Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Hans P. Niemand's avatar

Sorry for taking a while to reply, I have been pretty busy with grading. Here are some thoughts.

> I don’t know if criticism was implied in the throwaway line about the notion of a nonphilosopher being “imprecise,”

I wasn't implying any criticism.

> If I am correct, this undermines claims that there is a presumption in favor of moral realism because it is a “commonsense” or “intuitive” view widely held by nonphilosophers or is implicit in the way people are generally disposed to speak and/or think. ... Since the dilemma I propose maintains that training paradigms are either invalid in that they fail to measure people’s metaethical views or lacks external validity in that it does succeed but doesn’t allow for generalizations outside the study, *if* I am correct about these points, this would threaten the utility of such studies in resolving questions about whether moral realism is “commonsense.”

I think this is the key point. I am only assessing your dilemma insofar as it relates to this philosophical argument---insofar as it's not meant to relate to this, I have no criticism of it. The question I'm trying to answer is whether training paradigms can be useful for settling the dispute over the "argument from commonsense" that realists often appeal to. I claim that they can. If your dilemma is purely meant to target studies that are designed to capture the philosophical stances of people with zero philosophical training, with no assumption that the point of capturing ordinary people's philosophical stances is to make progress on the argument from commonsense, then I think it's correct.

But I took it that your dilemma for training paradigms was meant, at least in part, to show that training paradigms are not useful for resolving the dispute over the argument from commonsense, because they can't tell us anything about the stances of ordinary people. And your quote from above seems to confirm that. But my point is that what's relevant for the argument from commonsense, at least one important version of it, is not what stances ordinary people *actually* hold, but what stances they *would* hold under certain counterfactual conditions. And training paradigms *can* tell us about *that* (at least if they are otherwise well-designed). Let me briefly explain the argument from my initial post in a slightly different way, with this in mind.

I'll use your terminology of "stances" and "commitments." As I understand it, "stances" are people's explicit beliefs about philosophical questions, while "commitments" are philosophical views that would be implied by their actions or how they speak. (For instance, most ordinary people probably have a commitment to the negation of global skepticism, since they often say that they know things and act as if they know things, and knowing things is incompatible with global skepticism. But they probably don't have any stance on the nature of knowledge, e.g. whether the justified-true-belief account is accurate or not.) Let me know if I'm using these terms incorrectly.

Two simple versions of the argument from commonsense would go something like this:

S1. Most ordinary people have a stance that moral realism is true.

S2. If most ordinary people have a stance that some philosophical thesis is true, then that thesis is the default view.

S3. Therefore, moral realism is the default view.

C1. Most ordinary people have a commitment that moral realism is true.

C2. If most ordinary people have a commitment that some philosophical thesis is true, then that thesis is the default view.

C3. Therefore, moral realism is the default view.

The S argument is pretty bad, for basically the reasons Kauppinen gives in the "Rise and Fall" paper (which I recently read and enjoyed)---S2 is just false. C2 in the second argument is more promising, but I'm not sure whether training paradigms can tell us about people's commitments, so I'll just grant for the sake of argument that your dilemma shows that training paradigms can't tell us anything about whether C1 is true, and set the C argument aside.

Here is a third version:

H1. Most ordinary people would have a stance that moral realism is true, once they were taught the relevant concepts and distinctions.

H2. If most ordinary people would have a stance that some philosophical thesis is true, once they were taught the relevant concepts and distinctions, then that thesis is the default view.

H3. Therefore, moral realism is the default view.

A good chunk of my initial post was devoted to arguing essentially that the H argument, rather than the S argument, is the relevant one. The argument was basically this. Consider a fourth argument of the same form, based on the premise P2: If most *philosophers* have a stance that some philosophical thesis is true, then that thesis is the default view. P2 is false. The reason why it's false is that philosophers are biased in certain ways. In the context of the argument from commonsense, the reason to appeal to the views of ordinary people, rather than the views of philosophers, is to avoid those biases. And once we see that, we can see that H2, rather than S2, is what we want to base an argument from commonsense on. Another major chunk of my initial post then argues that training paradigms can help us assess whether H1 is true. So overall, my argument in the initial post is something like this:

A1. The H argument is the best version of the argument from commonsense

A2. Training paradigms can help us to assess whether H1 is true.

A3. If training paradigms can help us to assess whether H1 is true, then they are useful for resolving the dispute over the argument from commonsense. (Because the H argument is the best version of the argument from commonsense, and training paradigms can help us assess whether a premise of that argument is true.)

A4. Therefore, training paradigms are useful for resolving the dispute over the argument from commonsense.

> I believe Hans may be operating under the mistaken assumption that everyone already has metaethical intuitions and the goal of these studies is to find out what they are.

