Democracy is not a truth machine

Philosophy

Democracy is not a truth machine Thomas Wells In a democracy people are free to express their opinions and question those of others. This is an important personal freedom, and also essential to the very idea of government by discussion. But it has also been held to be instrumentally important because in open public debate true ideas will conquer false ones by their merit, and the people will see the truth for themselves. In other words, democracy has an epistemic function as a kind of truth machine. From this it follows that in a democracy there should be no dogma: no knowledge protected from public challenge and debate. Yet this whole argument is founded on embarrassing misconceptions of the nature of truth and of the working of democracy. The case for seeing freedom of expression as a public as well as a private good was made most eloquently and famously by J. S. Mill in On Liberty. [T]he peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. Mill's argument is a rhetorical tour de force in defence of pluralism and individual freedom. But it is only partly right. In particular Mill acknowledges no distinction between moral, religious & political opinions, and opinions about facts & rational truths. He also fails to distinguish the processes of discovery and evaluation. Mill is quite right to defend people's freedom to form, express, and debate their own opinions about religion, politics, and morality. These are subjects on which anyone can have an opinion; on which in a free society everyone has the right to have an opinion; and on which the very legitimacy of opinions requires their formation in a particular way (through non-coercive persuasion and critical self-reflection). Liberalism itself is founded on a respect for individual autonomy on these issues, in the sense that every person is considered to develop their own 'conception of the good': a kind of personal moral idiolect governing our judgements about value (opinions) that is built up from our cumulative interpretations and re-interpretations of our own experiences. Mill's particular contribution here is the counter-intuitive point that we can each learn from engaging with unconventional opinions even if we still conclude that they are bad and wrong, because they are interestingly wrong. Books like Plato's Republic, Machiavelli's Prince, Hobbes' Leviathon, or Mandeville's Fable of the Bees offend nearly everyone and persuade almost none, but they act like grit in an oyster by forcing us to rethink the justifications for our conventional beliefs. Allowing such dangerous ideas to be aired thus supports rather than undermines individual intellectual autonomy, which is why many undergraduates are required to read them. Mill's concept of an opinion also fits neatly with the public reasoning he recommends for democracy. Though held by private individuals, opinions have an inter-subjective aspect that allows them to be justified, debated, and critiqued in public. We can discuss and try to change each others' minds about what we should value and what should be done on issues as diverse as Who should win American Idol? or Should we invade Syria? In democratic politics, after talking like that for a while, we participate in a social choice exercise that transforms those individual opinions into a collective decision we vote to decide which opinions are most agreeable to most of us. But ethical precepts like 'torture is a crime against humanity', religious beliefs like 'Jesus loves you', literary judgements like 'Ulysses is the best book ever written', or explicitly political views like 'a republic is better than a monarchy' have the peculiar character of being fundamentally a matter of opinion. They really are up to us to decide. They are therefore quite different from objective truths, whether rational truths (as produced by rational enquiry, such as science) or facts (such as historical events). As Hannah Arendt noted in Truth and Politics (The New Yorker, 25/02/1967), objective truths have quite a different epistemic character than opinions, and that makes their evaluation quite different. Unlike opinions, objective truths are depersonalised 'views from nowhere'. Not my truth, your truth, or even 'our truth', but The Truth. They are not amenable to democratic debate or discussion since whether or not people find them agreeable is quite irrelevant. To put it in a nutshell, it is right that in a democracy the people can debate and vote to decide whether murderers should be executed, but it is misguided to think the democratic process can also decide the factual issue of whether a particular person (OJ Simpson say) is a murderer. Democracy can decide whether to teach Intelligent Design in schools, but not whether it is true. The democratic market for ideas cannot function as a truth machine If one tries to consider what a free democratic marketplace for ideas in keeping with Mill's beliefs would look like one would be hard-pressed to find a better candidate than the world wide web. Traditional media for the dissemination of ideas like books, newspapers, or even university seminar-rooms have space constraints and so their content must be curated by professional editors before being submitted to the public. That curation for quality and likely popularity naturally reflects the orthodoxy of the mainstream ('the tyranny of the majority' that Mill worried about) and filters out a lot of 'bad ideas' not fit for print. On the internet, in contrast, the space constraint disappears (though we still have an attention scarcity constraint!) and hence professional curation recedes in importance. 'The people' are now free to express their opinions directly to the world (if, in some countries, only anonymously). The people can also assess each others' ideas 'democratically'. We can search and browse for what people have written on the subject we're interested in, and bring our favourite ideas to prominence by sharing and linking to them. In other words, we vote up the opinions we find most agreeable, but we do not exclude the opinions we dislike from being found and considered by others. The web eminently satisfies the requirement for discovery generating and disseminating heterodox claims about objective truth. It also performs an assessment of those ideas in a democratic way, i.e. weighting them according to their popular appeal. Nevertheless the web offers an object lesson in the flaws in democracy's claim to be a truth machine. Democracy, in and of itself, provides no mechanism for the evaluation of objective truth. Rational truths Rational truths are those established by chains of human reasoning that can in principle be replicated by others. Like Euclid's geometry. Science is an archetypal form of rational truth seeking since its authority depends on such replication: that one will always get the same result in the same experiment because the result doesn't depend on who the scientists are, but on the independently existing world. That means for example that if all the climate scientists in the world were wiped out by a freak meteor at a conference, climate science would quickly reappear and say basically the same things again (as more or less happened when the Catholic Church tried to suppress heliocentricism). Note, however, that rational truth does not work by persuasion, as opinions do in a democracy. Instead it rudely asserts that this is how things are whether you like it or not. The standing invitation to replicate the results of an experiment is not an invitation to have your own opinion about whether they are true. Now consider how rational truths appear in the democratic 'free market for ideas' on the internet. One can find all sorts of claims, including ones that purport to have a scientific basis. So we can find claims that vaccinations cause autism; organic food is healthier; abortions cause cancer; the world's climate isn't actually changing (or if it is, it isn't our doing; or if it is, it won't be so bad); etc. These claims are often supported by some plausible sciencey sounding arguments and mechanisms that seem a bit like what you learned in high-school. So how is Mill's truth machine supposed to work here? Supposedly the presence of such heterodox claims benefits us because it gives us the chance to 'exchange error for truth' (or at least improve the partial truth we hold). But what actually results when people with different opinions on the science of climate change debate it in public is an increase in confusion, not enlightenment. The problem stems from an underlying confusion between the generally adequate liberal presumption of equal intellectual capacities (hence, freedom of ethical, religious, and political choice) and the faulty assumption that therefore everyone has the appropriate intellectual capabilities to assess particular truth claims. To actually assess the truth of the matter to learn from the debate in the Millian sense presupposes that we have developed the capabilities to assess the truth of specific scientific claims in the first place. And that seems to require that we be scientists, and in fact specialists on the topics concerned, rather than ordinary citizens. Take global warming. Suppose someone comes along and claims that there is a systematic problem in the interpolation models (that transform raw data from various sources such as treerings, satellite readings, and ice-cores into a standardised climate history that can serve as the input for global climate models). How are you as a non-scientist supposed to assess the scientific truth and significance of that claim? Or of the mainstream scientific consensus? If you do have an opinion on the matter, in what sense do you think it counts as knowledge? If you don't believe what the climate scientists say, what makes you think you know better? If you do believe them, do you consider that your belief in climate change is as well justified by an understanding of the relevant evidence as theirs? Mill also argued that the exercise of refuting even false claims provides the valuable benefit of improving our own understanding of the truth, by having to think it through for ourselves. Thus, in refuting false claims about climate science, you would presumably come to better understand the scientific credibility of proper climate science. Is this plausible? Climate science goes back over a century and integrates the refined expertise of dozens of distinct scientific disciplines and sub-disciplines, from meteorology to physics to biochemistry to computer modelling to statistics, as well as specialised techniques such as for analysing pre-historic temperature records from ice-cores or preserved pine-cones. Just how much of this are we required to master in order to claim to be 'thinking for ourselves' in rejecting heterodoxy? Bear in mind that the proponents of these ideas may dedicate their lives to coming up with detailed and complex arguments and defences for their positions, and a truly open minded engagement with them would be extraordinarily demanding. And don't we have other things to do with our lives, including other heterodox claims to refute? Just treating claims about the truth as contributions to the democratic market for ideas in the first place distorts their character and assessment. It suggests that we should treat such claims as opinions, and engage in constructive mutually respectful debate about them, as if they were of the same kind as other people's opinions about immigration reform or the Republican presidential nomination. But unlike those subjects, the claims of climate science do not depend on how agreeable they seem to us. Thinking that is so allows an invasion of truth status by political status. [Insert figure here] (From Riley E. Dunlap, 2008, Climate-Change Views: Republican-Democratic Gaps Expand; source url) The first consequence is that the people believe the truth status of climate science is a matter of opinion; that they have a right to their own opinion on it; and that they have a democratic right to have their opinion counted equally with anyone else's. But counting votes, though it may respect the equal dignity of every citizen, is irrelevant to the truth of scientific claims. Even if everyone based their vote on thorough internet research, a majority view that global warming is true has no more epistemic credibility than a majority view that it is false. Second, eliding matters of truth with matters of opinion politicises the assessment: the properly political aspect of evaluating the meaning and implications of truths is carried over into the assessment of the truths themselves. If the global warming thesis is true, uncomfortable political deliberations about its implications for our way of life would follow. It seems to some that one can win that debate by denying the truth of the starting point. Third, since most people are manifestly unable to evaluate the science, we reach for non-science related grounds for judgement that we do feel proficient at. In the classical analysis of rhetoric Aristotle divided efforts at persuading an audience into three main