Those familiar with my more general views will be unsurprised to find me ranting about the need to find philosophical room for the normative, as well as the causal. In this respect, this typical thread in my ranting aligns in effect with two points made by Frege (1984 p. 351) in noting that “[e]rror and superstition have causes just as much as correct cognition.”  Now, it seems to me that in the fairly recent past there has arisen a new way of making a similar mistake

McFee, Graham

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Aesthetic Investigations (E-Journal, Dutch Association of Aesthetics)

An Old Dog Rants Backwards: 1AuthorGraham McFeeAffiliationCalifornia StateUniversity Fullerton,USAAbstract: What is wrong with causalist approaches to our valuing.Those familiar with my more general views will be unsurprised to find meranting about the need to find philosophical room for the normative, as wellas the causal. In this respect, this typical thread in my ranting aligns in effectwith two points made by Frege in noting that ‘[e]rror and superstition havecauses just as much as correct cognition.’1 For, first, one cannot appeal tothe causal story to insist on the veridical character of our ‘experiences’ of theworld; and second, more crucially, we cannot reduce our normative processto such causal explanation: just ‘[a]s I do not create a tree by looking at it,. . . neither do I create a thought by thinking. And still less does the brainsecrete thoughts, as the liver does gall’2 Urging otherwise risks ‘. . . blurring theboundary between logic and psychology’, a boundary (with natural scientificexplanation) fundamental to the province of philosophy.3Now, it seems to me that in the fairly recent past there has arisen a newway of making a similar mistake: but one that may seem to have avoided theconcerns of a journal such as Aesthetic Investigations—given its focus on thephilosophy of art and philosophical aesthetics—since the new ‘mistake’ hastypically been applied to moral philosophy. The error I am thinking about iswell-instantiated in the project of two papers, chosen as representative of thetrend: (a) Young and Durwin 2013; (b) Goodwin and Darley 2008.c© Aesthetic Investigations Vol 2, No 1 (2017), 88-93Graham McFeeBoth use broadly empirical methods to investigate whether a meta-ethicalcommitment to kinds of moral realism might alter both one’s moral judge-ments and one’s degree of commitment to them.4I have never really known what most psychology does: with Wittgenstein,I have always suspected that it was an untenable mixture of ‘empirical meth-ods and conceptual confusion’.5 But the difficulty here is not that: for onecan see that what is being investigated in these papers—it is what peoplethink or believe, including the impact on their degree of conviction, such that‘. . . priming a belief in moral realism improved moral behavior’.6 So, in theend, the concern for the authors of these papers begins from, ‘What do peoplethink?’. Perhaps that is legitimate as sociology: but could it have a place inphilosophy? If ‘most people’ agreed on a certain mathematical result, thatalone would not make it right. And my concern in philosophy is only withwhat they ought to think (that is, with the truth)—and that is what theyought to think, since the alternative is to be deceived or deluded (as, say, inthe case of the Yeti, if there are no Yetis). After all, if moral realism is false,any ‘believers’ have found a new way to delude themselves—or others.This seems to me where a concern with the conceptual (in philosophy)contrasts with a concern with people’s views or their practice: yes, they do saysuch-and-such . . . but are they right so to do? And we cannot turn philosophyinto a game of Family Feud (USA)/Family Fortunes (UK) by trying to matchour answer to what ‘most people’ think. To decide on the rightness of theirclaims, we must address what precisely they say (looking at its implications,and such like), not merely reiterate their words. So if one asks ‘Why do peoplesay this?’, my answer has been, ‘because they think it true’. And only thatanswer looks like a justification here—false beliefs offer at best explanationsof why they are believed. Moreover, if the views are false, that explanationfor our interest in them disappears.So the Young and Durwin paper explicitly discusses whether I would be-have better if I were a moral realist, and concludes I would. If correct, thisoffers a practical reason (a bit like Plato’s myth of the metals) to trick peopleinto being moral realists. But I do not think any trick is needed: peopleshould be moral realists (in the correct version) if moral realism is true: andnot if it is not. The fact that they might behave better if misguided cannothave a bearing. And, indeed, I am unhappy about the way in which the resultis arrived at: I take truth to be too important to knowingly permit delusion.