Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing

Posted on July 31, 2024 by Peter

My family and I are going briefly to the Netherlands soon. In preparation, I reviewed Svetlana Alpers’ The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (1983), which has helped me to think about pictures since I first encountered this book in the 1990s.

Alpers’ theory is subtler than my summary, but a good way to introduce it might be to consider two paintings (neither of them discussed by Alpers).

First, an Annunciation by Fra Angelico from 15th-century Florence:

This image conveys a story (Luke 1:26-38). The important questions for the viewer are what is happening and what that signifies. (In this case, the significance is cosmic, since the the Incarnation is underway.) The characters are central; other objects function like scenery and props for these protagonists.

The frame is like a window or a proscenium arch that allows us to look into a defined space. We are assumed to stand or kneel in front of the frame, looking toward the vanishing point right above Mary’s head. Each object is clearly outlined–probably first drawn, then colored in. The artist has analyzed reality in terms of these outlines. For instance, the building is a perfect rectangle; the arches are half-circles. And the bodies of the angel and woman are meaningful shapes, since humans were created in the image of God. By showing the true shape of important objects and people, the artist conveys truths of theology, geometry, and other worthy subjects.

Now compare a View of Egmond aan Zee by Salomon van Ruisdael.

This work also shows a few people in a context. But now we might imagine that we always have a visual field that changes as we move our eyes, our heads, and our locations in space. We can’t even tell the shape of our current visual field because it moves as we try to look at the edges. This picture is like a finite rectangle that has been snipped out of the whole field at a certain moment and hung on the wall. It is formed not of outlines but of brushstrokes. It was probably not drawn but composed with paint.

Van Ruisdael surely had aesthetic reasons for what he included and where he placed these objects, enjoying the location of the bluff, the darker cloud, and the church tower. But he hid his own contrivance by allowing the frame to interrupt the landscape and clouds. We do not imagine that the frame is something real, like a window, but just the edge of the image.

It is not clear where the viewer is located, partly because there are hardly any objects with sharp edges that would allow us to infer a vanishing point. We might be looking gently down on the scene, or we might not occupy any single location. Similarly, a map presents the earth as it would be seen from no particular point, without foreshortening. The Dutch were fascinated by maps and excellent at mapmaking.

All the objects are interesting; the eye does not necessarily settle on anything in particular but moves across the canvas. Everything is bathed in the same light and air. Something is happening–a group moves toward the town–but the painting is not a meaningful story, and the best question is not “What does their activity signify?”

Alpers thinks the purpose of this second work is to describe the reality that the viewer already knows, because the viewer delights both in the physical world and in the art of description. Other critics have supposed that appreciation of the natural world is spiritual, based on the idea of a creator.

Here, “art” has its original, Latin sense, which encompasses what we would call science as well as painting. A Dutch person would buy a van Ruisdael for the same reason that he would look through van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope, Christiaan Huygens’ telescope, a lens ground by Spinoza, or at a map. He wanted to learn more about how things look.

Alpers identifies the first model with Italy and the second with the North, especially the Netherlands, but she resists a simple dichotomy. The two “schools” were in close contact from the 1400s on. Major artists intuitively understood the differences, and some (such as Michelangelo) wrote explicitly about them. Unsurprisingly, some of the most interesting artists disrupted the dichotomy in original ways. Alpers discusses Rembrandt as an example and mentions some Southern cases that are beyond the scope of her book about Dutch art: Titian, Caravaggio, and Velazquez.

The two models are heuristics for understanding a wide range of European painting, but great artists have challenged it.

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using a model to explain a single case

Posted on July 29, 2024 by Peter

Charles Sanders Peirce introduced the logic of what he called “abduction” — a complement to both deduction and induction — with this example:

The surprising fact, C, is observed;
But if A were true, C would be a matter of course,
Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.

At least since Harry Frankfurt in 1958, many readers have been skeptical. Can’t we make up an infinite number of premises that could explain any surprising fact?

For instance, Kamala Harris has gained in the polls compared to Joe Biden. If it were true that voters generally prefer female presidential candidates, then her rise would be a “matter of course.” But it is a mistake to infer that Harris has gained because she is a woman. Other explanations are possible and, indeed, more plausible.

Note that “voters prefer women candidates” is an empirical generalization. Generalizations cannot be derived from any single case. If that is what abduction means, then it seems shaky. Its only role might be to suggest hypotheses that should then be tested with representative samples or controlled experiments.

But what if A (the premise) is not an empirical generalization but rather a model? For instance, a model might posit that Harris’ current position in the polls is the combined result of eight different factors, some of them general (voters usually follow partisan cues) and some of them quite unrepeatable (the incumbent president has suddenly bowed out).

Positing a model to explain a single case has risks of its own. Perhaps we add no insight by contriving an elaborate model just to fit the observed reality. And we might be tempted to treat the various components of the model as general patterns and apply them elsewhere, even though one case should give us no basis for generalizing.

But let’s look at this example from a different perspective–a pragmatic one, as Peirce would recommend. After all, Peirce calls his topic “Abductive Judgment” (Peirce 1903), suggesting a connection to practical reason or phronesis.

The question is what should (someone) do? For instance, a month ago, should Joe Biden have dropped out and endorsed Harris? Right now, should Harris accentuate her gender or try to balance it with a male vice-presidential candidate?

Inductive logic might offer some insights. Research suggests that the choice of vice-president has never affected the outcome of a presidential election, and this general inference would suggest that Harris needn’t pay attention to the gender of her VP. But induction cannot answer other key questions, such as what to do when you replace the nominee 100 days before the election. (There is no data on this matter because it hasn’t happened before.)