components: logos; ethos; and pathos (respectively, argument; the speaker's personal credibility; and emotional appeal). Since assessing the logos of climate science debates is mostly beyond us, we are considerably swayed in our assessments of it by the other two components. So it really matters how trustworthy we think the speakers are. We may not understand what they're saying, but if we think they're not being honest, we don't have to. Hence the recent furore over the 'Climategate emails', and the general scrutiny of funding for both climate change proponents and deniers. We are also swayed by the emotional framing of the issue. In terms of saving a beautiful but fragile world for our grandchildren for example. Or in terms of defending individual liberty from the depredations of Big Government and protecting the American way of life. Framing has a directly political character because it resonates with strongly held opinions about the good life and the good society about which we already know how to disagree. Finally, in a democracy minority opinions deserve equal respect (reflecting Mill's concerns about majoritarian tyranny). Democratic debates are limited to deciding what we should do as a society, not what individual members of a society should think. Thus, unlike in actual scientific debate, losing a political argument does not mean accepting that you are wrong, only that you haven't (yet) managed to persuade enough people to your view. Facts The second kind of objective truth are facts, those stubborn bits of the objective world that also refuse democracy's authority. Unfortunately these are somewhat weaker even than rational truths, since they can't be replicated. They are one time concurrences of situational factors like Barack Obama being born in Hawaii not timeless laws we can access at our will. Our knowledge of them depends on the frailties of witnesses and faded documents, which are easily suppressed and anyway drift apart over time. So although on the one hand the truth of facts exceeds democracy's capacities of assessment, on the other hand the fragile character of their evidence makes knowledge of them all too vulnerable to political fiat (democratic or not). The problems I noted above apply here too, and I won't belabour the point by repeating them. However an example will illustrate the significance of the issue. Consider a fact like the holocaust that bends history all out of shape and leaves its mark everywhere. Sure we may disagree about whether that traffic light was red or green, or what the Iran-Contra affair was all about so many years later. But a fact like the holocaust is surely on a different level? Again, look at the internet. Explore the wonderful diversity of opinions, the revisionist histories, conspiracy theories, and photographs 'they don't want you to see'. This can involve elaborate analysis of such obscure details as whether the concrete remains of 'alleged' gas chambers contained sufficient rebar to have fulfilled such a purpose. And then ask yourself how to decide truth from falsity, if you didn't already know, thanks to your upbringing under the hegemony of mainstream orthodoxy (which might well have been different if you had been brought up in Iran or Russia). It isn't possible. Our ability as individuals to get to true facts merely by considering different arguments is distinctly limited. If we only know of one account of the holocaust what we were taught in school we are likely to accept it. But whether it is true or false is a matter of luck rather than our intellectual capacities. Now it is reasonable to suppose that if we were exposed to a diversity of claims about the holocaust then our opinions on the subject would become more clearly our own, and our own responsibility. They would be the product of our own intellectual capacities and character instead of simply reflecting which society we happened to be born into. But so what? Holding sincere opinions about whether the holocaust happened is all very well and Millian, but it has no necessary relation to their truth. As Harry Frankfurt noted in his philosophical essay On Bullshit (2005), sincerity is concerned with being true to oneself, not to the nature of the world: from the perspective of truth seeking, sincerity is bullshit. Knowing this, we can have no faith that the popularity of certain factual claims among people as ordinary as ourselves is any guide to their truth. Democracy is no more equipped to evaluate facts than rational truths. We can all, of course, hold opinions about the civilisational significance of the holocaust and its status as a justification for the state of Israel, and debate them with others in democratic ways. Yet, when it comes to the facts, neither the sincerity with which individuals believe that 'the holocaust' is a myth nor the popularity of such beliefs can make them epistemically respectable. 10% of the population denying the holocaust is irrelevant to its truth status. So is 95%. And vice versa. Reconciling truth and democracy Truth and democracy are in tension, but nevertheless truth and democracy do belong together. Good public deliberation, whether about foreign policy towards Iran or reforming education, requires a foundation of trustworthy true knowledge upon which we the people can construct sensible opinions of our own. Democracies thus require common knowledge (such as about the equal mental faculties of black people and white people, women and men) and ondemand access to trustworthy specific knowledge about how the world works (for example, climate science). This stands in contrast to the binary view of knowledge held by totalitarian regimes, as either propaganda or secrets of state. It is for this reason that successful democracy requires setting up and protecting independent and non-democratic spaces and institutions specialised epistemic communities with the authority to investigate truth. As Arendt noted, these trusted institutions include universities and law-courts with their explicitly non-political, non-democratic ethos. These are the real truth machines that are supposed to burrow after the truth wherever it may take them, and then report their findings back to the rest of us, who get to decide what to make of it. In other words, on matters of truth we have to take the specialists' evaluation on trust. Fortunately, since we are talking about truths here and not opinions it doesn't matter that we do not come to such beliefs by our own personal experience and reflection. Therefore we can make use of another characteristic of efficient markets, as well as freedom: specialisation. Specialisation is a context-specific role, not a kind of person. Scientists, mathematicians, historians, investigative journalists, jurists, statisticians, and so forth have political opinions like other people (and may also be found expressing embarrassing beliefs in conspiracy theories, and making uninformed judgements on subjects they think they understand, but don't). Nevertheless when they are working in their day jobs, within properly functioning epistemic communities, the judgements they come to deserve to be taken seriously in a way that general discussions in society do not. When the system works, we are able to deal with whacky claims about Obama's birthplace or genetically modified killer tomatoes by simply checking whether or not they came from respectable mainstream institutions (i.e. ethos lines up with logos). The central problem for these truth machines is that they will always be in tension with the democratic values and politics of the society that set them up. Institutions like universities and courts are deeply anti-democratic and anti-individualistic. And that is how they are supposed to be. They try by various institutionalised organisational structures, values, and discipline-specific methodologies to assess ideas on the basis of their objective truth without regard to how agreeable they are to few or many people. They represent both a massive contradiction to and a necessary foundation for our shared liberal commitments about the pre-eminence of individual judgement, respect for the opinions of all, and a co-operatively determined political rule. Not surprisingly they are in fact extremely vulnerable to political pressure because "the truth" has no intrinsic power to triumph in a democracy. Quite the reverse. Setting them up and maintaining them requires a self-binding political commitment from society, a collective agreement to place them outside the sphere of political contestation. All of this means that democratic polities are in the uncomfortable position of voluntarily giving up their authority to decide what truth is, of setting up and actively supporting somewhat unaccountable truth machines that then proceed to tell us all sorts of things about ourselves and the world that we would rather not believe. Summing up Mill argued that there are positive externalities to other people's freedom of expression: the chance for us to improve our own beliefs and to better understand them. I have argued that this cannot be assumed for objective truths in the way that it may be for opinions about ethics or politics. Proponents of pluralism are wrong when they argue for 'letting a thousand flowers bloom' that the presence of vaccine-autism or holocaust-denial claims in public discourse enhances a society's quality of debate and hence understanding on these topics. Democratic debate is exactly the wrong way to treat claims about rational truths and facts. At the least, there is no good reason to encourage such pluralism. In fact there may be negative externalities if false claims are publicised and individuals are unable to evaluate their truth. There may be direct harm, as when children die of measles because their parents read in newspapers that there really is a debate among doctors about whether MMR vaccines cause autism. There may be indirect harm if people come to believe that because they can't evaluate truth claims themselves the truth itself must be a matter of opinion (e.g. the politicisation of climate science). I believe that the case for pluralism is actually an ethical argument masquerading as an epistemic one. It promotes two important liberal ethical commitments: people should have the right to express themselves and to think for themselves. But once we start with ethical argument there is no need to restrict ourselves to these essential components of individual moral autonomy. One should also pay some attention to the harm that pluralism about the truth can do to both vulnerable individuals and society as a whole. This brings us to what we should do about such 'illegitimate' uses of free speech. Most interventions have focussed on the supply side of the market for truth claims: institution building and censorship. First, governments seek to improve the political conversation by building up the independence, credibility and effectiveness of the real truth machines. For example, if the national bureau of statistics acquires a reputation for independence and accuracy, it can provide a standard reference point for political debate. and more politicised sources of socio-economic statistics (like think tanks or Fox News) will be sidelined. Second, and much more controversially, democracies sometimes curtail the supply of falsity into the market when the risk of significant harm to individual welfare or to the truth is judged high enough to justify insulting the rational autonomy of their citizens. For example, we may privilege the judgements of relevant scientific experts over public opinion about the medical effects or safety of certain products (e.g. by banning pharmaceutical companies from making claims for their products that the FDA disagrees with). Sometimes it may be that a truth itself is considered politically significant enough to protect from disputation by banning its denial (as is the fact of the holocaust in 15 European democracies). But of course any such censorship must be a democratic political decision, to be made in the usual way on the basis of opinion our values, principles, and collective judgements and not by the unaccountable bureaucracies that decide what the truth is. This essay raises a different and much less controversial approach focused on the demand-side of the market for truth claims. It is set in train simply by reminding people of the central argument of this essay: that democracy is not a truth machine because the truth is not a matter of opinion and the popularity of truth claims is no guide to whether we should believe them. In general, the truth is something one looks up, not something one has to decide on for oneself. If this argument works, it may create a savvier public that distinguishes between opinions and matters of truth, and is less flattered by the appeals to our reason that people flogging heterodox truth claims are so keen to make. If making such arguments no longer pays so well, we will hear them less often. Public deliberation will then focus less on debating what is true or false and more on what we should make of inconvenient truths, and will be much the better.


