A Dennettian Ode

 

We know not what spurs our habits,

Our compulsions, our drives.

Most thought hides; we are but abbots,

Stewards of sacred hives;

Served by legions of selfless monks,

Who follow a scripture

Written by idiots and drunks.

The mind is a picture.

Morphological Mayhem

STUDY THIS CLOSELY AND BEHOLD UTTER CHAOS

Any third parenthetical argument following a verb is a notable, regular, inconstant feature.

The un-inflected and suffixal varieties of the free morphemes "pos-" and "pound"

pose (verb; transitive);  pose (verb; intransitive, "for"), pose (noun), posit (verb; transitive, "that-clause"), posit (noun), position (verb; transitive, reflexive), position (noun)

pound (verb; intransitive, "on"), pound (verb; transitive), pound (noun)

The most promiscuous prefix groups using these varieties

propose (verb; intransitive), propose (verb; transitive), proposal (noun), proposition (verb; transitive), proposition (noun)

propound (verb; transitive)

expose (verb; transitive, reflexive), exposure (noun), exposition (noun), expository (adjective)

expound (verb; intransitive, "on"), expound (verb; transitive)

impose (verb; transitive, reflexive), impose (verb; intransitive, "on"), imposing (adjective), imposition (noun)

impound (verb; transitive)

dispose (verb; intransitive, "of"), disposition (noun), disposal (noun), disposal (adjective)

depose (verb; transitive), deposition (noun), deposit (verb; transitive), deposit (noun)

DOES NOT EXIST: proposit (noun), proposit (verb), proposure (noun), propository (adjective), proposing (adjective), proposal (adjective), exposition (verb; transitive), exposal (noun), exposal (adjective), exposit (verb), exposit (noun), expose (noun) [we had to borrow French "exposé"!], exposing (adjective), impository (adjective), imposal (noun), imposal (adjective), imposit (verb), imposit (noun), impose (noun) [we had to borrow French "impôt"], imposition (verb; transitive), dispound (verb), dispository (adjective), disposit (verb; transitive), disposit (noun), dispose (noun), disposition (verb, transitive), disposing (adjective), depound (verb), depository (adjective), deposal (noun), deposal (adjective), depose (noun), deposition (verb; transitive), deposing (adjective)

Other Pairs with Semantically Related Prefixes:

compose (verb; transitive), composite (noun), composite (adjective), composition (noun), compound (verb; transitive), compound (noun)

oppose (verb; transitive), opposite (adjective) [pronounced with different stress!], opposition (noun)

DOES NOT EXIST: opposite (noun), oppound (verb; transitive), oppound (noun)

 

suppose (verb; transitive, "that-clause"), supposition (noun), suppository (noun)

superpose (verb; transitive), superposition (noun)

DOES NOT EXIST: superpose (verb, transitive, "that-clause"), superpository (noun)

 

transpose (verb; transitive), transposition (noun)

interpose (verb; transitive, reflexive), interposition (noun) [rare]

Mewing and Facial Structure: A Critical Appraisal

About a month ago, I watched an entire, almost 2 hr-long video of a discussion on "evolutionary dentistry" and the effect of "oral posture" and jaw exercise on dental alignment and facial structure (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYpPu-NrYSI). I'm not saying you shouldn't judge me negatively for this use of time - in fact, I recommend that you don't also use your time in this way- although the conversation was fairly engaging, and I have long been interested in evolutionary dentistry and facial morphology generally. The participants were one Bret Weinstein, perhaps the most 'lefty' member of the "Intellectual Dark Web", a former biology professor and a man I would describe as very grandiose, self-important, overconfident, articulate and largely thoughtful; and Mike Mew, another self-assured internet celebrity who has risen to prominence as a result of his promotion of a branch of medicine called "Orthotropics" and the set of exercises recommended by this fledgling science, known popularly as "mewing" (because Mew himself was the main populariser). Orthotropics seems to be intellectually founded upon an evolutionary-cum-physiological theory consisting of the following core propositions:

(1) The human jaw grows in response to chewing especially in early infancy (but also afterwards);

(2) A wider jaw means less tooth-crowding and typically ends up generating a correct bite;

(3) One's bite and facial structure are (also) affected by tongue and mouth posture, and may be nontrivially altered by changing one's posture even in adolescence or adulthood;

(4) The vast majority (?) of people could have entirely avoided malocclusion and related dental problems if they had been forced to chew more often in early life, and if they had maintained optimal oral posture throughout their life. (I translate this as follows: malocclusion may have a genetic underpinning similar to height - variation within populations is largely genetic (some people may be more susceptible to malocclusion than others) but the environment plays a very large role overall.)

There's also a more speculative outer belt to Orthotropics, or at least Mike Mew's personal version of it. Some of Mew's other proposals (evidenced in the interview) are as follows:

(5) Oral posture has a flow-on effect on general posture, and vice versa (the two form an influence circle);

(6) Chronic mouth-breathing has terrible effects on general health, including e.g. cognitive health, heart health and possibly even leading to acne;

(7) Maintaining optimal oral posture and frequently exercising one's jaw can also affect the shape of one's face more generally, making one's mid-face wider and flatter, and increasing the distance between the eyes;

(8) Traditional orthodontics would be (almost ?) completely unnecessary if everyone could maintain the optimal habits of oral posture from a young age. 

I shall now review each of these claims in turn.

Proposition (1) is supported mostly by evidence from archaeology comparing hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural societies, and by evidence from hunter-gatherer societies. There are two parts to the justification:  

(1.1) In hunter-gatherer societies, individuals are forced to exercise their jaw significantly more than in agricultural societies, and especially more than in modern industrial societies; 

(1.2) Hunter-gatherer peoples therefore tend to have wider and larger jaws, and overwhelmingly less malocclusion, than in these other populations. 

(1.1) breaks into two further sub-parts. 

(1.1.1) The 'norm' in hunter-gatherer societies, now and in the past, is that infants start chewing fibrous and otherwise chewy foods from a much earlier age than infants in modern societies. 

(1.1.2) Foods harvested by hunter-gatherers tend to be much chewier in general than most foods in the industrialised diet. 

The way Mew puts this idea in the interview with Weinstein is to say that we get our calories "too easily", whereas hunter-gatherers typically have to chew for a long time on raw, fibrous roots and undercooked or raw meats. Certainly, there are no ready-made "baby foods" for hunter-gatherers to feed their teething infants, and it seems intuitive that there would be less availability than we have of soft, high-calorie foods (soft breads, dairy products, sugary drinks and ice creams all result from complex industrial processes, and industrialised people probably also have better access to tender meat). 

In the interview, Mew claims at one point that searching for contemporary hunter-gatherers on Google Images will quickly demonstrate that the vast majority of hunter-gatherers have strong, wide jaws and good bites. I think that this is clearly wrong, as I tried it and saw plenty of images of people with small, narrow jaws and significant overbites. Consider, for example, the man in the first image on this website: https://www.crooked-compass.com/blog/hunter-gatherers-of-tanzania/. Try it for yourself. 

 I'm not saying this necessarily falsifies (1), because arguably the strongest evidence for (1) comes from archaeology: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0117301. There's also some palaeo-anthropologists and geneticists who think humans have undergone a kind of "self-domestication" in the last 10,000 years or so, leading to more neotenous faces (characterised by shorter face length, narrower faces, smaller skulls and bigger eyes) (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5646786/, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/677209?seq=1). This, if true, would likely be both genetic and environmental in causation and manifestation, so the implication for (1) is not straightforward. Regardless, it's important to bear in mind that, even if (1) is true, any jaw growth that is stimulated by chewing will be constrained by nutritional quality and health, as all growth is. If an infant is in a calorie-deficit, or lacks important nutrients, it seems unlikely that they will develop a powerful jaw, especially if they lack nutrients that are essential in bone-development. In a lot of his rhetoric, Mew seems to avoid this fact, or perhaps doesn't recognise it at all.

(2) is, I think, more or less conventional wisdom in dentistry and orthodontics generally. I think experts may disagree on the extent to which it is true - e.g. what "typically" actually means, statistically, which would be a complex problem - but I don't really think it's a position unique to Orthotropics. So that's a plus for Orthotropics. With this said, things can go wrong with teeth whether you have a narrow jaw or wide jaw. For example, the tooth roots can be disrupted via trauma, causing teeth to grow at wonky angles. I think I have this issue to some extent with one of my front two teeth (it is positioned slightly askew and sticks further forward than my other front tooth), possibly as a result of the fact that I lost my front two baby teeth violently when I was 7 (tripping and falling on a tree root).

(3) is the key to the explosion of Orthotropics on the internet. Again, I think that this is very close to conventional wisdom in orthodontics, except taken up a notch. Certainly, orthodontists all recognise that the growth of teeth is influenced by the various forces at work within the mouth, and that teeth respond, especially in early life, to physical feedback by moving and shifting. That's why braces are a thing! Similarly, all orthodontists agree with some of the stuff that Mew says about the benefits of nose-breathing and lip-sealing, e.g. that chronic mouth-breathers are much more prone to buck teeth.

