Tuesday 25 April 2017

An interesting post

I read an interesting post over at Robert Paul Wolff's blog, The Philosopher's Stone (check it out here).  In it, Wolff writes:

"Marx told us about three related but different things:  First, the fundamental exploitative structure of capitalism; Second, the probable direction in which capitalism would develop as its institutions matured; and Third, how men and women would respond to that underlying exploitation and that development."

According to Wolff, Marx was right on the first point; mostly right on the second, in that he predicted the continual boom-bust cycle, monopolization, automation, and so on.  He failed to predict, argues Wolff, the stratification of the working class into well paid managerial positions and lower paid laborious positions, which hampers worker solidarity even if they are all, technically exploited.

Wolff wonders, however, why Marx was so wrong on the third point: "But Marx was convinced that over time... workers would be led to unite ... and take collective ownership of their own collective product:  Capital." This, of course, hasn't happened, and Wolff wonders why people haven't revolted.

In reading this, I was reminded of Harry Frankfurt's argument that people are more bothered by unfairness than inequality (see here).  In some cases, making things more equal would make things worse (if somebody's car breaks down, it would make no sense to break everybody's car just to equal things out).  Moreover, many people seem not to be bothered by inequality if it the result of what is deemed a fair process: two athletes try out for the team but only one makes the cut and goes on to earn millions more than the other; so long as there was no bias or other unfairness in the tryout process, one may think that the resultant inequality is ok.

I wonder whether something like this helps to explain the failure that worries Wolff: maybe many people realize that capitalism is based on an exploitation that produces inequality, but consider it to be fair.  I recall, for example, arguments in my university days in which some of my fellow students felt that the "risk" incurred by those who start a business fully justifies their greater compensation than their employees.  They granted that this was an inequitable result, but it struck them as just fine.
  
In other words, perhaps an inegalitarian system is tolerated so long as it is viewed as fair.
Of course, we need to be careful here.  It is possible that a system in which each individual interaction is fair adds up to one that is unfair: we need to avoid the fallacy of composition.  Indeed, it may be argued that too much inequality of outcome eventually serves as evidence that the system as a whole is unfair after all, and that we need to reevaluate our assessment of fairness at the micro level.

All the same, I wonder whether a sense that society is largely fair explains the tolerance of inequality.  Further, perhaps it is when the sense that fairness has been lost that social structures are questioned.  Something like that may be happening at the moment.












Thursday 6 April 2017

Structure, Human and Non-Human

Try to imagine engaging in inquiry, any kind of inquiry, but without constraints: none whatsoever.  Any term, symbol, phrase, or utterance could mean anything at any time, and could change at any time.  One might utter ‘causation is local’, and by the time one had begun to say ‘local’, the meaning of ‘causation’ could be different.  ‘A and B’ could entail ‘A’, or ‘not-A’, and it may not be that ‘A’ represents the same thing in all three occasions.  Similarly, no assumption about the nature of reality is given: maybe the world has structure, maybe not; maybe whichever of those is the case changes from moment to moment; maybe it both has and lacks structure at all times; and so on.  Again, imagine that there are no constraints whatsoever on the inquiry so that no assumption about the inquirer’s tools, linguistic or otherwise, or the subject of inquiry can be made.

Under such conditions, any inquiry would be still-born, unable to proceed past its starting point (it couldn’t even really have a starting point, but let’s ignore that for the time being).  Moving forward under such conditions would be like trying to steer a car in outer space: it would be impossible to find the traction required to move.  Any attempt to interpret evidence would stall without the ability to settle on meanings for, say, basic logical terms such as ‘all’ or ‘the’; any attempt to draw a conclusion would falter without some standard of argument evaluation; and so on.  Therefore, in order to advance inquiry at all, in any direction, certain constraints have to be put in place, if they aren’t there already.

This is, I think, the only sensible interpretation of the claim that even science rests on untested assumptions.  It is also the reason that philosophy and science are essentially intertwined, each inextricable from the other.  Here is a nice statement of the situation:

“Science has always included a large philosophical component, whether at the level of basic presuppositions concerning evidence, causality, theory-construction, valid inference, hypothesis-testing, and so forth, or at the speculative stage where scientists ignore the guidance offered by well-informed philosophers only at risk of falling into various beguiling fallacies or fictions” (Christopher Norris, ‘Hawking Contra Philosophy’, https://philosophynow.org/issues/82/Hawking_contra_Philosophy)

None of this, of course, entails that the assumptions amount to superstition, mere game playing, wish fulfillment, or anything else that is non-truth-conducive.  Indeed, they may be just the presuppositions needed to get at the truth; they may not be, of course.  Whether suppositions about evidence, causality, hypothesis-testing, and so on, are good ones is a further matter of debate; their mere existence is a necessity either way, so that alone will not favour one conclusion or the other.

Now, we can draw certain conclusions from the foregoing. 

1.     We know – or, so I shall assume here – that various branches of human inquiry exist: physics, biology, math, economics, history, etc., whatever one thinks of them, are part of the world we inhabit.

2.     It follows that these branches of inquiry depend upon and involve constraints – assumptions, or presuppositions – that allow them to get off the ground.

3.     It follows that human beings are the kinds of creature that have the ability to recognize naturally occurring constraints – suppose, for example, that the laws of logic exist mind-independently and we discover them – or else have the ability to create and impose constraints that allow inquiry to proceed.

4.     It is absurd to suppose that we endow ourselves with either or both of these abilities.  That is, we cannot suppose that human beings come into creation as formless entities that lack all structure/constraint, and then proceed to endow ourselves with the ability to construct theoretical presuppositions.  The reason for this is that endowing ourselves with the ability to come up with theory-enabling assumptions is itself a kind of ability or capacity, in which case what we do, in conducting inquiry, presupposes that we have capacities. 

5.     Therefore, it follows that we have certain capacities that exist prior to any theory construction or evidence gathering in which we may engage.

The same goes for the species as a whole: we cannot explain how Homo sapiens or, indeed, species in general arose if we do not presuppose that the pre-human world contained the structure and capacities that would give rise to the variation-selection-heredity loop that leads from the earliest life-forms to what exists today.

Grand conclusion: it cannot be the case that all structure is human-constructed structure.  Our ability to construct presupposes structure.  Nature is, at least in part, independent of us and not of our making.