There is no such thing as psychophysical harmony (Part 2)
There is no such thing as psychophysical harmony (Part 2)
Psychophysical Harmony #2
This post is part of a series. See other parts of the series here:
In the previous post, I argued that one way to reject the argument from psychophysical harmony is to endorse type-A physicalism. On this view, there are no phenomenal states, and thus nothing to "harmonize". This provides a neat and straightforward solution to the alleged problem by denying that there is a problem. After all, one doesn't have to account for how P correlates with Q if there is no Q.
However, there are other problems with the details of the argument presented by Cutter and Crummett in their paper. Cutter appeared in this video about a month ago to discuss the paper, and I raised several objections to it there. I see no reason to reinvent the wheel, so I'll quote what I said there.
1.0 Rejecting normative harmony
My first remark echoes much of what I said in the previous post, which is that one can respond to the argument by endorsing Type-A physicalism (This is Option #1), so I won't repeat that here. However, I address some additional concerns in their paper in a second post:
(2) Option #2: Physicalists can deny the datum of psychophysical harmony Cutter & Crummett (forthcoming) provide examples of two forms of psychophysical harmony:
Example #1: “For example, phenomenal states are correlated with behavior and functioning that is justified or rationalized by those very phenomenal states (e.g., pain is correlated with avoidance behavior)” (p. 1)
And
Example #2: “[…] and phenomenal states are correlated with verbal reports and judgments that are made true by those very phenomenal states (e.g., we say, “I’m in such-and-such phenomenal state,” and sure enough, we are).” (p. 1) They state that a physicalist may reject the latter correlation, stating that:
“Everyone, even physicalists, should accept the datum of psychophysical harmony. (With one qualification: physicalists will reject one of the alleged cases of semantic harmony, namely, the alleged semantic correspondence between the non-physicality of consciousness and our judgments/reports about the non-physicality of consciousness. If physicalism is true, there is no semantic correspondence here, just an illusion of non-physicality.” (p. 29)As such, we may set aside Example #2. Instead, we can turn to example #1. They state that:
“Everyone, even physicalists, should accept the datum of psychophysical harmony” adding in a parenthetical that “But physicalists can accept our other examples of semantic harmony, and should also accept the existence of normative harmony, which will be our focus here.”
Unfortunately, I do not believe they present any good reasons to accept normative harmony. First, physicalists can deny that there are any irreducibly normative facts, that there are normative reasons, and more generally they can maintain that all normative claims can be redescribed in descriptive terms. As such, it is likely that I would deny that anything could be “justified” or “rationalized” in the respects implied by their conception of normative harmony. They describe normative harmony in section 2.2 by quoting Pautz (2020):
“Normative harmony: In every case, the psychophysical laws correlate a physical functional state P with a distinct conscious experience C whose essential normative role in providing reasons is harmonious with the causal role of P in generating verbal and other responses.”
I reject that there is normative harmony of this kind. I don’t there is anything that plays an “essential normative role in providing reasons,” since I don’t think there are any normative reasons, and don’t think it makes sense to speak of things “providing reasons” in this way. As such, I think this account of normative harmony contains elements that are, at best, underdescribed but more likely rely on appeals to concepts I’m a quietist about (see Kremm & Schafer, 2018), in that I do not think they are meaningful.