I am not operating under this assumption. What I meant by "reshape" was something like this. Suppose you're right that non-philosophers usually have no determinate stance on the realism/anti-realism question before being introduced to the philosophical concepts and distinctions explicitly. Now think of someone participating in an introduction to ethics class where there is a metaethics unit, and then going on to major in philosophy and go to graduate school in it. Before they study any philosophy, they have no stance on realism vs anti-realism. After they are first introduced to the question through the class, they have some stance on it (let's say they become an anti-realist). Then, throughout the rest of their philosophical training, they're exposed to all the pressures the profession might exert on people's stances---framing effects, social pressures, and so on. Under this influence, their intuition is reshaped, and they become a realist. Now consider someone undergoing a training paradigm study. Before they go through the training, they have no stance, just like the student. Then, once they're trained via the study instructions, they form a stance (let's say, again, that they become an anti-realist). But their stance doesn't undergo further pressures from being in philosophy academe for years on end. So their intuition is not reshaped. That's what I meant---I meant reshaped, as compared to the starting point where they first developed the intuition. (Though one's intuitions could also be distorted by having the concepts and distinctions explained to one in a way that biased one to form a particular stance initially; that's not quite "reshaping" since one didn't have initial intuitions to begin with, but this kind of thing probably also happens when students receive philosophical training.)

> Hans’s next remark leaves me incredulous:

> > Actually, maybe it's better to say that people who haven't been trained in the relevant concepts and distinctions could not have views about these questions: the questions are framed in terms of the relevant concepts and distinctions (and so must any answers to the questions be), so anyone without the relevant concepts and distinctions literally could not have views on those questions, in the same way that someone who doesn’t know what a “vector” in the mathematical sense is could not have views on linear algebra.

> …my dissertation is a defense of exactly this claim. Hans doesn’t even seem to be unaware of this, because the very next remark is:

> > (As an aside, this seems like a solid argument in favor of Lance's "folk metaethical indeterminacy"—the folk do not have determinate views on metaethical questions, because they don’t understand the relevant concepts and distinctions.)

> …Yes…why do you think this appeared in a dissertation defending folk metaethical indeterminacy? (That’s a rhetorical question).

Yeah, sorry about this. As I said, I haven't read your dissertation yet (at least not much of it), and I thought your defense of folk metaethical indeterminacy was mainly on empirical grounds (namely your studies in which you provide evidence that people systematically interpret the questions in unintended ways). So I was thinking this was maybe a complementary argument to the one you give, on *a priori* grounds. But if you also give this argument as well, then I apologize.

Expand full comment
Erick Wales's avatar

** Disclaimer: I am not formally educated in Philosophy nor have a read all of your research nor am I intimately familiar with the study methodologies regarding metaethical positions in the general public. I have been following you on here for a while and I read a great deal of philosophy on a daily basis **

I feel like your argument is somewhat circular and in the manner that you present it impossible to argue against. Your metaphor with asking about Christianity to the island population makes this quite clear.

"...the question I am addressing is what nonphilosophers outside the context of these studies think about these questions."

You seem to argue that you are interested in understanding the answer to this problem but at the same time argue that it cannot be answered. What if you are wrong? If people do hold metaethical stances you don't leave any room for your theory to be falsified. As you say, any measure can simply be thrown out as "illusory appearance of success". It seems you've set the table in such a way that you cannot lose.

For the record, I think you might be right to some degree but I feel the manner in which your argument is made makes it impossible to know.

What I don't understand though is why questions like the following can't give us some insight into peoples views:

"Do you believe there are moral standards or values that hold true in every context?"

"Do you think it is ok to change your moral positions based on certain contexts?"

I don't think these questions are perfect but maybe lean towards a way of asking people about these issues in a manner in which the average person would understand and be able to answer in a meaningful way.

To put it into your Christianity metaphor, instead of asking people if they accept or reject Christianity (something that is clearly nonsensical to a population that has never heard of it) you could ask questions like this:

"Do you believe there is some invisible force in the universe capable of affecting the lives of people?"

"Do you believe that worshiping such forces can improve the outcome of your life?"

Again, these are just quick passes at more generalized questions but I think you get the idea.

It is obvious that people who have never heard of anti-realism or realism hold no views on the matter but that does not mean that those people could not think that their morals are absolute or not. You can always argue this is spontaneous theorizing but that could be argued about most surveys and if you want to hold that position then you are invalidating the entirety surveys that may ask people any generalized questions that they may not have ever stopped to think about before.

I am reminded of quantum decoherence and the measurement problem. Until we measure a particular quantum state it is considered to hold a range of values (wave function) and once we look at it it collapses down to one in particular. Physicists don't then say that the values they measure are useless and meaningless, what they do is make lots of measurements of different particles to develop a statisical model of the generalized behavior. While it's true that any one particle is unknown before measurement and the act of measurement does affect the outcome, the understanding gained from many measurements does provide insight into the general behavior of those particles.

Expand full comment
13 more comments...

No posts