Besides, various factors can interrelate. The general pattern that vice-presidents do not matter might be reversed in a situation where the nominee had herself been the second person on the ticket until last week.

And the important questions are inescapably normative. For Harris, one good goal is to win the election, but she must attend to other values as well. For instance, I think she should adopt positions that would benefit working-class voters of all races. Possibly this would help her win by restoring some of Biden’s working-class coalition from 2020. Polling data would help us assess that claim. But I favor a worker-oriented strategy for reasons of justice, and I think the important question is how (not whether) to campaign that way.

Models of social phenomena typically incorporate descriptive elements (Harris is down by two points today), causal claims (Trump is still benefitting from a minor convention bump), and normative premises (Harris must win)–all combined for the purpose of guiding action.

Arguably, we cannot do better than abduction when we are trying to decide what to do next. Beginning with a surprising fact, C (and almost anything can be seen as “surprising”), we must come up with something, A, that we can rely on to guide our next steps. A should not be a single sentence, but rather a model composed of various elements.

It is worthwhile to consider evidence from other cases that may validate or challenge components of A. But it is not possible to prove or disprove A. As the pioneering statistician Georg Rasch said, “Models should not be true, but it is important that they are applicable, and whether they are applicable for any given purpose must of course be investigated. This also means that a model is never accepted finally, only on trial.”

If a model cannot be true, why should we make it explicit? It lays out what we are assuming so that we can test the assumptions as we act. It promotes learning from error. And it can help us to hold decision-makers accountable. When evaluating leaders, we should not assess the outcomes, which are beyond anyone’s control, but rather the quality of their models and their ability to adjust in in the light of new experience.

Sources: Peirce, C.S. 1903. Lectures on Pragmatism, Lecture 1: Pragmatism: The Normative Sciences; Frankfurt, Harry G. “Peirce’s notion of abduction.” The Journal of Philosophy 55.14 (1958): 593-597. See also: choosing models that illuminate issues–on the logic of abduction in the social sciences and policy; modeling social reality; different kinds of social models

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what should we pay attention to?

Posted on July 25, 2024 by Peter

In “Your Mind is Being Fracked” (May 31, 2024), Ezra Klein Interviews Princeton professor D. Graham Burnett. Their main topic is how companies manipulate our attention for profit–to our severe detriment.

Klein and Burnett also contrast two senses of “attention.” One is a focus on a practical task, leading to action. The other is an openness to experience or to another person that feels more like quiet waiting. These two forms of attention can conflict. The latter is especially at risk in a world of busy work-schedules and portable electronic devices.

At one point, Klein refers to the “debate that we’re having right now about smartphones and kids.” He acknowledges that there is an unresolved debate about the critique of smartphones that Jonathan Haidt and others are making; “the research is very complicated and you can fairly come to a view on either end of it.” But for Klein, the effects of heavy smartphone use are not really the point. He says,

If you convinced me that my kids scroll on their phones for four hours a day, had no outcome on their mental health at all — it did not make them more anxious — it did not make them more depressed — it would change my view on this not at all. I just think, as a way of living a good life, you shouldn’t be staring at your phone for four hours a day.

And yet, I also realize the language of society right now and parenting doesn’t have that much room for that. And I think we have a lot of trouble talking about just what we think a good life would be. Not a life that leads to a good job, not a life that leads to a high income, but just the idea, which I think we were more comfortable talking in terms of at other points in history, that it is better to read books than to not read books ….

As someone who spends about 3.5 hours a day on my smartphone and who reads somewhat fewer books than I once did, I agree that it is better to read books. Either my attention is being “fracked” (forcibly extracted for profit) or I am making unwise choices, or both.

I would define the benefits of reading much as Klein does later in the interview. A carefully constructed, lengthy written work affords us access to someone else’s thinking, thus allowing us to escape from our own limited selves. As my former colleague Maryanne Wolf said in a previous Klein podcast, “deep readers” display signs of absorption, empathy, and creativity. This mental state may have positive outcomes later, but that’s not really the point. Our life consists of time. What matters is the quality of it. Being absorbed, empathetic, and creative is good. Spending our time in a state of distraction and anxiety is not.

But here are some complications …

Klein is rightly concerned about a simplistic ideal of free choice that blocks us from asking whether some choices are better than others, either for ourselves or for our children. On the other hand, as Klein might acknowledge, choice is important. People differ, and we know things about our own needs and interests that others do not know. Also, we have the right to be the authors of our own lives. If someone forcibly took away my iPhone and ordered me into the library, I would have a good reason to be angry.

John Stuart Mill famously argued that individuals should have the liberty to allocate their time, yet if they are exposed to the higher things, they will freely choose them. If Mill was right, then excellence does not conflict with freedom. Liberal education liberates us by giving us the opportunity to choose higher things.

Mill’s predecessor, Jeremy Bentham, had said that poetry was just as valuable as the folk game of “push-pin” (illustrated above by James Gillray). But Mill responded that people who have the opportunity to learn poetry will not want to waste their time on such trivial table games.

Mill may not be right. I was given an expensive and extensive education, yet I am addicted–noticeably, although not overwhelmingly or irretrievably–to my phone. Sure, I sometimes use it for worthy purposes, including episodes of deep reading on its small screen, but I also play Stormbound enough to compete in the Platinum League. Actually, Stormbound has the same basic logic as push-pin–I try to get my tokens over the other player’s baseline, much like the Duke of Queensberry in Gillray’s cartoon.

