The Problem with Properties

When we use a term like “property” in relation to things having them, we suppose we know what we mean. What we have in mind in these cases is just some feature (or features) of a thing which, along with other features, combine to make it what it is. That is, we suppose that a property is that element or aspect of a thing which possesses it – along with every other element or aspect of it which then, if all are specified in full, would convey to an interlocutor the complete picture of the object in question. The property of a thing, in this sense, is any of its parts or elements which are accessible to us via the senses, either directly or indirectly.

Synonyms for the word “property” in various contexts include words like “feature,” “quality,” “aspect,” “element,” “constituent,” “characteristic,” “part,” and so on. None of these may be precisely the same as what we mean by “property” in every case for some are more specific, or refer to physical elements of a thing only while others have a more abstract reality. The idea of a “feature,” for instance, suggests something that may belong to a thing but is not an intrinsic part of it, i.e., something temporarily connected to the thing in question. A “quality” of a thing seems to suggest an evaluative or evaluated fact about it. An “aspect” conjures the picture of a particular appearance of something, depending on the viewer’s perspective and to speak of a thing’s “characteristic” suggests something not quite physical, something more like an effect the thing has on its observer, i.e., something it’s prone to produce in observers. The word “element” suggests some basic constituent part of the thing while the term “constituents,” itself, suggests parts, albeit not necessarily basic ones (i.e., something that is non-reducible to anything more basic than itself). . . .

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A Jamesian Wittgenstein?

A former professor of mine, Haim Marantz, sent me a paper of his on Richard Rorty and another on John Dewey recently for some comments. I have never been much for American Pragmatism, not since, as an undergraduate, I read a bit of William James and John Dewey and thought them somewhat soft as thinkers. I also concluded, probably because of the way an instructor at the time presented the two, that American Pragmatism really amounted to an argument that the truth is just whatever works and that's the whole story. This just seemed superficial and wrong to me and I gravitated, instead, to what seemed the more rigorous Analytic tradition in England. Later, I discovered Wittgenstein and his approach opened things up for me in a way that made analytic philosophy seem rather limited, too. I learned, eventually, that Wittgenstein was not well read in philosophy however, although he apparently liked Schopenhauer (at least in his youth) and, at some point in his career, had read William James. That surprised me because it seemed to me that there was a huge gap between James' seemingly superficial pragmatic vision of philosophy and Wittgenstein's penetrating understanding of how language shapes and reflects the way we understand things. Yet, years later I discovered that more and more thinkers were finding in Wittgenstein a pragmatic strain linking him firmly to the work of people like James, especially in light of his almost off-hand remark about 'meaning as use' (Philosophical Investigations). This approach forms the basis for understanding semantics in pragmatic terms, an approach to meaning in language that has taken hold in later Anglo-American philosophical thought. Marantz' papers reminded me of all this and were suggestive, as well, in their treatment of Rorty and Dewey.

A number of modern thinkers, Robert Brandom among them, have argued that Wittgenstein in fact stands in a long tradition of pragmatists going back at least as far as Kant and coming up through Hegel to the classic American Pragmatists (Peirce, James and Dewey) and flowering in the efforts of Wittgenstein and Heidegger (no less!) to find a modern voice in the work of people like the American philosophers Wilfrid Sellars and Richard Rorty. Pragmatism was back -- indeed if Brandom is right, it never left us. Only some, like me, had failed to notice. A year ago I picked up a book in a used book store by William James. Two books actually in one volume: Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth. This volume, with an introduction by A.J. Ayer, consolidates two sets of lectures delivered by James, the first set in Boston as the Lowell Lectures in 1906 and later at Columbia University (with some slight changes according to Ayer) in 1907. The first set was published in 1907 as Pragmatism. The text of that work forms the first part of the volume I bought, which I finally started reading just a few weeks ago. To my surprise, it contains elements which anticipate and predate Wittgenstein's influential On Certainty. In fact, some of the similarities are astounding . . .

