You make some good point, I agree there are lazy versions of this objection that beg the question in a fallacious way. However, i wonder if there are more sophisticated versions of the self-defeat objection against "illusionism" or phenomenal error theory that might be problematic to dismiss as merely question-begging. As you have pointed out, illusionism or phenomenal error theory says it seems to some or many people that their conscious experiences involve introspective properties of a phenomenal kind, however their conscious experiences don't involve introspective properties of a phenomenal kind, or simply that some or many people mistakenly think their conscious experiences involve phenomenal properties. It might be argued that illusionism construed in this way is self defeating. They're suggestion might be that the process whereby (supposedly mistakenly) many people form the belief that their conscious experiences involve phenomenal properties, itself has to involve phenomenal properties, because the belief-forming process itself may implicitly require phenomenology. If illusionism / phenomenal error theory is genuinely self-defeating in this way, then you can't actually point that out without begging the question, even though it's genuinely self-defeating, because in pointing that out, you would have to pressupose the phenomenal properties that are being denied by the illusionist, even if those phenomenal properties are actually being implicitly referenced in the illusionist position when the illusionist asserts that phenomenal properties seem to exist but they really don't, or that there is some process that leads people to think they exist even if they don't. In which case dismissing the objection as mere question-begging risks overlooking a perhaps subtle yet legitimate tension inherent in the illusionist thesis.
I still don’t really get what illusionism actually is even after reading this, and I intend to do more reading, but I gotta say: “illusionism” doesn’t just strike me as a bad name, it strikes me as an absolutely God awful one.
I’ve been reading and very much agreeing with your writing on moral realism, so if you’re an illusionist that’s some decent evidence that I’d probably find the stance at least somewhat reasonable, but on the surface, the suggestion that phenomenal consciousness is an “illusion” is absolutely and obviously absurd.
To whatever extent illusionism is a legitimate or even attractive philosophical stance, it denie seems to me that it must be using different definitions than everyone else, particularly for the word “illusion”.
Hey Lance I’m planning to critique an article you recently put out on here, but I’d like you to read it first and make sure I don’t strawman your position and that I do address what you’re actually saying. Let me know in DMs (I can’t DM you but you should be able to DM me) if you’re interested. If not I expect you to not complain if I get something wrong lol.
This is pretty much my own view - I can' t find anything here I disagree with, but will need to read it again more slowly.
Lance is right. The vast majority of critics of illusionism are distracted by the name, and anti-illusionists are very quick to adopt the rather implausible position that illusionists have adopted a transparently self-defeating position. A rough caricature of illusionism is imagined by people who have not bothered to understand it, and the caricature is then judged as nonsensical.
I'm yet to read any criticisms of illusionism that rises above the facile, or seems to attack a steel-manned version of illusionism, though that might reflect my sheltered life; such criticisms might be out there somewhere.
That said, I don't call myself an illusionist because the most common way of describing illusionism involves some form of support for the proposition that "Phenomenal consciousness does not exist." This proposition is just as meaningless as the proposition that " Phenomenal consciousness exists." Either proposition could be rendered true or false by defining phenomenal consciousness a certain way, and the main weakness of illusionism is that it does not adequately stop to define what it is that it doesn't believe in. I agree that many popular conceptions of phenomenal consciousness are conceptions of a non-existent entity, so my own position could be shoe-horned into illusionism.
Frankish illusionism seems to come from a position of thinking that Chalmers' The Conscious Mind is a potent rebuttal of physicalism, and Frankish seems to conclude that Chalmers framing is intuitively plausible, and we must be deceived by our own cognition to find it so plausible. I would argue, instead, that the framing of TCM is self-defeating and silly - not transparently so, but after serious reflection. Chalmers' version of phenomenal consciousness is only one possible view, though, and the fact that this version is silly/illusory/mistaken/whatever does not mean that there is nothing in reality that might be sensibly linked to the aspect of reality that saddled us with the confused term " phenomenal consciousness".
To argue that all possible versions of phenomenal consciousness are illusory would be premature, because our language is flexible enough to include whatever-it-is-that-drives-belief-in-phenomenal-consciousness; this has to exist, if we allow that beliefs can exist. (If we don' t allow that beliefs exist, we can take a similarly permissive view of " belief".) We will eventually get to something undeniable; but it need not be anything like the entity imagined to pose a challenge to physicalism.
Everyone could stand to be less rude towards people they disagree with, though the widespread dismissal of Illusionism is perhaps unsurprising. As Keith Frankish says, "Most people find it incredible, even ludicrous, to suppose that phenomenal consciousness is illusory." The aversion to the view (within philosophy) is the same that people feel towards other views that are prima facie absurd.
We can compare the theories of Logical Positivism and Utilitarianism. To the wider philosophical milieu, both positions were initially widely dismissed as either self-refuting or overly simplistic when first argued for. People were very rude about both! Now, 100+ years on, Logical Positivism has close to zero adherents, while Utilitarianism is a commonly held view, widely taught, with an influential social movement. People were correct to be dismissive about Logical Positivism— it really was absurd as it first appeared to be.
The question remains— in 100 years will Illusionism be more like Logical Positivism or Utilitarianism?