In short, offering everyone experiences with higher things may not work. Look at me, with my Oxford doctorate in literae humaniores–I spend my day playing Stormbound.

But we should be open-minded and thoughtful when we make value-judgments. The game of push-pin actually doesn’t sound so bad. It was a safe contest of skill between human competitors–maybe a way to sustain relationships.

Meanwhile, Bentham was suspicious of poetry. He saw poets as prone to lies and exaggeration. If we think that Bentham was wrong–poetry is better than push-pin–we owe an account of its value. What is so good about poetry and so bad about games? And is all poetry really worth our time?

I think I can address these questions. Poetry is language that is especially carefully constructed, with particular attention to its formal qualities. As such, it is particularly well suited to promote absorption, assuming that you really attend to it and learn how to analyze it. Reading poetry requires experience, particularly because poems tend to refer to previous poems, and it’s only by reading many of them that you can really begin to see how they operate. Therefore, it is advanced reading that is worthy, not just any reading. As Wallace Stevens says, “Poetry is one of the enlargements of life.”

Games are also worthwhile, particularly when they involve people who know each other and are in physical proximity, so that the players can learn and care about one another and exercise their bodies as well as their minds. I’m for push-pin! In contrast, my smartphone games pit me against the AI or against completely anonymous human opponents, and as such, they offer no human interaction. Besides, they are carefully designed to pull me back in for another round. In these respects, they are worse than poetry. (Yet I sometimes find my mind wandering into worthy topics while I play, so maybe that isn’t so bad.)

The main point here is that our evaluation of various activities should be nuanced and critical, not prejudiced by assumptions about what count as the higher pursuits.

For me at least, the epitome of an absorbing experience that takes me out of my own mind is a classic novel. Because of its length and careful construction, it retains attention. Because it is fictional, it is truly the product of someone else’s thought. Because it is mere text on paper, it requires and promotes imagination. And because I am not a literary critic, I don’t get anything concrete from reading a novel; its value is intrinsic.

Thus we might want to pursue activities that are as much as possible like reading classic novels. However, from his unorthodox Marxist perspective in the 1930s, the great critic Walter Benjamin disparaged novels in favor of “stories.” By the latter word, he meant folktales and other oral narratives that emerge from the masses. Benjamin preferred stories because they are communal and they elicit responses from their listeners, including impromptu additions. In contrast, novels are constructed by solo authors who control the whole narrative, including its end. The relationship between the novelist and the reader is private and consumeristic: I buy the experience that James Joyce manufactured.

If we applied Benjamin’s argument to the present day, it would offer no justification for playing Stormbound. But it might justify spending time interacting with other people on a social network (ignoring, for a moment, the problem of corporate ownership, which Benjamin would decry). Benjamin would see the attention demanded by a novel as individualistic and consumerist.

Here is a different take on somewhat similar issues. In one of the oldest of all Buddhist texts, “The Fruit of Contemplative Life” from the Pali Canon, the Buddha tries to teach a very bad king, Ajatasattu–who is troubled by guilt for having murdered his own father and usurped the throne–to follow a monk’s contemplative path. One recommendation is “sense restraint”:

And how does a mendicant guard the sense doors? When [monks see] a sight with their eyes, they don’t get caught up in the features and details. If the faculty of sight were left unrestrained, bad unskillful qualities of covetousness and displeasure would become overwhelming. For this reason, they practice restraint, protecting the faculty of sight, and achieving its restraint. When they hear a sound with their ears … When they smell an odor with their nose … When they taste a flavor with their tongue … When they feel a touch with their body … When they know an idea with their mind, they don’t get caught up in the features and details. If the faculty of mind were left unrestrained, bad unskillful qualities of covetousness and displeasure would become overwhelming. For this reason, they practice restraint, protecting the faculty of mind, and achieving its restraint. When they have this noble sense restraint, they experience an unsullied bliss inside themselves. That’s how a mendicant guards the sense doors.
DN 2, translated by Bhikkhu Sujato, on suttacentral.net

This passage surprises me a little because I would have thought that “getting caught up in … features and details” is how we achieve attention. Our task, when we read a poem by Wallace Stevens, is precisely to analyze its features and details. I suppose there’s a difference between “getting caught up” in something–so that you drift into “covetousness and displeasure”–versus attending to it with openness and equanimity. But the question remains whether complicated things like poems and novels are appropriate objects of attention or whether we would be better off with bare walls and our breath.

Speaking of the Pali Canon: I struggle to attend to it because the narration is very repetitive. Before King Ajatasattu finds his way to the Buddha, he first meets eight misguided sages, and each of those episodes is narrated with precisely the same text, except that each guru’s name and a sentence about his mistaken doctrine is substituted at a key point.

These discourses emerged as stories, not as novels. The medium was oral, meant for memorization and communal experience, not literature constructed for an individual reader. However, I happen to be an individual reader who sometimes opens translations of the Pali Canon–as well as many other kinds of texts–on my smartphone. “Unskillful qualities of covetousness and displeasure” arise rather quickly in my mind, not because I dislike the text but because I am unable to concentrate on it.

We are not going back to oral recitations or baskets of palm leaves with handwritten text, nor should we want to. However, the technologies of the present have costs as well as benefits, and we are just beginning to learn how to deal with them.

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democracy’s sovereignty

Posted on July 19, 2024 by Peter

Human beings have invented a vast and diverse set of institutions that coordinate behavior and allocate resources.