Unruly Words: A Study of Vague Language

Philosophy

Pre-publication draft. For citation purposes, please refer to the published version in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/47214-unruly-words-a-study-of-vaguelanguage-2/ _________________________________________________________________________ 1 Review of Diana Raffman, Unruly Words: A Study o f Vague Language , Oxford University Press, 2014, 215 pp., $45.00 (hbk), ISBN 978-0-19-991510-1 JONAS ÅKERMAN _____________________________________________________________ After twenty years as one of the most prominent contributors to the philosophical debate on vagueness, Diana Raffman has finally published her first book on this topic. She has abandoned her earlier view that vagueness is to be analysed as a form of context-sensitivity,1 and offers a new theory of vagueness, which aims to combine features that have previously been regarded as incompatible: a semantic (non-epistemic) analysis of vagueness and a classical logic and semantics for vague language.2 In support of her view, Raffman puts forward not only sophisticated philosophical arguments, but also empirical results gathered from psychological studies of how ordinary speakers actually use vague words. All of this is presented in an engaging and clear, yet relaxed prose, making these highly original and interesting thoughts easily accessible to anyone with an interest in vagueness and related issues. In view of this, Unruly Words is likely to become as least as influential as Raffman's previous groundbreaking work in this area. The book is divided into five chapters. The first, introductory chapter offers a review of previous theories and some initial observations about the character of vagueness and its relation to other features with which it often co-occurs, like gradability and context-sensitivity. Chapter two presents an alternative analysis of borderline cases, called the Incompatibilist Analysis (IA), according to which borderline cases should be defined in terms of contraries, like 'green' and 'blue' rather than in terms of contradictories, like 'blue' and 'not-blue'. Chapter three develops a semantic framework for accommodating some varieties of context-sensitivity typically exhibited by vague words, captured under the label 'V-index sensitivity'. V-index sensitivity is compared with indexicality-the contextual variability in reference exhibited by expressions like 'I', 'here' and 'now'-and Raffman convincingly argues that these two, despite some commonalities, are importantly different. Even more importantly, 1 See Raffman (1994) and (1996). See Åkerman (2012) for discussion of this and other contextualist views. 2 See Keefe (2000) for an overview and critical discussion of the main theories in the offing (except contextualism), and a defence of supervaluationism, the standard semantic theory of vagueness. Pre-publication draft. For citation purposes, please refer to the published version in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/47214-unruly-words-a-study-of-vaguelanguage-2/ _________________________________________________________________________ 2 it is argued that none of these varieties of context-sensitivity bears any essential relationship to vagueness. Chapter four is dedicated to the Multiple Range Theory of vagueness, according to which vagueness consists in there being multiple permissible ways of applying a word (even bracketing all forms of context-sensitivity). This theory is then applied to the most central tasks for a theory of vagueness: accounting for truth and validity, and solving the Sorites paradox. Chapter five concerns the competent use of vague words, and it also deals with a dynamic version of the Sorites paradox, known as the forced march Sorites. Raffman claims that this puzzle can be solved in terms of a certain dynamic effect in competent speakers application of vague words-a so-called hysteresis effect. She presents an empirical study providing evidence of such an effect, and it is then explained how these observations can also be seen as implementing the Multiple Range Theory of vagueness. Having given this brief summary of the book, I will for the remainder of this review focus on chapters two and four, where, in my view, the most original, controversial and interesting contributions are to be found. Raffman's presentation of IA departs from the following neutral characterization of borderline cases: "Borderline cases for a predicate 'Φ' are items whose satisfaction of 'Φ' is in some sense unclear or problematic" (25). According to the Standard Analysis (SA) a borderline case for 'Φ' is neither definitely Φ nor definitely non-Φ. Given a semantic (rather than an epistemic) conception of vagueness (and definiteness), this means that neither 'x is Φ' nor 'x is not Φ' can be assigned a classical truth-value (i.e. truth or falsity) when x is a borderline case for 'Φ'. Thus, it is standardly assumed that the adoption of a semantic theory of vagueness inevitably leads to the rejection of classical semantics, in particular bivalence. Raffman argues that if we can only give up SA, according to which borderline cases are conceived in terms of the opposition between a predicate and its negation, we can combine a semantic theory of borderline cases and vagueness with a classical logic and semantics. According to IA, "borderline cases for a predicate 'Φ' are not-Φ, the sentence 'x is not-Φ' is true, and the sentence 'x is Φ' is false" (26). Since the negation here is classical, bivalence is not threatened by the possibility of borderline cases. The key idea behind IA is that borderline cases are to be conceived in terms of the opposition between a predicate and one of its proximate incompatibles. What does this mean? First, incompatible predicates 'Φ' and 'Φ*' are contrary predicates for which there is a Φ/Φ* ordering, i.e. a linear ordering of items on a dimension decisive of the application of both 'Φ' and 'Φ*', progressing from an item that is clearly Φ (hence clearly not-Φ*) to an item that is clearly Φ* Pre-publication draft. For citation purposes, please refer to the published version in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/47214-unruly-words-a-study-of-vaguelanguage-2/ _________________________________________________________________________ 3 (hence clearly not-Φ). Second, two incompatible predicates 'Φ' and 'Φ*' are proximate just in case there are items in a replete Φ/Φ* ordering (i.e. one that contains all possible items that can be so ordered) that can competently be classified as Φ, and competently be classified as Φ*. Here is Raffman's proposal: i. For any proximate incompatible predicates 'Φ' and 'Φ*', x is a Φ[Φ*] borderline case if and only if x belongs to a Φ/Φ* ordering but is neither Φ nor Φ*. ii. For any predicate 'Φ', x is a borderline case for 'Φ' if and only if there is some proximate incompatible predicate 'Φ*' such that x is a Φ[Φ*] borderline case. (38) As usual, the borderline cases are located in the middle of the Φ/Φ* ordering, but since 'Φ' and 'Φ*' are not contradictories but merely contraries, these items can be classified as neither Φ nor Φ*, without thereby threatening any classical principles. This is a semantic analysis, since the Φ[Φ*] borderline cases arise from semantic features of 'Φ' and 'Φ*'; Φ[Φ*] borderline cases "fall within the gap" between their extensions, as it were (41). But there is no gap between the extension and anti-extension of 'Φ' or 'Φ*'. On IA, being a Φ[Φ*] borderline case entails being not-Φ as well as being not-Φ*. Consequently, the not-Φ items include the borderline cases for 'Φ' as well as the Φ*-items (the same holds mutatis mutandis for the not-Φ* items). To what extent is IA intuitively plausible? Raffman starts by arguing that there is at least one sense in which IA seems rather natural. She shows how the main idea of IA is reflected in dictionary entries as well as philosophical writings in that borderline cases are often characterized in terms of incompatibles rather than contraries (many philosophers slide between these) (33–35). Nevertheless, as Raffman is well aware, IA runs counter to several widely accepted ideas about the nature of borderline cases, the most central of which is the idea that the Φ-status of a borderline case for 'Φ' is indeterminate (31– 32). Recall that on IA, borderline cases for 'Φ' are not-Φ, and thus have a determinate Φ-status. How then, if at all, can IA capture the indeterminacy intuitively associated with borderline cases? Raffman concedes that IA cannot accommodate the intuition that borderline cases for 'Φ' are neither definitely Φ nor definitely not-Φ (56), but she denies that borderline cases have an indeterminate status in this sense. She Pre-publication draft. For citation purposes, please refer to the published version in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/47214-unruly-words-a-study-of-vaguelanguage-2/ _________________________________________________________________________ 4 does allow that they can have an indeterminate status in two other ways, both of which are "logically innocuous". First, there is a sense in which an item that belongs to a Φ/Φ* ordering but is neither Φ nor Φ* is indeterminate, since it "belongs to no category currently in play" (60). Second, borderline cases for 'Φ' can be competently classified as either Φ, Φ* or Φ[Φ*] borderline, and this variability, Raffman suggests, can be understood as a form of indeterminacy: "There is no single correct way to classify these items" (57). If one still finds the indeterminacy intuition in its original formulation compelling, one is not likely to be very impressed by the fact that IA can accommodate these other kinds of indeterminacy. From this point of view, there will still seem to be a crucial feature of borderline cases that IA-in contrast to SA-fails to take seriously. But if one is inclined to follow Raffman in taking this intuition to be less robust, these alternative forms of indeterminacy might play a part in explaining it away. I cannot here do full justice to Raffman's case for IA, or the interesting and rich discussion she provides on these issues, but two points deserve special mention. First, on IA there is no need to introduce a definiteness operator. When borderline cases are defined in terms of the opposition between contraries rather than contradictories, they can consistently be said to fall in the extension of neither, even given a full endorsement of classical logic and semantics. Second, IA rules out the possibility of so-called higher-order borderline cases, i.e. borderline cases between the Φ-items and the borderlineΦ-items in a Φ/Φ* ordering. Recall that on IA, a borderline case for 'Φ' is an item in a (replete) Φ/Φ* ordering that is neither Φ nor Φ*. If something in this ordering is to qualify as a higher-order borderline case for 'Φ' on IA, it must be neither Φ, Φ* nor borderline-Φ. Intuitively, it must be located between the Φ-items and the borderline-Φ items. But the definition simply does not leave room for this possibility, since it dictates that any item in the ordering that is neither Φ nor Φ* counts as borderline-Φ. The elimination of the definiteness operator and higher order borderlines yields a simpler theory, and avoids the complications that come with these notions. One may of course be inclined to think that such a theory would leave out something essential, the lack of which could not be outweighed by simplicity. However, in order to be dialectically effective in this context, such an inclination would need to be complemented by some independent argument, since, as Raffman points out, neither of these notions has any clear basis in ordinary speech or common sense (60–62). Unless it can be shown that they are not mere artefacts of SA, as Raffman