Here’s the abstract:

Colin McGinn maintains that Othello is about the problem of other minds. But Othello’s version of the problem – the inaccessibility of particular others in particular respects, not of other minds per se – might seem to lack the generality needed to count as philosophical. Drawing on examples from Othello, Caleb Williams, and Amerika, I argue that Othello’s problem, while distinct from the traditional problem of other minds, is indeed a genuine philosophical problem, but one produced and sustained by alterable features of human society (specifically, race, gender, and class distinctions) rather than by unalterable features of cognition as such.

And speaking of Shakespeare, check out this neglected masterpiece.

1. Right-libertarians sometimes accuse left-libertarians of misrepresenting right-libertarians’ relation to corporatism. “They say we support government favouritism toward big business,” they complain, “yet no libertarian supports any such thing.”

To answer this, I need to invoke the de re / de dicto distinction.

Suppose I’m reading Ozma of Oz, and I think, “hey, this guy Baum is a good author.” Assume I don’t know that Baum also wrote a novel (a lousy one, in fact, though that doesn’t matter for the example) called The Master Key. Would it be true or false to say, “Roderick thinks the author of The Master Key is a good author”?

Well, it’s ambiguous. I don’t have a thought of the form “The author of The Master Key is a good author,” since I’m not aware of any such book. But I do think of Baum that he’s a good author; and since Baum is the author of The Master Key, I thereby think of the author of The Master Key that he’s a good author. So the philosopher’s way of marking the distinction is to say that I believe de re (“of the thing”), but not de dicto (“of what is said”), that the author of The Master Key is a good author.

Or again, suppose I want to marry Griselda. And suppose Griselda is, unbeknownst to me, a pathological liar. Then is it true or false that I want to marry a pathological liar? Well, in one sense it’s true and in another sense it’s false. I don’t have such a desire de dicto; I don’t form any thought expressible as “I want to marry a pathological liar.” But I do have such a desire de re, since there’s a pathological liar that I want to marry.

So when left-libertarians accuse (some) right-libertarians of supporting corporatism, this is to be understood in a de re sense, not in a de dicto sense. Thus the claim is that right-libertarians are supporting certain policies/institutions/phenomena that are in fact instances of corporatism; we are not claiming that right-libertarians are deliberately supporting them qua instances of corporatism – and so pointing out that they’re not is not relevant as a reply to the original point.

2. The left-libertarian call for worker empowerment can itself be construed as a (left-wing) form of corporatism.

Lew Rockwell recently wrote:

[S]yndicalism means economic control by the producers. Capitalism is different. It places by virtue of market structures all control in the hands of the consumers. The only question for syndicalists, then, is which producers are going to enjoy political privilege. It might be the workers, but it can also be the largest corporations.

not a left-libertarian

Lew doesn’t draw the inference that left-libertarians are corporatists, but he illuminates a way in which that inference might be drawn. After all, we too favour economic control by producers, right? So why doesn’t that make our position akin to corporatism?

I think there’s a perilous ambiguity here. In one way, “economic control” can mean ownership; in that sense, we left-libertarians do favour economic control by producers.

But in that sense capitalists (taking that term in the Rothbardian sense) do not favour economic control by consumers; they favour economic control by producers too, even if capitalist employers loom larger in their conception of “producers” than in ours.

When Lew says that capitalism favours consumer control, he’s not talking about ownership; he means that consumer preferences determine production decisions through the price system – which is true enough (although I think that way of putting it makes producers seem too passive – what about advertising? entrepreneurial experimentation?) but that’s just as true when the producers are workers’ co-ops. So there’s no one sense of producer control which is both advocated by left-libertarians and akin to corporatism.

(These issues are closely related to those I’ve discussed under the name of the “POOTMOP” problem, here and here, as well as to the different ways that the libertarian and authoritarian wings of the French industriel movement understood the concept of producer control, discussed here.)

3. There is a tendency among right-libertarians to treat racism and sexism as equivalent to hostility toward persons of a different race or gender. Thus where such hostility is absent, racism and sexism are presumed to be absent also – with the upshot that left-libertarians are seen as exaggerating the amount of racism and sexism around.

For example, Walter Block argues that because heterosexual male employers are attracted to women, they are more likely to be prejudiced in their favour rather than against them.

But racism and sexism are found in more forms than simply that of hostility (not that there isn’t plenty of that form around too – and we all know, too well, that being a heterosexual male is not exactly an obstacle to hostility against women). A white male employer who feels no hostility toward women or minorities may still be inclined to pay them less or deny them positions of authority if he holds, say, prejudicial expectations about their likely capacities.