(This seems to me to be the issue with religion: given that [on my view] theclaims of religion are false, it does not matter if believing them helps you livebetter or behave better. And if they are true, that cannot be because thebelief helps one live better—assuming it did!)So think about the religious case, as discussed in the Goodwin and Darleypaper: as the Abstract states the target in the experiment, ‘Groundings whichemphasize the religious . . . underpinnings of ethical belief . . . predicted greaterethical objectivity’.7 If I had a magic wand, I would want people to realize that89An Old Dog Rants Backwards: 1the grounding idea is misconceived—where this went double for any putativereligious grounding. As above, I do not care how best to ‘engineer’ peopletowards a certain view, as what is needed is that each come to recognize thetruth for his/her self.Of course, like views about the Yeti, all of these views remain held bypeople; and it makes sense (I suppose) for sociology and social psychology tostudy those people in this respect. But were I right that views such as theseare false, I do not see how there can be philosophical investigation of them.8At this point it might seem that at least aestheticians are spared from myrant: they, at least, have no part in the debate mentioned above. Yet whatelse is the explanation of trying to use fMRI to understand dance audiences?9But such studies concern the person’s ability to recognize perceptually (thatis, to see) such difference. For I, at least, would readily concede that atrained dancer’s account of movements might well be more accurate than1that of those lacking this training—after all, the dancer has typically seenthose movements more regularly.2 And, for the same reason, the femaledancer may well be more perceptive when considering moves typical of femalesin ballet.10 But such investigations rely on what these observers recognise3.The hope, though, seems to be, somehow, to track aesthetic/artistic responsesto patterns of neural response. But, again, I do not know, nor really care,about the causal stories here: what remains important are the normativeones—the sort of things4 art 5critics might help us with. For they operateat an appropriate explanatory level for one’s coming to understand dances.And only they will reflect what it is appropriate to find in this dance, or tosay about it.As Wittgenstein noticed, ‘[m]ental processes just are strange.’11 So that,concerned about artistic judgements (say, of dance-works), we should notrush to any particular comparison as just obviously the right one; and es-pecially a comparison with physical or biological processes. In explanation,Wittgenstein imagines someone saying:6The clock shows us the time. What time is, is not yet settled.And, as regards the point of telling the time—that doesn’t comein here.712So the comparison with our knowledge of human psychological processesacknowledges their diversity: for example, how sometimes what one says1ik heb hier "that" vervangen door "than"2hier ontbrak een punt. Die heb ik ingevoegd3heb ize vervangen door ise4heb "sorts of thing" vervangen door "sort of things"5 heb koppelteken vervangen door spatie6heb quotation marks verwijderd7idem90Graham McFeeexpresses a desire (‘I want a glass of beer’, said to a bartender, is not a de-scription of my state of mind); or a belief (‘I think John is in LA’ is not mereautobiography); or a feeling (‘My leg hurts’ is sometimes informational, butsometimes simply an expression of the pain). To assume that a single modelmust do here, since these are all in some sense psychological processes, is togive in to what, later, Wittgenstein diagnosed as ‘ [a] main cause of philo-sophical diseases—[namely] a one-sided diet: one nourishes one’s thinkingwith only one kind of example.’13Moreover, Wittgenstein rightly deplored the tendency to put off sine diethe detail of matters where the broad contours are assumed; that is, as:. . . the conception that there are questions the answers to whichwill be found at a later date. It is held that, although a result isnot known, there is a way of finding it.14Later he elaborated the basis of the problem as he saw it:. . . [t]he first step is the one that altogether escapes notice. Wetalk of processes and states and leave their nature undecided.Sometime perhaps we’ll know more about them—we think. Butthat’s just what commits us to a particular way of looking at thematter. For we have a certain conception of what it means toknow a process better . . . 