Why Perspective and Context Are Features - Not Bugs - Of Human Reason

[DocWatts]

I thought I might share this write up on meta-rationality which I drafted for the philosophy book I'm working on, 7 Provisional Truths.

In it I discuss both the usefulness and limitations of conceptual categories, and make the case that 'Reason' is inherently tied to a human perspective within Reality. And that this is a feature - not a bug - of rationality.

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Context Is King for Categorization

What a context refers to is the background situation and circumstances that shape our interpretation of something. Consider spoken language, for instance - and the degree to which tone, body language, and personal relationships contribute to the meaning of a verbal conversation. Although we readily recognize context’s influence on speech, we often fail to acknowledge its foundational importance for the categories we use to make sense of the world.

Notably, this contextual influence doesn’t just apply to elusive categories like ‘truth’ and ‘beauty’, whose meanings have been discussed and debated for centuries. It extends to concrete phenomena in the everyday world as well. This includes material objects like tables and chairs, sensory properties like color and texture, and even spatiotemporal fundamentals like space and time. Our intuitions tell us that these everyday categories correspond to ‘objective’ categories that exist in nature; yet this is a mistaken assumption. As we’ll discover, a more complex and fascinating truth awaits us, if we can let go of our rigid insistence  that our categories are mirrors of Reality.

The roots of this deceptive intuition arise from a fundamental misunderstanding about the formation and function of the categories we use. Conceptual categories, even for seemingly concrete things, aren’t a straightforward retrieval of pre-existing distinctions that are ‘out there’ in the world. Instead, they are more like mental frameworks that help us make sense of our embodied experience. These mental frameworks, or schemas, are inherently tailored to our needs, capacities, and purposes as human beings. In this sense, categories are unavoidably anthropocentric - reflecting our uniquely human perspective within Reality. A schema, simply put, is a pattern for organizing and interpreting information within a given domain. Categories, then, can be understood as anthropocentric schemas, which are unavoidably tied to our embodied experience within the world.

This understanding of categories as anthropocentric schemas reveals an important insight into their formation and structure. At their core, categories are functional rather than objective. Their purpose is to help us make predictive generalizations about what we encounter within the world, which is integral to our ability to reason. Reason, then, is our capacity to manipulate and extend these ‘predictive generalizations’ - using them to draw inferences, predict patterns, and reflect upon our embodied experience. 

A closer look at the formation and structure of categories also invites us to reexamine many of our intuitions about Reason - chief among them, the prevailing assumption that Reason is primarily a detached, intellectual activity. This traditional view presupposes that reason is inherently transcendental, meaning that it literally transcends our human perspective. Reason, in this view, is an inherent feature of Reality, independent of any thinking beings. Going forward, we’ll refer to this perspective as Transcendental Reason. When we use the word ‘Reason’ with a capital R, it’s to this transcendental conception of Reason that we’re referring. The alternative perspective we’ll be exploring aims to show how human reason arises from our embodied, everyday experience - and that reasoning relies significantly upon emotion, imagination, and metaphor. In contrast to capital 'R' Reason, when we use the word with a lowercase 'r', it's to this embodied, human reason that we refer.

In connection with this alternate account of reason, we’ll also challenge prevailing assumptions around ‘Objectivity’. These notions often presuppose that there’s a single, correct view of Reality that transcends our human perspective - in essence, a ‘‘Transcendental Objectivity’. In contrast to the transcendental perspective, what we’ll be articulating is a fundamentally ‘human objectivity’. Where the focus is on leveraging a shared human context to arrive at common forms of understanding, without resorting to the unrealistic idea that Reality can be understood from a 'neutral', perspective-free viewpoint.  As with our account of ‘Reason’ and ‘reason’, we’ll use a capital ‘O’ when we’re referring to Transcendental Objectivity, and a lowercase ‘o’ for human objectivity.

So why draw attention to these distinctions? It’s to highlight that being bound within a context and a perspective isn’t a ‘flaw’ of human reasoning - it’s an essential feature. The epistemological ramifications of this observation are huge. In essence, it’s a ‘shot across the bow’ to notions that we can have absolute or universal knowledge.