I don't consider the position to be "prima facie absurd." Likewise for logical positivism and utilitarianism. People who think these positions are "absurd" often seem to think this isn't up for debate, or that others don't differ in what they regard as absurd.
I don't agree with you about logical positivism. I don't think it's absurd or self-refuting, and don't think people were correct to dismiss it for the reasons they did. Its dismissal is largely based on myth and dogma.
I guess, though, that there are also non-intellectually-lazy people who think they've got sophisticated arguments for why illusionism is self-defeating. That argument certainly can be made lazily, but I wouldn't want to imply that it is always the case that such arguments are lazy. I don't think such arguments work, but (and perhaps you agree) I wouldn't want to assume that anyone trying to make such an argument is being lazy.
Now, you may ask me to provide an example of someone giving such a non-lazy argument from self-defeating, at which point I'll have to concede that I don't have one ready to hand.
I don't think putting serious effort into a bad argument is lazy. So yea, people can put a lot of effort into a self-defeat argument without specifically being lazy.
Self-defeat arguments are generally awful, though, and this is a case where they'd be especially bad. What you'd have to do in this case is show that illusionists must be committed, given their own views, to conflicting positions that lead to self-defeat. And that just isn't going to happen. It would be one thing to think this:
1. Illusionists claim we're subject to the illusion of phenomenal consciousness.
2. This is impossible because being subject to an illusion requires phenomenal consciousness.
Zero illusionists are going to agree to (2).
But the main reason such arguments are bad is that illusionism doesn't require defending any distinctive conception of "illusion" that could plausibly be self-defeating in the first place. The term is a shorthand for a kind of introspective error, and it isn't a matter of serious controversy whether the mental states illusionists think we do have *must* be construed in terms of phenomenal consciousness: they're just going to stipulate a host of states that, by stipulation don't involve phenomenal consciousness! So I don't think there could be a reasonable version of a self-defeat argument that didn't just misconstrue illusionism.
I think a self-defeat argument against illusionism would not necessarily need to depend on the concept of an illusion per se. It would probably lean on the idea that only conscious beings can really have introspective errors or genuine beliefs or understanding, etc.
For example, if you thought the Chinese Room argument made sense (although it is itself a terrible argument, admittedly), then you might think that understanding is not a functional thing, implying that misunderstandings (like the introspective error you metnion) are likewise not functional.
This is all very devil's advocate hypothetical steelmanning (I can't seem to resist that sort of thing), of course, and none of these arguments are actually compelling for me.
>>I think a self-defeat argument against illusionism would not necessarily need to depend on the concept of an illusion per se. It would probably lean on the idea that only conscious beings can really have introspective errors or genuine beliefs or understanding, etc.
This still wouldn't be *SELF*-defeat though. For a position to be self-defeating, it's proponents have to have the requisite conflicting commitments.
Suppose I think X does not require Y.
If someone else thinks X does require Y, it would make no sense to say my position is "self-defeating" because X requires Y. That I don't think it does *is* my position.
This is exactly what's going on with illusionists. They don't think only phenomenally conscious beings can have introspective errors. So they can't be committed to the fact that they do and therefore hold a self-defeating position.
A person's position is only self-defeating if that person is actually committed to a position that is undermined by some other commitment they actually have. It's not self-defeating if someone just thinks they're wrong about something.
Although I guess it may not strictly count as self-defeating given that illusionists are clearly not going to agree that misunderstandings are not functional. The thought is more that what illusionists claim implies the falsity of illusionism if we bring in additional arguments about the nature of those claims.
Yes, exactly. The critics presenting these self-defeat arguments mistakenly think other people are obligated to be committed to what the critic thinks is true. It's ridiculous.
Imagine I think X and Y, and that X and Y are consistent.
Some critic thinks X and Y are inconsistent.
Then they say my position is self-defeating because I think X and Y, but they're inconsistent. So my position is "self-defeating." How the hell is it self-defeating if I don't think they're inconsistent?!
I guess there are very few cases where somebody knowingly embraces X and Y and agrees that they are inconsistent (maybe someone who is into paraconsistent logic or something). So I guess for you it is pretty much always a mistake to accuse a position of being self-defeating?
To me, this is an interesting question, so now I'm going on a complete tangent that has not that much to do with illusionism. Sorry!
I don't think it's always quite about consistency. A good example of a self-defeating position might be the idea that I am a Boltzmann Brain. All the information and reasons I might have for thinking such a thing are unreliable if I am a Boltzmann Brain, so the idea is self-defeating (or as Sean Carroll puts it, cognitively unstable). But there isn't an inconsistency here, it's more that the reasons we might have for believing such a thing are undermined.
Maybe that's a different thing? OK, let's look at some exaggerated example of straightforward inconsistency. Suppose somebody wearing a red jumper says "Every claim uttered by a person in a red jumper is false". You might say that this is self-defeating, but then the person objects that it is not because his jumper is not red but maroon. If you regard maroon as a species of red, or that the jumper is more red than maroon, is this self-defeating or not? I would say it's fair enough to say that it is, even if your interlocutor has reason to disagree.
So, for me, it is not a necessary condition for self-defeating views that the person accused of holding such views must assent. The accusation of being self-defeating is more charitably interpreted as an explanation of why the accuser cannot accept it, due to inconsistencies perceived by the accuser. The "self" here just means that the inconsistencies are readily apparent at a surface level in the claims of the view itself, but not necessarily that they are apparent to the holder of the view herself.