Their examples of normative harmony all seem to rely on concepts and phenomena the physicalist is free to reject, and, I think, they should reject. The physicalist can reject normative realism more generally, but should also reject any stance-dependent metanormative positions that draw on one or more of the terms and concepts most commonly associated with non-naturalist normative realism, e.g., the notion that there are “reasons” for us to do things that “count in favor” of our doing them, or more generally the notion that anything can “provide a reason.” Their appeal to normative harmony draws on Pautz (2020), who does appear to appeal to precisely these kinds of notions. For instance, Pautz describes “essential normative significance” as follows:
“Essential normative significance: Conscious states have built-in normative features. For instance, maybe it is in the essence of a state of being ostensibly conscious of a reddish and round thing that it gives you reason to believe (i) that a reddish and round item is present (‘dogmatism’), (ii) that you are conscious, (iii) that the quality red is simple, etc. Other conscious states have intrinsic value or disvalue; it’s in their essences to provide a reason to desire that they continue or stop. Maybe only experiences could be the source of such reasons.” (p. 146)
I don’t know if Cutter and Crummett believe normative harmony could be characterized in a way that doesn’t draw on notions like these, but if it does, then the physicalist is in a good position to reject the argument. For instance, I don’t think conscious states have “built-in normative features.”Cutter and Crummett provide a number of examples, which they claim “closely mirror some of Pautz’s own examples” (p. 6). Yet these examples serve to reinforce an appeal to presuppositions about normativity that the physicalist can (and that I do) reject.
The first example concerns hedonic harmony:
“Here’s a hedonic example. A damaging stimulus causes physical state X, a certain biochemical or computational state of your brain. X causes you to avoid or eliminate the stimulus in the future. Conveniently, the psychophysical laws map X onto the experience of pain, an intrinsically bad experience which essentially provides one with reason to avoid or eliminate it. So the psychophysical laws correlate X with a phenomenal state whose essential normative role harmonizes with the functional role of X” (pp. 5-6). This example makes clear what a physicalist can reject. In particular, I deny that there are any such things as an “intrinsically bad experience.” I don’t believe anything has intrinsic normative or evaluative properties, and I don’t think anything can “provide” us with reasons. This draws on a conception of normativity and of reasons that I don’t accept.
Similar concerns apply to their other examples. For instance, they say:
“Conveniently, the psychophysical laws map Y onto an experience involving a phenomenal presentation of a round object, an experience that essentially provides you with justification to believe that there is a round object in front of you” (p. 8)
Once again, I deny normative facts of this kind. I don’t think experiences provide us with justifications. Note their use of the term “essentially,” as well, and that they once again state that these experiences play an “essential normative role,” language used throughout Pautz’s paper. This gives me the impression that their own conception of normative harmony is very similar (perhaps identical) to Pautz’s own. If so, problems with Pautz’s account may be mirrored in problems for their own account. And, as I noted above, Pautz’s account of essential normative significance explicitly makes an appeal to something that a physicalist can reject: that conscious states have built-in normative features. If this conception of normativity is presupposed in Cutter and Crummett’s account of normative harmony, then I reject their account for this reason as well.
Finally, they refer to cognitive harmony. This example draws on Goff (2018), who describes a related problem he calls “the cognitive fine-tuning problem” (as quoted in Cutter & Crummett, forthcoming, p. 8). According to Cutter and Crummett, this is specifically a problem for proponents of “cognitive phenomenalism,” which is “the view, roughly, that thoughts (e.g., occurrent beliefs and desires) are constituted by non-sensory phenomenal states, where these phenomenal states are not grounded in purely functional states” (pp. 8-9).
They add that:
“In effect, the puzzle is to explain why cognitive phenomenal states exhibit a kind of normative harmony, which we might call cognitive harmony.” (p. 9) Since this account critiques a view that grants the existence of phenomenal states, and I am appealing to views which deny that there are phenomenal states, this can likewise be rejected by denying that there are physical states. In other words, physicalists can just reject cognitive phenomenalism.
In short, physicalists can deny normative harmony, and this undercuts a large part of the argument that psychophysical harmony poses a challenge to physicalism.
They do discuss one potential route for rejecting normative harmony. They describe a type of response, called the “contingent normative roles explanation,” which holds that “experiences have their normative roles contingently, in virtue of their contingently associated functional roles” (p. 10). However, I don’t accept either of these accounts, and see no reason why the physicalist and normative antirealist should do so. I don’t think objections to these accounts pose any threat to views like my own, since I would have rejected those views on independent grounds to begin with.
References Cutter & Crummett (forthcoming). Psychophysical harmony: A new argument for theism.
Frankish, K. (2016). Illusionism as a theory of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23(11-12), 11-39.