Edited July 31, 2024 by DocWatts

[Leo Gura]

Excellent!

7 provisonal thumbs up

Edited July 31, 2024 by Leo Gura

[DocWatts]

2 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Excellent!

7 provisonal thumbs up

Thank you! 

[Leo Gura]

@DocWatts One thumb for each paragraph

[Ulax]

@DocWatts Nice.

So how would you be able to decide whether one argument is better than another one? If at all? Even within a specific context

Edited August 1, 2024 by Ulax

[DocWatts]

10 hours ago, Ulax said:

@DocWatts Nice.

So how would you be able to decide whether one argument is better than another one? If at all? Even within a specific context

Well, if somebody offers you a simple rule for determining what's true that's supposedly applicable to every type of situation, odds are they're bullshiting you.

My own perspective is that one is far more likely to arrive at something resembling the truth if they have access to a few things:

1) Domain specific expertise -or- good heuristics for assessing who is a credible source for that expertise.

2) The ability to identity and scrutinize the background assumptions that are presupposed by a truth claim.

3) Inner awareness of our own emotional attachments to whatever it is that orients is within Reality (such as a scientific or political paradigm, spiritual beliefs, etc). And how that is influencing our approach when assessing a truth claim.

4) A general overview of how paradigms work, and a basic understanding of human psychology.

5) This one will be a bit longer, since there's some nuance to this point. But an ability to tie statements of truth to a purposive context, instead of an inflexible insistence that there's a single, correct understanding of Reality. In the context of my write-up, we could think of this as a shift away from capital 'Transcendental Truth' to a 'human truth' that includes self awareness about the limitations of our own perspective. Importantly, this isn't a relativistic claim that truth is inherently 'subjective' - as a practical matter, human beings can and must be able to arrive at shared forms of understanding. At the same time, 'truth' isn't something that exists apart from us, it is inherently relational - sitting at the cross section of a specific context and perspective on one hand, and our broader, shared Reality on the other. In essence, this point is a rejection of both extreme forms of both absolutism and relativism, in favor of a perspective to truth that's more flexible.

Edited August 1, 2024 by DocWatts

[zurew]

 

@DocWatts  Regarding specifically the "what would make an argument better compared to another" do you have a take on theoretical virtues?

Also do you have a stance on theories of truth? (I am referring to correspondence, pragmatist , coherence and others)

[DocWatts]

57 minutes ago, zurew said:

 

@DocWatts  Regarding specifically the "what would make an argument better compared to another" do you have a take on theoretical virtues?

Also do you have a stance on theories of truth? (I am referring to correspondence, pragmatist , coherence and others)

Could you describe what you mean by 'theoretical virtues'?

Short answer to your second question :

Of the categories you listed,  'pragmatism' would probably be the closest fit.

Longer answer:

The theory of truth that I'm working with is a Disclosive Theory of Truth that emphasizes how explicit beliefs are derived from nonconceptual familiarity with the world, which we attain through everyday practices and activities.

(Think of Heideggerian ontology and epistemology, alongside a Ken Wilber-esque emphasis that perspectives can be 'true but partial', and a AN Whitehead emphasis on 'process' and 'relationality', if that's at all helpful).

In particular, it's a rejection of the Correspondence View in favor of a phenomenological and embodied perspective towards truth, with insights from evolutionary biology.

Edited August 1, 2024 by DocWatts

[zurew]

1 hour ago, DocWatts said:

Could you describe what you mean by 'theoretical virtues'?

By theoretical virtue I mean things that can help us differentiate and rank theories.  It basically gives meaning to the word "better" in the context of choosing between theories. So for instance, if there is a set of facts (call it X), and there are 3 different theories put forth to explain X, theoretical virtues can helps us to non-randomly choose between those theories.

