t like pineapple on pizza

2. I like pineapple on pizza, but I don’t only like pineapple on pizza

As a possible interpretation, (b) makes absolutely no sense. Likewise for the critic’s proposal of (b) as an interpretation of Harris above.

When someone says that science is “in no sense” committed to ontological objectivity, the only reasonable interpretation of this is that it is not committed to ontological objectivity, full stop. That’s what “in no sense” means. This term is typically used to mean something like “in any respect” or “definitely not.” You can see these characterizations of that turn of phrase here. 

“In no sense” is used as a form of emphasis and to exclude a kind of fuzzy rejection where one affirms or denies something in one respect, but not another. The whole point of “in no sense” is to be as maximally inclusive and as definitive as possible. When someone says “there is no sense in which I like the taste of pineapple on pizza” they mean to exclude someone thinking that they might not like pineapple on pizza in some situations, but not others. For instance, maybe they’d like pineapple on a dessert pizza, or if the pineapple was cooked or fresh instead of from a can. To say “in no sense” is to gesture at something like “you may think there are exceptions to this, but there aren’t.”

In short: the only reasonable interpretation of Harris’s remark is that he thinks that science isn’t committed to ontological objectivity. The remark was not ambiguous. The critic is simply and straightforwardly wrong.

Maybe Harris misspoke or said something he doesn’t actually think, and I am not confused about what Harris said. Harris’s remarks elsewhere are so muddled and confused about the objective/subjective distinction that it’s hard to even know what Harris thinks (more on this below). It would be one thing for a critic to acknowledge that Harris made a mistake, and that this isn’t Harris’s actual view. Note, however, that they provide no textual support or any other evidence that Harris thinks otherwise elsewhere. It may exist. 

In that case, I’m happy to acknowledge that Harris thinks that science is in some way committed to ontological objectivity (despite explicitly saying that it is in no way committed to ontological objectivity in his latest commentary on the topic). 

They go on to say this:

What he's trying to say is that science isn't limited to concerning itself with clearly existent physical objects and their processes. Science can be about much more. Science can also concern itself with things that are ontologically subjective, such as pain. Pain only exists (i.e., its ontology) subjectively, but it can still be studied and discussed in epistemologically objective terms. And that's precisely what science does when it describes the neurological pathways that bring pain into existence, and effective treatments that snuff it out. 

He may have been trying to say that. If he was, he failed miserably. Harris said that:

But it [science] is in no sense committed to ontological objectivity. 

Note that, above, this critic also says that, as a result of my alleged  misunderstanding of Harris:

In section 3.0, I go out of my way to not definitively attribute a rejection of ontological objectivity to Harris. Here is the full opening of that section, for context:

Harris claims that science is only committed to epistemological objectivity, but not ontological objectivity. This appears to be tied to his misconstrual of ontological objectivity as only concerned with the study of physical objects. But, Harris adds, “We can study human subjectivity, the mind as experienced from the first person point of view objectively, that is, without bias and other sources of cognitive error.” 

Does Harris think subjectivity and the mind aren’t purely physical things? His remarks would imply this is the case. But how would this show that science isn’t committed to ontological objectivity? If ontological objectivity were about physical objects, and consciousness wasn’t physical, then we could only study consciousness by dropping a commitment to ontological objectivity. This is why I think Harris does so, but this mistake is predicated on his misunderstanding of what ontological objectivity is.

Harris hasn’t actually provided a good rationale for abandoning ontological objectivity. If he did, it would suggest that science is in no way committed to the objective existence of tables or trees or hydrogen or oxygen. I’m a scientific antirealist, so I’m happy to go along with this. But is Harris? I’m not so sure. The problem here isn’t that Harris has convincingly committed himself to scientific realism or antirealism. If he did, he would appear to be a scientific antirealist, and, by extension, a moral antirealist. 

I’m not comfortable attributing either of these views to Harris. Instead, I think, ironically, that the most charitable stance to take is that Harris is confused about Searle’s distinction between epistemological and ontological objectivity, and any remarks downstream of this are the result of that confusion. Otherwise, Harris would appear to be either a scientific and moral antirealist, or agnostic on these positions. 