These forms include disciplined organizations headed by leaders, voluntary groups that strive to operate by consensus, procedures for voting directly on policies, elected bodies that deliberate and vote, courts that decide cases and controversies (with or without juries, which may or may not be randomly selected), bureaucracies characterized by hierarchies of defined positions, markets with or without firms (which may themselves by mini-dictatorships, bureaucracies, or co-ops), markets for capital, informal norms defined by a widespread assumption that everyone else will behave in certain ways, scientific disciplines organized by peer-review and replication, and networks that newcomers can join by agreeing to relay messages to other members.

This list is not meant to be comprehensive and is not closed. Several important forms are no more than 300 years old, and the last one originated within the past half century. In the future, new forms will be invented.

We should not view current institutions complacently, since many originated in injustice and still perpetuate bad outcomes. To name just one example, the Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602, pioneered essential features of capital markets, including shares that could be resold on the world’s first stock market and a board accountable to shareholders. Its major activities included conquest, ethnic cleansing, and slavery. And I do not mean to cite a corporation alone, since governmental forms are also rooted in cruelty.

But I do start with the assumption that each of these forms has been invented and has survived because it serves significant functions and offers distinctive advantages. Also, each one can be improved. Progress is by no means inevitable, but we can identify and enhance changes that are beneficial. A certain kind of arrogance is required to assume that any one of these forms is simply bad and should be dispensed with.

In that case, we must decide which institutional forms should be used for each social purpose. And a second-order question: which institution(s) should decide this matter?

A decision about which institution should play any given role typically looks like a law (although it might technically be a constitutional provision, a decree, or a regulation). For example, to have an independent, private press or else a governmental media system requires a law. Likewise for health insurance.

Which institutions can yield such laws? Not a market, which simply doesn’t offer products that look like laws. Nor are people invited to reason about the role of various other institutions when they are participating in market exchanges.

A king, dictator, high priest, or junta can decide which institution will do what. Instead of grabbing all power for himself, a ruler may favor courts or markets (think of Frederick the Great or Augusto Pinochet). Regardless, we do not want rulers to make these decisions for two major reasons. First, they cannot be trusted to decide which institutions work best for all, when they stand to profit for making them work mainly for themselves. Besides, even in the rare case of a benign despot, he cannot know enough about how each institution affects all the people of the society to be able to decide wisely.

In the US system, courts sometimes decide which kinds of institutions may do what. In the 1905 Lochner decision, the Supreme Court notoriously gave control over wages and working decisions to companies rather than the state. When judges seem to be deciding such cases on the basis of their own views (a charge against the current Supreme Court), then they appear no different from juntas. The special advantage of a court is not allocating responsibilities among institutions but interpreting and applying laws created by other institutions to adjudicate specific cases.

Science might be able to decide which institution works best for each purpose–if this turns out to be a tractable research question. Coase’s Theorem is supposed to be a result of research that proves the superiority of competitive markets for many purposes; some versions of Marxism are supposed to prove the deep flaws of capitalism.

I view these claims as useful inputs to reasoning about which institutions are best for various purposes. Research should be taken seriously and should develop further. I doubt it will ever resolve the discussion, because the choice of institutions involves conflicting values and interests, not merely empirical claims, and also because the world keeps changing as a result of people’s uncontrollable behavior. Any institution that is neatly designed according to a theory will soon be subverted by people who understand it and “hack” its design.

If the decision about which institution should do what looks like a law, and we don’t want rulers, judges, or specialized experts to make such laws, then the best candidate is a democracy. As Knight and Johnson (2014) argue, a democracy elicits views about the role of various other institutions, it gives everyone an equal opportunity to affect the decision, and it permits continued reflection once a decision is made.

One does not need optimistic assumptions about individuals’ wisdom or their tendency to learn from other people to believe that our best available way to decide the role of other institutions is to have an ongoing debate in civil society, then to empower elected, accountable representatives to vote, and then to debate the results and reconsider the decisions.

In fact, a reasonably healthy democracy seems to be one in which political competition is about the role of other institutions. For example, things would be going better if US voters were thinking about whether the government of the United States should channel resources into “green” technologies or else leave the allocation of capital to markets. I mention this example because the 2024 election is not about the pros or cons of Biden’s channeling more than a trillion dollars into green industries, but about who counts as a real American.

The above argument is deeply inspired by Knight and Johnson. Paul Aligica (2014) dissents in part. He sees all the different kinds of institutions as more or less on par within a polycentric order. He argues that institutions should and do grow and change as a result of decentralized decisions made by many actors across the society as a whole. In that sense, the people rule through all the institutions. Aligica defends an elected, democratic government but emphasizes that it cannot assess and influence the other institutions wisely unless they develop robustly and independently and demonstrate successes and failures.

I think Aligica makes valid points, but the gap between him and Knight and Johnson is not very wide, and I’m inclined to endorse the priority of democracy as long as we remember (as Knight and Johnson do) that a plurality of institutions is an asset for democratic government.

Sources: Jack Knight and James Johnson, The priority of democracy: Political consequences of pragmatism. Princeton University Press, 2014; Paul Aligica, Institutional Diversity and Political Economy: The Ostroms and Beyond. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. See also polycentricity: the case for a (very) mixed economy; modus vivendi theory; what if people’s political opinions are very heterogeneous?; China teaches the value of political pluralism, etc.

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class inversion in France

Posted on July 18, 2024 by Peter

After the 2022 French election, I wrote:

The left should represent the lower-income half of the population; the right should represent the top half. When that happens, the left will generally advocate government spending and regulation. Such policies may or may not be wise, but they can be changed if they fail and prove unpopular. Meanwhile, the right will advocate less government, which (again) may or may not be desirable but will not destroy the constitutional order. After all, limited government is a self-limiting political objective.