So things like simplicity  (all else being equal, a theory that assumes less is better) , explainability ( all else being equal, a theory that can explain more facts is better) , predictability ( all else being equal , a theory that can predict future events or behaviour and isn't just an explanation for an  existing dataset is better) and there are more virtues , but generally speaking those are the ones that are brought up.

Edited August 1, 2024 by zurew

[DocWatts]

3 hours ago, zurew said:

By theoretical virtue I mean things that can help us differentiate and rank theories.  It basically gives meaning to the word "better" in the context of choosing between theories. So for instance, if there is a set of facts (call it X), and there are 3 different theories put forth to explain X, theoretical virtues can helps us to non-randomly choose between those theories.

So things like simplicity  (all else being equal, a theory that assumes less is better) , explainability ( all else being equal, a theory that can explain more facts is better) , predictability ( all else being equal , a theory that can predict future events or behaviour and isn't just an explanation for an  existing dataset is better) and there are more virtues , but generally speaking those are the ones that are brought up.

The type of metatheory that I'm developing is meant to be complimentary to other perspectives, rather than THE one-true framework for every situation and context.

It's primary emphasis is on how we interpret our everyday experience - in particular, it calls attention to the unexamined assumptions we normally attach to that experience.

As far as that goes, the emphasis is on learning to hold our frameworks in a more self aware and ultimately provisional way, by cultivating an acute awareness of thier limitations. To that end, I argue for thinking about theories less in terms of transcendental or absolute 'truth', and more in terms of thier appropriateness for given purposive context. In other words, thinking about theories in terms of what we're trying to understand. Additionally, I do argue that completely explicit formal rules for theory selection are impractical, because one quickly runs into an infinite regression problem (since we would also need rules for when and how to apply the rules, ad-infinitum ).

As far as what makes something a good 'fit' for a given situation on context, nothing really unexpected or novel here. Solid heuristics include things like relevance, simplicity, internal coherence, and explainability. In addition to these, I'd also add: 'do not bar the path of inquiry' (that is, we should be cautious about adopting theories that prevent us from discovering something that could turn out to be true).

The 'pivot', then, is more about examining the emotional attachments that we form to our theories and beliefs. In particular, when our beliefs become our identity.

Edited August 1, 2024 by DocWatts

[zurew]

1 hour ago, DocWatts said:

To that end, I argue for thinking about theories less in terms of transcendental or absolute 'truth', and more in terms of thier appropriateness for given purposive context.

I can agree with this, just from the fact, that I find context independent (or in other words absolute) truth to be pretty much gibberish, the same goes for moral realism. 

1 hour ago, DocWatts said:

Additionally, I do argue that completely explicit formal rules for theory selection are impractical, because one quickly runs into an infinite regression problem (since we would also need rules for when and how to apply the rules, ad-infinitum ).

Decision theory is grounded in morality and I think that you are a moral antirealist as well, so these things are either grounded in our subjective preferences/values or we can decide these things in an intersubjective manner (once proper context is provided, what the actual goal is).

Edited August 1, 2024 by zurew

[DocWatts]

1 hour ago, zurew said:

Decision theory is grounded in morality and I think that you are a moral antirealist as well

I'd agree with this, though more in a descriptive rather than prescriptive way ( I didn't necessarily set out to construct an antirealist theory).

Definitely a moral constructivist, but too often I find that people equate 'constructed' with arbitrary or subjective. 

If anything, I'm more interested in reclaiming subjectivism and objectivism away from metaphysical realism (in ethics and in other domains). And emphasizing that these are human constructs that can still be useful to us, so long was we do don't insist that they're inherent features of Reality, independent of any thinking beings.

Edited August 1, 2024 by DocWatts

[zurew]

1 hour ago, DocWatts said:

Definitely a moral constructivist, but too often I find that people equates constructed with arbitrary or subjective. 

If anything, I'm more interested in reclaiming subjectivism and objectivism away from metaphysical realism (in ethics and in other domains). And emphasizing that these are human constructs that can still be useful to us, so long was we do don't insist that they're inherent features of Reality, independent of any thinking beings.