I think it’s pretty clear I’m a bit hesitant to say “Harris denies ontological objectivity.” The main point I put Harris’s apparent denial of ontological objectivity to work is in showing that it would create such apparent tensions in his views that I conclude that I’m not willing to attribute the view to him, despite the fact that he seems to have explicitly endorsed it. This is due to Harris’s lack of clarity and his apparent misunderstanding of the terms.

Given that my first point decisively established that Harris contradicted himself on the meaning of “ontological objectivity,” and that his remarks elsewhere likewise suggest he’s confused about the relevant distinctions, my position is that Harris is too confused to present a clear position. I provide textual evidence from The Moral Landscape to support this as well.

In other words, what I ended up doing in section 2.0 and much of section 3.0 is providing evidence that Harris is confused about the terms “subjective” and “objective,” and, as a result, has a muddled position. I stand by that, and I believe this critic has done nothing to rebut any of the main claims made in those sections. 

What they’ve offered is an unsupported assertion about what Harris really means which seems to me flatly conflict with what Harris actually says in the transcribed portion of the video. In short, they simply assert that they know what Harris thinks on the matter, and claim that Harris’s remark was ambiguous when it wasn’t, but they do not provide any textual evidence or transcripts of his remarks in support of those assertions. I bring my receipts. Where are theirs?

In a follow-up, this critic says:

Honestly, I haven't read it any further either! The guy clearly has an axe to grind with Sam, and his initial opening is presented as a huge gotcha that isn't. 

I hope they will read further. Regarding the axe to grind: of course I do. I present those axes in the conclusion of the essay.

Note that second remark. They say: 

 and his initial opening is presented as a huge gotcha that isn't. 

I’m not fond of calling things “gotchas,” but my opening critique in section 2.0 is very good evidence that Harris is confused, since I showed that Harris outright contradicted himself in section 2.0 in a very egregious way. Section 2.0 precedes section 3.0, making the contradiction I identified the initial opening. Note that this poster did not address this at all.

They then add:

I mean, on one hand Sam's wording in isolation is ambiguous, but if you read it in the context you have to be pretty uncharitable (and kind of lazy) to assume Sam meant (a). 

This reader provides no textual context to support the claim that I read Harris out of context. Meanwhile, I provided further support for my contention that Harris is confused about the relevant concepts and distinctions by going back to what Harris said in The Moral Landscape and providing supporting quotes. I even dug into his endnotes and wrote an extensive commentary on those. What supporting quotes and outside text and transcriptions have they provided? Absolutely none. Given this, it seems pretty remarkable to call me “lazy.”

They then say this:

This guy impresses me as another one of these, "Sam doesn't even understand philosophy 101!" types. These people who presume he's such a neophyte rarely apply the effort to actually apprehend what he's saying, so they're doomed to misrepresenting/straw-manning him. 

I actually agree with the first part of this characterization. I do think Harris doesn’t even understand philosophy 101. If anyone did as poor a job articulating and arguing for their views in one of my classes, I’d probably send their paper back to them and ask them to rewrite it. I don’t assume Harris misunderstands these distinctions. Throughout the essay, I critically evaluate what Harris says against my own understanding of the relevant subject matter, and build a case for it. Providing evidence and arguing for a view is literally the opposite of assuming that it’s true.

Someone responded to this person with the following remark:

Yeah, there's something about the sneering 'you haven't done a PhD in philosophy' attitude that brings out the worst kind of ax-grinding in these guys.

Note the irony: I don’t have a PhD in philosophy. Why on earth would I sneer at someone for not having one? This person has made an assumption about my attitude towards credentials that is not only false, it is the opposite of true.

I go out of my way to engage nonspecialists on the topic of metaethics. I regularly stream on TikTok, and talk with nonspecialists on YouTube regularly. Consider my remarks in this recent conversation:

Seth: 

I don’t come from a traditional you know academic philosophy background, I was an accountant and a software engineer [...]