The questionable part of this proposition is the second part: what I've described as the idea that adult facial structure - dental alignment, and palate and jaw width - "may be nontrivially altered by changing one's posture". To be clear, this is not a quote from Mew but an inference. Whilst I haven't quoted him, I feel that I actually have phrased the doctrine in a way that is actually quite understated, given what I've seen. (Obviously, this is a very vague and ill-defined proposition, with two weasel words in combination - "may" and "nontrivially" - but I don't think he himself has any kind of precise statistical model.) For example, he sometimes seems to say quite extreme things: if you watch 30 seconds of this video from the timestamp in the link (https://youtu.be/ZNocCJNicrc?t=211), you will see him describe his belief that one day while driving he managed to expand his "upper dental arch" after literally 45 minutes of exercise. Similarly, though he equivocates a little, he ends up endorsing to Bret Weinstein that his older teenage can be weaned off the retainer he is about to get from his orthodonist if he (the son) manages to implement the correct mewing techniques. (Mew also endorses that Weinstein's younger teenage son need not get braces at all if he can implement mewing). In general, the tenor and rhetoric of Mew's Youtube videos seems to encourage the idea that adults, too, can achieve significant results that will improve their quality of life. I've learned from here (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/20/magazine/teeth-mewing-incels.html) that the Mews' Orthotropics movement did start out focussed on children and that the push to claim that it could work for adults came largely from internet acolytes. But it certainly appears that Mike Mew has come to endorse the idea that his therapy is very much worth pursuing for adults. 

(4) is, arguably, just a corollary of (1) and (2), and similarly rests on evidence from hunter-gatherer societies and archaeological remains of pre-agricultural people. It also might be defended using evidence from other mammals, and at one point during the interview Mew or Weinstein (can't remember which) raises this idea. Again, we are forced to resort to vague language in describing it: what exactly does "the vast majority" mean, and how different would people's habits have to be? The translation I have made in brackets probably brings the idea closer to being falsifiable and helps specify the counterfactual in a more nuanced way (allowing for the Orthotropics theory to survive the existence of a society where everyone followed the correct practices for maximising jaw growth and yet a lot of people had underdeveloped jaws, because of, say, very poor nutrition). But even including that translation may err on the side of "steelmanning" too strongly, as Mew doesn't ever seem to talk about genetic variation in innate jaw size, which may indicate that he hasn't thought about this much. (He also never seems to explicitly reckon with the idea that some people are born with jaws so small - for genetic or other reasons (such as Foetal Alcohol Syndrome) - that it's likely impossible to avoid malocclusion, even under perfect conditions. Incidentally, lots of things can go wrong in the womb, affecting facial structure - for example, I have identified certain asymmetries in various parts of my own head that lead me to believe that the right side of my skull was squashed slightly either in the womb or during the process of birth. This, I believe, is extremely common.) Depending on how we do interpret this proposition, it's potentially undermined by the fact that lots of things can cause malocclusion, such as disease and (again) poor nutrition. And contra some speculations made in the interview, wild animals can definitely suffer malocclusion: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjRuYP07LDrAhVFbSsKHet1A24QFjAMegQIARAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbioone.org%2Fjournals%2FJournal-of-Wildlife-Diseases%2Fvolume-40%2Fissue-2%2F0090-3558-40.2.185%2FORAL-DISEASE-IN-FREE-LIVING-RED-SQUIRRELS-SCIURUS-VULGARIS-IN%2F10.7589%2F0090-3558-40.2.185.pdf&usg=AOvVaw1F41WeqE0vkn8nTrFyLBy5). So, certainly, there's a reasonable interpretation of this proposition under which it is wrong.

Now onto Mew's speculations.

(5) seems to me reasonable enough, but probably overstated (at least the way Mew states the "flow-on effect"). Although the main aspects of mewing are just tongue posture and lip sealing, another facet seems to be holding your head up straight, which is I think because it subtly engages one's masseter muscle (apparently good) and puts a little more pressure on one's front teeth. Holding your head up straight is certainly a way to mitigate bad posture, but, then again, there are some people - for example, my grandma - who probably always hold their head up in a normal way but succumb to kyphosis due to muscle weakness and whatever else. Posture is complicated.

(6) Not going to comment much on this because I don't really know. I do at least know that Mew is not the only person who thinks that chronic mouth-breathing is very bad for one's health generally. The acne hypothesis that he throws out to Weinstein is pretty odd - for what it's worth, my pet theory on acne is that it's made worse by constantly washing one's face with soaps, similar to how scalp oil production seems to respond somewhat to the frequency of shampooing - but at least he makes clear that it's just rank speculation.

(7) I'm very sceptical of this one. Again, I am more disposed to believe that activity in infancy may cause your adult face to look very different, but I'm very sceptical that adults can change their facial structure so dramatically (and, again, I'm not sure Mew is wholly consistent on this in any case).

(8) is very similar to (4) - almost a corollary. The reason this isn't a mere corollary of (4), however, is that I've left out the chewing-in-early-life part in the phrasing of (8). As I've made clear, Mew's rhetoric wavers, and at points during the conversation (and I think in some of his other videos), the importance of chewing in early infancy gets de-emphasised. This proposition is also significant for directly motivating a recurring theme of the discussion with Weinstein: the hypothesised influence of institutional and professional incentives on the poor reception of Orthotropics and Mike Mew among orthodonists. 

My personal experience with "mewing"

A month or two before I watched the video with Mew and Weinstein, I started changing my own oral posture according to what I understood the practice of "mewing" to be. I had first learned of "mewing" a long time before that, via a Youtube recommendation, and had also tried implementing the same practices at that time. I gave up quite early on the first time because the change in my tongue position was causing me to salivate a lot and it didn't seem to make a noticeable difference to my masseter engagement or the balance of pressures on my teeth. Even though I made exactly the same changes for my second attempt, and experienced the same initial problem with saliva production, I pushed through this and began to successfully engrain this new tongue position as a habit. After a while of doing this, I looked in the mirror at my bite one day and perceived that it looked straighter than I remember it being. Also, my front two teeth seemed slightly less forward-leaning than I remembered. I wasn't 100% sure - in fact, not even really sure at all (I try consciously to be a good Bayesian) - but it seemed evidence of a positive benefit. I also felt like my nose-breathing was possibly slightly better than usual.

But then I discovered that what I had been doing wasn't even "mewing"! In fact, it turned out that my natural oral posture was closer, if not already the "optimal" posture! (I'll get to what this says about the effect of "mewing" in a minute.) This confusion had come about because my initial resource was (I think) some video by Mew where he had described mewing as holding your tongue against "the roof of your mouth", and I figured that I was supposed to raise the tip of my tongue back and higher, behind the upper alveolar ridge and onto the slope at the beginning of the hard palate. In fact, the concept is more about holding your tongue high in your mouth generally. The tip can just sit anywhere behind the front teeth, ahead of or on the upper alveolar ridge (this is where the tip of my tongue was *naturally* positioned, and so it probably is for most people). I found this out from another Youtube video debunking "common myths", and this person's debunking was then confirmed by looking at another of Mike Mew's own videos in light of this understanding. After I realised my mistake, I also came across an old video where John Mew (Mike's dad and seemingly the progenitor of the movement) describes the ideal posture simply as the position of the tongue when one says "nnnnnnn". As far as I can tell, this is a 0-effort oral posture for me - I can't sense any movement of my tongue from its default position when I do utter this sound. So, if this is still Mewing orthodoxy, my oral posture was already optimal before I started doing the slightly more unnatural thing that I thought I was supposed to be doing.

Now, I'm not sure that Mike Mew (his son, and the main guru of the movement) would agree that the optimal posture can be encapsulated by this description. He seems to emphasise the idea that the "posterior third" of your tongue should also be against the rough of your mouth, which doesn't seem to be the case for me when I say "nnnnn". The problem with this idea is that I don't really have much control over the posterior third of my tongue. I can feel that my masseter muscles contract a little when I try to push my whole tongue up as high as I can in my mouth (I think this is "hard mewing") but, even supposing I tried to do this for many minutes or hours every day, it doesn't seem likely that this would cause a re-structuring of my face. (You could say my guess that it doesn't "seem likely" is not very good grounds for dismissing the idea, except that the effect on my masseter engagement is small, and for a small difference in masseter engagement to cause, over time, a change in bone structure significant enough to restructure my jaw would be pretty damn shocking to me!)