When the class-distribution turns upside down, the left will no longer advocate impressive social reforms, because its base will be privileged. And the right will no longer favor limited government, because tax cuts don’t help the poor much. The right will instead embrace government activism in the interests of traditional national, racial or religious hierarchies. The left will frustrate change, while the right–now eager to use the government for its objectives–will become genuinely dangerous.

I wrote this as a US citizen, concerned that the Democratic Party relies on upper-income liberals while the GOP is increasingly based in the working class. But the pattern is seen internationally, which should influence how we seek to explain it.

At that time, I noted that the French electorate had turned upside-down. The right-wing far surpassed the center and the left among voters from the lowest occupational class, while the top stratum of the society favored the center or the left.

The same pattern was not clear in Britain’s recent election, where Labour performed about as well across the social spectrum (although the Tories did best among workers). However, the inversion did repeat in last week’s French election, as shown in the graphic with this post.

The data come from IPSOS. The occupational categories, in declining order of prestige, are: “cadre,” “profession intermédiaire,” “employé,” and “ouvrier.” (See more here.) The parties, in order from left to right, are the leftist New Popular Front, Macron’s “Ensemble,” the Gaullist Republicans, and the rightwing National Rally.

The inversion is most clearly illustrated by a comparison between Ensemble and the National Rally. Macron drew from the top; the right-wing party, from the bottom. But the supposedly left-wing New Popular Front performed worst among workers (ouvriers), and was the top choice of the managerial class (cadres).

IPSOS also asked about self-described class, educational attainment, and economic circumstances. The patterns are the same as shown in my graphic, but I thought that occupation would be the most reliable measure. (Reports of class identity and economic circumstances can be affected by people’s political views, rather than the reverse; but IPSOS derives its occupational categories from people’s actual jobs.)

In the USA, race is certainly relevant. The working-class Americans who have shifted right are mostly (but not exclusively) white. This may also be the case in other countries, but it is important not to assume that race and racism explain the class inversion without looking more closely at the data from the country. Unfortunately, per French law, voters cannot be asked about their race/ethnicity. However, in the IPSOS poll, just 16 percent of Catholics, versus 34 percent of members of other religions, voted for the left, and the “other” category may pick up a fair proportion of immigrants. This may suggest that some French citizens who identify as white and Catholic are voting for the right on cultural/national grounds, but that explanation is not clear from these data.

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listeners, not speakers, are the main reasoners

Posted on July 15, 2024 by Peter

Robert Brandom offers an influential and respected account of reasoning, which I find intuitive (see Brandom 2000 and other works). At the same time, a large body of psychological research suggests that reasoning–as he defines it–is rare.

That could be a valid conclusion. Starting with Socrates, philosophers who have proposed various accounts of reason have drawn the conclusion that most people don’t reason. Just for example, the great American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce defines reason as fearless experimentation and doubts that most people are open to it (Peirce 1877).

Brandom’s theory could support a similarly pessimistic conclusion. But that doesn’t sit well with me, because I believe that I observe many people reasoning. Instead, I suggest a modest tweak in his theory that would allow us to predict that reasoning is fairly common.

Brandom argues that any claim (any thought that can be expressed in a sentence) has both antecedents and consequences: “upstream” and “downstream” links “in a network of inferences.” To use my example, if you say, “It is morning,” you must have reasons for that claim (e.g., the alarm bell rang or the sun is low in the eastern sky) and you can draw inferences from it, such as, “It is time for breakfast.” In this respect, you are different from an app. that notifies you when it’s morning or a parrot that has been reliably trained to say “It is morning” at sunrise. You can answer the questions, “Why do you believe that?” and “What does that imply?” by offering additional sentences.

(By the way, an alarm clock app. cannot reason, but an artificial neural network might. As of 2019, Brandom considered it an open question whether computers will “participate as full–fledged members of our discursive communities or … form their own communities which would confer content” [Frápolli & Wischin 2019].)

Whenever we make a claim, we propose that others can also use it “as a premise in their reasoning.” That means that we implicitly promise to divulge our own reasons and implications. “Thus one essential aspect of this model of discursive practice is communication: the interpersonal, intra-content inheritance of entitlement to commitments.” In sum, “The game of giving and asking for reasons is an essentially social practice.” Reasoning in your own head is a special case, in which you basically simulate a discussion with real other people.

The challenge comes from a lot of psychological research that finds that beliefs are intuitive, in the specific sense that we don’t know why we think them. They just come to us. One seminal work is Nisbett and Wilson (1977), which has been cited nearly 18,000 times, often in studies that add empirical support to their view.

According to this theory, when you are asked why you believe what you just said, you make up a reason–better called a “rationalization”–for your intuition. Regardless of what you intuit, you can always come up with upstream and downstream connections that make it sound good. In that sense, you are not really reasoning, in Brandom’s sense. You are justifying yourself.

Indeed, the kinds of discussions that tend to be watched by spectators or recorded for posterity often reflect sequences of self-justifications rather than reasoning. I recently wrote about the scarcity of examples of real reasoning in transcripts and recordings of official meetings. As Martin Buber wrote in The Knowledge of Man (as pointed out to me by my friend Eric Gordon):

By far the greater part of what is called conversation among men would be more properly and precisely described as speechifying. In general, people do not really speak to one another, but each, although turned to the other, really speaks to a fictitious court of appeal where life consists of nothing but listening to him.

Some grounds for optimism come from Mercier and Sperber (2017). They argue that people are pretty good at assessing the inferences that other people make in discussions. Although we may invent rationalizations for what we have intuited, we can test other people’s rationalizations and decide whether they are persuasive.

