Used to pretend to like them

I’m not really all that into my courses this semester. I’m really taking three courses in the history of philosophy: one on British Empiricism (Locke, Berkeley, Hume), one on Wittgenstein, and one on A. N. Prior (20th-century philosophy of time). I’m occasionally mildly interested in the material, but never anything close to being inspired. I write papers because of their deadlines — or, in the case of the one I finished last night, because it’s a week past its deadline. It’s not an intellectually invigorating system.

One of the cool things about that conference I went to to present my dreaming paper was that it got me re-energized about some of the philosophy I’ve done. I’d sort of forgotten how cool that material is, and how proud I was of that paper. It’s on my mind again now, along with imagination in general. I originally wrote it for Ernie’s seminar last spring.

Late last night, I was finishing up this paper on Hume and propositional attitudes, and I ended up citing in passing a paper I’d responded to in a paper for Jaegwon’s seminar last spring. I opened the old document to copy the citation, and, on a nostalgic whim, I read all fifteen pages of it. It’s good. I think it puts forward a substantive and correct view, too. Action explanation is fundamentally a question of attribution of the relevant belief-desire pair, and apparently-competing explanations should be thought of as supplementing that one. I wrote two good papers last semester. Go me.

I’d been intending for a couple of weeks to take a look at yet another paper I wrote last semester, to see if I can shorten it into something presentable at a conference. I finally got around to that just now. The paper is a limited defense of a value fictionalism. This is worth explaining briefly, because, well, it’s interesting. I’m going to give you a brief philosophy lecture now. Don’t get intimidated. I’m going to explain things pretty carefully, so if you get confused, just back up a bit and start reading again. And if you end up confused anyway, don’t post me a note saying, “wow that was really complicated and it went over my head”. Those notes are annoying. If you have a specific question or confusion or point where what I said didn’t make sense, then ask for clarification. But don’t just tell me you don’t get it.

Right, so apparently we’ve discovered one of my pet peeves.

On to fictionalism. There is a certain class of statements in English that we can call normative statements. Normative statements make value claims. Here are some examples of normative statements:

• Homosexual acts are morally wrong.
• Happiness is good.
• You should look both ways before crossing the road.

Normative statements contrast with descriptive statements, which are pretty much our ordinary fact-stating sentences.

• It is raining today.
• Susan is sad.
• My car gets more miles per gallon than yours does.

Normative statements pose a special challenge for philosophers, and one branch of philosophy — metaethics — deals with two major questions about them: (1) how does normative language work?, and (2) are there normative properties ‘out there in the world’? The second question will make more sense after a brief discussion of the first.

The first question is about language. What are we doing when we make normative claims? A first sort of common-sense approach to normative language is to treat it pretty much like we treat descriptive language. When I say “sodomy is bad”, I am saying something about the practice of sodomy: I am saying that sodomy has the property of badness. This is just like when I say that “grass is green”, I am saying that grass has the property of green-ness. This may seem obvious, but some people think it’s wrong. Some people think that normative language is fundamentally different from descriptive language — that when we make normative statements, we’re not really stating facts that could be true or false. Instead, we’re doing something different. On one view, if I say “sodomy is bad”, I’m giving the order, “do not sodomize”. On another, I’m expressing a negative emotion, as if I’d said, “boo, sodomy!”

Call the first view in that paragraph cognitivism. According to cognitivism, when we use moral language, we are making statements that can be true or false — we are ascribing normative properties like goodness and badness and should-be-done-ness to various things. This contrasts with non-cognitivism, according to which we’re doing something else, like commanding or booing. Most people think that cognitivism is correct. It sure SEEMS like we’re saying things that can be either true or false. But it’s stil an active debate.