But what if these expectations are rationally justified? The problem is that they generally aren’t. And the arguments on behalf of such expectations are so shockingly sloppy (as, e.g., Anne Fausto-Sterling shows), and the historical track record of such arguments is so wretched, that an employer’s indulgence in such expectations is overwhelmingly likely to be the result of an irrational bias, most often one unconsciously absorbed from the culture. In such cases we will say that the empoyer’s decision is shaped by racism or sexism – but in saying that, we are not (necessarily) saying that the employer is an evil, hate-filled person. After all, by analogy: most people are statists, but that doesn’t mean that most people are filled with hated for individual liberty.

Walter says in the same piece that the persistence of unjustified racist or sexist prejudices is unlikely, since “as we know from our study of business cycles, any such conglomeration of error cannot long endure without continued statist interference with markets.” Now of course we have “continued statist interference with markets,” so for anything Walter says here we could still have plenty of prejudice in the real world. But in any case I question the implied (and un-Austrian!) assumption that the market always gets us to equilibrium in the long run. There’s a difference between saying that the market has a tendency to equilibrium and saying that the market eventually reaches equilibrium. After all, everything on earth has a tendency to move toward the center of the earth, but that doesn’t mean that everything eventually gets to the center of the earth. Culture matters; it’s not just an epiphenomenon of the price system.

And of course, comme l’on dit, “we are market forces.”

Tonight I half-watched a series of National Geographic specials about vision, memory, illusions, and such. It was fascinating, and all the science in it was sound (AFAIK). But not all the purported science in it was science. What the series did (as is fairly typical for science programs) was to translate the scientific results into a conceptual framework that is actually philosophical (and philosophically controversial), not scientific. All the stuff about colour not existing in extramental reality, about our brains “filling in” background information, and so forth are part of a particular philosophical interpretation of the scientific data, not something one can simply read off the data.

I happen to think that the particular conceptual framework into which the National Geographic series was cramming its data is a deeply mistaken and oft-refuted philosophical confusion. But that’s not my point just now. My point is that the people who make shows like this don’t even realise that they are making any philosophical assumptions. And that in turn is because the entire field of philosophy is essentially invisible in our culture (meaning, in this context, American culture; things are a bit different in, say, France). People who are interested in what are actually philosophical questions generally turn to science or religion, because they are simply unaware that there are philosophical methods for addressing such questions.

You might say, “Williams, while there are gray areas in the Constitution, the U.S. Supreme Court would never brazenly rule against clear constitutional prohibitions!” That’s nonsense. The first clause of Article 1, Section 10 mandates that “No State shall … pass any … Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts.” During the Great Depression, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Minnesota law that restricted the ability of banks to foreclose on overdue mortgages, thereby impairing contracts made between lender and borrower. To prevent this kind of contract impairment – routinely done under the Articles of Confederation – was precisely why the Framers added the clause.

I agree, of course, that the Supreme Court has little compunction about overriding “clear constitutional prohibitions.” But I don’t think the example Williams has chosen proves his case. To uphold the obligation of a contract does not mean to uphold whatever the contract says; otherwise contracts to sell oneself into slavery, or contracts to assassinate another person, would be legitimately enforceable. Thus contracting to do X is not by itself sufficient to incur an enforceable obligation to do X.

And as Lysander Spooner argues:

“The obligation of contracts,” here spoken of, is, of necessity, the natural obligation; for that is the only real or true obligation that any contracts can have.

The court’s decision in Home Building & Loan Association v. Blaisdell thus counts as violating the constitutional prohibition on impairing the obligation of contracts only if those contracts were legitimately enforceable under natural law. Now maybe they were and maybe they weren’t; that moral question is not my current concern. My point is simply that one cannot determine whether the court violated the constitution in this case without addressing that moral question; it’s not something that one can simply read off the words.

The Benefits and Hazards of Dialectical Libertarianism (2.2, Spring 2001)

Keeping Context In Context: The Limits of Dialectics (3.2, Spring 2002)

Praxeology: Who Needs It (6.2, Spring 2005)

Reference and Necessity: A Rand-Kripke Synthesis? (7.1, Fall 2005)

A Beauty Contest For Dichotomies: Browne’s Terminological Revolutions (8.1, Fall 2006)

Interpreting Plato’s Dialogues: Aristotle versus Seddon (10.1, Fall 2008)

Most of those were my side of debates with other people, so you should probably go read their side too. Plus lots of other good stuff. Here.