In summary, I think I already had close to optimal oral posture before I learned about mewing - and I certainly was always making an effort to keep my lips sealed and breathe through my nose (the most basic aspects of "mewing"). I think I probably even was swallowing the 'correct' way most of the time (i.e. relying only on the buccinator muscles) before I learned about "mewing". So whilst I guess that's good for me, it also suggests that mewing is essentially common-sense. More importantly, this further suggests that the practice can't really be that efficacious, given that there must be millions of people like me, with narrower-than-average palates and natural overbites, who have these conditions despite decent oral posture! To be fair, Mew does also recommend that people chew a lot of gum and regularly practise a tongue exercise called "tongue chewing" while doing so. But the main thing he emphasises is posture.

After I discovered that I had been confused, I decided, for obvious reasons, to put my tongue back to where it was before. So, in all, this whole experiment was a waste of time! 

 

Concluding Thoughts

 

A final word on Orthotropics. Some parts of the underlying theory behind Orthotropics seem to me reasonable, as I've made clear. However, Mew's statements often lack nuance, and he is not always fully consistent and precise. I think he is sometimes vague deliberately. In particular, he seems to employ a "Motte and Bailey"-style rhetorical strategy: he makes quite bold statements and promises - which lures in people hopeful that they can make themselves more beautiful and healthy - but at other times falls back on the idea that he's just promoting good old-fashioned "common-sense" (he actually says just this near the start of the conversation with Weinstein). Of course, Mew should not necessarily define this movement in general - that's why I made an effort to separate the core theoretical ideas from his personal speculations - but he is clearly the main driver. It's also worth bearing in mind that, just as traditional orthodontists are potentially financially incentivised to disparage Orthotropics and insult Mew, Mew is financially incentivised to over-promise on the benefits of "mewing" and disparage traditional orthodontics, because, as he says to Weinstein, this movement has become his entire career!

Personally, I don't think traditional orthodontics ought to go the way of the Dodo. Or at least, I certainly am not at all convinced. With that said, I do think there's intriguing evidence for the idea that aspects of our modern environment cause reduced jaw development, and that jaw growth can be stimulated by chewing, especially in infancy. I am sufficiently disposed to believe this that I have decided that if I have kids of my own, I will try to get them chewing things as early as possible (I am aware that raising children is very challenging and that for various reasons it can be hard to shape them as you might want, so it may be that I later renege on this.) But since I discovered that my personal tongue posture is pretty much 'correct' already (which also suggested to me that most people's tongue posture is probably correct), and when you recognise that most people already swallow in the way advocated by John and Mike Mew, mewing seems far less interesting. 

 

Overall, I suspect that, even if it keeps growing in popularity on the internet, mewing will probably not change the world. I suspect its ultimate impact on the world will be relatively neutral. It's possible Orthotropics will have a net positive effect on the world; I think this is most likely if the infantile-chewing part gains popular currency. But I believe it's equally possible it could have a negative effect on the world also, if those people who really need orthodontic treatment get suckered by Mike Mew's more radical claims. 

In short, the picture is nuanced, as many things are.

Returning to a Topic Previously Discussed on this Blog, but now with a better Wiki discussion - what the MWI of QM says about DEATH

 If the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is true, I think it follows that falling asleep and death are not very different events. This causes me anxiety. 

The Many Worlds interpretation of QM implies that at every moment ‘you’ are splitting into a vast number of copies of you in different worlds. From the point of view of your individual subjective experience, this may not seem like a plausible view, but once you understand the details of the view, you see that it doesn’t pose any direct inconsistency with this experience. There’s a famous Wittgenstein anecdote (due to Elizabeth Anscombe, a participant in the alleged conversation) that’s relevant to this: 

“Tell me," Wittgenstein asked Elizabeth Anscombe, "why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?" She replied, "Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth." Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?”

Subjectively, you only inhabit one stream of thoughts and consciousness that seems unbroken and whole because you are a pattern along a path through the infinitely branching universes. But in the broader context of reality, there are infinite copies of patterns very similar to the pattern that characterises you.

When you wake up in the morning, what makes it seem that you are ‘continuing on’ from yesterday as a single being is that you have a flood of memories of ‘your life’, of the things you have to do during the current day and of the night before. Again, it may feel to you that there is one and only you, but in fact there is nothing in this experience that is logically contradictory with the idea that while you were sleeping there was a gargantuan number of branchings, and the specific you that is most particularly you is just one of many yous who are a little different.

You might find it a little baffling that you - each version of you - only ever experiences one arbitrary pattern of a vast multitude of similar pattens. Why don’t I experience multiple consciousnesses at once? That is because the emergent ontology which includes human beings and experience only emerges at each ‘moment’ of decoherence (wave function collapse), so it makes no sense to suppose that one could have experience of multiple decohered worlds at once.

How does this bear on death? Well, it implies that death perhaps doesn’t even matter all that much in the grand scheme of things, because it’s just death relative to a world. There will be plenty of other worlds where you don’t die at that moment you die relative to the particular one your pattern is experiencing. And so, likely, a pattern extremely similar to yours will be isomorphic to conscious experience in another world. What’s scary is that this conscious experience in this other world may very well be associated with significant physical and/or mental suffering, which is certainly a common thing among moribund people.

As I’ve written about previously, the great philosopher David Kellogg Lewis cooked up an unimaginably horrific scenario out of this, suggesting that the ultimate implication was that, at any moment, in any universe, ‘you’ should expect to live eternal life in likely massively decreased health and therefore more suffering. All injuries, accidents and diseases will be outlasted on a multitude of branches, simply because there are so vastly many. And in many of these you will retain a lively mind, full-bodied consciousness, and therefore a full capacity to suffer. In those, the pattern of existence most similar to your own consciousness will live on, endlessly.

This is the thing that causes me anxiety. And not even necessarily for selfish reasons, either; it just suggests, in general, that the multiverse might be full of terrible suffering.

Luckily, there are a number of responses to this. It would seem that many Many Worlds proponents do not believe (though I don’t think anyone is quite sure) that at each, say, 100-year time-slice of the overall tree of worlds, there is an infinite number of branches containing at least one pattern that is very similar to you as an adult person, at some point during your adult life as you remember it. Instead, there is probably only a very large finite number of such branches and such consciousness-associated patterns at each time-slice. And if this number is finite, this opens the possibility for variation between such time-slices. In particular, it seems plausible to think that the number of such patterns in the overall multiverse might start to decay at a certain point, as you die or decay along most branches. 

You might also think that physical decay should statistically be associated with decay in consciousness, so that the combination of physical suffering with full-bodied consciousness is less probable.

You might also ask: Does probability even matter? Once you start thinking objectively about suffering, beyond the fear of subjective suffering, it would seem that the answer is Yes, because the less suffering in the overall multiverse, the better. But just so long as there are always a vast number of consciousnesses experiencing great suffering, some element of fear or foreboding seems natural.

There’s a lot of fascinating commentary on this issue on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality

Analysis of real-world feasibility[edit]

In response to questions about "subjective immortality" from normal causes of death, Max Tegmark suggested that the flaw in that reasoning is that dying is not a binary event as in the thought experiment; it is a progressive process, with a continuum of states of decreasing consciousness. He states that in most real causes of death, one experiences such a gradual loss of self-awareness. It is only within the confines of an abstract scenario that an observer finds they defy all odds.[1] Referring to the above criteria, he elaborates as follows: "[m]ost accidents and common causes of death clearly don't satisfy all three criteria, suggesting you won't feel immortal after all. In particular, regarding criterion 2, under normal circumstances dying isn't a binary thing where you're either alive or dead [...] What makes the quantum suicide work is that it forces an abrupt transition."[14]

David Lewis' commentary and subsequent criticism[edit]

Philosopher David Lewis explored the possibility of quantum immortality in a 2001 lecture titled How Many Lives Has Schrödinger's Cat?, his first - and last, due to his death less than four months afterwards - academic foray into the field of the interpretation of quantum mechanics. In the lecture, published posthumously in 2004, Lewis rejected the many-worlds interpretation, allowing that it offers initial theoretical attractions, but also arguing that it suffers from irremediable flaws, mainly regarding probabilities, and came to tentatively endorse the Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber theory instead. Lewis concluded the lecture by stating that the quantum suicide thought experiment, if applied to real-world causes of death, would entail what he deemed a "terrifying corollary": as all causes of death are ultimately quantum-mechanical in nature, if the many-worlds interpretation were true, in Lewis' view an observer should subjectively "expect with certainty to go on forever surviving whatever dangers [he or she] may encounter," as there will always be possibilities of survival, no matter how unlikely; faced with branching events of survival and death, an observer should not "equally expect to experience life and death," as there is no such thing as experiencing death, and should thus divide his or her expectations only among branches where he or she survives. If survival is guaranteed, however, this is not the case for good health or integrity. This would lead to a cumulative deterioration that indefinitively stops just short of death.[2][15]