suggests, it is far from clear that accommodating them is a reasonable adequacy condition on an analysis of borderline cases. Raffman has plenty to say about why SA is more problematic, Pre-publication draft. For citation purposes, please refer to the published version in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/47214-unruly-words-a-study-of-vaguelanguage-2/ _________________________________________________________________________ 5 and less intuitively plausible than IA, and she also argues that the notion of higher order borderlines is independently "fishy" (64–70). These considerations (which I do not have the space to account for here) are not meant to be decisive, but rather to underscore the advantage of a view that dispenses with this notion. As Raffman is well aware, IA too has some odd features. For instance, IA suggests that 'not-Φ' may lack borderline cases even though 'Φ' does not. First, according to IA, 'Φ' and 'not-Φ' cannot share borderline cases. Second, as Raffman argues, it seems difficult in general to come up with a recipe for finding a proximate incompatible with which 'not-Φ' can share borderline cases (42–43). Raffman does not seem too worried about this somewhat surprising consequence. She points out that in contrast to 'Φ', 'not-Φ' has a heterogeneous extension-for instance, the extension of 'not-blue' contains things of many different colours, including borderline cases for 'blue'-and suggests that this may be part of the explanation for this asymmetry between these predicates (192n); once we observe this heterogeneity, we should be sceptical of the idea of a symmetry between contradictories (63). Here it may be objected that even if there are certain respects in which 'Φ' and 'not-Φ' are asymmetrical, there are other respects in which they should be expected to be symmetrical. For instance, it seems very plausible that we should expect 'not-Φ' to be vague insofar as 'Φ' is. And if 'not-Φ' is vague, it should be expected to have borderline cases, just like 'Φ'. Thus, 'not-Φ' should be expected to have borderline cases, contrary to what IA suggests. But Raffman has the resources to block this objection, since on her Multiple Range Theory of vagueness (which will be considered in more detail shortly) possession of borderline cases is neither necessary nor sufficient for vagueness (132). Thus, she can grant that both 'Φ' and 'not-Φ' are vague, but still maintain that the former has borderline cases whereas the latter does not. Whether or not this claim is intuitively plausible, or in line with common sense, is of course arguable, but from the point of view of Raffman's own theory, it does seem perfectly coherent. A closely related worry is that IA appears to entail that the extensions of vague predicates are sharply bounded, since there are no possible borderline cases between Φ-items and not-Φ-items. Even if the ordering is replete, there will be a cut-off in the ordering, i.e. an item that is Φ immediately followed by an item that is not-Φ. How can one square the presence of such a boundary with the assumption that 'Φ' is a vague predicate? Well, again, on Raffman's view, neither the distinction between sharp and blurred boundaries, nor the Pre-publication draft. For citation purposes, please refer to the published version in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/47214-unruly-words-a-study-of-vaguelanguage-2/ _________________________________________________________________________ 6 distinction between vagueness and precision, is understood in terms of borderline cases. It is now time to turn to the part of Raffman's account that is meant to underwrite these replies to the above worries concerning IA: The Multiple Range Theory of vagueness (MRT). MRT is based on the observation that there seem to be multiple ways of correctly applying a vague predicate. Even when all contextual factors (as represented in the V-index) are fixed, there are several different ranges of items to which a vague predicate 'Φ' can competently be applied. Any choice of a particular range on a particular occasion seems semantically arbitrary, and "hence not legislative" (92). On the basis of her conviction that we should "ground our theorizing about vagueness as deeply as possible in commonsense intuition and our actual competent use of vague words" (12), Raffman proposes that "the multiple competent ways of applying a vague predicate relative to a given V-index reflect multiple ranges of application in the semantics of the term" (96), where a ranges of applications are sets of values or properties, which are instantiated by objects that make up the V-extensions of vague predicates (relative to given V-indices). But according to Raffman, mere "first-level" multiplicity is not sufficient for vagueness, since that would intuitively come too close to having sharp boundaries. Thus, she suggests that vagueness requires multiplicity on higher levels as well. More precisely, she suggests that "a predicate 'Φ' is vague only if 'Φ' and also 'range of application of "Φ"' and its indefinitely many iterations have multiple arbitrarily different ranges of application" (107). It is, at least in part, this "iterated multiplicity" that makes a predicate vague, and blurs the boundaries of its extension. So, on MRT, the notions of vagueness and precision are not understood in terms of borderline cases or bivalence, but rather in terms of the notion of range of application: precision consists in possession of a single range of application. To say that a boundary between the extension and the antiextension is sharp is to say that it is a unique legislative division. In the light of this, it should be clear enough how Raffman's replies to the above worries about IA are grounded in MRT. Let us now turn to how Raffman deals with the most central tasks for a theory of vagueness, i.e. accounting for truth and validity and solving the Sorites paradox. On MRT, the extension of a vague predicate and the truthvalue of a vague sentence containing it are relative to a V-index and a range of application. The notions of truth and falsity involved here are supposed to be "plain old regular truth and falsity" (109), and Raffman contends that when it comes to vague predicates, "[o]rdinary truth is truth relative to a competent way of applying a predicate" (113). The crucial feature of valid arguments is Pre-publication draft. For citation purposes, please refer to the published version in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/47214-unruly-words-a-study-of-vaguelanguage-2/ _________________________________________________________________________ 7 taken to be that they are truth-preserving relative to any given V-index and range of application (120). As for the Sorites paradox, Raffman asks us to consider a series of coloured patches proceeding from patch #1, a central blue, to #30, a central green, arranged so that each patch is incrementally different from its successor. Then she presents a Sorites paradox of the following form: 1. Patch #1 is blue. 2. For any n, if patch #n is blue, then patch #(n+1) is blue. 3. Therefore patch #30 is blue. (122) The argument is valid on her view, but since there is a last value in any range of application for 'blue', premise 2 is always false. Thus, the argument is unsound. Raffman emphasizes that the last value in a range of application is not supposed to mark a sharp semantic boundary, but merely a permissible stopping place (122). One cannot competently go on to apply 'blue' to all the patches in the series, but no particular stopping place is mandatory. She suggests that part of the reason why the Sorites argument seems initially compelling is that we confuse the claim that any application of 'blue' to one patch but not to its successor is arbitrary, with the claim that any application of 'blue' to one patch but not to its successor is impermissible. The latter claim is what is needed for the paradox to arise, but only the former is true. To be clear, Raffman's view is not contextualist or agent relativist:3 she does not take a competent speaker's application of 'Φ' at a certain time to determine a semantic boundary for 'Φ', not even relative to that particular time and speaker. The use of a predicate is variable, but its multiple extensions as determined by its semantics are fixed (relative to a V-index). As Raffman puts it, "the semantics is multiple, not variable" (101). There is a lot in this account that deserves to be discussed in more detail, but I will restrict myself to raising a general worry, which, I think, stand out as particularly important. It concerns the sense in which MRT is a classical theory. Granted, on MRT, truth can be classically defined relative to each single range of application. The problem is that according to MRT, the semantics of vague words, together with all the facts about how they are used, do not in general allow for a single range of application to be determined for sentences/utterances containing them, even relative to a context that can be made as specific as we like. As long as a vague word does not get precisified, it has an iterated multiplicity of ranges of application; indeed, that is what its vagueness consists in according to MRT. So, it seems that what we really get is 3 For a discussion of agent relativism, and how it differs from contextualism, see Åkerman (2013). Pre-publication draft. For citation purposes, please refer to the published version in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/47214-unruly-words-a-study-of-vaguelanguage-2/ _________________________________________________________________________ 8 not an account of truth for vague language, since that would require that truth for sentences/utterances were defined relative to an iterated multiplicity of ranges of application.4 As long as vagueness-as characterized by MRT- remains, there is, for items whose membership in the extension varies across ranges of application, no single classical evaluation to be had, and thus no assignment of single classical truth-values to sentences/utterances concerning such items.5 Arguably, a theory that assigns a multiplicity of classical truthvalues to many sentences/utterances (relative to context) of a vague language L does not really provide a classical semantics for L. So, in the end it is not entirely clear that Raffman satisfies her ambition to give a semantic, yet classical account of vagueness. But of course, this is a very high ambition. Her attempt-successful or not-is admirable, and many of the highly original ideas put forward in this book are worth engaging with for their own sake. Overall, Unruly Words is a pleasure to read, and it provides plenty of material for thought and discussion. I strongly recommend it for anyone involved or interested in the philosophical debate on vagueness.6 Stockholm University REFERENCES Åkerman, J. (2012) "Contextualist Theories of Vagueness". Philosophy Compass 7: 470–480. Åkerman, J. (2013) "Forced-march Sorites Arguments and Linguistic Competence". dialectica 67: 403–426. Keefe, R. (2000) Theories of Vagueness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Raffman, D. (1994) "Vagueness Without Paradox". Philosophical Review 103: 41– 74. Raffman, D. (1996) "Vagueness and Context Relativity". Philosophical Studies 81: 175–192. 4 Recall that the notion of truth is supposed to be "plain old regular truth" (109), so we should expect sentences/utterances to have truth-values (at least derivatively). 5 Even if it would be possible to complement Raffman's theory in its current form with an account of how a single value could be determined for vague sentences/utterances (semantically or pragmatically), that would go against the very spirit of MRT. 6 Thanks to Mikael Pettersson for helpful comments on an earlier draft.