Yeah I pretty much agree with this approach as well.  To me, these are words that we use to categorize things, and they are useful for that and thats it (not necessarily claims about metaphysics).

What do you mean by moral constructivism? how is that meaningfully different from saying that you have your own personal goals and preferences and that is what grounds what you ought to do?

Edited August 1, 2024 by zurew

[DocWatts]

2 hours ago, zurew said:

What do you mean by moral constructivism? how is that meaningfully different from saying that you have your own personal goals and preferences and that is what grounds what you ought to do?

Moral constructivism, as I use the term, is a recognition that morality is always grounded in a biological, cultural, and personal context. It's a descriptive (rather than prescriptive) antirealitist approach to morality. Here are some of its core tenets: 

1) Morality is largely intuition driven, and only secondarily about rational deliberation.

2) There is an evolutionary context for our moral intuitions, having to do with the survival situations that were in place as human psychology was evolving. For most of our history, human beings lived in tribes where you would know your neighbors on a face-to-face basis; this was where our root level moral intuitions evolved. Living alongside strangers as a fact of life only came much later.

3) Morality is functional rather than objective - as social animals, its purpose is to let us have functional societies. It's shaped by biology, culture, and and an individual's life experience. Morality doesn't exist 'out there' in some external Reality, but neither is it fully subjective.

4) Though humans have a shared pool of moral intuitions, they get expressed differently depending on the social and cultural context. in fact, I'd go so far as to say that moral constructivism is inherently anti-essentialist in nature, while at the same time rejecting extreme forms of relativism as well. 

5) Morality is constructed in the sense that it's created and sustained by human minds, but that doesn't mean it's arbitrary, or that its effects aren't very real. Morality may be constructed, but that doesn't mean that 'anything goes'; or that all moral viewpoints are equally healthy.

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In essence, it's a viewpoint that does allow for moral progress, but in the sense that there are better and worse lived outcomes for human beings. Moral constructivism stands in contrast to the supposition that our moral ideas are correct or incorrect to the extent that they correspond with Transcendental (ie, fixed and absolute) moral principles.

Edited August 1, 2024 by DocWatts

[zurew]

10 hours ago, DocWatts said:

Moral constructivism, as I use the term, is a recognition that morality is always grounded in a biological, cultural, and personal context. It's a descriptive (rather than prescriptive) antirealitist approach to morality

Okay gotcha. Now I understand your semantics a little better on this, but I personally wouldn't use morality in this case, because to me morality cannot not be prescriptive, this is why science alone cant "solve" moral questions . If we are talking about a purely descriptive statement, then thats just gonna be a scientific question.

So for example, if we create a descriptive statement about what we mean by human flourishing, then thats not gonna be a moral statement yet, unless we add moral language to it like (should). We can answer the question of what can bring higher and lower human flourishing without any need for morality there. But, if we make a statement like "we should care about human flourishing", now we are in moral territory and now we can use human flourishing as a moral axiom to work towards. 

 

10 hours ago, DocWatts said:

2) There is an evolutionary context for our moral intuitions, having to do with the survival situations that were in place as human psychology was evolving. For most of our history, human beings lived in tribes where you would know your neighbors on a face-to-face basis; this was where our root level moral intuitions evolved. Living alongside strangers as a fact of life only came much later.

3) Morality is functional rather than objective - as social animals, its purpose is to let us have functional societies. It's shaped by biology, culture, and and an individual's life experience. Morality doesn't exist 'out there' in some external Reality, but neither is it fully subjective.

Under my semantics - all of this is compatible with moral subjectivism. Subjective just means mind dependent. The fact that we can give a description about how our moral preferences or intuitions developed or from where they came from or the fact that it can be influenced by outside factors doesn't negate the fact that these preferences are still mind dependent .

A good way to recognize this, is if we switch moral preferences with taste preferences.  So going with taste preferences - We would probably never say  that  just because there is a cultural or evolutionary explanation for why I have this preference, that my preference for vanilla over chocolate isn't subjective. 

