Sometimes I forget I’m a moral realist, because in reading the dialectic between moral realists and moral anti-realists, I almost always agree more with the anti-realists than I do with the realists. I can be rather harsh with moral realists.
One way I fall outside the mainstream of moral realists is that I am, in some ways, an eliminative materialist, even though eliminative materialism is considered anathema to naturalistic moral realism.
What is eliminative materialism? Patricia Churchland summed it up this way for Philosophy Bites:
One of the things you can see in the history of science is that there is a kind of progression… whereby certain old concepts get replaced by new developments…
As neurobiology comes to [engage] with higher-level concepts, what will those higher-level concepts look like? Will they look like folk psychology as it has been since ever, or will there be fundamental changes?
[Paul Churchland and I] made a prediction. The prediction was that… certain concepts might be modified, developed [and] eliminated as neuroscience progresses: [such concepts as] beliefs, desires, intentions…
I think the notion of “having a goal” is part of folk psychology, but I think that’s one of the concepts that is likely to be retained as a high-level psychological concept that really does fit quite well with neurobiological findings. Other concepts such as the notion of will… [are less likely to match anything in neurobiology.]
Patricia and many others are skeptical that our folk concept of desire will end up matching anything in neurobiology. Some think the concept of desire will end up being eliminated by neurobiology, just as we’ve had to discard our notions of “melancholy” or “sin” or “demonic possession” because they don’t actually match anything in our biology.
I don’t know what neurobiologists will discover, but I’m sympathetic to this view. And I think Patricia is right that “having a goal” is more likely to survive the next few centuries of neuroscience than “desire” is. The concept of “will” is probably the next one scheduled to go away.
Is Folk Psychology a Good Theory?
Why am I skeptical about the folk concept of “desire”?
Paul Churchland introduced a set of worries in 1981 with “Eliminative Materialism and Propositional Attitudes.”
Paul asked us to realize that folk psychology is a theory. We use concepts like “belief” and “desire” and “intention” and “fear,” to explain and prediction other’s behavior. For example, we say that “If John tells Sue she will get that raise she wanted, and then Sue does not get the raise, Sue will be angry at John.” And folk psychology makes accurate predictions about other’s behaviors much of the time, which is probably why we keep using it.
(Also, confirmation bias helps: We tend to forget all the times we predicted people’s behavior badly, and thus we think of ourselves as experts in human psychology and behavior.)
Abbreviating “folk psychology” as FP, Paul says “not so fast”:
…we must reckon not only with FP’s successes, but with its explanatory failures, and with their extent and seriousness. [Also] we must consider what sorts of theories are likely to be true of the etiology of our behavior, given what else we have learned about ourselves in recent history. That is, we must evaluate FP with regard to its coherence and continuity with fertile and well-established theories in adjacent and overlapping domains – with evolutionary theory, biology, and neuroscience, for example…
A serious inventory of this sort reveals a very troubled situation, one which would evoke open skepticism in the case of any theory less familiar and dear to us.
Consider, for example, what FP fails to explain: mental illness, creative imagination, intelligence differences between individuals, the function of sleep, the ability to catch a fly ball on the run, the internal construction of 3D objects from a 2D array of stimulations, visual illusions, the features of memory, the nature of the learning process.
Consider also the history of FP:
The presumed domain of FP used to be much larger than it is now. In primitive cultures, the behavior of most of the elements of nature were understood in intentional terms. The wind could know anger, the moon jealousy, the river generosity… These were not metaphors… the animistic approach to nature has dominated our history, and it is only in the last two or three thousand years that we have restricted FP’s literal application to the domain of the higher animals.
[Even still,] the FP of the Greeks is essentially the FP we uses today… This is a very long period of stagnation and infertility for any theory to display, especially when faced with such an enormous backlog of anomalies and mysteries in its own explanatory domain… To use Imre Lakatos’ terms, FP is a stagnant or degenerating research program, and has been for millennia.
FP’s prospects for theoretical integration are also grim:
If we approach homo sapiens from the perspective of natural history and the physical sciences, we can tell a coherent story of its constitution, development, and behavioral capacities which encompasses particle physics, atomic and molecular theory, organic chemistry, evolutionary theory, biology, physiology, and materialistic neuroscience. The story, though still radically incomplete, is already extremely powerful, outperforming FP at many points even in its own domain. And it is deliberately… coherent with the rest of our developing world picture. In short, the greatest theoretical synthesis in [history] is currently in our hands…
But FP is no part of this growing synthesis. Its intentional categories stand magnificently alone, without visible prospect of reduction to that larger corpus. A successful reduction cannot be ruled out, in my view, but FP’s explanatory impotence and long stagnation inspire little faith that its categories will find themselves neatly reflected in the framework of neuroscience. On the contrary, one is reminded of how alchemy must have looked as elemental chemistry was taking form, how Aristotelean cosmology must have looked as classical mechanics was being articulated, or how the vitalist conception of life must have looked as organic chemistry marched forward.
…what we must say is that FP suffers explanatory failures on an epic scale, that it has been stagnant for at least twenty-five centuries, and that its categories appear (so far) to be incommensurable with… the categories of the background physical science whose long-term claim to explain human behavior seems undeniable. Any theory that meets this description must be allowed [as] a serious candidate for outright elimination.
…FP is a theory, and quite probably a false one; let us attempt therefore to transcend it.
As if that were not bad enough, there is another set of problems that has to do with the apparent syntactic structure of “propositional attitudes” such as beliefs and desires. Consider a desire to visit Grandma in Texas. This desire appears to be composed to concepts like “Grandma” and “Texas” and “visit,” and these concepts must be arranged in a particular syntactic structure or else the desire would be for something else entirely, for example to visit Texas after visiting Grandma (who lives in, say, New Mexico).
Desires, then, appear to involve discrete symbols and combinatorial syntax. But the brain consists of action potentials, spiking frequencies, and spreading activation. As Patricia Churchland pointed out in Neurophilosophy, it’s hard to see how desires as we understand them will reduce to brain activity.1
But What About Desirism?
Desire is one of the foundational concepts in folk psychology. If folk psychology is a bad theory, then there may well be nothing in a completed neuroscience to which the term “desire” can be made to fit. So maybe “desire” is just an ancient folk concept that will have to be eliminated like “sin” and “demonic possession” and “melancholy.”
Considerations like those are why Alonzo Fyfe and I have long said that the greatest objection to desirism is the claim that desires do not exist. Strangely, opponents of desirism almost never raise this objection, but we think it is the strongest objection that can be raised against desirism, and we take it very seriously.
Desirism claims that value is a relation between desires and states of affairs. If desires don’t exist, then desirism is false, just like moral theories that invoke divine commands, intrinsic value, and other non-existent things are false.
So if I know about all these problems with folk psychology and the notion of “desire”, why do I defend desirism?
This will be the topic of my next post.