If the standards for self-defeat aren't the positions and commitments of the person who holds the position or the set of positions in abstracta (whether or not anyone holds them), but is instead based on an external appraiser's standards, there are a few problems:
(1) This strains the meaning of "self"-defeat, and makes it an inappropriate and misleading term.
(2) If we're to employ standards about what is or isn't "readily apparent" we're stuck with either presupposing some objective standard that the target of a self-defeat objection may also reject, or employing more subjective standards.
(3) If the latter, then if someone finds it readily apparent that your account of self-defeat is mistaken, they could argue that your account of self-defeat is self-defeating.
I'm mostly concerned with (1). I don't think it makes sense to say that if it's readily apparent to YOU that someone's views would run into contradictions or problems based on the truth of propositions you think are true but they don't that there is any meaningful sense in which their position is "self"-defeating. It's entirely fine to say the position would inevitably run into contradictions, but that's just not what self-defeat implies.
I often think that the resort to such lazy 'it's self-defeating' arguments and the like result from the self-characterisation of analytic philosophy. They place so much emphasis on how the tradition is uniquely 'charitable' and 'rigorous' that it ends up like a self-justifying loop. If it's a position outside of what's already popular analytically, well that means that it can't be rigorous, and that you therefore don't need to be charitable. In the end, the more you self-identify as charitable and rigorous, the more it ends up as nothing but an excuse to throw away charity and rigor in every particular case simply because you already proved to yourself how much you have these virtues in the abstract, by the simple fact of being an analytic. It's like a journalist who has no problem with bending the evidence against rowdy climate protestors because they already know in their 'objectivity' that only very polite, and non-violent to the point of graciously accepting state violence, protest is OK.
Sorry to be blunt Lance and I mean this as a respectful critique: this whole piece is strewn with words like “ignorance” “lazy” “absurd” “uncharitable” “ridiculous” “lazy and weak” “silly” “asinine” all while accusing others of “hostility,” and while really lacking any argument. You’ve basically just asserted that anyone who doesn’t agree with you or who takes the word “illusionism” to imply "illusion” (the gall) is both wrong, uncharitable and disingenuous, and I don’t see how this helps anyone or isn’t basically just an example of what you seem to be accusing others of. Some might be engaging badly, fine, more the worse from them. How is this any better?
No need to apologize for being blunt, as long as you’re okay with me being blunt myself: I don’t think you’ve offered me any good reasons to reconsider anything I’ve said. Yes, my article makes a lot of critical remarks about the kind of error I am criticizing. Suppose for a moment I am correct that the objection I describe here is, in fact, lazy, silly, asinine, and uncharitable. If it were, would there be something inappropriate about describing it as such? You may disagree, but I don’t think so. I think it’s important to call a spade a spade. There are times where one should abstain from being too harsh when doing so, but I don’t think this is one of them.
You say that I employ these terms “while really lacking any argument.”
What I’ve said could be easily construed as including one or more arguments. At least one of those arguments would be something like:
P1: If People accuse illusionism of self-defeat because being subject to an illusion requires phenomenal consciousness, they are begging the question against illusionism.
P2. People accuse illusionism of self-defeat because being subject to an illusion requires phenomenal consciousness.
C: These people are begging the question against illusionism.
Support for the first premise would come from accurately describing illusionism, which I did in the article: nothing about the position requires an internal commitment to the notion that being subject to an illusion requires phenomenal consciousness.
Support for the second premise comes from the examples provided in the article.
So I’ve presented a fairly straightforward argument and supported the premises of that argument.
If you don’t want to construe that as an argument, that’s fine: I don’t think you need a formal argument to point out that the objection relies on a mistaken presumption about what illusionism is committed to.
Suppose that people routinely claimed “atheism is committed to the view that the universe came from nowhere.”
There’s not much you can do to “argue” against this sort of claim. It’s an empty and confused assertion that turns on a misunderstanding of what atheism entails. The “no argument” version of my post would likewise consist in simply pointing out that critics who make self-defeat claims have simply mischaracterized illusionism.
>>You’ve basically just asserted that anyone who doesn’t agree with you or who takes the word “illusionism” to imply "illusion” (the gall) is both wrong, uncharitable and disingenuous, and I don’t see how this helps anyone or isn’t basically just an example of what you seem to be accusing others of.
I have not “just asserted” that anyone who “doesn’t agree with me” or who “takes the word ‘illusionism’ to imply ‘illusion’ is both wrong.” First, I didn’t just assert anything. I explained what illusionism is, and how critics who make the self-defeat claim have mischaracterized it. That isn’t merely asserting anything. Second, my position is not that people mistakenly take illusionism to “imply illusion.” I don’t know what that means and it isn’t something I stated in the article. What I said is that they presuppose that one could only be subject to an illusion if they were phenomenally conscious, which is question begging, and that the position “illusionism” doesn’t require any particular conception of illusions or people being subject to an illusion as such to begin with.
I also never said anyone is being disingenuous.
>>I don’t see how this helps anyone or isn’t basically just an example of what you seem to be accusing others of.
