Saturday, January 17, 2004 The Morality of the Market By Diana Hsieh @ 1:50 PM It's rather odd that someone could write a lengthy article on the morality of capitalism without reference to Ayn Rand. Oh, but don't worry, Hegel gets lots of attention. Link / Noodles / Trackback Friday, January 16, 2004 The Meaning of Self-Interest By Diana Hsieh @ 12:18 PM Many people, including those who claim to agree with it, are often very, very confused about the Objectivist concept of self-interest. For example, Jim Groark recently posted this message to the SOLO Forum: A person is walking down a deserted street late at night, and notices a small fire through the window of a locked, empty store. It is certain that if the small fire is not contained, it will destroy the entire store, and it is a given that there is no time to contact the owner, fire department, or anyone else in order to douse the fire in time to prevent destruction of the entire store. So the person breaks the window, stamps out the fire, and saves the store. Later on, the store owner, who happens to be an Objectivist, arrives on the scene. While happy that his store has been saved, being an Objectivist, he realizes that his property (his window) was destroyed without his permission, so he seeks restitution for that damage inflicted by the passerby. Further, he is morally obligated to demand such restitution, since this is in his own rational self-interest (he wins twice: his store is saved, and he is repaid for his damaged window). Various people objected to this characterization of the store owner's self-interest. So Jim then modified the scenario as follows: Suppose that the storeowner could demand restitution without any sufferring any harmful effects in terms of reputation (let's say that the demand for payment is not made public or publicized in any way), and let's suppose that the "amateur firefighter" is not a resident of that town or area, and does not communicate his plight to anyone in the area. Then, at the margin, in this situation, the storeowner could be said to have, from an Objectivist viewpoint, a moral obligation (in his interest), to demand repayment. Yikes! So here was my reply: No, no, and no. First, this scenario is arbitrarily constructed. The store owner could not possibly know in advance that his demand for restitution would remain private. In fact, he ought to know that such is quite unlikely, even if the firefighter is from out-of-town. This method of constructing ethical scenarios is very typical in academic philosophy -- and it's completely wrong. It requires us to pretend that moral agents can infallibly foresee the consequences of their actions, all the while ignoring the likely consequences of those actions. Second, the store owner would know that his demand for payment was unjust and immoral, even if no one else ever discovered it. (An unwillingness to perform such an action in public indicates that a person knows it to be morally indefensible.) The store owner would thus be undermining his commitment to justice in his dealings with others, not to mention his integrity. And that would surely harm him in the long run. In other words, the Objectivist virtues aren't only virtues when other people are looking. Third, can you imagine Howard Roark or Dagny Taggart acting in this fashion? I hope not. Unlike the store owner, these characters wholly reject the idea that moral principles are expendable when a few dollars are at stake. Link / Noodles / Trackback Wednesday, January 14, 2004 Positivism and Psychology By Diana Hsieh @ 6:00 PM Robert Campbell recently posted this analysis of the relationship between positivism and psychology on a mailing list. I thought it well worth sharing. In some past discussions, I've made offhand references to the role of positivism in American psychology. Joe Duarte asked me to say a little more about the positivist legacy. So here comes something that may seem rather epic, but is already a highly condensed version. Those who have studied the history of philosophy might save some time by skipping to the second half... Positivism is a conception of science. Roughly, it is the view that science consists entirely collecting and analyzing empirical data. To put it another way, it is the view that the only questions that qualify as scientific are those that can be answered by collecting and analyzing data. The philosophical background Positivism is an extreme form of empiricism. Its important features are already on view in the philosophy of David Hume (1711-1776): the diremption between "relations of ideas" (the truths of logic and mathematics) and "matters of fact" the claim that knowledge of matters of fact must be based on sensory data of the simplest kind (simplest, that is, according to Hume's favored theories about how we perceive) and the rejection of any other claim to knowledge (including knowledge of causes that necessarily produce their effects) as "metaphysical" and therefore impossible to establish the truth of. As a movement, however, positivism belongs to the 1800s. The actual word positivism was coined by Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who maintained that the different areas of human knowledge develop through three historical stages: theological, metaphysical, and positive. (Impertinent listeners must have wanted to ask Comte whether evolution through these stages was necessary...) Comte thought that physics had become "positive" by his time, and that biology and some of the other natural sciences were getting there. He disparaged "the search for causes" as metaphysical; he also denounced scientific research programs that were not aimed at bringing about near-term practical benefits. (For instance, he made fun of certain astronomers of his day because they were given to speculating about the temperatures inside stars. It's too bad that we can't bring Comte back and set him down face-to-face with an astrophysicist!) The second major contributor to classical positivism was Ernst Mach (1838-1916) who, unlike Comte, was a