Interviewed for the 2004 book Schrödinger's Rabbits, Max Tegmark rejected this scenario for the reason that "the fading of consciousness is a continuous process. Although I cannot experience a world line in which I am altogether absent, I can enter one in which my speed of thought is diminishing, my memories and other faculties fading [...] [Max Tegmark] is confident that even if he cannot die all at once, he can gently fade away." In the same book, philosopher of science and many-worlds proponent David Wallace[16] undermines the case for real-world quantum immortality on the basis that death can be understood as a continuum of decreasing states of consciousness not only in time, as argued by Tegmark, but also in space: "our consciousness is not located at one unique point in the brain, but is presumably a kind of emergent or holistic property of a sufficiently large group of neurons [...] our consciousness might not be able to go out like a light, but it can dwindle exponentially until it is, for all practical purposes, gone."[17]

Directly responding to David Lewis' lecture, British philosopher and many-worlds proponent David Papineau, while finding Lewis' other objections to the many-worlds interpretation lacking, strongly denies that any modification to the usual probability rules is warranted in death situations. Assured subjective survival can follow from the quantum suicide idea only if an agent reasons in terms of "what will be experienced next" instead of the more obvious "what will happen next, whether will be experienced or not". He writes: "[...] it is by no means obvious why Everettians should modify their intensity rule[note 3] in this way. For it seems perfectly open for them to apply the unmodified intensity rule in life-or-death situations, just as elsewhere. If they do this, then they can expect all futures in proportion to their intensities, whether or not those futures contain any of their live successors. For example, even when you know you are about to be the subject in a fifty-fifty Schrödinger’s experiment, you should expect a future branch where you perish, to just the same degree as you expect a future branch where you survive."[15]

On a similar note, quoting David Lewis' position that death should not be expected as an experience, philosopher of science Charles Sebens concedes that, in a quantum suicide experiment, "[i]t is tempting to think you should expect survival with certainty." However, he remarks that expectation of survival could follow only if the quantum branching and death were absolutely simultaneous, otherwise normal chances of death apply: "[i]f death is indeed immediate on all branches but one, the thought has some plausibility. But if there is any delay it should be rejected. In such a case, there is a short period of time when there are multiple copies of you, each (effectively) causally isolated from the others and able to assign a credence to being the one who will live. Only one will survive. Surely rationality does not compel you to be maximally optimistic in such a scenario." Sebens also explores the possibility that death might not be simultaneous to branching, but still faster than a human can mentally realize the outcome of the experiment. Again, an agent should expect to die with normal probabilities: "[d]o the copies need to last long enough to have thoughts to cause trouble?[note 4] I think not. If you survive, you can consider what credences you should have assigned during the short period after splitting when you coexisted with the other copies."[18]

Writing in the journal Ratio, philosopher István Aranyosi, while noting that "[the] tension between the idea of states being both actual and probable is taken as the chief weakness of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics," summarizes that most of the critical commentary of David Lewis' immortality argument has revolved around its premises. But even if, for the sake of argument, one were willing to entirely accept Lewis' assumptions, Aranyosi strongly denies that the "terrifying corollary" would be the correct implication of said premises. Instead, the two scenarios that would most likely follow would be what Aranyosi describes as the "Comforting Corollary," in which an observer should never expect to get very sick in the first place, or the "Momentary Life" picture, in which an observer should expect "eternal life, spent almost entirely in an unconscious state," punctuated by extremely brief, amnesiac moments of consciousness. Thus, Aranyosi concludes that while "[w]e can’t assess whether one or the other [of the two alternative scenarios] gets the lion’s share of the total intensity associated with branches compatible with self-awareness, [...] we can be sure that they together (i.e. their disjunction) do indeed get the lion’s share, which is much reassuring."[19]

Analysis by other proponents of the many-worlds interpretation[edit]

Physicist David Deutsch, though a proponent of the many-worlds interpretation, states regarding quantum suicide that "that way of applying probabilities does not follow directly from quantum theory, as the usual one does. It requires an additional assumption, namely that when making decisions one should ignore the histories in which the decision-maker is absent....[M]y guess is that the assumption is false."[20]

Tegmark now believes experimenters should only expect a normal probability of survival, not immortality. The experimenter's probability amplitude in the wavefunction decreases significantly, meaning they exist with a much lower measure than they had before. Per the anthropic principle, a person is less likely to find themselves in a world where they are less likely to exist, that is, a world with a lower measure has a lower probability of being observed by them. Therefore, the experimenter will have a lower probability of observing the world in which they survive than the earlier world in which they set up the experiment.[14] This same problem of reduced measure was pointed out by Lev Vaidman in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.[21] In the 2001 paper, "Probability and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory", Vaidman writes that an agent should not agree to undergo a quantum suicide experiment: "The large "measures" of the worlds with dead successors is a good reason not to play." Vaidman argues that it is the instantaneity of death that may seem to imply subjective survival of the experimenter, but that normal probabilities nevertheless must apply even in this special case: "[i]ndeed, the instantaneity makes it difficult to establish the probability postulate, but after it has been justified in the wide range of other situations it is natural to apply the postulate for all cases."[22]

In his 2013 book The Emergent Multiverse, David Wallace opines that the reasons for expecting subjective survival in the thought experiment "do not really withstand close inspection," although he concedes that it would be "probably fair to say [...] that precisely because death is philosophically complicated, my objections fall short of being a knock-down refutation." Besides re-stating that there appears to be no motive to reason in terms of expectations of experience instead of expectations of what will happen, he suggests that a decision-theoretic analysis shows that "an agent who prefers certain life to certain death is rationally compelled to prefer life in high-weight branches and death in low-weight branches to the opposite."[3]

Physicist Sean M. Carroll, another proponent of the many-worlds interpretation, states regarding quantum suicide that neither experiences nor rewards should be thought of as being shared between future versions of oneself, as they become distinct persons when the world splits. He further states that one cannot pick out some future versions of oneself as "really you" over others, and that quantum suicide still cuts off the existence of some of these future selves, which would be worth objecting to just as if there were a single world.[23]

Truth: the Final Word

My Thoughts on Truth and the Philosophical Truth Discourse Accumulated over Years of Contemplation

Foreword:

A lot of the material here dates back to a bigger Google Doc project I worked on with my best friend for more than a year, maybe two years, and which we both essentially abandoned around two years ago. Other things are more recent. This information is not important and you wasted your time reading this. Enjoy.

I’ve always been a bit mystified by the philosophical debate over so-called “theories of truth”. One reason is that I don’t really think we need a ‘theory of truth’ per se, and another is that it seems to me a failed enterprise, given that all the candidates for stand-alone “theories of truth” seem not to match our intuitions about the role the lexeme TRUTH plays in a large set of sentences in natural language (each one fails on a different large set of sentences in natural language). This forces the proponents of these theories to declare large swathes of natural language somehow infelicitous, which is confusing to me, as I can’t understand why you would propose a ‘theory of truth’ that doesn’t account for large swathes of language. The ‘resolution’ to this problem is to hold that humans are getting it wrong somehow, a take which requires that truth is a real thing: some entity in an external reality of abstracta which binds to some other set of abstract entities - theories or propositions or theorems or some other class of things, which therefore must also exist in this abstract realm. But even if one was inclined to believe such a thing (for what it’s worth, I personally tap out of philosophical inquiry once I hear so much as a mention of the ontological status of abstracta), it doesn’t seem like anyone has any arguments as to why this truth stuff in this abstract realm would only choose to bind to the class of entities that their theory favours, i.e. why it would only choose propositions which ‘represent’ or ‘picture’ aspects of reality (Correspondence Theory), or why it would only choose coherent groupings of propositions (which I imagine as propositional goo in the abstract ether) (Coherentism) or why it would refuse to bind to anything exactly but instead kind of float around certain propositions and theories that prove useful to human endeavours (Pragmatism). There’s certainly no mechanism that anyone has identified, so far as I can tell, because nobody knows the scientific laws of this postulated abstract realm! (Also, if truth is a real entity, does accuracy also exist in a similar fashion? Correctness? Validity? Rightness? Do they somehow reduce to one real entity? I’m sure that someone has examined these questions, but I would bet good money the answers are wack.)

Deflationism is the ‘theory of truth’ that supposedly one turns to if one does not have such commitments to abstract reality. But despite its anti-metaphysical positioning, it also proposes a way of understanding TRUTH that tries to explain away common usage as some kind of mistake. Deflationism basically says that “is true” is a redundant predicate, because you’re already “asserting” whatever it is you’ve uttered before you add “is true”. This wonderful trick goes by the name the “Equivalence Schema”, and it’s literally a triviality (at least in its most common version: https://stanford.library.sydney.edu.au/entries/truth-deflationary/). This theory accounts for usage cases where people describe someone as “speaking truths”, or say “That is a true statement”, by saying that the people in question are endorsing (or asserting(?what does this mean?)) the propositions behind those utterances. 