Kremm, D., & Schafer, K. (2018). Metaethical Quietism. In T. McPherson & D. Plunkett (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of metaethics (pp. 643-658). New York, NY: Routledge.
Mandik, P. (2016). Meta-illusionism and qualia quietism. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23(11-12), 140-148.
Pautz, A. (2020). Consciousness and coincidence: Comments on Chalmers. Journal of Consciousness Studies, (5-6).
Williamson, J. (2022). One philosopher's modus ponens is another's modus tollens: Pantomemes and nisowir. Metaphilosophy, 53(2-3), 284-304.
In short, the types of harmony they bring up can be rejected on independent grounds. Semantic harmony poses no meaningful threat to critics of their argument, who can simply reject that there is any such thing as semantic harmony. And critics can likewise reject normative harmony. Normative harmony draws on yet further questionable concepts, e.g. notions of normativity that may themselves be unintelligible.
2.0 P-tables and tollens webs
Arguments may seem superficially to be meaningful and sophisticated, but only because they look meaningful on the surface. If any particular term or concept is unclear, it’s natural to assume that whoever is using it could explain what it means if asked. And if that answer seems obscure or unclear, one might ask for further clarification. But such requests, at a certain point, could make you feel rude or foolish, and, in any case, would require considerable time and effort. This can lead us to something similar to illusion of explanatory depth. The illusion of explanatory depth refers to the mistaken impression that we understand a topic better than we do. But there is a natural extension to this illusion: the mistaken sense that other people or particular fields of inquiry contain a sufficiently deep account that would, if you understood it, snap into place such that the whole thing made sense.
Think about how someone who has no idea what a phenomenal state is might react to this term if it is used. First, it sounds fancy and technical, so that already creates a barrier to questioning its legitimacy.Do you really want to ask what a fancy-sounding term means? Do you want to reveal that you’re uninformed and unsophisticated? Perhaps not. But suppose you do ask, anyway. Now you might be given a response. It’s likely to be a fairly unsophisticated and superficial response, such as “it’s the subjective nature of our experience,” or “it’s what it’s like to have an experience” or whatever. Surely nobody could object to that. Yet this is misleading and unhelpful: illusionists and others who deny phenomenal states are often perfectly happy to agree that people “have experiences” or “have phenomenology,” or whatever; they just don’t think this phenomenology involves access to private, ineffable, nonrelational properties that seriously challenge physicalism.
So, suppose you are given this superficial response, a response which doesn’t actually tell you what a phenomenal state is in any sort of philosophically robust and informative way that would identify what the term means in a way that could be used to distinguish what those who think there are phenomenal states from those who don’t. That is, I am suggesting such a response is, in a certain sense, obviously inadequate. If someone gave you a definition of “theism” that couldn’t be used to distinguish people who believe in God from those who don’t, it’s not a very good definition.
Suppose you press on, or, perhaps, they might even preempt you. Their remarks are likely to consist of some promissory note or apology that, trust us, if you really wanted us to get into it we totally could, and we could regale you with hours of detailed discussion about what this means. This brief explanation is the tip of a very deep iceberg.
Here’s the thing: they’re not wrong. They could spend hours delving into a sprawling literature with a dizzying array of technical terms and dramatic debates spanning decades, countless articles, dozens of books, and so on. Here is where the burden of further skepticism is likely to overwhelm almost anyone. What are you going to do at this point? Spend years going through this work just to find out if phenomenal state is meaningful? Almost nobody is willing to do this, and for good reason. We have limited time and resources. So at this point most people would pack it up and tacitly accept that the notion of a phenomenal state must be legitimate, since, after all, all these people are talking about it.