15So we seem to know the form of the answer: and that form typically comesfrom natural science.Further, if we are told that, while not the whole story, this account ofbrain causality is part of the relevant explanation of human mental processes,we should respond as Wittgenstein did, faced with such an enumerative con-ception: that ‘then the question would arise: Is that all?’.16 For, faced withthe claim to have explained some part, we are surely owned both an expla-nation of the parts currently unexplained, and a way to recognize when theenumerative exercise is complete. Neither is forthcoming; and, to me, couldnever be provided in principle, since these ‘parts’ cannot form a finite totality.It seems David Davies and I broadly agree on the fruitfulness of attemptingto understand dance by reference to empirical work in neuroscience, to judgeby his contribution to the JAAC symposium on Dance, Art and Science.17At the least, in his paper, David classifies us both as pessimists.18 However,David is only a moderate pessimist (197) while I am accused of ‘extremepessimism’ (199). Then David concludes:. . . as ever, the moderate pessimist will council modesty when thephilosopher of art elects to dance with neuroscience.1991An Old Dog Rants Backwards: 1I hear the rebuke implicit in this remark: it is positively immodest of me tobehave as I do, voicing my extreme pessimism. Now I must agree that there isan element of outrage in my pronouncements, perhaps disproportionate to theevils perpetrated. My only defence here is that, when I see the vast amounts ofmoney (in the UK, chiefly government money) that such neuroscience-basedresearch attracts, I am frankly jealous: how can the warnings of Gottlob Fregeand (especially) Ludwig Wittgenstein have gone unheeded?gmcfee@exchange.fullerton.eduNOTES1. Frege 1984, 351.2. Frege 1979, 137.3. Frege 1984, 352.4. The second paper is also interested in theimpact of locating a religious basis forone’s moral judgements.5. Wittgenstein 1953, Part Two xiv, Philoso-phy of Psychology § 371.6. Abstract to Young and Durwin 2013.7. They make the same claim for othergroundings, equally contrary to theEuth8yphro argument—an argument Itake to demonstrate that morality cannothave an extra-moral grounding.8. Which is why I understand a social psy-chology of religious belief, but not a phi-losophy of it.9. Calvo-Merino et al. 2005.10. Montero 2006; Calvo-Merino 2008.11. Wittgenstein 1953, § 363.12. Wittgenstein 1953, § 363.13. Wittgenstein 1953, § 593.14. Wittgenstein 1979, 182 [December, 1931].15. Wittgenstein 1953 § 308.16. Wittgenstein and Waismann 2003, 325.17. JAAC Vol. 71,9 No.10 2 Spring, 2013.18. Davies 2013.19. Davies 2013, 201.REFERENCESCalvo-Merino, Beatriz. 2008. “Towards a Sensorimotor Aesthetics of Per-forming Art.” Consciousness and Cognition 17:911–922.Calvo-Merino, Beatriz, D. E. Glaser, J. Grezes, R.E. Passingham, andP. Harrard. 2005. “Action Observation and Acquired Motor Skills: AnfRMI Study with Expert Dancers.” Cerebral Cortex 15:1243–1249.Davies, David. 2013. “Ducking Around the Issues: Prospects for an Em-pirically Grounded Philosophy of Dance.” Journal of Aesthetics and ArtCriticism 71:195–202.Frege, Gottlob. 1979. Posthumous Writings. Oxford: Blackwell.. 1984. Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic and Philosophy.Oxford: Blackwell.8heb "r" verwijderd9heb komma ingevoegd10heb punt ingevoegd92Graham McFeeGoodwin, Geoffrey P., and John M. Darley. 2008. “The psychology of meta-ethics: Exploring objectivism.” Cognition 106:1339–1366.Montero, Barbara. 2006. “Proprioception as an Aesthetic Sense.” Journalof Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71:231–242.Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2009 (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Trans-lated by P. M. S. Hacker and J. Schulte (G.E.M. Anscombe). Oxford:Blackwell.. 1979. Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. Oxford: Blackwell.Wittgenstein, Ludwig, and Friedrich Waismann. 2003. In The Voices ofWittgenstein, edited by Gordon Baker. London: Routledge.Young, Liane, and A.J. Durwin. 2013. “Moral realism as moral motivation:The impact of meta-ethics on everyday decision making.” Journal ofExperimental Social Psychology 49:302–306.93

An Old Dog Rants Backwards: 1

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