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Moral Judgment, Factual Belief and Wittgenstein's "On Certainty"

Returning to an issue dealt with here a while back, I thought it might be helpful to recap what may be understood as a later Wittgensteinian perspective on moral valuing. John Whittaker, explicating the Wittgensteinian thinker from Swansea, R. W. Beardsmore, wrote that:

If we distinguish between Wittgenstein’s substantive moral views, expressed in his early Lecture on Ethics, and his more discriminating grammatical approach to logical issues that we find in the later works, we can say that R. W. Beardsmore tried to bring this latter way of doing philosophy to ethics. One might even say that he tried to give ethics something like a Wittgensteinian moral epistemology. That would be misleading if it were thought to imply anything like a theoretical system for making moral discoveries or resolving moral problems. But if epistemological work includes conceptual clarity about the distinctions that we commonly observe when we are making moral judgements – but which we often forget when we reflect analytically on what we are doing – then it can be said that Beardsmore brought some epistemological light to the dark subject of moral judgement. Contrary to the aspirations of many, Beardsmore tried to show that there is no such thing as an ultimate, rational ground of moral justification in ethics. Not that there are no arguments, but our arguments always rest on deep, often unspoken, moral commitments. These commitments involve our conceptions of value, and the place that they occupy in our thinking does not rest on evidentiary grounds.

http://wittgensteinrepository.org/agora-ontos/article/view/2224/2336

If Whittaker's take on Beardsmore is right, then Beardsmore was arguing that a Wittgensteinian approach to ethics works rather like Wittgenstein's approach to knowledge in On Certainty. That is, claims about our moral standards (rather than about the moral judgments we make based on them) are not subject to debate as such because we stand upon them in making the various judgments we make. And yet it's not so easy to distinguish between a particular judgment and the standard it expresses. . . .

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Logic and Value

Some preliminary thoughts on the nature of valuation as a human activity and how that fits with the rules of logic which we find embedded within the practice of language:

Language and Thought

Language consists of various things we do with sounds and symbols. A main part of language involves the use of naming and descriptive terms (words and phrases) to stand for the things we can discern (by observation and/or thought), as well as those operators (in words or phrases) by which we can combine the naming and descriptive terms in informative ways.

Language also includes various signaling practices (exclamations, gestures, expressions employed for evocative or invocative purposes) but these are not "about" terms (referential) and so can be set aside for the moment.

The purpose of any language is to inform, that is to convey information in order to communicate with other speakers.

The methods of combination applied to naming and descriptive terms, as represented by the non-naming and descriptive operators, constitute the logic (the basic and distinct rules) of any language.

But the rules of logic are themselves used, in any given language, according to other rules of practice, which are distinctive to each particular language, and to relevant contexts, in order to generate informative statements in any given language. That is, grammatical differences mask logical similarities from language to language and even within the same language.

Unlike the rules of linguistic practice (grammar), which are, to a large extent, contingent because they are governed by historical experiences of the speaker, by habits formed and preserved, and by physical possibility, the rules of logic, although manifested through the rules of practice (grammar) in many different ways, have a universal character, i.e., they are common to all languages so that the same thoughts can generally be expressed in them in various languages.

The study of any language consists of discovering how the practical rules of that language make use of, and manifest, the logical possibilities (the range of possible combinations of naming and descriptive terms) in the given language.

The study of logic, on the other hand . . .

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Moral Judgment in the Real World

David Brooks, writing in the New York Times on Tuesday, March 10th, offers an account of moral values as those societal standards which we adopt (either implicitly or, if necessary, deliberately and consciously) in order to achieve better social outcomes (by producing more stable, productive members of that society). I'm not sure if this offers the best possible account of moral judgment, but it does seem to make some sense:

We now have multiple generations of people caught in recurring feedback loops of economic stress and family breakdown, often leading to something approaching an anarchy of the intimate life.

. . . The health of society is primarily determined by the habits and virtues of its citizens. In many parts of America there are no minimally agreed upon standards for what it means to be a father. There are no basic codes and rules woven into daily life, which people can absorb unconsciously and follow automatically.

This account suggests a naturalistic picture, i.e., that morally good behavior derives from recognizing what is good for human beings via the societies they live in (social goods) and acting in accord with such standards. . . .

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Why Goodness is not a Property

Since G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica (1903) the question of whether "good" denotes a property of something has been important in the field of Ethics. Indeed, one might say it spawned the whole field of metaethics which looks at the epistemological and metaphysical underpinnings of ethical beliefs. Moore challenged the notion of hedonistic utilitarians like John Stuart Mill that we could determine the right things to do, the morally good acts we should perform and support, by a calculus of the acts' effects in terms of how much pleasure or happiness such acts added to, or subtracted from, the world. Formulating his "open question" argument, Moore pointed out that it made no logical sense to suppose that anything that could be brought about in the natural world was what we meant by "good" and so it could never be enough to presume that how much happiness or pleasure, or any other natural phenomenon, was fostered in the world could determine whether or not we should act to bring such things about. This, he noted, was simply because we can always ask a further question of the supposed good, i.e., whether it, itself, is good. That is, since we can conceive of circumstances in which pleasure or happiness are not good (think of the happy junkie or serial killer who takes delight in his pursuits), the term "good" cannot possibly be equivalent to being happy or, indeed, any other phenomenon or condition.