On top of all this, people may, out of politeness, express understanding of something even if they didn’t really understand it. And they might even convince themselves that they understand it well enough for the discussion to proceed. But this often simply isn’t the case. Understanding a concept isn’t necessarily a categorical issue. One can understand some things to a greater or lesser degree. My understanding of moral antirealism is better than my understanding of evolution, which is much better than my understanding of quantum mechanics. And yet, even in the latter case, it’s not likely I know nothing at all. I could point to some minor, popularized, and abstract differences between e.g., the Copenhagen and Many Worlds interpretations of quantum mechanics, but I couldn’t engage with or understand any of the questions involved. People may consider themselves to “understand” a topic well enough to continue thinking and talking about it even if that understanding isn’t very deep.
The illusion of explanatory depth may cause some of us to think we understand how cars or bridges of computers or whatever work, when we understand very little about how they actually work. Yet in all these cases, we can be confident that there is some way they work, and that some people understand how they work to a greater degree than we do: after all, someone has to create all the cars and bridges and computers.
Yet an academic field can appear to be about a similarly robust reality, and we can feel confident that there must be some underlying explanation, even if there isn’t. We can be confident if we don’t understand how clouds and rain and the weather works that, even if nobody understood the water cycle, that if we did enough work, we could understand it. When we examine work in the sciences, the immediate exposure to terms and concepts is presumably underwritten by broader and deeper understanding of how all these things work. Someone gets it, or at least an understanding of it is distributed across a knowledgeable network of scholars.
When we turn to philosophy, we are likewise confronted with technical terms and fancy jargon and serious scholarship. The credibility of all of this is enhanced by the fact that philosophers work in top universities. There isn’t an obvious sense that philosophy is on similarly poor epistemic footing as astrology. It’s not like we find philosophers in ramshackle shacks in the woods or in run down strip malls with flickering neon signs advertising “Ancient Wisdom.”
So when we’re presented with a term like phenomenal state, it carries the formality and gravitas of terms like hydrostatic pressure and molecular holographic encoding and primordial nuclides*.
How is all of this relevant? It is relevant because I deny the notion of psychophysical harmony is intelligible. Why? Because it relies on the notion of phenomenal states, and I don’t think the notion of phenomenal states is meaningful. Even if it were, their argument contains further appeals to yet more concepts that I don’t think are meaningful, including normative concepts. What may seem on the surface like a meaningful argument is, I believe, not meaningful, because it relies on terms and concepts that present an illusion of explanatory depth, and, more importantly, an illusion of intelligibility, through the use of technical sounding jargon embedded in a broader network of technical sounding terms and concepts that are so interconnected and so massive that one would have to spend years studying them to have a comprehensive understanding of the relevant concepts and how they all fit together.
Contemporary analytic philosophy could involve so many technical terms and phrases that aren’t meaningful. The problem is that one can appeal to some of these meaningless terms and phrases to prop up or argue for some other set of meaningless terms and phrases.
The result is the superficial appearance of substantive arguments, and a deep and seemingly interconnected web of mutually supporting ideas. On its own, any isolated term or phrase could be vulnerable to challenges to its intelligibility. But when that term exists against an entrenched backdrop of other terms and concepts, proponents of the concept in question may be reluctant to consider that it may not be meaningful. If it were, this might threaten to unravel the rest of their ideas. And if all these ideas seem or feel intelligible, meaningful, important, obvious, and so on, this can give one the sense that a challenge to the meaningfulness of any one of the terms or concepts in one’s philosophical web of belief is less likely to be credible than the person questioning the intelligibility of the concept in question simply being confused or mistaken about the intelligibility of the concept.
Imagine, for instance, you are knowledgeable about an entire scientific field, such as chemistry. If someone were to come along and propose that carbon didn’t exist, you may scoff and remain incredulous. After all, if carbon didn’t exist, this wouldn’t merely be an isolated and surprising discovery. The existence of carbon fits into a broader network of beliefs and commitments that would also be threatened by the nonexistence of carbon. For instance, Carbon’s atomic number is 6. If there were no such thing as carbon, we’d have a bizarre lacuna in the middle of the periodic table. And many things we think we know about the engineering applications, biological role, interactions with other elements, and so on associated with carbon would all be false or require serious revision. In short, one couldn’t neatly excise “carbon” from one’s scientific picture of the world. Its removal would result in a branching cascade of devastation to many of your other beliefs.