To be clear, under your semantics (the way you use subjective, it might make sense to use terms like "not fully subjective", but under those semantics im not even sure if you would categorize anything as purely subjective)

10 hours ago, DocWatts said:

Morality may be constructed, but that doesn't mean that 'anything goes'; or that all moral viewpoints are equally healthy.

 When you bring comparative statements in the picture, then its should be trivial for everyone that not all moral systems will be equally fit/good for that given thing.  So for instance, if  by healthy you mean something like "being good for survival" then yeah, it should be trivially easy to recognize for everyone that certain moral systems that don't care or that care less about survival, those will be less healthy compared to others under this definition of healthy , but under my semantics this still wouldn't make one moral system better compared to another. This is just picking a metric you care about and then checking which moral system can maximize it.

 

Edited August 2, 2024 by zurew

[DocWatts]

@zurew 

I think we mostly agree with one another, we're just using somewhat different semantics for some key terms.

As far moral theories go, on one end you have perenialism (the idea that there's a fixed/essential human nature). And on the other end you have radical forms of constructivism (which often come with the assumption that human nature is fluid and largely socially constructed).

My own moral theory is grounded in a middle point between these two poles, arguing that morality is grounded in a shared biological context - and that morality is culturally / socially constructed. Biology sets the bounds for what can be constructed. It could be argued that this is a 'weak' rather than a 'strong' version of constructivism, or that its an attempted synthesis between these two poles.

And yeah, I'll admit that my moral theory isn't completely descriptive, as there are metrics I care about (human flourishing) which can't be defined in an impartial way. Fair point. Maybe leans descriptive would be more apt? (Of course, just because a theory is descriptive doesn't mean that it 's necessarily 'correct' in what it's describing).

For subjectivism, basically everything we do and interact with is mind-dependent at some level, so I don't find 'mind-dependent' to be all that helpful. (Let me know if this is a mischaracterization of your semantics). Even the Laws of Physics are inherently coupled to human interests and capacities (in essence, they're a pattern recognition framework for human beings). Material objects that we interact with in the everyday world are mentally constructed (we don't sit on a lump of meaningless, uninterpreted matter - we sit on a chair). (Note that 'mentally constructed' does not mean 'imaginary', or that what's being referred to 'does not exist')

In my mind I've found 'decided by an individual's whims, preferences, and individual understanding' to be a more useful description of subjectivity. So by my semantics 'beauty' would fall under the realm of the 'subjective'. Morals (again by my semantics) would have a subjective component, but wouldn't be completely subjective - since they're grounded in biological mechanisms and a cultural context that's outside of an individual's whims, preferences, and personalized understanding.

Edited August 2, 2024 by DocWatts

[zurew]

 

7 hours ago, DocWatts said:

In my mind I've found 'decided by an individual's whims, preferences, and individual understanding' to be a more useful description of subjectivity.

Sure we can use that semantics for the purpose of this discussion about moral talk.

7 hours ago, DocWatts said:

Morals (again by my semantics) would have a subjective component, but wouldn't be completely subjective - since they're grounded in biological mechanisms and a cultural context that's outside of an individual's whims, preferences, and personalized understanding.

I think even under your semantics it would be subjective and I will lay out why (and you can obviously correct me if  i am strawmanning) .  If you can say that your morality is not completely subjective , under the same semantics I don't see how your stance on beauty would be different (how beauty would be purely subjective), because your sense of beauty can probably be explained or at the very least it is informed by biological  mechanism and evolution and by even cultural factors as well, so the same things are applicable there (as far as I see it).

Lets talk about moral statements, that includes moral language like should. For example: "I think we should maximize human flourishing". Just because that moral statement has an element in it that is basically connected to or informed by outside factors namely  by  'human flourishing' which  is grounded in biology, culture ,spiritual practices etc, that does not make that moral statement not subjective.