MolinariSociety.org

Call for Papers

for the Society’s Symposium to be held in conjunction with the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division meeting, April 4-8, 2012, Seattle.

Symposium Topic:
Explorations in Philosophical Anarchy (II)

Submission Deadline:
September 30, 2011

The past two decades have seen a resurgence of interest, both in activist and academic circles, in Anarchist politics and theory, with new and challenging work from several different directions. Renewed academic interest in Anarchism has drawn attention to the importance, vitality and philosophical fruitfulness of key Anarchist arguments and concepts – such as the conflict between authority and autonomy; tensions between collectivism and individualism; critical challenges to hierarchy, centralized power, top-down control and authoritarian conceptions of representation; and the development of concepts of spontaneous social order, decentralized consensus, and the knowledge problems and ideological mythologzing inherent in relations or structures of domination.

Most of this discussion has, naturally enough, taken place within the field of political and moral philosophy. But Anarchist theory (like marxist or feminist theory) embodies more than a policy orientation or a system of moral or political theses. The Anarchist tradition offers a wide-ranging, diverse and vigorously argued literature, concerning the nature and foundations of human society, with implications for every aspect of philosophy, including not only political and moral theory but also aesthetics, social-science methodology, epistemology, and the philosophies of science, religion, history, language and logic. We are looking for papers that address possible connections, approaches, challenges or insights that anarchy and its conceptual environs may suggest for philosophy broadly – or that philosophy may suggest for anarchy – beyond the familiar territory of political and moral theory, especially in such areas as epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, and metaphilosophy or philosophical method. Papers from all analytical and critical standpoints (both with regard to philosophy and with regard to Anarchism) are welcome.

Please submit complete papers of 3,000-6,000 words for consideration for the 2012 Symposium by September 30, 2011. Papers should be of appropriate scope and length to be presented within 15-30 minutes. Submitting authors will be notified of the acceptance or rejection of their papers by October 10, 2011.

Submit papers as e-mail attachments, in Word .doc format or PDF, to longrob@auburn.edu or feedback@radgeek.com.

For any questions or information, contact us at the above email addresses.

* * *

Some possible topics include – but are by no means limited to:

• Authority and Epistemology
• Anarchy and Logic
• Illusions of control in philosophy
• Decentralism or spontaneous order in philosophy of language
• Philosophical implications of the work of “canonical” Anarchist theorists (Godwin, Proudhon, Molinari, Tucker, Spooner, Kropotkin, Tolstoy, De Cleyre, Goodman, Bookchin, Rothbard, Wolff, Zerzan…)
• Anarchy and Rationality
• Hierarchy, legibility and knowledge problems
• Philosophical Method and Anarchism
• Claims of representation and claims of knowledge
• Etc.

Please spread the word to anyone who you think would be interested in the symposium topic!

Addendum:

More info here.

I take your view to be as follows: that genuine knowledge includes a) awareness of our own subjective mental states, and b) the grasp of a priori conceptual truths like mathematics and praxeology, but not c) sensory perception and the judgments based thereon – and that the reason for this is that it’s possible for (c) to be mistaken while it’s not possible for (a) and (b) to be so, and that while it may be appropriate to believe things that could possibly be wrong, we shouldn’t claim to know them. And part of your reason for this latter claim is that treating beliefs that might be wrong as cases of knowledge is equivalent to deciding what knowledge is by randomly throwing darts at a dartboard.

So here are some of my objections (some of these I talked about yesterday, others not):

1. This is not how the word is used in ordinary language. In ordinary language, we regularly apply the word to fallible beliefs; and since use determines meaning, what we ordinarily mean by knowledge seems to be something that does not fit your criteria. So in effect you’re proposing to change the meaning of the word “knowledge, ” or you’re introducing some special philosophical sense of knowledge different from the ordinary one (call it Knowledge-with-a-capital-K). And then the question is why we should care about Knowledge-with-a-capital-K, as opposed to (what I’m tempted to call) real knowledge.

2. I suspect the attractiveness of Knowledge-with-a-capital-K depends in part on a couple of fallacies. One turns on the ambiguity of “if I know something, then I can’t be wrong about it. ” That’s true if it’s read as “NEC:(If I know that p, then I am not wrong about whether p)”; but there’s a tendency to shift illicitly from this claim to the stronger claim “If I know that p, then NEC:(I am not wrong about whether p).” But the latter claim doesn’t follow. (This is called a confusion of necessitas consequentiæ and necessitas consequentis.) The other fallacy is that of sliding from “If it’s infallible, then it’s certain” to “if it’s certain, then it’s infallible.” (That’s called affirming the consequent.)