Incidentally, it kind of seems like this proposition entity plays a big role in the Deflationist theory, and, whilst I could be wrong, it just struck me that there’s something problematic about this. The very idea behind Deflationism – in particular, the idea behind showing the possibility of removing truth-language - is similar to the Expressivist move in meta-ethics to try to show that statements about “good”, “bad” (etc) can be translated into sentences which merely express sentiments, and other similar moves in philosophy. The thought is, “If I deny that X is a real entity, I have to show that communication makes sense without it.” Mutatis mutandis (as the great Jerry Fodor used to say), the proud placement of this “proposition” word in the Deflationist theory seems to suggest a metaphysical commitment to the reality of propositions. And yet, it seems kind of weird that if you don’t believe truth is a real entity, you’d nevertheless believe in the abstract reality of propositions, given that the proposition is usually defined as the truth-bearing entity. Maybe there’s some sense to the idea of propositions existing and truth not, or maybe there’s some way of re-describing proposition in the Deflationist theory using other terms that imply ‘ontological commitment’ to entities that are less troublesome. But it sure seems a mess!

So, basically, not really a fan of Deflationism either.

You might reasonably ask: if I’ve rejected all these theories, then what could I possibly believe? Does this not leave me in the foggy hinterland of Nowhere, stranded, lost, directionless?  My own view, which I accept may be irrational somehow, is that we don’t need to propose an alternate ‘theory’. I think that the project is flawed! 

The following undertaking is a related project which I think is slightly more useful: an analysis or account of the TRUTH lexeme/concept that explores the many different functions served by the word/concept in different contexts, and the different things that can be said about what justifies an attribution of “truth” in these different contexts. As the Deflationist theory suggests, truth, like its sibling words – accuracy, correctness, validity, rightness – is used in the context of speech acts relating to endorsement or approval, and I believe it is interesting to examine the different rules necessary to induce this endorsement in different social games. It’s also interesting to explore what happens when you approach certain areas of discourse without the traditional philosopher’s penchant for linguistic imperialism (it’ll become clear what I mean by that in the course of events).

So, without further ado, here’s my own analysis of TRUTH.

Preliminaries:

It seems to me that having an anti-metaphysical take on truth renders it impossible to separate your analysis of TRUTH from your ethical beliefs about when people should deploy this TRUTH lexeme. If you are one of these ‘realists’ about truth (as in, one of these believers in the realm in which theories and propositions gallavant and frolick, conjugally bonded for eternity to either Truth or Falsehood corpuscules) then many deployments of TRUTH become ‘wrong’ in the profound sense that they are factually incorrect. On this view, when people attrbute truth to a proposition that has none, they literally misdescribes the abstract reality (incidentally, this raises the question: is there are a meta-abstract realm which grounds statements like “It is false that the proposition The moon is made of cheese is true.”? What about “It is true that it is false that … is true””? An infinite regress of such realms?). But if you’re less inclined to join this tribe, then the only ‘wrong’ you have at your disposal is the familiar ‘wrong’ from ethics, rather than this more intuitively powerful normative force of misrepresentation of abstract reality. That is why I must begin by laying out my own view on the ethics of TRUTH usage.

The only way I can think to express my own normative stance on these special words is using Wittgenstein’s term “language game”, which I define as any “form of life” (roughly, set of social rituals enacted in a certain cultural or physical context or set of such contexts) with a characteristic associated language/discourse. Here are some suggestive examples: number theory, calculus, propositional logic, conversations about sport, being at church (/worshipping), small talk, philosophical seminars, philosophical ethics, metaphysics, physics, chemistry, university lectures, literature discussion groups, gaming, Dungeons and Dragons, making love. (No requirement of non-overlap.) I define a language game to be “epistemically complex” if it commonly involves lexemes like TRUTH, ACCURACY, CORRECTNESS, VALIDITY, and if it relies on a sophisticated set of non-random principles or rules of justification/proof to warrant the invocation of these lexemes (that is, it has a sophisticated internal logic for deciding the utterances/statements/assertions/theories which get the “truth” label (or similar labels such as “correct” or “accurate”), versus those that don’t). I also rely on a further distinction between “formal” and “informal” language games of this type (this distinction is bimodal but continuous), where the “formality” refers to the precision of the proof rules, so that the best example of “formal” language games are the language games of mathematics or logic, and all other languae games are on a continuum away from these. Making heavy use of these categories, I can sum up my normative/ethical take as follows:

i) for any statement, assertion, sentence or theory produced within the context of an epistemically complex language game (ECLG), the question of its truth (its warrant to be called “true”) might as well be determined by the conditions/rules appropriate to the language game in which these utterances/notions are produced, whether these rules be formal, not-at-all formal or in-between;

ii) that for informal ECLGs, any statement acceded to by a large majority is clearly not false (at least, from the point of view of someone making her judgment using the appropriate rules), whereas in formal ECLGs, this need not be true because a large majority could (in principle, at least) be following the rules incorrectly, or at least not seeing the potential for new rules that everyone will ultimately agree match the spirit of the game (where the game is in this case a mathematical/scientific enterprise) (this statement makes most sense in mathematics and begins to make less sense as we move into the sciences, but I hope the idea can be understood));

iii) that some ECLGs ought to be altered, replaced or even destroyed on the grounds that this may help bring people towards a more scientific understanding of certain aspects of the world around them.

The last of these requires exemplification. A good example is any community of believers in ‘woo’ or abject mysticism – e.g. believers in ghosts – who, necessarily, aren’t relying on scientific or scientifically adjacent justification rules. If possible without causing strong negative outcomes, it seems to me morally desirable to try to alter or dismantle the language games in which these people promulgate these ideas, because I think the world would be a better place if fewer people believed in such things. 

Ethical stance articulated. Now onto the mains...

Overview

It seems to me that one of the most crucial things to note about TRUTH is that there are reasonable and socially effective invocations of this lexeme that, in their semantic context, suggest divergent things about relationship of the concept of truth to justification and epistemology. I think this is part of the reason as to why these different ‘theories of truth’ cropped up to begin with.

This can be observed even within the context of scientific discourse: I will show that standard ways of attributing the property of “truth” to a scientific statement or a theory can’t be unified in terms of the underlying ideas about how truth (the concept) connects to epistemology. I will also illustrate that in ethical discourse the TRUTH lexeme/concept has a very different, and still interesting and valid, role. In illustrating this, I will defend my (ethical) view that philosophers have no right to declare that all applications of TRUTH in ethics are wrong or bad. Later, I’ll try to clear up some confusions left over by this discussion. 

As the dessert course, I’ll supplement the criticism I made of theories of truth earlier with a full-frontal assault on the ‘Correspondence Theory of Truth’ specifically, by arguing that many commonsense ‘truths’ which purport to be about the external world are merely conceptual (meaning that the class of statements for which a correspondentist analysis is at least potentially appropriate is smaller than is commonly believed).

Part I: Science is True and not True, but not Both at Once

I had to start my analysis by laying out normative principles because people wield this TRUTH lexeme in mutually incompatible ways, and one needs a way of adjudicating between them. As you’ve seen, I tend to have a chill ‘peace and love’ vibe about this whole thing. My aim is to show that truth talk is so messy that any alternative would lead to truly crazy conclusions about the constraints we ought to impose on language.

When I say that people wield TRUTH in mutually incompatible ways, the “incompatibility” I’m referring to is the implication of the relevant utterances about the connection of truth to epistemology. Crucially, I’m not just saying that people from different walks of life exhibit this incompatibility when compared against each other, but that it is fairly natural for even the same person to use the word “true” in these mutually incompatible ways. And I can illustrate this with an example of how science people talk about scientific theories.

The following seems to me an unremarkable sentence: “Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity is true – it has survived over 80 years of experimental test and produced predictions that are being confirmed even today (e.g. gravitational waves)”. One can easily imagine a physicist or someone with an interest in physics, saying something like that to introductory students, or maybe to a crowd of people who are ignorant or distrustful of modern physics. In fact, I believe I’ve heard utterances very similar to this. The following also seems to me an unremarkable sentence: “We have good reason to think that Einstein’s theory isn’t absolutely true, because in current form it can’t be brought into harmony with quantum mechanics and because of the ‘pessimistic meta-induction’.” One can imagine a similar person – even the same person, perhaps – saying this in the context of a philosophy of science seminar. Again, I think I’ve heard utterances very similar to this (because in fact it is true to say that GR is incompatible with QM, because there is no gravity in QM and there are apparently technical reasons why we can’t just dismiss gravity as “an emergent property”).

But obviously, if you’re being pedantic about truth, the two sentences are at odds! In the first situation, the use of this imprimatur, “true”, supposedly has to do with the strong empirical status of the theory (giving correspondentist vibes). In the second situation, “true” is being used in a way that’s favourable to a kind of Peircean account, which says that a true theory is a theory that’s unbetterable at the “limit of inquiry” - on which account there are arguably no true scientific theories at present! 