Confronted with this possibility, one may opt to tollens rather than ponens. That is, one might conclude that if an argument leads to the conclusion that carbon doesn’t exist, that the conclusion must be wrong, and one may set out to identify what went wrong in the premises of the argument. When it comes to the existence of carbon, this would be a completely reasonable response. If someone wants to insist carbon doesn’t exist, they’re going to have to offer a very good argument, an argument that could allow one to revise the rest of their beliefs and commitments in a way that allows their overall web of belief to settle back into a stable state where everything hangs together. That’s going to be a lot of work, and to get there, one is going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting to show how one could account for all of our observations without appealing to carbon, and it's probably not going to work.
This is as it should be. Part of what makes a belief in carbon so reasonable is precisely that it fits into our broader understanding in just this way, such that any effort to remove it would be like removing an explanatory heart or liver, rather than an appendix or wisdom tooth.
I suspect philosophy creates superficial webs of interconnected and mutually corroborating concepts that look like this but don’t possess the same explanatory virtues as the role carbon plays in our scientific accounts. Rather than fitting into a broad and defensible network of theories, explanations, and so on, one can prop up the plausibility of a candidate concept to the level of it seeming indispensable provided one can create or appeal to enough other candidate concepts to create a mutually corroborating web of terms and concepts that give the appearance of virtuous mutual reinforcement. As a result, any individual concept might be vulnerable on its own. Once it is embedded in a web of other concepts, however, that concept, and all the rest, can become nearly impervious to objections, since a convincing objection would have to take down all of the concepts at once.
Perhaps a metaphor would illustrate the problem. Suppose it would be fairly easy to object to the intelligibility of a single isolated concept. And suppose this were true for each of a string of possible concepts, if each were considered in isolation. So far so good. But suppose we also proposed a complicated network of connections between these concepts, such that to object to any one of them would require effectively objecting to all or most of the rest. This could result in any objection to one of these concepts, which might seem plausible on its own, instead seeming like an objection to all or most of the entire worldview underpinning the concept in questions. If so, this may prompt whoever holds that worldview to think:
“You’re not just objecting to X, you’re objecting to all the rest of my beliefs, e.g., beliefs {A, B, C} Now I have to ask what’s more likely: that all or most of my beliefs, and the connections between them, are wrong, or that there’s something wrong with your single, isolated objection to X?”
Suppose the philosophical concept in question is a philosophical stand in for carbon. Let’s call it p-carbon (for “philosophical carbon). Now, any objection to p-carbon doesn’t seem like a mere isolated objection to a single idea. A proponent of p-carbon all on its own might be willing to consider such an objection, and drop their notion of p-carbon. But imagine that p-carbon fits into their broader set of philosophical beliefs and commitments, into a kind of philosophical periodic table. A “p-table” as it were. Now if you question whether there is a concept of p-carbon, you may appear to be objecting to their entire p-table. Indeed, if the reasons you have for questioning the intelligibility of p-carbon would, in fact, generalize, such that you would challenge much or all of the contents of the p-table and the alleged relations between the contents of the p-table, the person who endorses p-carbon and the p-table may correctly judge that to take your argument seriously wouldn’t just obliged them to abandon their concept of p-carbon, it would require them to abandon most or all of their p-table. And if that p-table is a kind of broad superstructure integral to their entire worldview, any objection to p-carbon is effectively an objection to their entire worldview. Acknowledging that p-carbon is unintelligible would open a metaphilosophical pandora’s box that, were one to look inside and stare down whatever emerged, would require a radical revision not only of one’s entire worldview, but the metaphilosophical framework one used to construct and support that worldview. It wouldn’t merely result in ontological shock (i.e., being confronted with a challenge to one’s worldview), but metaontological shock: one would be faced not only with reconsidering their worldview, but reconsidering very tools they use to adjudicate between competing worldviews. This is a very high expectation to ask of anyone.