I’m accusing people of being ignorant of a position they criticize, of begging the question against that position, of falsely claiming that the position is “self-defeating” (it isn’t; illusionists don’t somehow mistakenly commit themselves to the existence of phenomenal consciousness by saying we’re subject to the illusion of phenomenal consciousness), and of committing the nominal fallacy. I’m not doing any of those things. Having very harsh and critical things to say about something other people say doesn't mean I'm doing the same thing those people are.
I don' t agree that even if your arguments are right the criticisms are any of those adjectives you've applied. The problem of what we actually even mean when we use a term like "phenomenal consciousness" seems to be a much bigger issue than whether people are question begging. I think Strawson's position makes sense if you are someone who is convinced that any instance of a "seeming" is an instance of "phenomenal consciousness," it's just that you reject that position. It's perfectly fine to reject it, I also reject it although I think for slightly different reasons, but I don't think that makes people who hold that view asinine.
No, it's not just that I reject the position. They are question begging, but their criticism is even worse than just begging the question.
As I said in the article, illusionists can articulate their entire position without reference to illusion, so the objection makes no sense at all. The critics who raise this objection are being so foolish that they think they can criticize illusionism based on a mistaken inference about what the illusionist is committed to based on the *name* of the position. It's unclear how anyone could make such an error unless they literally just don't even understand what the position is.
I'm troubled that you don't seem to be engaging with or expressing disagreeing with such points, and are instead focused on finding the specific terms I use to describe the errors I'm claiming they're making to be objectionable. If they are making the errors I say they are (and you haven't shown otherwise), then what would you call it?
Daniel Dennett: "Consciousness is the mind's user illusion," Keith Frankish from a paper outlining illusionism as a position: "phenomenal consciousness is an illusion...phenomenal consciousness is illusory...the illusion has been hardwired into our psychology." He uses the word "illusion" 174 times in this one paper.
So people who think illusionists are saying consciousness is an "illusion" are asinine? Frankish uses examples of visual illusions etc in this paper. I don't think those critics are misrepresenting anything. You can argue there is more nuance or that someone other than Franish could have a position that rejects the word, but so could I since you've picked a few quotes from Twitter.
Can you explain how the number of times the term is used is relevant to anything I've said?
If you don't think the critics are misrepresenting anything, then I'm sorry but I don't think you understand the position and I include you among the people I'm describing. You sound you like you're committing the nominal fallacy yourself.
I didn't just pick a few quotes from Twitter. Now you're not even accurately representing what is actually in my article.
It's not a nominal fallacy if the position is literally that "phenomenal consciousness is an illusion," that's just incorrect. Again, you can disagree about what follows and say that the argument has much nuance to it, but I could also argue that there are plenty of nuanced defences of the claim that it is self refuting.
The number of times it's used is a clear refutation of you claiming that "illusionism" is quote just a "a cute name for the view." Again, that's just incorrect.
I'm not fond of the "illusionism" label either. It seems to concede too much, that we all intuitively think we have an indescribable, unanalyzable, scientifically invisible essence. That strikes me more as an incoherent theory than an illusion. Which makes me closer to Pete Mandik's qualia quietism.
But these days I just call myself a functionalist. It emphasizes what I think is the case rather than what I don't. When people then ask me about qualia / phenomenal properties / what-it's-like, etc, I ask them to clarify exactly what they mean, and why it doesn't count as functionality, in the sense of cause-effect relations.
It's a technical term philosophers use to refer to a conception of consciousness captured by notions like that there is "something it's like' to have particular experiences. I don't think the concept is meaningful.
Hi Lance, if you don’t think the notion of "there being something it's like to have particular experiences" is meaningful, then I'm curious, how do you explain your use of the term in your recently uploaded conversation with Jennifer Nado about intuitions on your Youtube channel, where you referred to "subjective experiences of **what it's like** to entertain certain propositions"?
Here's the full quote for context:
"This is something to emphasize, you know, I think you and I are familiar with this, but like what sorts of outputs count as intuitions, and you mentioned ethical, you mentioned logical. And so when I see people give like a list of paradigmatic intuitions, you'll see this just whole panoply of different sorts of stuff. Two plus two equals four, like torturing babies is morally wrong. You'll see epistemic stuff, modal stuff, metaphysical stuff, linguistic stuff. Like, you just see this massive array of things where they might look disunified from the outside, but to people that, like, study philosophy, they don't look disunified to me. Like, I get the sense that, yeah, they're the sorts of things that you get this hunchy feeling about, this intuitive thing about. So they might be unified in terms of their phenomenology, or in other words, the sort of subjective experience of like **what it's like to entertain the proposition** and how one feels about it, what experience one has about it..."
I think it might be worth explaining this because on the face of it at least, it looks like there might be a sort of performative contradiction or tension in rejecting talk of "there being something it's like to have a given experience" and at the same time use that same sort of talk of "there being something it's like to have the experiences of entertaining certain propositions".
"the lazy, cliquish way philosophers denigrate certain philosophical positions has been one of my primary sources of disappointment with academia." It's almost as if philosophers first decided on opinions and then scrambled together arguments with whatever raw materials were close at hand to justify them! But that it would make philosophers into normal humans, not hyper-rational galaxy brains! Heresy, I say!