Furthermore, our intuitions are not random or rooted only in fixed characteristics, such as demographic identities and personality. Our intuitions have been influenced by the previous conversations that we have heard and assessed. For instance, if we hold an invidious prejudice, it did not spring up automatically but resulted from our endorsing lots of prejudiced thoughts that other people linked together into webs of belief. And it is possible–although difficult and not common–for us to change our intuitions when we decide that some inferences are invalid. Forming and revising opinions requires attentive listening, critical but also generous.

The modest tweak I suggest in Brandom’s view involves how we understand the “game of giving and asking for reasons.” We might assume that the main player is the person who gives a reason: the speaker. The other parties are waiting for their turns to play. But I would reverse that model. Giving reasons is somewhat arbitrary and problematic. The main player is the one who listens and judges reasons. A speaker is basically waiting for a turn to do the most important task, which is listening.

This view also suggests some tolerance for events dominated by “speechifying.” To be sure, we should prize genuine conversations in which people jointly try to decide what is right, and in which one person’s reasons cause other people to change their minds. This kind of relationship is the heart of Buber’s thought, and I concur. But it is unreasonable to put accountable leaders on a public stage and expect them to have a genuine conversation. None of the incentives push them in that direction. They are pretty much bound to justify positions they already held. Although theirs is not a conversation that would satisfy Buber, it does have two important functions: it allows us to judge people with authority, and it gives us arguments that we can evaluate as we form our own views.

Again, if we focus on the listener rather than the speaker, we may see more value in an event that is mostly a series of speeches.

Sources: Robert R. Brandom, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism. (Harvard 2000); Charles S. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” Popular Science Monthly 12 (November 1877), 1-15; María José Frápolli and Kurt Wischin, “From Conceptual Content in Big Apes and AI, to the Classical Principle of Explosion: An Interview with Robert B. Brandom” (2019); Richard E. Nisbett and Timothy D. Wilson. “Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes,” Psychological review 84.3 (1977); and Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, The Enigma of Reason (Harvard University Press 2017. See also: looking for deliberative moments; Generous Listening Symposium; how intuitions relate to reasons: a social approach and how the structure of ideas affects a conversation

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UK election results by social class

Posted on July 5, 2024 by Peter

One of my obsessions is the social-class inversion that has been visible in several countries in the 21st century, in which parties of the left draw their strongest support from highly educated, “professional” voters and those on the right appeal best to the working class. Under those circumstances, left parties will block bold economic initiatives (which would cost their voters), and right parties may offer ethno-nationalism and authoritarianism, since libertarian economic policies have little relevance to workers. This is potentially a road to fascism.

The full exit polls from yesterday's UK election do not seem to be available yet (I assume they are still embargoed for the media companies that subscribe to Ipsos' service), so I have used Ipsos' final pre-election survey as a rough substitute. The interactive graphic above lets you see each party's support by social class.

The image above this post simplifies matters by grouping the Tories and Reform as "all right," and Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, and the Scottish and Welsh nationalists as "all left."

You can see evidence here of a class inversion, but it is not as dramatic as in some 21st century elections. The Reform and Green parties illustrate the pattern best, drawing their support (respectively) from the bottom and the top of the social class structure. The Conservatives perform best at the bottom, but only by a bit. In all, the right does considerably better among semi-skilled and unskilled workers than among managers and professionals, but Labour holds its own across all categories, blurring the pattern.

I would argue that Labour must pursue policies that benefit the lowest social class category, not only for social justice but also to reverse the class inversion that threatens democracy itself.

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some basics

Posted on July 3, 2024 by Peter

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
  -- Wallace Stevens, "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon" (1921)

For those who are interested in the most fundamental questions, it has often proven useful to ask about the thinker rather than what is thought. We can derive insights about the world by first understanding our own predispositions and limitations.

Hence the early Buddhists went searching for the self and found only the five aggregates (form, sensation, perception, volition, consciousness), Socrates tested various kinds of expertise, Aristotle based his system on logic, the sixth Chan patriarch Huineng found truth in his own original nature once all attachments fell away, Ibn al-Haytham explored optics to understand space and matter, Descartes proposed to ground philosophy on a critical theory of reason, Hegel analyzed the logic of history because he saw reason as cumulative, Husserl turned to pure experience, and Wittgenstein looked to the ordinary language with which we express thoughts.

These are examples of examining the subjective to understand what is objective.

For me, the most basic truth about our thought is that we use brains that evolved for specific needs, leaving us with severely limited cognitive powers and motives that are dubious, even by our own lights.

Indeed, we come into the world knowing almost nothing and hold most of our beliefs because of what other members of our species have told us. We are able to believe many different things, but what we actually believe depends in large part on who has influenced us, which is the result of our surrounding social structure–things like schools and publishers and churches and governments. And all social structures are dubious, even by our own lights.

I would believe very different things if I were a medieval Catholic, let alone a dolphin. Each organism has its own Umwelt (self-centered world), or kyogai (bounded consciousness, in Zen), or “mundo” in Stevens’ idiosyncratic vocabulary.

This relativism is grounds for humility but not an excuse for blanket skepticism. We can make and test specific inferences. Our understanding can accumulate, albeit from many starting points. We are obliged to think as well as we can and not to ignore what we have reason to believe.

Considering the knowledge that has accumulated for me, I think I discern two main pillars.

One is natural science, which assumes and reinforces a picture of nature as impersonal, purposeless. Things happen because things previously happened.