3. The difference between a priori and empirical knowledge is not that the first is infallible and the second not. A priori knowledge is fallible too. After all, we can make mistakes in math, for example. I might be wrong in thinking that 32794 + 85649 = 118443; maybe I forgot to carry a 2 or something. The difference lies not in whether it’s fallible or not, but rather in what kinds of evidence are relevant to showing it to be wrong. Objections to empirical claims appeal to empirical evidence; objection to conceptual claims appeal to conceptual evidence.

A related mistake is that of confusing the necessity of the fact stated by a claim with the necessity of our being right about the claim. If it’s really true that 32794 + 85649 = 118443, then it is necessarily true that 32794 + 85649 = 118443; but likewise if it’s really true that F=G(m₁m₂/r²), then it’s also necessarily true that F=G(m₁m₂/r²), even though the former is a conceptual claim and the latter is empirical. But we could be wrong about either one.

4. The principle that we can only know things that can’t possibly be doubted doesn’t seem to pass its own test; that is, it seems possible to doubt (indeed I do doubt) that we can only know things that can’t possibly be doubted – so by its own standards that claim doesn’t count as knowledge.

5. The distinction between what we can know and what it’s appropriate for us to believe for practical purposes seems difficult to maintain. First, if I can’t know that there’s a table in front of me, then I can’t know that I have good practical reason to acts as though there’s a table in front of me either. Second, if a belief isn’t justified, then by definition we shouldn’t believe it; so there doesn’t seem to be room for a class of beliefs that are unjustified but that should be accepted for practical purposes. Third, it’s difficult to accept a belief and yet claim not to know it; “p, but I don’t know whether p” seems Moore-paradoxical.

6. I think your position makes sense-perception impossible. After all, if I look at a table and have a hallucination of a swan, my experience of the swan doesn’t count as my perceiving the table. Yet similarly, if I look at a table while simultaneously having a hallucination of a table, that doesn’t count as my perceiving the table either. But what if my sensory experience of a table is caused by the table; in that case is it now a genuine perception rather than a hallucination? On my view, sure; but I think your view requires you to say otherwise. For if you really think that a belief that’s only probably true is no better off, knowledge-wise, than throwing darts randomly at a dartboard, then I think you also have to say that as long as our experience of a table could be caused by something other than an actual table, then its status is equivalent to that of a hallucination even when, as chance has it, it’s caused by an actual table. And that means that we never make genuine cognitive contact with the world through perceptual experience at all; we’re always merely hallucinating, though some of our hallucinations are accidentally accurate. And as a result, all our knowledge of the world is hypothetical; we can know that if there are 2 + 2 bottles on the table, then there are four bottles on the table, but we cannot know whether there are actually any bottles on the table or indeed anywhere else.

I think what this view advocates then, is a kind of pathological alienation from the world. It means that you’ve never actually seen or touched a physical object; you’ve only theorised about them. Likewise you’ve never actually seen or touched another person; again, you’ve only theorised about them. The attitude your view seeks to inculcate has characteristics of mental illness.

More to the point, I think it’s incoherent. Here’s why. The ability to apply a concept (not exceptionlessly, but at least with reasonable reliability) is part of having the concept; we don’t count as having a concept unless we know how to apply it. After all, the process of acquiring a concept just is the process of learning to recognise and identify instances of it in our environment. But it’s an upshot of your view that we have no such ability to recognise and identify anything in our environment. But that would mean that we’d be unable not just to know but even to conceive of physical objects, or of minds other than our own; we’d be driven to solipsism.

For example, since we can identify agency only in our own case (I would claim we couldn’t even do that – since agency is a general concept its possession requires ability to apply it to more than one case – but never mind that for now), we can never apply the concept of interpersonal exchange, since that requires more than one agent. But that in turn would mean that we can’t even have the concept of interpersonal exchange thus, rendering praxeology impossible. (That’s what I meant in saying that we couldn’t even have praxeology unless our fallible empirical beliefs counted as knowledge.) Since in fact we do have the concept of interpersonal exchange, that shows that our ability to identify such exchanges is genuine even though it’s fallible. (Thus the skeptic’s inference from “you could be wrong in any particular case” to “you could be wrong in all cases simultaneously” doesn’t go through.)

A related point: you seem to accept uncritically the Humean empirical conception of perceptual experience. (Ditto for Hoppe when he says we can only perceive correlations and not causings.) The point of a Kantian approach is not to turn the realm of perception over to Hume but then retreat to a higher conceptual realm; rather it’s to claim that the perceptual realm is already conceptually ordered.