You make some good point, I agree there are lazy versions of this objection that beg the question in a fallacious way. However, i wonder if there are more sophisticated versions of the self-defeat objection against "illusionism" or phenomenal error theory that might be problematic to dismiss as merely question-begging. As you have pointed out, illusionism or phenomenal error theory says it seems to some or many people that their conscious experiences involve introspective properties of a phenomenal kind, however their conscious experiences don't involve introspective properties of a phenomenal kind, or simply that some or many people mistakenly think their conscious experiences involve phenomenal properties. It might be argued that illusionism construed in this way is self defeating. They're suggestion might be that the process whereby (supposedly mistakenly) many people form the belief that their conscious experiences involve phenomenal properties, itself has to involve phenomenal properties, because the belief-forming process itself may implicitly require phenomenology. If illusionism / phenomenal error theory is genuinely self-defeating in this way, then you can't actually point that out without begging the question, even though it's genuinely self-defeating, because in pointing that out, you would have to pressupose the phenomenal properties that are being denied by the illusionist, even if those phenomenal properties are actually being implicitly referenced in the illusionist position when the illusionist asserts that phenomenal properties seem to exist but they really don't, or that there is some process that leads people to think they exist even if they don't. In which case dismissing the objection as mere question-begging risks overlooking a perhaps subtle yet legitimate tension inherent in the illusionist thesis.
I still don’t really get what illusionism actually is even after reading this, and I intend to do more reading, but I gotta say: “illusionism” doesn’t just strike me as a bad name, it strikes me as an absolutely God awful one.
I’ve been reading and very much agreeing with your writing on moral realism, so if you’re an illusionist that’s some decent evidence that I’d probably find the stance at least somewhat reasonable, but on the surface, the suggestion that phenomenal consciousness is an “illusion” is absolutely and obviously absurd.
To whatever extent illusionism is a legitimate or even attractive philosophical stance, it denie seems to me that it must be using different definitions than everyone else, particularly for the word “illusion”.
'Pataphysics is more fun.
Hey Lance I’m planning to critique an article you recently put out on here, but I’d like you to read it first and make sure I don’t strawman your position and that I do address what you’re actually saying. Let me know in DMs (I can’t DM you but you should be able to DM me) if you’re interested. If not I expect you to not complain if I get something wrong lol.
Sure, sounds good. I'll message you.
This is pretty much my own view - I can' t find anything here I disagree with, but will need to read it again more slowly.
Lance is right. The vast majority of critics of illusionism are distracted by the name, and anti-illusionists are very quick to adopt the rather implausible position that illusionists have adopted a transparently self-defeating position. A rough caricature of illusionism is imagined by people who have not bothered to understand it, and the caricature is then judged as nonsensical.
I'm yet to read any criticisms of illusionism that rises above the facile, or seems to attack a steel-manned version of illusionism, though that might reflect my sheltered life; such criticisms might be out there somewhere.
That said, I don't call myself an illusionist because the most common way of describing illusionism involves some form of support for the proposition that "Phenomenal consciousness does not exist." This proposition is just as meaningless as the proposition that " Phenomenal consciousness exists." Either proposition could be rendered true or false by defining phenomenal consciousness a certain way, and the main weakness of illusionism is that it does not adequately stop to define what it is that it doesn't believe in. I agree that many popular conceptions of phenomenal consciousness are conceptions of a non-existent entity, so my own position could be shoe-horned into illusionism.
Frankish illusionism seems to come from a position of thinking that Chalmers' The Conscious Mind is a potent rebuttal of physicalism, and Frankish seems to conclude that Chalmers framing is intuitively plausible, and we must be deceived by our own cognition to find it so plausible. I would argue, instead, that the framing of TCM is self-defeating and silly - not transparently so, but after serious reflection. Chalmers' version of phenomenal consciousness is only one possible view, though, and the fact that this version is silly/illusory/mistaken/whatever does not mean that there is nothing in reality that might be sensibly linked to the aspect of reality that saddled us with the confused term " phenomenal consciousness".
To argue that all possible versions of phenomenal consciousness are illusory would be premature, because our language is flexible enough to include whatever-it-is-that-drives-belief-in-phenomenal-consciousness; this has to exist, if we allow that beliefs can exist. (If we don' t allow that beliefs exist, we can take a similarly permissive view of " belief".) We will eventually get to something undeniable; but it need not be anything like the entity imagined to pose a challenge to physicalism.
Everyone could stand to be less rude towards people they disagree with, though the widespread dismissal of Illusionism is perhaps unsurprising. As Keith Frankish says, "Most people find it incredible, even ludicrous, to suppose that phenomenal consciousness is illusory." The aversion to the view (within philosophy) is the same that people feel towards other views that are prima facie absurd.
We can compare the theories of Logical Positivism and Utilitarianism. To the wider philosophical milieu, both positions were initially widely dismissed as either self-refuting or overly simplistic when first argued for. People were very rude about both! Now, 100+ years on, Logical Positivism has close to zero adherents, while Utilitarianism is a commonly held view, widely taught, with an influential social movement. People were correct to be dismissive about Logical Positivism— it really was absurd as it first appeared to be.
The question remains— in 100 years will Illusionism be more like Logical Positivism or Utilitarianism?
I don't consider the position to be "prima facie absurd." Likewise for logical positivism and utilitarianism. People who think these positions are "absurd" often seem to think this isn't up for debate, or that others don't differ in what they regard as absurd.