The other is ethics, in the very general sense that what matters is experience, not only my experience. “Without exception, no sufferings belong to anyone. They must be warded off simply because they are suffering” (Shantideva, 8.102-3).

Science and ethics stand separately. Neither lends support to the other. Each can be doubted in a very abstract way. Many human beings have denied each of them, and I could deny them as well. But such doubt is abstract because I have been formed by accumulated thought that supports both pillars.

Further, these two assumptions are responsible. Not to care about others is selfish; not to accept the basic purposelessness of nature is sentimental. We are to address suffering in a world that will not offer respite by itself. To doubt science or ethics is a mere temptation, not a responsible option.

On this planet, the general principles of a purposeless nature have generated the logic of natural selection, which causes increasingly complex organisms to proliferate against the current of entropy. In earth’s animal kingdom, this complexity has yielded sensitivity and, ultimately, experience.

Nothing suggests that evolution would tend toward happiness. On the contrary, a sensitive animal is more likely to survive if it experiences negative emotions, such as fear and aversion. Nor is there any reason to expect that an evolved brain would be able to understand itself. The first-person world–the stream of consciousness–is a slippery thing for us because we are not well designed for meta-cognition. We can describe the Umwelt of a deer-tick but not our own. We resort to crude words like “self” and “world” or “cause” and “effect” that seem inadequate to what we experience.

Recognizing the abstract idea that the world is experienced differently by other kinds of people and species reminds us that it has unplumbed depths. Attending very closely to our own experience offers hints of what we normally miss. Listening to others describe their experience enriches our own and encourages compassion by directing attention to their emotions and the causes of their experiences, something that our evolved brains seem able to do.

Genuine compassion demands action, and action to address suffering keeps one from marinating in one’s own concerns. We should listen not only to homo sapiens but also to other sentient creatures. But it is a mistake to attend only to others, since each of us is usually best placed to hear and respond to our own stream of consciousness, which is easy for us to ignore. If we can find ways to share what we find within, without burdening other people with self-indulgent confessions, then what we share about ourselves may be a gift for them.

Modern philosophers call the very close description of one’s own experience “phenomenology.” This practice has ancient roots. For Husserl, the ancient Buddhist Pali Canon was exemplary of phenomenology. He wrote that understanding its “joyous mastery of the world … means a great adventure” for those who start with different assumptions–in his case, with concepts derived from Protestantism (trans. in Hanna 1995). In other words, the Pali Canon offered both a skillful description of human experience in general and an alternative to Husserl’s local context. Exploring this alternative liberated him from himself.

Not only ancient Buddhist scriptures and dense modern phenomenological treatises but also many literary texts and images offer hints about consciousness as experienced by specific people. Since the mind is constantly attentive to the world and to other minds, a work that describes nature or people is also an account of the one who experiences such things. Thus a poem about a nightingale or a painting of a haystack or a fiction about one day in Dublin is also a kind of phenomenology. As Stevens said (I am on a Stevens kick right now), “Poetry is one of the enlargements of life.”

We have brains designed for survival, which means that they are destined for suffering. But this inheritance has equipped us with the capacity to “enlarge” ourselves by listening generously–listening to others, to nature, and to ourselves.

Again, to listen seriously compels compassionate action. If we act for the sake of a good outcome, we will inevitably be frustrated, so we must act just to be compassionate (which, however, implies thoughtfully choosing the most effective means). And since each of us is cognitively limited and motivationally flawed, we should almost always decide what to do together. This is where the inner life and civic life come together.

Sources: F.J. Hanna, “Husserl on the teachings of the Buddha,” The Humanistic Psychologist, 23(3), (1995) 365–372; Shantideva, The Bodhiicaryacatara, trans. by Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton (Oxford University Press, 1995). See also: Cuttings version 2.0: a book about happiness; verdant mountains usually walk; Montaigne the bodhisattva?; Wallace Stevens’ idea of order; the fetter; thinking both sides of the limits of human cognition; joys and limitations of phenomenology; and a Husserlian meditation.

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beyond Chevron

Posted on July 1, 2024 by Peter

Since my 1999 book, The Future of Democracy, I have been critical of delegation: the practice of passing vague laws and asking regulators to work out the details. This practice has become pervasive, not only in the United States but in all the wealthy societies that I know about.

We are taught that the US federal government has three branches, but it has actually had at least four for the past century. The fourth branch consists of the regulatory agencies, which generate 72 pages of regulations for every single page of law passed by Congress.

Congress often intentionally enacts values that are in tension or impossible to achieve fully, so that regulators have the responsibility to make tradeoffs. For instance, the authorizing legislation for the Environmental Protection Agency requires the “Federal Government to use all practicable means, consistent with other essential considerations of national policy, … to the end that the Nation may … attain the widest range of beneficial uses of the environment without degradation, risk to health or safety, or other undesirable and unintended consequences.”

Of course, the whole Environmental Protection Act is more detailed than this, but it leaves a vast amount for the agency to decide. When an EPA policy does not avoid all undesirable consequences (and how could it?), legislators can complain and thereby act as if they were exercising “oversight” even though they have ceded their power to the agency.

Delegation would be appropriate if good policy could be determined by science, but policy choices always involve values. Delegation would be appropriate if utilitarianism (in the form of cost-benefit analysis) were an adequate theory of value, but it is not. Thus, in practice, Congress gives bureaucracies the discretion to govern. This is undemocratic, whether we think of democracy as majority-rule, public deliberation, or accountability. Delegation is also inconsistent with rule-of-law because it generates mutable and inconsistent rules that are hard to predict and follow.