working natural scientist of some accomplishment. Mach chided physicists and chemists who believed that atoms were real; on Mach's view, theories that talked about atoms were OK, but only so long as they were treated instrumentally--as ways of predicting patterns of data. Atoms were unobservable, so claiming that they were real was metaphysical and therefore scientifically unacceptable. One important difference between Comte and Mach has shown up repeatedly during the history of positivism. Are empirical data to be understood in common-sense terms, as straightforward, truthful descriptions of particular physical objects located in space and time? Or are they truly "sense data," which can't be properly appreciated without an elaborate philosophical analysis of sensations, done perhaps with the help of sensory psychology, that will establish what they are like--and to relate them, however tenuously, to things or structures out in the world? Comte saw little need for an analysis of sensations; Mach devoted massive efforts to that very project. Classical positivists usually insisted that the laws of logic and mathematics aren't based on empirical data, yet manage to avoid being metaphysical. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, as Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and others developed symbolic logic and attempted to establish the foundations of mathematics, the old positivists' treatment of logic and math came to be seen as inadequate. Logical positivism arose in the years after World War I, when Bertrand Russell elaborated a theory of "logical atomism" and Ludwig Wittgenstein published his Tractatus. Wittgenstein cut a razor-sharp distinction between logical (or analytic) truths, which were simply a function of manipulating symbols according to rules and consequently said nothing about the world, and empirical (or synthetic) truths, which depended on using data to match propositions to structures in the world. All other claims to knowledge were metaphysical. And to Wittgenstein, metaphysical didn't just mean that there was no way to know whether they were true or not (so why bother trying to find out?); it meant that they were literally meaningless. Of course, the Tractatus ends with Wittgenstein's realization that his own philosophy is metaphysical...and therefore meaningless. (Wittgenstein's response was to move to a remote area of Upper Austria, where he taught grade school for several years. And when he returned to philosophy, he did not continue with logical positivism.) The development of logical positivism was left to the members of the Vienna Circle (with the rise of Hitler, many of them fled to the United States, where they became the dominant influence on academic philosophy of science for a generation or more). Although they continued the rigid separation of logical from empirical, the Vienna Circle saw some uses for logical formalisms in science. In their view, scientific disciplines should produce "formal theories" that state axioms and rules of inference and proceed to deduce propositions. Somewhere down the line the process will lead to propositions that can be tested with empirical data. Elaborate theories were now allowable, so long as scientists avoided the temptation to treat them realistically, as making claims about the existence of unobservables. The logical positivists also believed that the logical necessity involved in deducing statements about data from theoretical generalizations could take the place of the natural necessity that naively "metaphysical" people believed was involved in causal relationships. The leading logical positivists disagreed rather sharply on matters of importance to psychology. Some championed behaviorism, on the grounds that claims about mental states and processes were more metaphysical than claims about electrons; some adopted physicalistic reductionism, according to which everything is basically subatomic particles; others continued the Machian tradition of analyzing conscious experience for the sensations that supposedly make it up. The logical positivists had plenty of faults. They were fond of making arrogant prescriptions to scientists (fortunately, most natural scientists had the good sense to ignore them), and they promoted obnoxious philosophical positions (such as the diremption between analytic and synthetic propositions, and the emotive theory of ethics). Nonetheless, they deserve a lot of credit for being sharp critics of their own formulations. For instance, the so-called "verifiability theory of meaning" (the meaning of a synthetic proposition is the experiences that would verify it, if it were true) collapsed after multiple rounds of criticism, most of it brought by logical positivists. A couple of useful sources on logical positivism: (1) The long Introduction and Afterword to Frederick Suppe's book The Structure of Scientific Theories (be sure to get the 2nd edition, because the Afterword isn't in the 1st). Suppe describes the logical positivists' conception of scientific theories (he calls it the "received view" because at one time most American philosophers of science accepted it) and shows, in some detail, how philosophers of science came to reject it. (2) Brand Blanshard's Reason and Analysis tells the sad story of the verifiability theory of meaning. (Look out, though, for his treatment of Karl Popper--he seems to have read Vienna Circle efforts to assimilate Popper, but not Popper himself. Popper never put forward a criterion of meaning, but some in the Circle distorted his emphasis on empirically falsifiable hypotheses into a falsifiability theory of meaning.) Positivism and contemporary psychology At one time, I was under the impression that logical positivism strongly influenced American academic psychology. In this vein, a 1985 article by Bickhard, Cooper, and Mace (two of my professors, and one of my fellow grad students), criticized certain developmental psychologists for holding onto "vestiges of logical positivism." But as I've learned more about the