And such an avalanche can begin with the mere flick of a pebble: if someone like me is correct, then the entire metaphilosophical framework in which most of contemporary philosophy is conducted is, to put it bluntly, completely misguided. If seriously engaging with a challenge to the intelligibility of p-carbon would threaten one’s views in this way, and result in the wholescale collapse of one’s p-table, a natural reaction to this is: it's more likely there’s something wrong with your argument than something wrong with my entire web of beliefs.
After all, this works in the case of chemistry: what’s more likely? That our entire understanding of chemistry, biology, engineering, and any other field impacted by the existence of carbon is radically mistaken and requires massive revision, or that whoever is challenging the existence of carbon has made a mistake somewhere? Presumably the latter. Just so, the proponent of a given philosophical concept may recognize that the form of challenge presented by a quietist or anyone else challenging the intelligibility of a concept would, if taken seriously, threaten one’s entire p-table, it seems more reasonable to reject the argument than to accept the conclusion.
In short, one may opt for a tollens rather than a ponens. Since this move is always available, so long as one’s belief in p-carbon is underwritten by a sufficiently robust p-table, their belief in p-carbon may be effectively incorrigible, or at least very difficult to challenge, even if p-carbon is completely meaningless, and even if most or all of their p-table is likewise meaningless. The problem is, in short, that one’s belief in and commitment to meaningless pseudoconcepts can be rendered virtually impervious to correction so long as that pseudoconcept is embedded in a sufficiently large and interconnected web of other meaningless pseudoconcepts. Confusions and errors can serve to mutually reinforce one another, creating a psychological bulwark against arguments against any isolated element of the entire edifice.
I will refer to those incorrigible or nearly-incorrigible p-tables as tollens webs.
A tollens web is a set of all or mostly meaningless pseudoconcepts that are sufficiently large and interconnected to render those committed to them incapable or nearly incapable of being persuaded that any given pseudoconcept contained within the set is mistaken. This is achieved by the set of pseudoconcepts creating superficially and seemingly sophisticated networks of apparent connections between one another that gives a person committed to the contents of the web the false impression that they possess a substantive and defensible set of views.
One additional upshot of a tollens web is that the meaninglessness of the concepts can be easily obscured by appealing to nodes within the web itself. This obscurity has at least two consequences. First, it shields the person committed to the contents of the tollens web from readily recognizing that the pseudoconcepts they appeal to are meaningless by creating the illusion of conceptual depth and interconnectedness. And second, it serves a valuable dialectical function by providing a neat and standardized response pattern to anyone challenging the intelligibility of one’s concepts that allows someone committed to a tollens web to avoid challenges immediately and always bottoming out in concessions that the term or concept whose intelligibility is being challenged is primitive.
Here’s how this works. Suppose I ask a moral realist what they mean by a “decisive reason.” They could say, “a decisive reason is a reason that counts in favor of an action independent of the goals and values of the agent who possesses the reason.”
Note that they do not say “it’s a primitive concept the meaning of which cannot be communicated.” No, they appear to give a substantive answer, even what appears to be a technical-sounding textbook definition. This may satisfy an audience that answer has been given. If so, and the challenger continues to press for a more substantive response, an audience may feel that they are being unfair, or demanding too much of the person appealing to the existence of a “decisive reason.” Thus, this response is already a rhetorical win for the proponent of “decisive reasons,” even if their response is meaningless.
The critic has probably already lost, or at least lost some points or favor with an audience, but suppose they press on anyway, and ask what it means for something to “count in favor.” At this point, the proponent of decisive reasons may balk and challenge the critic.
“Are you serious? You don’t know what it means for something to count in favor? I can explain by pointing to examples. That a piece of evidence supports a theory counts in favor of believing that theory is more likely to be true. That drinking a glass of water would satisfy your thirst counts in favor of drinking it. I could continue to give examples, but the meaning of ‘counts in favor’ should be obvious, and most people don’t have any problem understanding what it means.”