Seth went on to provide more background. How did I respond to this? After I talked a bit about my own background, I said this:

The thing is though, with all the degrees and all that stuff, I’ve always had this kind of thing where I’m not a big fan of an excessive emphasis on credentials or like, you know, I don’t like the elite ivory tower type of vibe that I get from a lot of academia, and so for me a big thing is I think everybody should get in on the conversations, as long as do the research and are respectful and appreciate and acknowledge the work that’s done in a given field without just becoming completely dismissive

This person’s characterization of my attitude towards credentials isn’t just wrong, it is exactly backwards. They then add this remark:

Lance is again and again taking Sam to task for having not done the reading. But had Lance himself simply consulted the paper by Searle that Sam was referencing, this would have cleared up the confusion. 

First, there was no confusion. My interpretation of Harris was the most plausible interpretation available, and the person who purports to have identified an ambiguity in the remark that prompted me to make a mistake is wrong: there is no ambiguity, and I didn’t misunderstand Harris. At best, Harris misspoke and actually holds a view contrary to what a reasonable person would have interpreted him to have said.  

Second, how would reading the paper this person mentions clarify my alleged misunderstanding of what Harris said? The alleged misunderstanding concerns how I interpreted Harris’s remarks; it had nothing to do with some supposed misunderstanding of Searle’s distinction. So suggesting if I’d have read Searle’s article that this would have settled the matter makes no sense. 

Third, Harris has been drawing the distinction between epistemological and ontological objectivity since the publication of The Moral Landscape, which was first published in 2010. The article this person links to is from 2013. In TML, Harris references the eighth page of Searle’s 1995 book The construction of social reality. Harris has been employing this distinction for a long time. The notion that I’m not aware of or familiar with the distinction is ridiculous, since I make numerous references to epistemic and ontological senses of “objective” in my dissertation (e.g., S1.13, pp. 64, S3.5, pp. 402-403, S4.1, p. 576, S4.5.5, p. 635, to provide just some examples). The only people who are confused here are Harris and the people defending him.

Also, why so much emphasis on a relatively unimportant, tangential distinction Searle of all people makes in the context of work in philosophy that isn’t directly related to moral philosophy or metaethics in particular, anyway? My concern with Harris’s lack of engagement with the literature is the literature in moral philosophy. Harris is pulling a distinction out of work that isn’t even in the same area of specialization. That people conflate epistemological and ontological senses of the notion of objectivity is almost an afterthought in contemporary metaethics. It’s so basic a distinction few of us trouble ourselves with it outside of pedagogical contexts where we try to ensure students don’t mix things up. Harris’s failure to engage with literature in the actual field of moral philosophy while drawing on distinctions from other areas comes off as amateurish. It’s one thing to eschew the distinctions, it’s another to make a sloppy, half-hearted, and misguided effort to do so.

Finally, we get this remark:

The author is probably deliberately confused. Your good faith is appreciated though. Mine has run out when dealing with those who spend most of their time indulging in antipathy porn. 

Here we go with the mindreading. Again, there was no confusion. The person suggesting I am “confused” pointed to a nonexistent ambiguity in Harris’s remark that makes no sense since it requires not understanding an idiom that has a very well-established meaning in line with my interpretation. Nevertheless, this person, without knowing anything about me, has suggested that my alleged “confusion” is intentional. By describing the person who alleges that I made a mistake as being in “good faith,” there is also a pragmatic implication (reinforced by the claim that my confusion is deliberate) that I am criticizing Harris in bad faith. To criticize someone in bad faith is to do so insincerely, with the intent to deceive. It means I’m being dishonest. In what universe is it appropriate or reasonable to infer that if you think someone is confused, that they’re not actually confused, they’re just lying? One has to wonder whether people who are quick to make such accusations are projecting their own proclivities.

2.0 New comments as of [5/9/2024, 1:05 AM GMT]

Some new comments have come in. Here’s one:

What a fucking joke.

Presumably, this is a critical remark suggesting that my blog post is a joke. I can assure you that it is not.

Another person says:

In the context, Harris is perfectly clear.

u/tcl33 explained here: https://www.reddit.com/r/samharris/s/4QeLVSmjz3

Imo, the obviously incorrect interpretation requires a bad faith logical leap.