The Wrong of Rudeness

Philosophy

Amy Olberding, The Wrong of Rudeness: Learning Modern Civility from Ancient Chinese Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2019, 183pp., $29.95 (hbk), ISBN 9780190880965.

          Reviewed byAndrew Lambert, City University of New York, College of Staten Island

/ College of Arts and Letters Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2020.02.11 Everything Amy Olberding The Wrong of Rudeness: Learning Modern Civility from Ancient Chinese Philosophy Published: February 13, 2020 Amy Olberding, The Wrong of Rudeness: Learning Modern Civility from Ancient Chinese Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2019, 183pp., $29.95 (hbk), ISBN 9780190880965. Reviewed by Andrew Lambert, City University of New York, College of Staten Island Amy Olberding notes that this book is a response to increased polarization and conflict in civil life in the United States (ix). Besides political discourse, the problem of incivility or rudeness is found also in everyday social life -such as what to do when "Uncle Frank" makes offensive remarks about race, sexuality and immigration at the family Thanksgiving dinner (144). Olberding's response is to turn to the Confucian tradition. The early Confucians' commitment to civility can help us to re-think social relations, and arrive at an outlook that recognizes the difficulty of bridging gaps between us but also sustains a sense of solidarity. Olberding starts from a disconcerting premise, the sheer pleasure of being rude: "I am often rude. I often want to be rude. I often enjoy being rude" (1, italics in original). The pleasure of casting off burdensome self-regulation and letting fly, perhaps at Uncle Frank, contrasts with the labor of polite conduct. Why, then, be polite? So begins a multi-part answer that finds renewed importance in manners, etiquette and civility. Olberding's book is aimed at a wide audience, and its style is folksy and personal rather than analytic or data-driven. Popular movies and her students' anecdotes provide illustrative examples, and the citations are a few brief endnotes. The attempt to explain Confucian ideas by relating them to the existential concerns of the general reader has solid pedigree. The book might be placed alongside Michael Puett's The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us about the Good Life or Sam Crane's Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Dao. The guiding aim is not so much well-defended scholarly interpretations of texts or analysis of arguments, but to show the value of ancient texts and ideas for the modern reader. Perhaps more importantly, the book is enjoyable to read and insightful. Regarding the book's structure and arguments, the first chapter lays out the appeal of rudeness and claims that, despite the apparent personal costs, politeness is still worth the effort. Notably, there is a conscious decision to treat civility and good manners as closely linked concepts. This is one of the lessons drawn from Confucian social ethics (4), which is grounded in li (禮, often translated as "ritual"). Civility typically refers to values or virtues often associated with public life and discourse, while good manners apply to everyday social interactions. Their separation in European thought was the product of a particular social and economic history, in which manners and etiquette came to function as markers of social mobility and class rather than having moral significance. For Olberding, however, both are indicators of important pro-social values -- "respect, consideration and toleration" (9) -that benefit public life and reflect the social nature of people. On this view, for example, etiquette is the form (social codes, gestures and habits) through which such values are recognizably expressed. One doubt about the book's starting concern bears mention: whether rudeness and incivility are, in fact, enjoyable and politeness a burden. That premise isn't obviously true. People are often nervous at the thought of abrasion and conflict, and even when resorting to incivility -the dismissive response, the rude gesture, etc. -it's questionable whether they long for or enjoy it. This might sound like a minor worry, but it is relevant to what follows -to what extent arguments are needed to dissuade people from rudeness, or whether the arguments presented function more as warnings about the unappreciated dangers of incivility, independently of any psychological or cultural assumptions. In Olberding's defense, the arguments are avowedly confessional -having a "self-therapeutic quality" (3). Furthermore, the arguments against rudeness will resonate with those contemplating public incivility or bursts of righteous anger for the sake of some supposedly greater good. / Chapters two and three explore reasons for doubting civility and manners, and the attractions of incivility and bad manners. Civility involves upholding norms, such as tolerance and respect, which facilitate open and fair exchange in the public realm (16-18), and incivility involves breaking those social norms, with violations arousing moralized feelings of indignation. "Righteous incivility" arises when incivility is preferred on moral grounds over civility. Acts of righteous incivility might seek to defend shared values (as when antifascists violently confront Neo-Nazi marches) or aim to subvert the popular consensus and established norms (the suffragettes' radical campaign for the vote). Incivility can thus be a means to a moral outcome, not least because it attracts attention that can cause people to reflect and so hasten social change. Righteous incivility is not, however, as attractive as it might appear. In brief, Olberding's concern is that such incivility relies upon a simplified psychology, one motivated by generalizations and a self-righteous sense of integrity. This mindset obscures a host of relevant cognitive reactions and prevents sensitivity to the many perspectives typically involved in social disagreement. Bad manners operate in a different realm of human conduct, and are faux pas in "low-level, low-stakes, commonplace interactions of daily life" (30). An example Olberding gives is failing to hold open a door for someone. Here, the wrongdoing is a thoughtlessness or impatience, rather than offenses driven by conviction about underlying values. Politeness can also seem to be more trouble than it is worth. It exhausts our conscious attention, is cultivated only with effort and can feel trivial. Furthermore, Olberding insightfully details how allowing manners too much scope in determining conduct can stymie the development of personal character or individuality (35), as well as more meaningful or expressive areas of life. Virtue signaling can become more important than genuine concern or worthwhile projects. Good manners can thus seem to be a trivial or joyless concern. After exploring reasons to be skeptical of the value of incivility and rudeness, the middle chapters (4-6) explore the case for civility, manners and etiquette. It is here that Olberding draws on classical Confucian thought for inspiration: "there are none who compare to the Confucians for a passionate commitment to manners and civility" (49). The Confucians offer a different understanding of the purpose and meaning of civility, manners and etiquette in human social life. Olberding agrees with the characterization of civility in terms of toleration and respect; however, she disagrees with the liberal account that such virtues serve the end of allowing others equal opportunity to construct their own version of the good life. On that view, difference and disagreement should be tolerated, within reason, even though this feels at times like an imposition, with the right placed above the good. To use Olberding's analogy, it can feel like paying taxes -people recognize and endorse overarching aims and values although sustaining them is psychologically uncomfortable. The Confucians, however, understood civility, etiquette and manners as serving a different purpose. The respect and tolerance they convey are integral to our well-being as social beings: we both need and want social interaction and human relationships, which bring both material and psychological benefit. The goods in life that we prize are often social, "friendship, love, companionship" (56), but the full enjoyment of these requires the cultivation of appropriate skills and sensibilities. Civility and manners provide these. Thus, on this account, everyday social life and its myriad interactions are both the location for and the primary vehicle of human flourishing. Civility and manners are not only important in local personal relationships, however; they can also regulate dealings with strangers, or those