Notice a few elements of a response like this. First, incredulity. Incredulity serves to subtly discredit the challenger, by implying that the answer is so obvious that to question is evidence of error or incompetence on the part of the person posing the question. If the notion that “counting in favor” has a clear and straightforward meaning, this can help win over an audience, who can develop the impression that the critic is holding the proponent of a decisive reason to an unreasonably high standard. After all, we use lots of other phrases like “counts in favor” without always pedantically unpacking their meaning. “Counts in favor,” doesn’t seem straightaway to be notably different. It’s a perfectly ordinary sort of phrase, with a perfectly ordinary sort of meaning.
Here’s the problem. The critic isn’t asking whether there is any way at all one could use “counts in favor,” that could be made sense of. They’re asking for a specific account of its meaning that would allow it to serve the role of explaining, or making sense of, the concept of a decisive reason.
According to a proponent of “decisive reasons,” certain facts can provide us with decisive reasons which count in favor of performing the action. In the examples above, there are interpretations of “counts in favor” that could be understood in antirealist terms and don’t require one to invoke the notion of decisive reasons, or the notion that facts can provide reasons. Personally, I think the idea of a fact providing a reason is complete nonsense. A fact provides a reason? What does that even mean? What could it mean? A farmer can provide me with a bucket of potatoes, but I understood “provide” there in a way that can be reduced to a physical description of a set of events. I have no damn clue what it could mean for a fact to “provide,” anything; I don’t even know what “provide” could possibly mean in principle in this context. It seems like a weird, metaphorical use of the notion of “provide,” the meaning of which is so obscure I can’t begin to fathom what’s being stated. I think this whole chain of phrases is completely meaningless, and is at best a kind of garbled and unintelligible misuse of metaphorical language and superficially substantive phrases that look like they mean something even though they don’t.
Returning to the proponent of decisive reason’s response: the person asking what is meant by “counts in favor,” can readily make sense of the examples given without imagining that “counting in favor” is some primitive or incommunicable concept or, just as critically, without supposing that their understanding of these usages sheds any light on what a decisive reason is. Take this example: “That drinking a glass of water would satisfy your thirst counts in favor of drinking it.” An antirealist can understand this to mean something like:
“It would be consistent with the goals of a person who is thirsty to drink a glass of water, if doing so would satisfy their thirst.”
“Counts in favor,” could be understood here to refer to a consistency relation between a goal or desire, and a means of acting consistently with that goal or desire. Thus, an antirealist could make sense of “counts of favor” in this phrase in a way that doesn’t in any way facilitate an understanding of decisive reasons since, after all, decisive reasons are reasons that count in favor of something regardless of one’s goals or desires.
Part of what’s going on with example uses of terms is that the proponent of decisive reasons who employs the term “counts in favor” as part of an explanation for what decisive reasons are can provide examples of fairly normal-sounding sentences that could be interpreted in a variety of ways, including ways that don’t in any way illustrate what is meant by “counts in favor” in a way that would communicate what a decisive reason is. The critic is now faced with a dilemma: if they question whether “counts in favor” means something in these sentences, the proponent of decisive reasons can object that these are perfectly acceptable sentences that don’t at all seem unnatural or weird or meaningless. And this may be true, to anyone familiar with the relevant language, terms, and concepts.
The intuition, inference, or sentiment that these sentences “make sense” may seem reasonable even if they don’t mean anything can seem compelling for two reasons. First, if we are familiar with the ordinary sorts of things a person might say, such sentences may strike us as acceptable so long as they strike us as the sorts of things someone might say. Yet, critically, simply because the phrase “counts in favor” can figure into the sorts of things someone might say, and we might take what they say to be meaningful, the proponent of decisive reasons has not thereby demonstrated that their use of “counts in favor” outside the context of these sentences is meaningful. This is because our sense that “counts in favor” could be meaningful in the context of an ordinary sentence could be due, correctly, to recognizing that its meaning could be fixed by, and rendered intelligible in that context.