Karl Popper, the philosopher of science whom scientists tend to like the most, was a Peircean about truth in this way, arguing that scientific theories aren’t true exactly, but that they merely approximate the truth in the sense that they logically imply a greater number of true propositions than their predecessors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verisimilitude). I somehow doubt, though, that all scientists who admire and claim to agree with Popper would want to put away the truth language when talking about scientific theories, especially given that we all, as humans, tend to apply the truth predicate to many statements and notions that don’t remotely have the epistemic status of our best physical theories (I’ll take that as an obvious observation, though it’ll also be demonstrated amply by later discussions).

Again, my point in raising this is normative: it seems to me that it would be very silly and wrong to try to correct people when they talk about our best scientific theories in a given field as being “true”. These uses of truth are both fine, in their respective contexts! This kind of incompatibility might become weird and confusing if a person mixed up their use of TRUTH in the context of a single lecture, say, but otherwise it doesn’t pose a problem.

Part II: Contra the Philosophers, Ethics is a Complex Game Worthy of Ethical Respect

Outside of the Ivory Tower of academic meta-ethics, it would be extremely peculiar to describe as either “false” or “not true” the sentence “You shouldn’t murder your own children”. Supposing you put that proposition to the average person (in a way that didn’t make you come across as mentally unwell or whatever) and asked whether it was “true” or “false”, I suspect that the response, idealising away the existence of trolls and other assorted louts, would be some variation of “Yes, that is certainly true!!!” (Perhaps this claim ought to make you angrily cry Unscientific appeal to psychological speculation! But somehow I suspect that will not be the reaction. And I think everyone can accept the basic point that this statement seems quite obviously morally ‘right’ or ‘correct’ or, at the very least, ‘conventional’.)

And yet many philosophers think that people are ‘wrong’ to think this way!

One class of philosophers who think this way go by the name Expressivists. Expressivists claim that when people make moral judgments like this, the literal meaning of the words is basically irrelevant, because they’re really just expressing an attitude or emotion or both. Since expressions of attitudes or emotions are not the kinds of things to which we could conventionally attribute “truth” or “falsehood”, they argue that the best approach is to declare all moral judgments to fall in the class of utterances which are “neither true nor false”.

I don’t agree with this view at all. Whilst the logic makes sense, the claim that the only thing the average person is doing when they make such a statement is expressing an attitude or emotion seems to me an empirical claim falling within the domain of social psychology, and, interpreted as such, it seems totally silly. Even ordinary people get into arguments about morality; my experience is that humans overwhelmingly think there are rights and wrongs to evaluating rights and wrongs. And ordinary people clearly have no problem using the words “true” and “false” in evaluating moral judgments like the one mentioned. This suggests that, in addition to being expressive or sometimes expressive and commissive speech acts, expressions of moral judgment are typically assertions or assertoric, i.e. put forward as “facts”.

Further, it is clear, as innumerable authors have pointed out, that it is common and perfectly felicitous to conditionally embed ethical judgments as if they were propositions (“If killing elephants is wrong, then killing whales is wrong”), which obviously poses problems for expressivism. Clearly, you can’t successfully ‘translate’ this sentence into a form where the speaker is just talking about their emotional states! 

This seemingly takes away the reasons to say that moral judgments are “neither true nor false”.

Another clan, going by the name Error Theorists, take the view that, since people think they are asserting “truths” or “facts” but are actually using language that has no place in any modern science, the correct reaction is to think, “They are wrong, they are stating falsehoods”. I think that this kind of argument makes a kind of intuitive sense; I also think that to declare oneself an Error Theorist is sort of sexy (you are part of the small community of people who realise that people are actually talking nonsense when they talk about morality! And everyone else is a naive fool!). The issue I have with it is that I don’t believe that the fact that Darwin banished cosmic purpose from the scientific worldview means that you have to be so supercilious and snooty about moral language games. In fact, I think it’s a bad look. 

… You might say this is not an argument, and you would be right, but that would be to miss the broader point that Error Theorists’ arguments don’t themselves attempt to argue that we should call ethical judgments “false”, or that we should think of them as false; they make no argument that we need to collapse all language games into one. They merely argue that ethical statements don’t, under the harsh light of logical analysis, seem to be talking about experimentally detectable or otherwise perceptible properties of the fully mind-independent world. They think the normative implications of this are obvious presumably because they are ‘realists’ about truth, meaning that these ethical statements are as bad as any other factually incorrect statements, in that they clearly don’t express propositions which match the propositions bonded to the truth substance in the abstract realm. But without this assumption, this line of reasoning doesn’t at all imply the normative claim that we should call or think of ethical judgments as “false” (an Error Theorist knows she can’t justify any normative claim, by definition.). Even if I agree - and I do - that Darwin showed that the already logically questionable theory of agential design of life is completely unnecessary to explain the wondrous phenomena of life, and that “good” and “bad” do not exist in the fully mind-independent world, it doesn’t force me to judge negatively the usage of words like “true” and “false” in ethical/moral contexts. In fact, this insight makes no difference just so long as I am able to keep in my mind that ethical language belongs to a different language game or games to, say, fundamental physics, and that it doesn’t undermine science for different parts of natural language to have their own truth conditions appropriate to the game in which we use the language. This is, of course, similar to a standard objection to Error Theory and Realism made by expressivists.

Clearly, Error Theorists don’t think it’s a problem that they would come across as batshit insane were they to say to their family at Christmas “I believe the claim that “You shouldn’t kill your own babies” is false.” But the fact that saying this definitely would come across as nuts, or at least a bit kooky, is indicative of the fact that the Error-Theoretic position involves applying standards to moral language games which are totally inappropriate to use. Why can’t we have our ethical debates and discussions even if good and bad aren’t properties that have reality in the fully mind-independent world? We clearly can! After all, even those of us who do have this metaphysical view still engage in ethical debates and discussions.

I can imagine someone potentially pushing back on this way of thinking using the ethical stance I myself laid out in the Preliminaries, in particular, (iii). If one were to successfully demonstrate that the language game of ethics is epistemically primitive, i.e. that ethics is not an ECLG, or that it’s a highly informal ECLG – that is, that the rules for determining felicitous attributions of “truth” and “falsehood” to ethical statements/judgments are haphazard, random and highly subjective – then this might give one an (ethical) reason to try to undermine this language game entirely.

But I believe this view is closed off in ethics, because at least certain kinds of ethics language games can be very complex and rather formal. To put it another way, the other problem with both these Expressivism and Error Theory is that they make it seem as if the rich system of norms that sophisticated, intellectual moral discourse involves – with logic playing a central role – is just some kind of “illusion”. That is, I think that both these theories of ethics are bad at ‘accounting for’ the language game of academic ethics - in particular, what I believe to be the true proposition that some ethical arguments are good (rigorous, solid, plausible), whilst others are bad (incoherent, unsound, reliant on intuitions that almost nobody shares). The word “true” is the main word academic ethicists, and other people involved in sophisticated ethical debates, use to demarcate those moral stances that have on their side the strong weight of relevant considerations from those that don’t. Consider the following.

Analytic ethics survives because (crudely) some ethical judgments are more logical than others. In slightly more precise terms, I have developed the following simple model of ‘rational ethical discourse’:

“Person A agrees with person B that x (where x is some ethical principle or a highly general ethical judgment). Person B points out that person A is violating x in the case of y (where y is some specific issue: women’s rights, race, animal welfare, abortion, whatever). Person A argues that position on y is not a violation of x because of an error in Person B’s argument, or because of empirical considerations which Person B has overlooked. The debate either continues with furthe discussion of the merits in each other’s arguments or onto further discussion of the empirical considerations.”

(A similar model of rational belief-resolution, modified so that Person A and Person B become two perspectives within a single individual’s mind, goes by the name “reflective equilibrium”.)