Harris was not clear. Harris contradicted himself and then said something that appears to conflict with the rest of what he seems to think. This person seems to be agreeing with the other commenter who claims there was an ambiguity in Harris’s remark and that I misinterpreted the remark as a result. There was no ambiguity and I didn’t misinterpret it.

The person who made the original charge that I was confused added to the thead:

The author has engaged with this subreddit thread on Substack. I'm not going to engage there because I don't want to dox myself with my Substack account.

The author says:

When someone says that science is “in no sense” committed to ontological objectivity, the only reasonable interpretation of this is that it is not committed to ontological objectivity, full stop. That’s what “in no sense” means. This term is typically used to mean something like “in any respect” or “definitely not.” You can see these characterizations of that turn of phrase here.

I don't think this "only reasonable interpretation" is being honest about the variable sense of the word "committed". For fun, I asked ChatGPT to interpret "The team is 'committed' to solving the problem" and "The van is 'committed' to supply runs". It interpreted the former as (a) but the latter as (b). I asked it to explain the difference.

FWIW, its explanation is completely consistent with my experience. Here you can read the ChatGPT exchange. It demonstrates enough variability in senses of the term that I stick to my claim that Sam's use was ambiguous. "Science" is in a fuzzy gray area between "a team" and "a thing".

Yes. It is the only reasonable interpretation. If someone says “science is in no way committed to ontological objectivity” the only reasonable interpretation of this is that science isn’t committed (in any respect) to ontological objectivity. If Harris doesn’t actually think this, then he should consult his editors for blundering in the first few minutes of a prepared podcast episode. I don’t typically make blunders this bad when I livestream (which isn’t to say I don’t make them!).

It would be great if the people critical of me would simply acknowledge that if Harris doesn’t actually think this, that the blunder was his, and that I’m correct for pointing it out. Note, too, the total lack of rebuttal to my claim that Harris contradicted himself or is otherwise unclear about what he thinks, or, you know, the rest of the ~15,000 word critique.

What’s worse, this reddit commenter has now joined the chorus of people who apparently can’t fathom that someone can honestly disagree. Note that they say that they think that my claim that this is the only reasonable interpretation isn’t “honest.” Why imagine that I believe I’m mistaken but am publicly saying things I don’t believe are true? It’s bizarre how people are so quick to characterize people who disagree as dishonest.

The remark also doesn’t make much sense. They say:

I don't think this "only reasonable interpretation" is being honest about the variable sense of the word "committed".

This person is mistakenly thinking that because I think there’s only one plausible interpretation of Harris’s remark as a whole, that I think there’s only one plausible meaning of the individual word (isolated from any context presumably) “committed.” This is simply false. I never said anything to suggest that the word “committed” doesn’t have a “variable sense.”

I think all words are polysemous and flexible and that any word can mean anything, because the meanings of words is determined by their contexts of usage, and not a fixed semantics. I have gone out of my way, repeatedly, and at length, to endorse a language as use view, to be openly critical of semantic-centric views of language, to emphasize the importance of context, to discuss pragmatics at length, and to discuss polysemy. I study how variation in wording and ambiguity can undermine the validity of measures, and make a noting that words don’t have fixed and rigid meanings. Yet here I am accused of a view about word meaning that I publicly and explicitly reject. So far, the critics here don’t seem to to know much, if anything, about my views in a broader sense, and yet seem perfectly comfortable accusing me of dishonesty and suggesting I’m confused.

I never claimed that there is only one way to interpret the word “committed.” I said there is only one reasonable interpretation of Harris’s remark. I say that there’s only one reasonable interpretation given the context of the surrounding text. And again, as I’ve now had to repeat numerous times, I said this:

I’m not comfortable attributing either of these views to Harris. Instead, I think, ironically, that the most charitable stance to take is that Harris is confused about Searle’s distinction between epistemological and ontological objectivity, and any remarks downstream of this are the result of that confusion.