The way you check for subjectivity and objectivity in the context of morals is by checking what a given moral statement's truth value is depended on. So given the same statement of "I think we should maximize human flourishing" , this statement's truth value isn't depended on outside factors, it is depended on your own preferences and values and those values and preferences exist in your mind (using your semantics,of subjectivity -  it is depeneded on your preferences). Even if there would be no other human that would have the same kind of morals as you, that statement could still be true given your preferences.

 

Just as a sidenote for language kind of problems: I don't have strong views on it, this is why im perfectly okay with using your semantics. I am not a language realist or whatever it would be called (I am not even sure what objective definition would even mean).I only have two main goals in mind with language. 1) I want to make myself to be clear enough for my conversational partner so that he/she can understand what im saying 2) I want to understand what my conversational partner is trying to communicate.

 

Edited August 2, 2024 by zurew

[DocWatts]

57 minutes ago, zurew said:

I think even under your semantics it would be subjective and I will lay out why (and you can obviously correct me if  i am strawmanning) .  If you can say that your morality is not completely subjective , under the same semantics I don't see how your stance on beauty would be different (how beauty would be purely subjective), because your sense of beauty can probably be explained or at the very least it is informed by biological  mechanism and evolution and by even cultural factors as well, so the same things are applicable there (as far as I see it).

Fortunately, I'm more than willing to a concede a valid point that's well articulated, so yeah, i'll cop to some inconsistency in my use of 'beauty' as an example (since, as you point out, beauty is at some level informed by a shared biological context, just as I'm claiming that morals are). 

57 minutes ago, zurew said:

Just as a sidenote for language kind of problems: I don't have strong views on it, this is why im perfectly okay with using your semantics. I am not a language realist or whatever it would be called (I am not even sure what objective definition would even mean).

Hard agree here. The perspective you're alluding to (that both you and I disagree with) is called 'language prescriptivism', by the way - which is the normative view that words have one precisely defined semantic meaning that's 'correct'.

 

 

Suffice to say I think you bring up some valid points, that I'll respond to more fully after thinking about them some more.

Edited August 2, 2024 by DocWatts

[DocWatts]

15 hours ago, zurew said:

Lets talk about moral statements, that includes moral language like should. For example: "I think we should maximize human flourishing". Just because that moral statement has an element in it that is basically connected to or informed by outside factors namely  by  'human flourishing' which  is grounded in biology, culture ,spiritual practices etc, that does not make that moral statement not subjective.

The way you check for subjectivity and objectivity in the context of morals is by checking what a given moral statement's truth value is depended on. So given the same statement of "I think we should maximize human flourishing" , this statement's truth value isn't depended on outside factors, it is depended on your own preferences and values and those values and preferences exist in your mind (using your semantics,of subjectivity -  it is depeneded on your preferences). Even if there would be no other human that would have the same kind of morals as you, that statement could still be true given your preferences.

So I think your heuristics here are solid. My only asterisk is that subjective values and preferences aren't hermeneutically sealed - the biological, cultural, and technological context sets the horizons for subjective preference formation (for instance, someone living in Ancient Athens literally wouldn't have access to certain forms of preference formation for things like trans rights, online privacy, etc).

Edited August 3, 2024 by DocWatts

[zurew]

2 hours ago, DocWatts said:

So I think your heuristics here are solid. My only asterisk is that subjective values and preferences aren't hermeneutically sealed - the biological, cultural, and technological context sets the horizons for subjective preference formation (for instance, someone living in Ancient Athens literally wouldn't have access to certain forms of preference formation for things like trans rights, online privacy, etc).

I don't have a strong position on preference formation, because it is an empirical question that I haven't investigated at all - all I would say about it is that you can't have a preference for something that you cant conceive  of (thats my way to roughly say, what you mentioned about biological ,cultural and tech context)

To be clear though, I am willing to grant that the vast majority of our preferences can be explained by the context that you said, im just not 100% sure whether we can have a preference for something that is removed from that (thats why I used 'to conceive  of' )

Btw, appreciate the good faith engagement and appreciate that you were willing to lay down your semantics.

Edited August 3, 2024 by zurew