I don't agree with you about logical positivism. I don't think it's absurd or self-refuting, and don't think people were correct to dismiss it for the reasons they did. Its dismissal is largely based on myth and dogma.
Nice! Think you got it exactly right.
I guess, though, that there are also non-intellectually-lazy people who think they've got sophisticated arguments for why illusionism is self-defeating. That argument certainly can be made lazily, but I wouldn't want to imply that it is always the case that such arguments are lazy. I don't think such arguments work, but (and perhaps you agree) I wouldn't want to assume that anyone trying to make such an argument is being lazy.
Now, you may ask me to provide an example of someone giving such a non-lazy argument from self-defeating, at which point I'll have to concede that I don't have one ready to hand.
I don't think putting serious effort into a bad argument is lazy. So yea, people can put a lot of effort into a self-defeat argument without specifically being lazy.
Self-defeat arguments are generally awful, though, and this is a case where they'd be especially bad. What you'd have to do in this case is show that illusionists must be committed, given their own views, to conflicting positions that lead to self-defeat. And that just isn't going to happen. It would be one thing to think this:
1. Illusionists claim we're subject to the illusion of phenomenal consciousness.
2. This is impossible because being subject to an illusion requires phenomenal consciousness.
Zero illusionists are going to agree to (2).
But the main reason such arguments are bad is that illusionism doesn't require defending any distinctive conception of "illusion" that could plausibly be self-defeating in the first place. The term is a shorthand for a kind of introspective error, and it isn't a matter of serious controversy whether the mental states illusionists think we do have *must* be construed in terms of phenomenal consciousness: they're just going to stipulate a host of states that, by stipulation don't involve phenomenal consciousness! So I don't think there could be a reasonable version of a self-defeat argument that didn't just misconstrue illusionism.
All good points.
I think a self-defeat argument against illusionism would not necessarily need to depend on the concept of an illusion per se. It would probably lean on the idea that only conscious beings can really have introspective errors or genuine beliefs or understanding, etc.
For example, if you thought the Chinese Room argument made sense (although it is itself a terrible argument, admittedly), then you might think that understanding is not a functional thing, implying that misunderstandings (like the introspective error you metnion) are likewise not functional.
This is all very devil's advocate hypothetical steelmanning (I can't seem to resist that sort of thing), of course, and none of these arguments are actually compelling for me.
>>I think a self-defeat argument against illusionism would not necessarily need to depend on the concept of an illusion per se. It would probably lean on the idea that only conscious beings can really have introspective errors or genuine beliefs or understanding, etc.
This still wouldn't be *SELF*-defeat though. For a position to be self-defeating, it's proponents have to have the requisite conflicting commitments.
Suppose I think X does not require Y.
If someone else thinks X does require Y, it would make no sense to say my position is "self-defeating" because X requires Y. That I don't think it does *is* my position.
This is exactly what's going on with illusionists. They don't think only phenomenally conscious beings can have introspective errors. So they can't be committed to the fact that they do and therefore hold a self-defeating position.
A person's position is only self-defeating if that person is actually committed to a position that is undermined by some other commitment they actually have. It's not self-defeating if someone just thinks they're wrong about something.
Although I guess it may not strictly count as self-defeating given that illusionists are clearly not going to agree that misunderstandings are not functional. The thought is more that what illusionists claim implies the falsity of illusionism if we bring in additional arguments about the nature of those claims.
Yes, exactly. The critics presenting these self-defeat arguments mistakenly think other people are obligated to be committed to what the critic thinks is true. It's ridiculous.
Imagine I think X and Y, and that X and Y are consistent.
Some critic thinks X and Y are inconsistent.
Then they say my position is self-defeating because I think X and Y, but they're inconsistent. So my position is "self-defeating." How the hell is it self-defeating if I don't think they're inconsistent?!
I guess there are very few cases where somebody knowingly embraces X and Y and agrees that they are inconsistent (maybe someone who is into paraconsistent logic or something). So I guess for you it is pretty much always a mistake to accuse a position of being self-defeating?
To me, this is an interesting question, so now I'm going on a complete tangent that has not that much to do with illusionism. Sorry!
I don't think it's always quite about consistency. A good example of a self-defeating position might be the idea that I am a Boltzmann Brain. All the information and reasons I might have for thinking such a thing are unreliable if I am a Boltzmann Brain, so the idea is self-defeating (or as Sean Carroll puts it, cognitively unstable). But there isn't an inconsistency here, it's more that the reasons we might have for believing such a thing are undermined.
Maybe that's a different thing? OK, let's look at some exaggerated example of straightforward inconsistency. Suppose somebody wearing a red jumper says "Every claim uttered by a person in a red jumper is false". You might say that this is self-defeating, but then the person objects that it is not because his jumper is not red but maroon. If you regard maroon as a species of red, or that the jumper is more red than maroon, is this self-defeating or not? I would say it's fair enough to say that it is, even if your interlocutor has reason to disagree.
So, for me, it is not a necessary condition for self-defeating views that the person accused of holding such views must assent. The accusation of being self-defeating is more charitably interpreted as an explanation of why the accuser cannot accept it, due to inconsistencies perceived by the accuser. The "self" here just means that the inconsistencies are readily apparent at a surface level in the claims of the view itself, but not necessarily that they are apparent to the holder of the view herself.