In other words, I think the best explanation for Harris’s weird claim that science isn’t committed to ontological objectivity is that Harris is confused. I say this because I believe that while the local context of the remark very clearly seems to indicate that Harris thinks science isn’t committed to ontological objectivity, that his broader range of positions seem to be in some tension with this. In other words, from the very outset I did my best to attempt to interpret Harris charitably in light of his broader corpus of work.

Note that I am doing this, while these reddit commenters are critiquing me in a hypocritical way that not only doesn’t contextualize their objections against my broader set of positions, but that has emerged in this thread even when they themselves admit that they didn’t even read the rest of my post.

This person apparently ran a test to assess usages of “committed.” I don’t need to do a test. I can tell you several different uses:

• A strong endorsement to a cause or goal

• A position one must endorse because it is logically entailed by some other position they hold

• A willingness to continue with some course of action

• In a romantic relationship

Of course the word “committed” can mean lots of different things…depending on the context. In the context of Harris’s remark, Harris’s use is probably something most closely approximating the second bulleted point above. But my concern isn’t with an interpretation of how Harris used the term “committed” but about the remark as a whole.

Note that there is more context we can give to Harris’s remark. Harris says at 1:57 in the video:

Consider the concept of objectivity. Which most people assume is central to science. It is central, but only in one sense of the term.

Harris then goes on to draw a distinction between epistemological and ontological objectivity. That he says that objectivity is central to science “only in one sense of the term” only further reinforces my interpretation.

Here’s a proposal for what Harris probably actually thinks:

Science is fully committed to epistemological objectivity. That is, to analyzing evidence and argument without subjective bias. But it is in no sense committed limited to ontological objectivity. It isn’t limited to studying objects, that is, purely physical things and processes.

This would make perfect sense of the rest of what Harris seems to be saying. And it would be very weird to talk about science not being “committed” to ontological objectivity. Ontological objectivity isn’t, on Searle’s view, at odds with ontological subjectivity, as though one must either endorse ontological objectivism or subjectivism. Rather, Searle’s distinction turns on there being two distinct modes of existence, both of which characterize certain aspects of reality. As Searle (1995) puts it,

In the ontological sense, “objective” and “subjective” are predicates of entities and types of entities, and they ascribe modes of existence. In the ontological sense, pains are subjective entities, because their mode of existence depends on being felt by subjects. But mountains, for example, in contrast to pains, are ontologically objective because their mode of existence is independent of any perceiver or mental state. (p. 8)

There can be, on such a view, both ontologically objective and subjective things. Indeed, there probably are, unless one thinks one side of the divide doesn’t exist (e.g., mountains on the one hand, pains on the other). Saying that science isn’t “committed” to ontological objectivity, given this distinction, simply doesn’t make sense. What would that even mean?

Yet that’s what Harris said.

So let’s attribute this to a simple error. The other error is closely wedging his characterization of “ontology” to his notion of “ontological objectivity.” In retrospect, it’s not clear Harris has actually contradicted himself. I mean, maybe he has, but it’s hard to say. It may, instead, be that he’s used two distinct notions of “objective” in such rapid succession that it generates the appearance of either an equivocation or contradiction. In other words, Harris may be using the term "ontological" in a general sense to refer to the study of that which exists (both physical and non-physical), and in the second sense to refer to "physical as opposed to subjective things” in the Searlean sense. If so, he's just using "ontological" in two different respects in rapid succession, creating the appearance of a contradiction. It also becomes really mysterious why he’d pause to explain what “ontological” means if his use of “ontological for that first definition had little or nothing to do with his use of “ontological” with respect to Searle’s distinction. If that is what he did, then these remarks seem like a jumbled pile of poorly connected thoughts, rather than a contradiction. Worse, that jumbled pile uses a term with distinct meanings without flagging this shift in meaning, and without one of the uses seeming to be dialectically all that relevant to his point. Really, though, if the intended meaning wasn’t preserved across sentences, this is a very confused and confusing way to communicate.

Harris’s remarks are so jumbled, muddled, and confused, that it’s hard to even pin errors on him, because much of what he says might not be contradictions or errors so much as confused strings of non sequiturs. I’m not sure if that’s better, or even worse than just a straightforward series of mistakes.