Therefore, in 1999, I favored something like last week’s Loper decision, which held that “courts may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous.”

I favored this kind of ruling because I thought it would force the legislative branch to make important decisions instead of enacting vague statutes that might end up being decided by judges. This is not the Supreme Court’s intention in Loper. The decision anticipates that courts will decide what laws mean, using “the traditional tools of statutory construction” to resolve ambiguities, which is the “special competence” of judges. But no judge can decide what the law really means when Congress has written it vaguely. The court will simply make the law. I thought that Congress would be compelled to avoid this absurd outcome by passing clear statutes, which would return both power and accountability to the elected legislature.

What has changed is my confidence that Congress can actually legislate, in the sense of passing or updating substantive statutes. In 1965 alone, Congress passed at least 10 landmark bills that established agencies or dramatically altered national policies. Congress has passed fewer than 10 such laws in the last half century put together.

As an example, Congress has never passed legislation explicitly about the climate. Federal regulatory agencies are using the 1970s Clean Air Act (written before Congress was really aware of climate change) to try to regulate carbon. Likewise, federal financial laws were passed before cryptocurrency; and the Telecommunications Act of 1996 still governs despite some minor new developments, such as social media and smartphones.

I’ve previously explored several explanations for the decline of lawmaking, including the weakening of parties as actual institutions, the altered media system, a loss of confidence and clarity among both progressives and libertarians, and polarization.

A recent example supports blaming the media. Biden did sign landmark environmental legislation, but it has been almost entirely ignored. Why would a legislature be responsible and effective if it passes several trillion dollars of new spending and no one notices?

Another explanation is weak legislative capacity. I will digress briefly to explain that concept: A legislative body votes on bills. That is a zero-sum process: each “no” vote cancels each “aye” vote. But bills must come from somewhere. Developing legislation requires awareness, research, consultation, design, and persuasion. The number and sophistication of pending bills is not zero-sum; legislatures can have more or less capacity to develop legislation.

Today, only five percent of Hill staffers surveyed by the Congressional Management Foundation and the Partnership for Public Service believe that Congress has adequate capacity, and the other 95 percent are correct. Congress can barely get it together to pass budgets that merely modify current spending. With the exceptions of the environmental bills that Biden signed, Congress has little capacity to develop laws–whether conservative or progressive.

Under these circumstances, the Loper decision will shift power from the regulatory agencies to the courts. Given the composition of the federal judiciary, this shift will make regulations more conservative, regardless of what the public might want. Congress will not easily fix this problem, because Congress cannot write ambitious and extensive laws.

However, the best solution remains the same: responsibility must shift to Congress. Here are four ways to accomplish that:

Enhance the capacity of Congress. More people could work for the legislative branch, developing detailed statutes or amendments that determine outcomes without delegating decisions to bureaucracies. There are proposals for enhancing the Congressional Research Service, the General Accounting Office, and the Congressional Budget Office–all bureaus of the legislative branch. These agencies are about 20 percent smaller than they were in the later 20th century, and a fourth one, the Office of Technology Assessment, is now defunct (Select Committee, 2022, p. 127). Staff could also be added to congressional offices and committees; and whole new nonpartisan bureaus could be formed. The general strategy is to do the same kind of work now assigned to the executive branch but within Congress.
Taxing and spending instead of regulating: I believe that wealthy people and companies should bear most of the burden of addressing social problems. Regulations may shift costs and alter behavior for the better. However, the costs and effects of regulation are difficult to predict and account for. They do not appear on the balance sheets of the government. It is possible for burdens to fall on the wrong people (e.g., consumers instead of investors) or not to be efficient. In general, it is more transparent and democratic to impose burdens in the form of explicit taxes and then to use the revenues to purchase things that voters can assess. Taxing and spending are clearly constitutional; there is little that activist conservative jurists could do to stop it. What it requires is political will.
Codification: After a large body of detailed law has emerged over a long period, one option is to codify it: to impanel a committee that analyzes the whole corpus and replaces it with a much more concise and general structure. Justinian did this with Roman law, ca. 534. The Napoleonic Code of 1804 did the same for the many specific laws that the French revolutionary governments had passed since 1790. The Model Penal Code of 1962 was an attempt to codify US state criminal laws. At nearly 200,000 [sic!] printed pages, the Code of Federal Regulation is ripe for codification, either as one whole corpus or in big chunks, such as environment and labor. Today’s Congress certainly cannot codify, but a commission could produce a draft for Congress to approve. Congress could create this commission or, in theory, it could form in civil society and simply ask Congress to consider its recommendations. I am generally skeptical of AI, but codification is a task that computers might assist.
Public engagement: A commission would be dominated by experts, but representative people can be selected for juries or other kinds of deliberative panels that consider value-laden questions and make decisions. The US EPA offers a page about Citizen Juries, which is one such model. There is a burgeoning literature on “sortition” (randomly selected decision-makers), in both theory and practice, with many of the ambitious examples coming from overseas. Sortition is also a form of delegation, but random selection and a deliberative format provide a different kind of legitimacy. Congress might have to amend the Administrative Procedures Act to make courts defer to citizen panels, but nothing would prevent such an amendment.

Do I expect any of these solutions? Essentially, I expect very little positive to come from Washington over the next two years or more. Nevertheless, now is an important time to envision a better system. We are likely to experience instability or even chaos, and we should be aiming to come through that to a period of real reform.

Source: Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, Final Report, 2022. See also a trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon, you’re talking real money; judicial activism when the legislative branch is broken; legislative capacity is not zero-sum;

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