On to the second question: are there normative properties? Suppose that cognitivism is correct. When I say “sodomy is wrong,” I am saying, “sodomy has the property of wrongness”. What property is that? Is it reducible to physics, the way that properties like weighing over 200 pounds and being water-soluble are? This does not seem all that plausible. Furthermore, wrongness does not seem to play any role in our scientific explanations — so why should we believe in it? This second question is the question of whether there *really are* properties like wrongness. Call the view that there really are such properties, realism. The view that there are no such things — the one I’ve been pushing toward in this paragraph, is anti-realism.

The realism/anti-realism debate is still *very* active, and I think that most philosophers are probably realists. But there are some fairly compelling anti-realist arguments, which I’ve hinted at. Suppose now (and I swear, we’re *almost* back to my paper and writing about my life now) that cognitivism and anti-realism are both correct. So if I say something is wrong, or right, or bad, etc., I’m saying that it has some property. But that property doesn’t exist. This means that my statement is false. If there is no such thing as goodness, then nothing can be good. The combination of cognitivism and anti-realism is called an ‘error theory’. According to an error theory, we’re speaking falsely when use moral language.

This was Neitzsche’s view. And Neitzsche thought that it was a dangerous thing, for us to realize that we’re wrong about normative properties — that in fact, there are no objective values (anti-realism). It would be psychologically devastating to have our fundamental normative beliefs thus crushed: it would lead us to nihilism. I think the idea is supposed to be, we’d realize that nothing we’re doing is objectively valuable, and this would make us all depressed and suicidal and sad. Nietzsche’s suggestion (I think — Nietzsche exegesis can be tricky) is that we pre-empt this dangerous discovery by adopting a fictionalism about normative claims. Ok, fine, so we know these claims are false. Let’s just *pretend* they’re true. Nietzsche says, this can allow us to lead happy and fulfill lives and avoid nihilism. In typical colorful Nietzsche-language, he suggests that we embrace the “cult of the untrue”.

There are a lot of obvious problems with this suggestion. How could a PRETEND value give our lives meaning? And could just *imagining* that there are objective values really motivate us in the right way? Nietzsche tells us to just play this game, whereby there are values. Why should we play? Indeed, if anti-realism is true, it’s FALSE that we should play, because should-statements, like all normative statements, are literally false.

This is the point where I jumped in with my paper last spring. I think that a proper and sensitive understanding of imagination and moral psychology can get around a lot of these worries. So I wrote a defense of Nietzshe on those grounds. I won’t go into detail of my own arguments here, but I argue that imagination is not sensitive to evidence the way that belief is, but can still provide for emotional involvement in imaginary things. (Have you ever cried at a movie?) I wrote this paper for Bernard last spring — the same time I was writing my good papers for Ernie and Jaegwon.

Well, like I said, I’d been meaning to dust off this paper for a little while now, and I started tonight by reading Bernard’s comments about it. And, well, wow. I can’t believe I didn’t get more excited about these comments last spring. Or, you know, remember them. Here are some excerpts:

[Sir Despard] wrote an excellent, thought-provoking paper about a series of difficulties raised by the fictionalism about values developed in Nietzsche’s writings. … Overall, Jonathan’s work displays very promising characteristics to a high degree: a nice balance of probing critical-mindedness and philosophical inventiveness, couched in a clear, engaging, and succinct style. This is a work of a very high quality indeed, which could well lead to a publishable piece.

A publishable piece!?! That’s SOLID GOLD for a beginning Ph.D. student. Why didn’t I spend all summer corresponding with Bernard and trying to turn this thing into such a piece!? How absurd of me! I’m going to email him to ask for thoughts this very evening. He’s on sabbatical this year, but I know he’s around. He recently bought a house, and I occasionally see him around the department.

God damn, I wrote *three* really good papers last spring. In addition to making me feel proud, this makes me feel like I’ve wasted the current semester to some extent. Ah, well. Ernie and Jaegwon seminars this spring should give me inspiration to brilliance again, if I still have it in me, and in the meantime I’ll keep submitting to conferences and maybe maybe MAYbe also soon to journals.