And, critically, just because a term is meaningful in a particular context doesn’t mean that the term is meaningful outside of that context. As such, proponents of the phrases like “what it’s like” or “reason,” achieve nothing by using these terms in some context where they are meaningful, then insisting that because they seem meaningful in those contexts that they are therefore meaningful simpliciter, regardless of whatever other contexts they are used in, such as in a philosophical argument. In other words, a term that has a particular meaning in some everyday context can’t simply be lifted out of that context and used in a philosophical context and still be declared “meaningful” in the latter case, unless, and only unless, it has the same meaning. And yet, if its meaning in the everyday context were determined by features of that context, such that to remove it from that context is to remove those features that made it meaningful, then once it is removed from that context, the features that made it meaningful are no longer present.
As such, the same term couldn’t mean the same thing outside of the context, and may not mean anything at all. At best, then, when philosophers provide examples of how some term is used in an everyday context, they are not justified in straightforwardly claiming that if the term is meaningful in some everyday context, that therefore it is meaningful in a philosophical context. They would, at the very least, have to provide us with some reason to think it means the same thing. If they don’t, they are at best equivocating on the meaning of the term, and at worst, they may be using the term in a way that isn’t meaningful at all. Unfortunately, I think this diagnosis applies to much of the way analytic philosophers employ supposedly “ordinary” language in philosophical contexts, it might even apply to a majority of such terms. If so, then it could be that much or most of analytic philosophy relies on using terms and phrases that subtly equivocate or don’t mean anything at all.
For instance, the phrase “counts in favor” only acquires its meaning locally, that is, only insofar as it is embedded in this hypothetical everyday context of usage. Once the phrase “counts in favor” is snipped out of that context, it loses its meaning. What a proponent of decisive reasons is doing, in appealing to these examples in an attempt to demonstrate that “counts in favor” is meaningful in the philosophical context in which they are using it is the equivalent of someone insisting that because a chess piece plays a particular role in a given game of chess, that one can pluck the chess piece off the board, march around with it, and insist it maintains that use outside the context of the game. I don’t know about you, but I very much doubt that if you dress up like a bishop, you are obliged to walk in a diagonal line.
Terms and phrases only acquire a given meaning in a given context. One cannot point to the fact that it seems meaningful in that context without specifying what, exactly, it means, then insist that because it’s meaningful in that context, it is meaningful in any other context, or no context at all. Yet this is what philosophers routinely do. They rely on their audience or interlocutors to not appreciate that a term or phase is only meaningful in a given context of usage. They can then leverage this fact to prompt their audience and interlocutors to accept the superficial sense that a term or phrase “is meaningful,” to employ that term or phrase in novel and unrelated ways outside the contexts that make it meaningful. When pressed on the meaning of the term or phrase, the philosopher can always point to examples of contexts where the term or phrase is meaningful to insist that the term “is meaningful” in abstracta, and may therefore be lifted out of that context and used for their purposes without actually explaining what it meant in that original context, or demonstrating that it continues to mean the same thing in the contexts in which they employ it.
This is verbal legerdemain, and it is a grand illusion employed throughout much of contemporary analytic philosophy, the dark heart of the discipline that pumps the blackened blood of empty concepts and meaningless terms through the published pages of an endless menagerie of texts whose squiggles and lines have cast a grand spell over all of us: they look like they mean something; indeed many may see philosophy as a portal into the deepest and most profound insights, the peaks of wisdom, and the joys of true understanding. It may be poetically satisfying to suggest that much of what we have is, instead, some diabolic aberration of wisdom. But it’s not even that. It’s just words.
What we’re dealing with here is a bit of devious verbal prestidigitation, a kind of semantic magic show where one yanks an endless ribbon of seemingly intelligible terms and concepts out of a hat you better not look into or you’d discover there’s nothing there.
Note
*I asked chatGPT to make up one of these. Is it obvious which one is the fake term? If not, that should provide some small evidence that technical sounding terminology can carry gravitas even if it means nothing at all.