for whom no affection exists. They keep interactions civil even when the desire for connection is absent, and our love-hate relationships with fellow humans mean that this is often the case. They do this by acting on our habits and psychology, to bring them into line with the basic fact of mutual interdependence. Dependency not only refers to nurturing or meeting needs, but to more subtle connections, including the myriad achievements of others that make our own projects viable (those who "maintain the electric grid . . . designed my laptop technology . . . created written language" etc., 53). We cannot always be in friendly relations with others, but out sociality still draws us together in many ways. Recognition of this means, following the Confucian Xunzi, that we have to be trained or educated accordingly: even when our moods or feelings are not prosocial or friendly, our stance towards others is consistent with this oft-unacknowledged reality. The practical significance of this sociality and dependency, involving both the living and dead, is not well captured by ideals central to modern liberal society, such as the primacy of conscious volition and choice. In this, the messy Confucian picture of human psychology and habit formation offers a realism that lofty abstractions in contemporary social and political thought -such as Rawls' original position -fail to capture. / The importance of "sociality," and its role in human flourishing, to Olberding's argument for manners and politeness raises a question for her about what sociality is and its relation to civility. Sociality is variously glossed as dependency, the desirability of cooperation, something worked at or learnt (56), a cultivated personal sensitivity or psychological responsiveness to others, important for psychological well-being (57), yet something we are not always conscious of (58). It is even implicated in an account of the good life for people: "maintaining our social bonds with others is what renders us fully, magnificently human" (55, italics in original). Olberding discusses sociality in some detail (53-58), but so much is packed in here that it invites a longer and fuller discussion. Do manners and civility primarily convey attitudes such as toleration and respect? Or are they the grounds of a sense of connection with others that brings the most profound form of well-being? One wonders whether the defender of the liberal view of civility and manners, noted above, can agree on the need for civil cooperation, expressions of respect, and a cultivated sensitivity in social interactions but disagree that social bonds are the highest end, what is distinctively human. The painter Paul Gauguin might have suffered from stunted sociality and yet arguably produced a life (and art) of great value that was possible only because his sociality was marginalized. Some forms of difficult-to-attain human excellence seem to eschew at least some aspects of sociality. This is not a criticism so much as a longing to hear more, since greater detail about sociality can further strengthen the case for seeing manners and civility in the Confucian way. Does sociality entail a metaphysical claim about the self, as being relational in nature, as some have read the Confucian texts? Or an empirical claim that, correctly understood, the most complete well-being is realized specifically through social interaction and personal bonds? But if so, and if we can satisfy our need for sociality by interacting only with "my kind of people" (67), however bad this is for public discourse, then how strongly can the desire for sociality motivate wider public engagement? Still, the points made are well-taken and, as a book aimed at a wide audience, it achieves a good balance between analysis and appeals to ordinary experience. The final two chapters finish with a response to the lingering suspicion that righteous incivility is sometimes preferable to remaining within the bounds of civility. Recent events in North American society and politics, such as concern about climate change or the normalization of lying in public office, might appear to justify a hardening of stances and more direct acts of resistance. Yet the Confucian tradition bestows upon everyday civility -as customs, manners and etiquette -an authority that approaches moral demands. So, what are the limits of good form, politeness, and decorum? Perhaps the Confucian stance is anachronistic, naïve or even reactionary -not least because remaining bound to civility as public life deteriorates makes one vulnerable to being taken advantage of. Such concerns threaten Olberding's premise: that we moderns can learn from the Confucian tradition. In response, Olberding articulates alternatives to "heroic incivility", by first distinguishing between dissent and incivility. Acts of dissent can be effective yet civil, as seen in the non-violent mass demonstrations of the American civil rights movement. Remaining civil in the face of incivility might also inspire others to do likewise. Olberding, however, is skeptical that civil dissent has such effects. Instead, she defends civility by highlighting "an alternative psychology of disagreement" (145) -and here lies a possible answer to the question of how sociality in the local and personal sense can have an effect in the broader public realm. Incivility involves various cognitive and attitudinal failings. These include a misplaced sense of moral superiority, hasty evaluation of others, an implicit claim to decide who deserves censure and, most relevant to the Confucians, the "tribalizing effects" of abandoning a commitment to sociality -i.e., a reductive view of the world as divided into us and "those people" hostile to our values. The Confucian lesson here is to recognize and normalize this inner ambivalence, and offer mechanisms through which commitment to social connections is sustained in spite of negative attitudes to others. We can confront our disagreements, struggling with them without resorting to the incivility that would sever social ties. The struggle enables access to valuable interpersonal attitudes -such as generosity, epistemic humility, and the feelings of being torn or inner conflict typically experienced in disagreements with friends and family. Being able to dwell in this messy grey area, aware of if not always directly motivated by our sociality, is the true engine of civility. Strangers and distant acquaintances clearly lack such intimacy, but access to the kind of cautious and complex cognitive life generated in personal attachments can also ward off the "dark assumptions about another's character" (149) that promote incivility in the public realm. Readers familiar with the Confucian thinker Mencius might here detect traces of his idea of psychologically extending concern for family to distant others. Olberding finishes with one final question: why bother being polite when it involves personal cost, vulnerability, and seems to make such little difference to the world? She rejects two obvious justifications: that being polite inspires others to be polite, and that virtue (good manners) brings its own reward. Instead, the consolation of politeness centers on hope (164). If well-mannered interaction leads, in some small measure, to a better life for others (perhaps future generations) then the effort was worthwhile. / Perhaps Olberding is too modest in her hopes for motivating politeness. Confidence in manners also seems to come from appreciation of how they function within broader social systems. We queue for the bus not because of some future hope but because it enhances the goods integral to a well-functioning mass-transit system. It works better when everyone holds to customary norms of interaction and of use. In this context, we also have recourse to devices that encourage compliance -shame, blame and civil indignation. Further, we can make arguments to the rude -that good manners will benefit them -in the form of a smoothly running system, less conflict with other passengers, etc. If that fails, more punitive options are available. Hence, the situation might not be so bleak if we consider politeness both within this richer psychological picture (some of which Olberding outlines) and within the larger social structures in which social interaction with strangers unfolds. Regardless of these minor reservations, this is clearly a book for the times. It challenges the reader to reflect more carefully on the costs of tribalism and incivility, at a time when reasonable people are increasingly tempted by them. This richly imaginative exercise in renewing civic life deserves the widest possible audience. Copyright © 2020 ISSN: 1538 1617 College of Arts and Letters Accessibility Information Notre Dame, IN


