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 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.
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.
"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!
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
"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!
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.
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?
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.