It may be argued that, even if such a model of civil debate captures what occurs in the ‘best’ cases of ethical disagreement, the level of ethical disagreement that exists in our world suggests that typically such debate doesn’t work very well in helping people change their mind. This might in turn suggest that this style of discourse does not face adequate constraints of precision to meet an intuitive standard for discourse that can reasonably be called “truth-seeking”. In other words, it is not a stable-consensus discourse, where this term refers to a discourse with sufficiently precise rules of inference that we should expect rule-following participants in the discourse to eventually reach the same conclusions (or, in the language of the Preliminaries, it does not belong to a sufficiently formal ECLG). Even if it is possible for people to sometimes make some degree of ‘progress’ on ethical conflicts by working out that one of the views would require a conflict with a principle that they both hold dearly, it doesn’t happen often (or so the imaginary critic says). More damningly, it seems like a process that is inherently slippery or gameable, given that ethical principles, unlike mathematics theorems, are vague, natural-language formulations which do not have completely precise implications. For example, “Murder is bad” may seem an unambiguous principle - a bit like a mathematical theorem or logical tautology - until you recognise that:

(i) people don’t always agree in classifying events as “murder” (e.g. there is disagreement about whether abortions can be cases of “murder”, and there is often ambiguity between manslaughter and murder); 

(ii) the word “murder” is stretchy, especially in a war context, where if people view certain acts of killing as righteous, they tend to not want to call them “murder”, even if they’re probably or obviously outside of the laws of war (e.g. there are certainly disagreements in our society about whether dropping bombs which predictably kill civilians makes the orchestrators complicit in “mass murder”, and I believe many would bristle at calling the assassination of Bin Laden “murder”, even though it was an extra-judicial killing outside of the context of a war); 

(iii) it’s not immediately obvious how to weigh the “badness” of murder against other things (so we might imagine people having different intuitions about how much non-lethal maiming an individual would have to mete out to have done something equally as “bad” as committing a murder); 

(iv) people can wriggle their way out of their apparent commitment to a principle like “Murder is bad” by saying “Yes, murder is always bad, except in this case”; 

and so on. 

So the very words we use to describe states of affairs in the world on which we’re casting ethical judgment - e.g. “muder”, “charity”, “nurturing”, “genocide”, “rape”, “liar”, “caring” - are themselves debated endlessly due to their fuzziness and temporality and emotion-ladenness. 

Of course, the problem with ethical discourse being gameable in this way is that it would seem to undermine the idea that we can reasonably make judgments about the “rationality” or “well-motivatedness” or “validity” of ethical judgments, because it suggests that the reasons people believe they have for their ethical judgments or claims could always be called into question by someone operating according to the most ‘proper’ standards of ethical argumentation. It suggests, in fact, that two people both abiding by the most elite standards of ethical argumentation might nevertheless never reach an agreement on a case, because, e.g., they keep refining their principles to account for counter-examples, instead of changing their mind on cases, or define words in different ways and refuse to budge. None of this is even to mention disagreement about overarching ethical frameworks, which lead to subtly different principles and ways of thinking being invoked. In making the comparison to logic or mathematics, people often compare these frameworks to differently axiomatised systems in those fields. This might almost seem an ‘out’ for the idea of ethical reasoning as analogous to formal reasoning, except that I think that this form of persistent disagreement I’ve been describing occurs even between people who have a similar or the same overarching framework. Evidently, this is unlike the reasoning of logic and mathematics, where the proper standards of argumentation are sufficiently constrained (within the given proof system) so as to leave no ambiguity about the right conclusions, once the relevant proofs have been arrived at. (Another way of putting the disanalogy is that, in ethics, we never arrive at decisive proofs at all!)

The best response to this rebuttal may be to concede that whilst ethical discourse, even at its best, is not a stable-consensus discourse – in other words, the ECLG that is academic or sophisticated ethics is only moderately formal at best - it may still be a discourse with sufficient constraints that people can be shifted along the ‘landscape’ of ethics by the perturbations of reasoned argumentation, i.e. that instead of one equilibrium state, there are finitely multiple. Different ‘initial conditions’ may lead to different results, but it doesn’t mean that the discourse isn’t consensus-achieving in certain areas, or among communities of people with similar dispositions, or whatever. There are at least reasons of a kind involved in ethical discourse, and people can definitely respond to them (as I know I have on this or that issue). I think this is enough to make it justifiable in many cases for people to use words like “rational”, “valid” or “well-reasoned” with respect to ethical arguments or claims.

And, as the philosopher Crispin Wright has noted, certain ethical statements do meet one interesting criterion of discursive equilbrium that he has dubbed superassertibility. As I understand it, a superassertible statement is one that is warranted by the standards/rules/proof procedure of the discourse or language game, and could never become un-warranted unless those rules substantially evolve. Superassertible statements in a less formal ECLG are sort of like the axioms of formal ECLGs. “Murder is bad” is perhaps one such example in ethics; despite how fuzzy that statement actually is, it’s inconceivable that saying it could ever become seen as “false” or “distasteful” or “repugnant” or whatever, without a substantial shift in probably human nature itself.

To sum up, whilst I don’t subscribe to the view that all, or even most, ethical controversies do admit of an obviously more rational verdict – nor Parfit’s view in On What Matters that we should be seeking a general theory of ethics – it is an important fact to bear in mind that the tools of logic and generalisation are often meaningfully deployed in ethical discourse, and that ethical discourse can be consensus-promoting at least some of the time.

This seems to me both interesting in itself, and also an ethical justification for not sermonising that people are making a ‘mistake’ or ‘error’ in using truth language in these contexts. Respect the complexity!

(It’s an interesting question to what extent similar remarks as those above might be applied to aesthetics. I will not explore it here because it’s actually a kind of massive topic. I do at least believe that there is such a thing as sophisticated aesthetic discourse which relies on reasons, but we think it’s probably significant that many fewer people call themselves aesthetic realists than call themselves moral realists. I think there are not any statements exactly like “You shouldn’t kill your own children” or “Murder is bad” in aesthetics… (maybe “Michelangelo was a brilliant artist” comes close… but clearly it’s not quite the same).)

Part III: This is Not Relativism

I understand that many philosophers would be deeply concerned by the way I have defended “ethical truths” (even if they agreed with the bit about rational ethical discourse), since the reasons I adduced in favour have at least a ring of “relativism” or extreme scepticism to them. The idea that (as they would put it) what is true is determined by the utterances that people overwhelmingly agree to call “true” may strike the average hard-headed analytic philosopher as worryingly Rortyan (and the layman as worryingly Postmodern NeoMarxist). 

As it happens, I do not see my remarks on the possibility of “ethical truths” in the relativist or extreme sceptic light at all. Although these views I have expressed may have a lot in common with Rorty’s (I’m not sure – I read parts of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature before casting the book aside because it was too vague, unclear and unpersuasive), I am very much much in the camp of the “anti-relativists” in terms of tribal loyalties and identify as a scientific naturalist. In terms of my views about metaphysics, I think of myself as a neo-Positivist or neo-Positivist-Pragmatist, and my main philosophical influences are Hume, Quine, Dennett, and Ladyman and Ross . Not only that, I am partial to speech acts like “It is a form of insanity to deny objective truth”, “There is no such thing as personal, subjective truth”, “Science converges on truth” (etc), and I tend to be hostile to speech acts like “There is no objective truth”, “There are other ways of knowing apart from Western science”, “Il n’y a rien dehors de la texte”, “Nietzsche was the greatest philosopher to have ever lived” (etc).

‘But,’ our imaginary maddog realist asks, ‘How can this be?’ 

I don’t think that the above implies I have an incoherent set of beliefs, but I can understand why some philosophers might think so, because it feels that way, even to me (I worry myself that I have fallen into inconsistency). The solution, in my mind, is this:

(I) I do believe that language is useful for exchanging information about mind-independent phenomena – that it can and often does serve this purpose. My rejection of the Correspondence Theory of Truth doesn’t rule out the belief that some locutions ‘represent’ reality in at least the minimal sense that they give us information about the world that we can use to make accurate predictions. But there’s a whole other class of locutions that merely give us information about our interlocutor’s mental state. I think that truth language, because it’s related to endorsement, falls into the latter class.

(II) I think that one can fully justify the epistemic supremacy of this theory over that – e.g. of contemporary fundamental physics over Aristotelian or Newtonian physics - without leveraging this truth notion directly. Obviously, it may be common in philosophy of science to say such things as “Einstein’s Theory of Relativity implies more true propositions about the universe than Newtown’s mechanics”. And in doing this kind of epistemology – in making discriminations between empirical theories - one clearly must lean lean on the notion of a successful/accurate/true prediction. But the centrality of the truth language here does not mean that truth exists!

First, with respect to the Einstein claim, I think one can say essentially the same thing in a different way: “Einstein’s Theory of Relavity implies more physical implications that have been verified by experiment.” Crucially, this move effectively leaves us only having to deal with the notion of a successful or true prediction. Meanwhile, I believe I can analyse this notion without painting myself into a corner, as follows: a successful prediction consists in some event or set of events where some scientist precisely describes some model or makes some precise statement, and some later event or set of events where some kind of observer observes a certain configuration of phenomena that match the model or earlier statement. Done. Nothing I have said rules out my ability to consistently use the language I just used. (As always in philosophy, there is an endless amount to be said about the words used in trying to analyse other words.. For example, can I analyse this invocation of the word “match”, or was that just a covert replacement for “successful” that really gets us no further? Well, it just so happens that I think I can partly unpack the notions of ‘matching’ or ‘representing’ in terms of information theory, but we shan’t go there. My point is that I don’t think my view’s anymore susceptible to attacks on these sort of ontological grounds than the ‘theories of truth’.)