Moralising to Impress

Philosophy

Thoughts What is the point of public discussion about moral issues? Most people would probably say it's to spur moral improvement, highlight important causes, or change people's minds. We doubt many would list among their favoured explanations that public moral discourse should promote the status or reputation of its contributors. It's hard to imagine someone admitting that they use their protestations about injustice or lack of patriotism to impress other people. But if you take a close look at these discussions, it's hard to escape the conclusion that that's exactly what many people are hoping to achieve by weighing in. Activist and author Layla Saad recently told Jezebel Magazine, "A good ally isn't focused on whether they're looking like a good ally. They're focused on showing up in allyship to people of color, and not wondering about 'Am I going to be seen? Am I going to be rewarded?'" Some people, however, are focused on being seen and rewarded for taking the public stances that they do. When people contribute to moral discussions with that goal, they are engaging in moral grandstanding. There is a lot of confusion about what it means to grandstand – or, similarly, to engage in virtue signalling. We find it helpful to think of grandstanding as having two parts. First, someone says or writes something in public, like on Twitter or a cable news show. They could say something like "policing is inherently unjust, and should be abolished. This is just obvious to anyone who cares." Or, "I absolutely will not tolerate these people criticising the president. They're committing treason, and they should be punished." Many people want to stop here, and say that grandstanding is just publicly saying anything that invokes morality – especially something they don't like. But that's a mistake. This is because grandstanding has another essential feature, one that is hard to detect. Grandstanding isn't just talking about morality or politics. It's doing these things largely because we want to impress other people. As Saad puts it, they're focused on how they're being seen and how they'll be socially rewarded. Putting these parts together, grandstanding is saying something in public moral discourse because you want your audience to recognise you for being morally good. Put more succinctly, grandstanding is the use of moral talk for self-promotion. Even though our desire to stand out and look impressive can often push us to adopt Moralising to Impress Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke explain the ways of grandstanders Grandstanders can speak the truth 47 more extreme stances, grandstanders can speak the truth. So we should all be able to recognise that even people who agree with us are sometimes guilty of grandstanding. We should even be able to admit that we sometimes grandstand ourselves. It's also important to see that, in our view, grandstanders can mean what they say. They don't have to be engaged in hypocritical cheap talk to be grandstanding, though this is surely often the case. Layla Saad's concern is not that grandstanders are saying false things, or even that they're hypocrites. Rather she takes aim at those who enter moral and political debates to look good. She's right to do so. Grandstanding is a serious moral problem, one that has no doubt been exacerbated by the role social media has come to play in our lives. A hundred years ago, grandstanders had to go far out of their way to find an audience to impress with their moral pronouncements. You had to be a politician, a preacher, a journalist, or otherwise just stand on the street corner and yell. But now each of us has access to hundreds of thousands of people at arms' length, ready to sigThoughts © Mano Tang 48 Thoughts © Mano Tang Moralising to Impress 49 group who are perceived to be uncommitted or inconsistent in their commitment to the group's values are harshly judged. Aware of this, some people go out of their way to chime in to a discussion for no other reason than to be seen a certain way, and to be rewarded for saying things their group supports. Piling on can also involve darker behaviour in the form of online shame-fests, in which hundreds or thousands of people heap abuse on someone for an alleged moral mistake. Often these "transgressions" are blown out of proportion (we'll talk more about this in a bit). Grandstanders line up to call names, feel powerful, and assert their dominance all in the comfort of their supposed moral superiority. As nasty as this behaviour often is, what's perhaps more worrying is that a lot of this social sanctioning is done by people who don't even agree with the moral rules they're enforcing. Evidence suggests that people engage in such "false enforcement" of norms in order to look above suspicion of not being committed enough to their group's views. By going out of their way to punish people, they show they're true believers, even if they secretly harbour doubts about whether some poor soul did something wrong – or if they did, whether they deserve the aggregate social punishment from thousands of strangers online. A second thing grandstanders do in public discourse is ramp up. You may have noticed conversations following this kind of script between three people: I'm really shocked and disappointed that Taylor Swift chose to film her music video in Texas, given its history of human rights abuses. I'm not sure I can continue to support her. nal agreement with our moral and political views. For this reason, many feel tempted or even pressured to engage in grandstanding, especially online. In our book, Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk, we give several arguments for why grandstanding is bad and should be avoided. Here, we'll just show you some of the things people do when they grandstand, leaving it as an exercise to the reader to consider the moral implications of a marked increase in these behaviours where grandstanding is prevalent. One common tactic of grandstanders is to join in on what others are saying or doing because they want to be seen as having the "right" values or being a member in good standing on their political team. This piling on can take two forms. Sometimes grandstanders just want to be seen as holding certain moral or political views, and to be affirmed and praised for doing so by their in-group. A grandstander might pile on in this way by joining hundreds of their friends in replying to a social media post about how some speaker should absolutely not be allowed on campus: "YES. This is everything. I just want to add my voice to this brave chorus and let it be known that I do NOT approve of this. We must remember the university community is watching!" Grandstanders behave this way in part due to the Black Sheep Effect: members of a Grandstanding is the use of moral talk for self-promotion 50 Here, let me help you out. What she did is absolutely unforgivable and I can't believe you're sitting on the fence on this one. Maybe you aren't really committed to doing the hard work of justice if you're uncertain about this. Seriously? She's basically complicit in genocide. She needs to be dropped from Spotify immediately. Do better. In their search for social status, conversations among grandstanders often resemble a moral arms race, as participants vie for the position of caring most about some value, or being most outraged about some event (more on this soon, too). This happens because of a psychological phenomenon called social comparison. We tend to think of ourselves in terms of how we measure up against others. So if you think of yourself as caring deeply about some value, yet someone else says something that makes them look like they care more than you do, you have two options. You can let that person look better than you, or you can intervene and outdo them. Grandstanders take the latter option, which is why so many of our discussions about politics quickly take us to extremes. Another tool of the grandstander's trade is trumping up. Just like prosecutors can trump up legal charges against the innocent, grandstanders trump up moral charges when they use others' morally innocent behaviour (or a minor moral misstep) as an occasion to display their heightened moral awareness or exacting moral standards. The wrongs that fall below the radar of the hoi polloi are not missed by the vigilant eye of the grandstander. By publicly deploying her heavy moral artillery – strident moral condemnation, and incitement of others to do the same – the grandstander presents herself as a person of high moral character, committed to righting the wrongs of the world no matter how inconsequential they may seem to the rest of us. Hence the outcry when President Obama wore a tan suit to a press conference or saluted a Marine holding a coffee cup. It takes a deep commitment to decorum to get incensed about those sorts of things. In Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale The Princess and the Pea, a would-be princess's royal credentials are certified when, upon sleeping upon 20 beds and 20 mattresses, she's badly bruised by a pea hidden under the bottom of the stack. Andersen uses the story to poke fun at the pretensions of royalty – for only a person suited for royalty could be so sensitive! Grandstanding in the form of trumping up has the same logic, which is why so much grandstanding involves moralising about the minutiae of others' behaviour. Grandstanders also commonly engage in displays of strong emotions. They are quick to express moral outrage, report that they are devastated by the news of the day, or share the degree of their ecstasy at outcomes that please their in-group. There is nothing necessarily wrong with feeling things deeply, or letting others see that you're doing so. On the contrary, it's part of being human, Thoughts Grandstanding is a serious moral problem Moralising to Impress 51 and at least sometimes socially valuable for people to share their emotional reactions. But grandstanders frequently overuse their emotional outlets. Once we consider some of the social functions of emotions, it won't be surprising that grandstanders exploit them in this way. Psychological research and common sense both suggest that our emotions are often tied up with our most firmly held moral beliefs. When we see behaviour that runs afoul of our deep moral convictions, we tend to get upset or outraged. Grandstanders are aware of this, and they take full advantage of emotional displays to show others how strong their moral convictions are. By becoming outraged so often, they encourage others to see them as especially morally sensitive or serious. There is also research in psychology that suggests we use our emotions to feel self-righteous. In one study, participants were more likely to keep reading stories about injustice when the stories made them feel righteous anger, rather than switch to a morally neutral story. This suggests that people enjoy opportunities to reinforce their images of themselves as morally good. It makes sense that we would also welcome opportunities to present those images to others, by sharing our outrage about injustice. Grandstanders do just that. Finally, grandstanders are often dismissive of those who disagree with them about moral issues. We can all agree that it is sometimes entirely fair to refuse to © Mano Tang Each of us has access to hundreds of thousands of people 52 Thoughts engage with people who are so hostile or so thoroughly corrupt that they cannot be reasoned with. But dismissal of others and their views can also be exploited to suggest flattering things about yourself. Perhaps the grandstander is so advanced in her moral thinking that she wouldn't even know where to begin in discussion with someone so blighted as the fool who disagrees with her. Or maybe the moral truth is so obvious to her that it is beneath her to explain herself to someone who refuses to see the light. It might be thought that such refusal to engage is a sign of moral vice – impatience in doing the hard work of talking through your reasons with others. But it could also be interpreted as a sign of purity. The moral elite does not waste its time getting its hands dirty or giving evil the time of day. Grandstanders often refuse to "platform" views they regard, publicly least, to be so harmful, that they could do great damage by discussing them. By refusing even to engage, the grandstanding protects us from that harm, an act of virtue for which we owe the grandstander our appreciation and praise. If someone goes about her business in public moral discourse while displaying this attitude, then perhaps she is not a lazy ideologue, but a true saint. Some grandstanders find this strategy irresistible. Upon learning how people use public discourse to self-promote and gain social status, there are two ways one might respond. One is to go into the wild of social media and try to identify grandstanders, perhaps even calling them out for it. This is the wrong response. Our lack of access to peoples' motivations makes it hard to tell if someone is grandstanding. And furthermore, even if it looks like someone is, say, expressing outrage in an effort to impress others, not every instance of outrage is grandstanding. Instead, seeing what people do when they grandstand helps us monitor our own contributions to discourse. Are we feeling morally superior and trying to dominate others? Or expressing outrage to get others to notice us? Improving our conversations starts from the bottom up, as individuals pause and reflect on why we get involved at all. Layla Saad's question is the right one. Am I doing this to be seen and rewarded? Or do I have something more valuable to add to the already crowded public square than the promotion of my own image? Justin Tosi is assistant professor of philosophy at Texas Tech University. He works on moral, social, political, and legal philosophy. Brandon Warmke is assistant professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University. He writes about ethics and politics.