Moore's solution was to suppose that "good" must therefore be understood as denoting something else and, because everything natural (occurring as part of the natural world in which we stand) could be either good or not good (i.e., fell victim to the "open question"), what "good" denotes must, in fact, be understood as being non-natural. That is, Moore suggested, it must be some property of a thing that is outside the natural world. Moreover, he suggested that such a property must be bottom line in its own nature, i.e., it must be unanalyzable to anything more basic than itself. Finally, he reasoned, such a property must be known to us in a way quite different than physical phenomena (natural properties and their aggregates) are known to us. That is, he concluded, it must be apprehended, when it is present, in some direct, intuited way. Thus Moore concluded the word "good," while operating like other words for properties, such as "yellow," must name a kind of property quite different from the sort of thing "yellow" names.

Later thinkers in the twentieth century, while finding Moore's critique of hedonistic utilitarianism compelling, were less moved by his solution. . . .

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Why Moral Judgments Aren't True or False and Why They Don't Have to Be

One big debate in metaethics today is whether or not we can argue for the truth or falsity of value claims. Is it true that kicking babies is bad? Or eradicating ethnic groups (genocide)? Is it true that keeping promises is good? That being kind to animals is? That being one's brother's keeper is? That we should treat others as we would wish to be treated? So-called moral realists argue for the necessity of being able to claim that such statements, and a great many others, are either true or false for, if it turns out we can't, then it looks as if we have lost the possibility of believing in the rightness or wrongness of these and similar behaviors. And this seems to undermine the moral project (the possibility of selectively differentiating between a certain class of actions). Without the ability to grant validity to our moral claims, we seem to be at a loss to tell others to do or not do a whole class of actions which seem to demand just such differentiating capability from us if we are to get on, in a satisfying way, with our lives. Societies and communities stand on the capacity to make such differentiations and to defend them when we do so, i.e., to believe in the truth of our differentiations.

No one doubts that one can judge the prudential value or its lack in certain behaviors, of course. We can know if it's true that we should keep our promise to another if we come to believe that doing so will prompt some good result for ourselves, e.g., that they will keep promises in turn to us (something we wish or need them to do) or if keeping promises will yield other rewards for us. But if personal rewards are the name of the game, then it's not keeping promises that's good (the right thing to do) per se, but getting the reward. And doing something to get a reward for doing it seems to vitiate the claim of moral goodness because it allows us, when the desired reward may not be available, to disregard practices like promise keeping, indeed to pursue a policy of deliberately performing their opposites.

Moral realists want to say that moral value claims carry their own criteria for being true or false, criteria which are not the same as the benefits an agent may gain, or hope to gain, by acting in a prudentially good way. Prudential benefits are external to the presumed morally good trait or action while what makes them morally good (or not) must be intrinsic to them, part of their very nature. Making and acting on moral claims must be independent of personal benefit, the value-granting feature (the presumed property of moral goodness the action is thought to possess) existing somewhere and somehow within the act itself -- or in our description of it. It's the presence or absence of such an extra feature, a feature we discern by observation and inquiry and which we assert to be there in statements which are subject to true or false judgments, that makes any claim of moral goodness reliable (or not) and so fit to be acted on (or rejected).

Intuitionists suppose such extra features are recognized by us because we have a kind of sense of them when they are there, picking up whatever the goodness feature is in a fundamentally unanalyzable way. Just as we see colors and hear sounds and taste flavors, so, for intuitionists, we have a kind of parallel capacity to apprehend moral goodness. That was G. E. Moore's notion and the notion of others, like Henry Sidgwick, who followed him down the intuitionist path. But intuitionism lacks a certain respectability in the modern intellectual world. If we can't explain the intuitive mechanism, as we can explain how and why we see colors, etc., in some physically demonstrable way (as a function of our sensing faculties and as phenomena sensed and thus relayed to the brain), then the idea of intuitions of goodness just looks spurious . . .

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