This does not mean, as also indicated before, that the word “truth” is dispensable. It’s an immensely powerful imprimatur of ideas we want to endorse, and gives us shortcuts for agreeing with people (e.g. we can say “Everything X says is true” rather than asserting each statement separately). But the point is this: denying that “truths” are ‘out there’ (implying that huge swathes of language, and many forms of life, are ‘wrong’), does not mean being a relativist or extreme sceptic. 

Well, that’s the start of the explanation at any rate; I understand that the concerns may persist. Here is an obvious concern. There are contemporary communities, and throughout history there have no doubt been societies, where the majority of people, even the ‘smart’ people or ‘intellectuals’, apply the word “true” (or its nearest-equivalent in their language!) to sentences or theories which no intellectuals today would apply this word to (“The Earth is flat”, “The body has four humours”, “X is a witch”, “God created the world in 7 days”, “God gave us souls”, etc). And the logic I have relied on hitherto implies that these sentences are true within these communities (for these people), or were true within these communities or societies (for these people), if the majority of these communities do/did find it felicitous to call them “True” (or, to put it in a way more concordant with the spirit of our thinking, that they at least weren’t misusing any language, and that their contemporaries probably didn’t have good reason to try to correct their language). If you reflect on this for a second, there’s actually nothing scary about this logic at all, because within our community we know that these beliefs are false; they are not true for us, and we have good reasons for declaring them false. We have good reasons for perhaps even calling these beliefs “absurd” and so on when we talk amongst ourselves; depending on the circumstances, we may have good reasons to try to tell the superstitious communities among us directly that their beliefs are false according to our, superior epistemic standards (the restriction is that we ought to stay in accordance with the principles I laid out in the Preliminaries). And is this really such a traumatic conclusion? Are you realists not satisfied? …

Actually, there is one more thing I must deal with to make sure that I am understood. As I made clear much earlier, I regard logic and mathematics, and also physics, chemistry (etc), as “language games” in themselves (again, the ‘language game’ concept is for me very stretchy - for simplicity we can think of “mathematics and logic” as one language game in this context). You can only play these language games properly if you obey the rules (the rules in logic and mathematics are usually formal and precise, obviously (axioms and simple rules of inference, or more complicated deduction rules that everyone agrees on), whereas the rules in the sciences are more complicated), and people are right or wrong about their statements or claims and (trivially) therefore also right or wrong about their ascriptions of “truth” and “falsity”. The ethical principles I have put forward do not imply that there is something unethical or misguided about a mathematics professor telling a student that they are wrong when that student is indeed wrong. And it does not imply that mathematical truths are relative in any way shape or form. In fact, in mathematics, the rules are sufficiently precise (even before deduction rules were formalised in mathematical logic by figures like Frege, Russell and Hilbert, and even before we realised that the ‘top-down’ Euclidean approach to founding mathematics doesn’t work [Lakatos] because we don’t have enough absolutely self-evident axioms) that (as far as we’re aware) the major results in the history of mathematics conjectured to be true and later disproven were actually false according to the same deduction rules and technical-term definitions by which mathematicians were operating when most of them thought they were true. 

Obviously, science language games are much different than mathematics and logic: the whole system of standards, the rules of the game, have evolved massively over time (especially, of course, with the Enlightenment and Galilean Revolution); standards of rigour continue to shift and change (consider the internal battles in the social sciences, or the String Theory Wars in physics); and technical-term definitions change with every big theoretical upheaval. For these reasons, it’s hardly surprising that when scientists and philosophers of science talk about science, they will use the word “true” in ways which imply different things about the relationship of truth to justification. But, again, similar would apply to mathematics, insofar as the rules in certain science language games are sufficiently constrained that one needn’t be a relativist about game-specific falsehoods – e.g. I can happily endorse labelling as “falsehoods” the ramblings of a crank physicist, because what makes him a crank is that he is not following the rules of rigorous physics (the language game of academic physics)!

Part IV (Dessert): “Grass is green” does not Represent Reality

I have a critique of the Correspondence Theory of Truth that I believe is somewhat novel (probably not really novel, but I think unconventional to be sure). It turns on the observation that the number of felicitous, socially effective and natural applications of the word “true” for which the Correspondence account, despite all its vague generality, makes no sense whatsoever is much larger than people conventionally think. 

I used to be heavily invested in the field of cognitive science and its various sub-fields and offshots. There’s a simple theory in cognitive linguistics which goes by the name Prototype Theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_theory). This Theory basically states that human concepts of commonsense entities such as household objects and animal species are (a) internally graded and fuzzy, and (b) that we have strong intuitions of the belongingness of entities to given categories based on the perceptual ‘distance’ (morphological/chromatic/textural difference) of those things from the prototypical exemplars of the categories in our heads, almost as if we model belongingness to a category against a single central ‘model’ or ‘pattern’. In my view, this Theory seems pretty accurate and is decently well-supported by experimental studies. 

A very common syntactic form in English is the subject-predicate sentence form where the subject is some simple taxon and the predicate is some simple everyday property. Examples of such sentences are “Grass is green” and “Trees have leaves” or “Bananas are yellow” or “Elephants are big”. I mention this subsequent to my introduction of Prototype Theory because I think that what makes these sentences seem true is that the prototype of the subject-concept in our head has the property mentioned, even if the instantiations of the taxon in the external world often do not really have the property in a robust or consistent way.

As I just implied, those examples I inserted above seem to me good examples of sentences that people intuitively and overwhelmingly believe to be true. I cite as evidence, for the first at least, the fact that this sentence is commonly used in logic courses as an example of a “true proposition”. Despite this status as True Sentences, it seems to me that the more you reflect on such sentences, the stranger their intuitive truthiness seems. For starters, it is evidently not true that all grass is green, nor that all trees have leaves. In fact, it seems to me that most people would agree that the assertions “All grass is green” and “All trees have leaves” are false (the third of our original examples, altered in this way, seems also false and the last one becomes at the very least not obviously true). One could try to defend the ordinary truth evaluations on the grounds that the first two assertions are empirical generalisations - although one must concede that, functioning as generalisations, their truth conditions are extremely vague and probably elude precisification altogether (the majority of the surface area of every single identifiable, living organism falling within the Family Poacaea is green? This is silly for a million and one reasons.). The key to solving this mystery is understanding the psychological explanation for our attribution of Truth to these sentences, which goes as follows: 

Mental prototypes have determinate properties. Sentences which have a very superficially similar grammatical form are evaluated for truth against different propositional ‘architectures’. We evaluate the truth of the claims “All grass is green” or “All trees have leaves” against a broader background or situating `architecture' of alternative propositions – drawing on more background knowledge – than we do for the claims “Grass is green” or “Trees have leaves”. “All grass is green” comes out false because the universal quantification forces us to think beyond the prototype, about all the instantiations of the taxon “grass” and their various forms, and the same for “All trees have leaves”. The claims that “Grass is green” or “Trees have leaves” are, nevertheless, we say, true. Why? The answer is Prototype Theory. The first comes out true because the GRASS prototype, which seems to be describable as something like “healthy, lawn grass”, can take only one colour property, and it is GREEN, not red, not yellow, not blue. Similarly, “Trees have leaves” comes out true because the prototypical tree in our head has leaves. There’s no ambiguity because the prototype can’t have and not have leaves; the prototype has determinate properties. Despite what philosophers have thought since time immemorial, these propositions are really conceptual truths, not truths about the world. 

And so now we see where the Correspondence Theory comes in. Most advocates of the Correspondence Theory would claim that Grass is green is a classic example of a proposition whose truth is ‘explained’ or ‘accounted for’ by their theory… but it’s not, because the correct explanation is merely psychological! Furthermore, I think that this point cuts across a very large amount of language. Sure, it is true that grass is a real enough entity and greenness is a reliable property to attribute to things, so thinking about grass and greenness is not like thinking about unicorns epistemically, but insofar as what could possibly explain why we endorse these clearly true sentences with the word “true”, the “Correspondence Theory” is a non-starter.

I can imagine an objection to this which concedes that the proposition expressed by the statement “Grass is green” actually pertains to that subset of grass in the world which is close to the prototype in our head (i.e. when we say “Grass is green” we express something closer to Healthy lawn grass looks uniformly green, at least from a distance) and yet that this is compatible with the Correspondence account because the Correspondence account explains the truth of the actual proposition/s being expressed by the statement. This is probably the best move (rather than saying Grass is green is actually false, though I can imagine that move being made also), as it comes close to forcing me to retreat to my other critiques of the theory. The way I would push back is by re-asserting that this truth is in fact merely conceptual. When we say Healthy lawn grass looks uniformly green, we’re still just talking about a concept in our head, which is inherently defined by greenness. It’s like saying “Green grass is green”. 

I’m sad that I had to finish by revealing my belief that the category of “conceptual truths” is far larger than most philosophers believe – which hints at my broader perversions in the area of semantics – but philosophy takes us to strange places. Sayonara.