If the standards for self-defeat aren't the positions and commitments of the person who holds the position or the set of positions in abstracta (whether or not anyone holds them), but is instead based on an external appraiser's standards, there are a few problems:
(1) This strains the meaning of "self"-defeat, and makes it an inappropriate and misleading term.
(2) If we're to employ standards about what is or isn't "readily apparent" we're stuck with either presupposing some objective standard that the target of a self-defeat objection may also reject, or employing more subjective standards.
(3) If the latter, then if someone finds it readily apparent that your account of self-defeat is mistaken, they could argue that your account of self-defeat is self-defeating.
I'm mostly concerned with (1). I don't think it makes sense to say that if it's readily apparent to YOU that someone's views would run into contradictions or problems based on the truth of propositions you think are true but they don't that there is any meaningful sense in which their position is "self"-defeating. It's entirely fine to say the position would inevitably run into contradictions, but that's just not what self-defeat implies.
I often think that the resort to such lazy 'it's self-defeating' arguments and the like result from the self-characterisation of analytic philosophy. They place so much emphasis on how the tradition is uniquely 'charitable' and 'rigorous' that it ends up like a self-justifying loop. If it's a position outside of what's already popular analytically, well that means that it can't be rigorous, and that you therefore don't need to be charitable. In the end, the more you self-identify as charitable and rigorous, the more it ends up as nothing but an excuse to throw away charity and rigor in every particular case simply because you already proved to yourself how much you have these virtues in the abstract, by the simple fact of being an analytic. It's like a journalist who has no problem with bending the evidence against rowdy climate protestors because they already know in their 'objectivity' that only very polite, and non-violent to the point of graciously accepting state violence, protest is OK.
Sorry to be blunt Lance and I mean this as a respectful critique: this whole piece is strewn with words like “ignorance” “lazy” “absurd” “uncharitable” “ridiculous” “lazy and weak” “silly” “asinine” all while accusing others of “hostility,” and while really lacking any argument. You’ve basically just asserted that anyone who doesn’t agree with you or who takes the word “illusionism” to imply "illusion” (the gall) is both wrong, uncharitable and disingenuous, and I don’t see how this helps anyone or isn’t basically just an example of what you seem to be accusing others of. Some might be engaging badly, fine, more the worse from them. How is this any better?
No need to apologize for being blunt, as long as you’re okay with me being blunt myself: I don’t think you’ve offered me any good reasons to reconsider anything I’ve said. Yes, my article makes a lot of critical remarks about the kind of error I am criticizing. Suppose for a moment I am correct that the objection I describe here is, in fact, lazy, silly, asinine, and uncharitable. If it were, would there be something inappropriate about describing it as such? You may disagree, but I don’t think so. I think it’s important to call a spade a spade. There are times where one should abstain from being too harsh when doing so, but I don’t think this is one of them.
You say that I employ these terms “while really lacking any argument.”
What I’ve said could be easily construed as including one or more arguments. At least one of those arguments would be something like:
P1: If People accuse illusionism of self-defeat because being subject to an illusion requires phenomenal consciousness, they are begging the question against illusionism.
P2. People accuse illusionism of self-defeat because being subject to an illusion requires phenomenal consciousness.
C: These people are begging the question against illusionism.
Support for the first premise would come from accurately describing illusionism, which I did in the article: nothing about the position requires an internal commitment to the notion that being subject to an illusion requires phenomenal consciousness.
Support for the second premise comes from the examples provided in the article.
So I’ve presented a fairly straightforward argument and supported the premises of that argument.
If you don’t want to construe that as an argument, that’s fine: I don’t think you need a formal argument to point out that the objection relies on a mistaken presumption about what illusionism is committed to.
Suppose that people routinely claimed “atheism is committed to the view that the universe came from nowhere.”
There’s not much you can do to “argue” against this sort of claim. It’s an empty and confused assertion that turns on a misunderstanding of what atheism entails. The “no argument” version of my post would likewise consist in simply pointing out that critics who make self-defeat claims have simply mischaracterized illusionism.
>>You’ve basically just asserted that anyone who doesn’t agree with you or who takes the word “illusionism” to imply "illusion” (the gall) is both wrong, uncharitable and disingenuous, and I don’t see how this helps anyone or isn’t basically just an example of what you seem to be accusing others of.
I have not “just asserted” that anyone who “doesn’t agree with me” or who “takes the word ‘illusionism’ to imply ‘illusion’ is both wrong.” First, I didn’t just assert anything. I explained what illusionism is, and how critics who make the self-defeat claim have mischaracterized it. That isn’t merely asserting anything. Second, my position is not that people mistakenly take illusionism to “imply illusion.” I don’t know what that means and it isn’t something I stated in the article. What I said is that they presuppose that one could only be subject to an illusion if they were phenomenally conscious, which is question begging, and that the position “illusionism” doesn’t require any particular conception of illusions or people being subject to an illusion as such to begin with.
I also never said anyone is being disingenuous.
>>I don’t see how this helps anyone or isn’t basically just an example of what you seem to be accusing others of.