Laura J. Snyder, _Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society_

Philosophy

The 19th-century philosopher John Stuart Mill is widely regarded as one of historyâs leading proponents of inductive science and of political liberty. Yet, oddly, philosophers working in his train have been remarkably unsuccessful in saying exactly what is wrong with the scientific skepticism or the political tyrannies of the past one hundred and fifty years. Is it possible that Mr. Mill was not such a good guy after all?

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          I recommend the book to anyone interested in a scholarly treatment of Victorian England, of 19th-century science, of the history of scientific method, of the philosophy of induction, or of the underappreciated historian and philosopher William Whewell. For anyone who thinks John Stuart Mill was a champion of commonsense realism, inductive science, or individual liberty, the book is a must-read.

Book Reviews The Objective Standard • Summer 2008 107 Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society by Laura J. Snyder. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 386 pp. $45.00 (cloth). Reviewed by John P. McCaskey The 19th-century philosopher John Stuart Mill is widely regarded as one of history's leading proponents of inductive science and of political liberty. Yet, oddly, philosophers working in his train have been remarkably unsuccessful in saying exactly what is wrong with the scientific skepticism or the political tyrannies of the past one hundred and fifty years. Is it possible that Mr. Mill was not such a good guy after all? This question is not the stated theme of Laura Snyder's Reforming Philosophy, but it is the underlying spirit of this excellent work of scholarly intellectual history. Snyder introduces us to Mill as he saw himself-a social reformer locked in epic battle with the forces of the status quo, whose philosophy Mill called intuitionism and whose most forceful advocate was one William Whewell, a "lion-like man" (Tennyson's phrase, p. 1) and Master of Trinity College. Mill was born into London's elite intellectual circles. He read Latin at age three, Greek by eight, Aristotle and Plato at age twelve, scholastic logic and political economy by thirteen. His first publication was on a theory of economic value. He was sixteen. He never attended college. He nominally had a career at Britain's East India Office, but primarily he was a writer, producing works on logic, political economy, literature, moral philosophy, and current political and cultural affairs. Whereas Mill was an intellectual-class prodigy, his nemesis was a working-class one. The son of a carpenter and twelve years older than Mill, William Whewell entered Cambridge University on a scholarship to study science and mathematics. He was elected to the Royal Society at age twenty-three and remained throughout his life an active member of the major mathematical and scientific communities and institutions in Britain. He spent his whole career at Cambridge. At different times he was professor of mineralogy, professor of moral philosophy, and vice-chancellor of the university. He penned important works on mechanics, geology, the tides, crystallography, scientific method, history, international law, moral philosophy, and political and cultural affairs. He translated Plato's dialogues and German literature. He hated Mill's moral philosophy. Mill, in turn, hated Whewell's philosophy of scientific knowledge-which might seem odd, for Mill was a social reformer with little expertise or background in the natural sciences. But Mill knew that every political and moral system rests on some theory of human cognition or epistemology, and, as Snyder explains in chapters 1 and 2, Mill saw Whewell's epistemology as the foundation for the conventional moral and social philosophies Mill wanted to overturn. Whewell's epistemology was an update of Francis Bacon's. Whewell's system was inductive, not deductive, and, at least as he articulated it, the philosophy relied on the unassailability of fundamental concepts such as necessity and causality. As Mill saw things, these special concepts were just intuitions incapable of rational justification. To accept them would be to sanction building whole epistemological, moral, and political philosophies based on whatever unjustified ideas people happened to Reproduced by permission granted Oct 20, 2010. 108 The Objective Standard • Summer 2008 Book Reviews have in their heads. To do that would have been to thwart Mill's campaign of social reform. In what Snyder calls Mill's "radicalization of induction" (ch. 2), Mill turned Whewell's philosophy inside out. Mill granted (or rather misunderstood then granted) Whewell's claim that induction depends on accepting notions of, for example, causality and necessity, but he assigned them a much different role in human cognition and denied that one could justifiably accept these notions. To Mill, induction is not an autonomous method but just a kind of deduction, a kind in which these contested notions provide crucial premises. But if these notions are empty, then the premises are untrue, the deductions are invalid, and Whewell's whole inductive method falls apart. Mill did not completely abandon induction and indeed offered his famous rules for how best to reason inductively. But he held that these rules apply only in limited cases, and he thought that in the future the best scientists would rely on deduction not induction. Mill's rejection of Whewell's methods did not end with his rejection of induction. He developed a philosophy that Snyder labels "ultra-empiricism" (p. 106). Mill rejected not only causality, mathematical certainty, and scientific necessity but even knowledge of the materiality of the observed world. His premises and goals forced him to conclude that reality is nothing more than the "'Permanent Possibility of Sensation'" (p. 131), his metaphysics reduced itself to that of Bishop Berkeley ("To be is to be perceived"), and by late in life Mill acknowledged that he had "no quarrel" (p. 135) with the metaphysics of Immanuel Kant. Unfortunately, Mill's whole framework for thinking about induction, causality, and necessity has pervaded scientific epistemology ever since. In chapter 3, "Reforming Science," Snyder unfolds some implications of Mill's philosophy of science and highlights other differences he had with Whewell. Particularly interesting is Mill's denial, natural enough given his premises, of the possibility of knowing causes that are not directly perceivable-this at the very moment when the sciences of imperceptible molecules and unobservable electromagnetic fields were advancing by leaps. But some of the most eye-opening aspects of Mill's philosophy-and some of Snyder's most interesting conclusions because they integrate her several lines of inquiry- come in chapter 4, "Reforming Culture: Morality and Politics." What, we may step back to ask, was this social reformer's big goal? He wrote on the subjection of women, slavery, poverty, capital punishment, parliamentary structure, population, and economics. He had been reared to be a social commentator, and he played the role throughout his life. He attacked any epistemology that he thought stood in the way of his reforms. But what did he think was fundamentally wrong with society and think should be its guiding principle? Mill was always a utilitarian. Utilitarianism had two central doctrines: in ethics, that the moral is that which contributes to the greatest happiness for the greatest number; and in politics, that every man should be free to act as he chooses as long as the action does not harm others. The first had long drawn criticism. It seemed to sanction the most ignoble pursuits and even to give preference to common over refined pleasures. If one man's enjoyment of poetry could be sacrificed to give ten Reproduced by permission granted Oct 20, 2010. Book Reviews The Objective Standard • Summer 2008 109 men enjoyment from a game of pushpin, utilitarian morality demanded the trade. Jeremy Bentham, the leading utilitarian of the previous generation, thought this was right, but Mill found it troubling. Mill came to think that quality of happiness was more important than mere quantity. Happiness would be improved, Mill held, if people were taught to value higher pleasures. Which pleasures were in fact higher should be determined, Mill concluded, by an "intellectual clerisy" (p.12). This cultural elite would take on educating the common men, and common men in turn would learn to submit to the guidance of their betters. Thus Mill retained but importantly altered the utilitarian moral doctrine, and he did the same with the political doctrine. His direction there becomes clear when we consider the ambiguity in that utilitarian phrase, "as long as the action does not harm others." This could be taken to mean "as long as one does not violate the rights of any other individual." But Mill did not take it this way. He understood "others" as a collective. His mature political doctrine amounted to this: An individual should be free to act in any way that does not harm the public good. Though Snyder does not mention it, this, of course, is the stock construction of socialist constitutions. The 1977 Soviet constitution, for example, guarantees freedom of speech, of assembly, of religion, of self-government, of property, and so forth-and then reverses all such guarantees by saying, "Enjoyment of the rights and freedoms of citizens must not be to the detriment of the interests of society" (art. 39). The goal of John Stuart Mill, this mighty social reformer, was to train citizens to reject the low pleasures of "selfishness" and "miserable individuality" (p. 240) and find happiness in contributing to the common good, a common good defined and promoted by a society's selfless intellectual elite. I wish Snyder had said something about Mill's views on educational institutions. If she is right that Mill saw a certain epistemology as the foundation for social reform, I would expect him to have had strong views about how young citizens should be taught to think. Given the "low intellectual and moral state of all classes" (p. 311), will the citizens go freely to be reeducated? If not, then what? How will they be taught to place the common good above their selfish interests? But let me set this and occasional disagreements aside and draw the following conclusion. Reforming Philosophy is an example of intellectual history done well. Snyder reconstructs the full context in which selected historical figures thought, wrote, and acted, but thankfully she does not cast their ideas as products determined by that context. Instead, she examines a writer's own goals and ambitions, chosen enemies and influences, and whole oeuvre to help us better understand the writer's ideas. Her use of neglected source material, such as drafts, overlooked writings, and unpublished letters, is particularly rewarding. I recommend the book to anyone interested in a scholarly treatment of Victorian England, of 19th-century science, of the history of scientific method, of the philosophy of induction, or of the underappreciated historian and philosopher William Whewell. For anyone who thinks John Stuart Mill was a champion of commonsense realism, inductive science, or individual liberty, the book is a must-read. Reproduced by permission granted Oct 20, 2010.