I’m accusing people of being ignorant of a position they criticize, of begging the question against that position, of falsely claiming that the position is “self-defeating” (it isn’t; illusionists don’t somehow mistakenly commit themselves to the existence of phenomenal consciousness by saying we’re subject to the illusion of phenomenal consciousness), and of committing the nominal fallacy. I’m not doing any of those things. Having very harsh and critical things to say about something other people say doesn't mean I'm doing the same thing those people are.
I don' t agree that even if your arguments are right the criticisms are any of those adjectives you've applied. The problem of what we actually even mean when we use a term like "phenomenal consciousness" seems to be a much bigger issue than whether people are question begging. I think Strawson's position makes sense if you are someone who is convinced that any instance of a "seeming" is an instance of "phenomenal consciousness," it's just that you reject that position. It's perfectly fine to reject it, I also reject it although I think for slightly different reasons, but I don't think that makes people who hold that view asinine.
No, it's not just that I reject the position. They are question begging, but their criticism is even worse than just begging the question.
As I said in the article, illusionists can articulate their entire position without reference to illusion, so the objection makes no sense at all. The critics who raise this objection are being so foolish that they think they can criticize illusionism based on a mistaken inference about what the illusionist is committed to based on the *name* of the position. It's unclear how anyone could make such an error unless they literally just don't even understand what the position is.
I'm troubled that you don't seem to be engaging with or expressing disagreeing with such points, and are instead focused on finding the specific terms I use to describe the errors I'm claiming they're making to be objectionable. If they are making the errors I say they are (and you haven't shown otherwise), then what would you call it?
Daniel Dennett: "Consciousness is the mind's user illusion," Keith Frankish from a paper outlining illusionism as a position: "phenomenal consciousness is an illusion...phenomenal consciousness is illusory...the illusion has been hardwired into our psychology." He uses the word "illusion" 174 times in this one paper.
So people who think illusionists are saying consciousness is an "illusion" are asinine? Frankish uses examples of visual illusions etc in this paper. I don't think those critics are misrepresenting anything. You can argue there is more nuance or that someone other than Franish could have a position that rejects the word, but so could I since you've picked a few quotes from Twitter.
Can you explain how the number of times the term is used is relevant to anything I've said?
If you don't think the critics are misrepresenting anything, then I'm sorry but I don't think you understand the position and I include you among the people I'm describing. You sound you like you're committing the nominal fallacy yourself.
I didn't just pick a few quotes from Twitter. Now you're not even accurately representing what is actually in my article.
It's not a nominal fallacy if the position is literally that "phenomenal consciousness is an illusion," that's just incorrect. Again, you can disagree about what follows and say that the argument has much nuance to it, but I could also argue that there are plenty of nuanced defences of the claim that it is self refuting.
The number of times it's used is a clear refutation of you claiming that "illusionism" is quote just a "a cute name for the view." Again, that's just incorrect.
I'm not fond of the "illusionism" label either. It seems to concede too much, that we all intuitively think we have an indescribable, unanalyzable, scientifically invisible essence. That strikes me more as an incoherent theory than an illusion. Which makes me closer to Pete Mandik's qualia quietism.
But these days I just call myself a functionalist. It emphasizes what I think is the case rather than what I don't. When people then ask me about qualia / phenomenal properties / what-it's-like, etc, I ask them to clarify exactly what they mean, and why it doesn't count as functionality, in the sense of cause-effect relations.
Illusionism denies that people are phenomenally conscious. What do you mean by "phenomenal consciousness"?
It's a technical term philosophers use to refer to a conception of consciousness captured by notions like that there is "something it's like' to have particular experiences. I don't think the concept is meaningful.
Hi Lance, if you don’t think the notion of "there being something it's like to have particular experiences" is meaningful, then I'm curious, how do you explain your use of the term in your recently uploaded conversation with Jennifer Nado about intuitions on your Youtube channel, where you referred to "subjective experiences of **what it's like** to entertain certain propositions"?
Here's the full quote for context:
"This is something to emphasize, you know, I think you and I are familiar with this, but like what sorts of outputs count as intuitions, and you mentioned ethical, you mentioned logical. And so when I see people give like a list of paradigmatic intuitions, you'll see this just whole panoply of different sorts of stuff. Two plus two equals four, like torturing babies is morally wrong. You'll see epistemic stuff, modal stuff, metaphysical stuff, linguistic stuff. Like, you just see this massive array of things where they might look disunified from the outside, but to people that, like, study philosophy, they don't look disunified to me. Like, I get the sense that, yeah, they're the sorts of things that you get this hunchy feeling about, this intuitive thing about. So they might be unified in terms of their phenomenology, or in other words, the sort of subjective experience of like **what it's like to entertain the proposition** and how one feels about it, what experience one has about it..."
I think it might be worth explaining this because on the face of it at least, it looks like there might be a sort of performative contradiction or tension in rejecting talk of "there being something it's like to have a given experience" and at the same time use that same sort of talk of "there being something it's like to have the experiences of entertaining certain propositions".
"the lazy, cliquish way philosophers denigrate certain philosophical positions has been one of my primary sources of disappointment with academia." It's almost as if philosophers first decided on opinions and then scrambled together arguments with whatever raw materials were close at hand to justify them! But that it would make philosophers into normal humans, not hyper-rational galaxy brains! Heresy, I say!