history of psychology, it's become clear that very few psychologists ever mastered the intricacies of logical positivism. Most of the positivism in American psychology is of the 19th century variety, and some of positivistic doctrines that took hold most widely in psychology were actually rejected by logical positivist philosophers. In the behaviorist movement, for instance, neither John B. Watson nor Burrhus Frederic Skinner was a logical positivist. Their (implied) philosophy of science was 19th century positivism. For instance, Skinner was convinced that a good scientist mustn't have a theory, because theories inevitably make assertions about causes and try to explain phenomena. So he denied that his account of operant conditioning was a theory. Taking that stand made him more extreme than Comte. The one major figure in the behaviorist movement who took logical positivism to heart and made a thorough effort to implement it was Clark L. Hull (1884-1952). Hull was famous in the 1930s and 1940s, washed up by the early 1950s; today, only the historical specialists care about him. Hull attempted to structure his theory formally, providing mathematical definitions, laying down axioms, proving results. But the theory, no matter how it was modified, never correctly predicted how rats ran laboratory mazes under different conditions of reward. So most behaviorists gave up on it, and those who stayed with behaviorism most often turned to "Fred" Skinner, who insisted that he wasn't in the theory business at all. Since neither the old nor the new positivism actually dictates behaviorism, it may not come as such a great shock that most of the actors in the Cognitive Revolution of the 1950s were still positivistic in their outlook. For the most part, the pioneers of modern cognitive psychology claimed that they had rejected the prohibition on "mentalistic" concepts in psychology because they came to believe that psychological theories needed to employ such concepts in order to yield effective predictions about patterns of data. The positivistic attitudes come through sharply in Bernard J. Baars' book of interviews, The Cognitive Revolution in Psychology. For instance, the late Allen Newell, whose computer simulations of human problem solving played a major role in bringing down behaviorism, remained a hard-core positivist to the end. Looking at early modern cognitive psychology today, we can see all kinds of metaphysical claims being made in it. But even Noam Chomsky, who rejected positivism, has been less than forthcoming about which of his theoretical claims are empirically testable. One specific legacy of positivism that academic psychologists still haven't entirely given up is operationism, the doctrine of "operational definitions." Operationism was hatched in a 1927 book by Percy W. Bridgman, a physicist who wanted to keep major changes in physical theory from altering the definitions of physical concepts. The objects of Bridgman's concern were special and general relativity, which were still shaking physics up as he wrote, and quantum mechanics, whose breaking news he tried to keep up with in some of his footnotes. His advice to physicists was to keep theory out of the definitions of physical concepts, and to define them in terms of the procedures or the operations used to measure them instead. (Bridgman assumed that measurement techniques would remain stable as theory changed.) In operationist terms, length is what you measure with a meter stick, weight is what you measure with a Mettler balance, and temperature is what you measure with a mercury thermometer. No reference to theory (even worse, to metaphysics) need intrude. Operationism did not get the reception that Bridgman expected. His colleagues saw no need for it and politely ignored it. But among academic psychologists, who were chronically anxious lest they be exposed as unscientific, it caught on like crazy. Both behaviorists and nonbehaviorists could claim that they were scientific because they used operational definitions. IQ testers could fend off pesky questions about their theory of intelligence by declaring that intelligence was operationally defined as the score on their IQ test--end of story. Meanwhile, the Vienna Circle was initially intrigued by Bridgman's proposal, if only because they shared his objectives of avoiding metaphysics, and keeping theory on a short leash. But they soon established that operational definitions wouldn't work in physics--for instance, how many operational definitions of temperature would there have to be, and how could one be compared with another? But American academic psychology kept right on going with operationism well into the 1950s. When Lee Cronbach and Paul Meehl and Donald Campbell introduced systems for comparing measurement procedures into academic psychology in the mid to late 1950s, their work was fundamentally inconsistent with Bridgmanian operationism and should have been seen as putting an end to it. But in a poorly thought out effort at diplomacy, Donald Campbell and his colleagues sought to minimize their differences with operationism. In consequence, operationism (albeit in a watered-down version) is still being taught in the Experimental Psych textbooks in 2003. Any time that an academic psychologist talks about "operationalizing," he or she is still talking the language of operationism. In consequence, psychologists' discourse about the genuinely tough problems of psychological measurement continues to be clouded. In a less focused way, positivism is in evidence whenever research psychologists restrict their focus to narrowly defined empirical data sets. Thinking about psychological theories is devalued. From a positivistic standpoint there is little point in examining and critiquing your own theory. There is even less to be gotten from studying rival theories closely enough to be able to make detailed comparisons between your own and theirs. Instead, all questions are supposed to be resolved (or to have been resolved) by collecting and analyzing data. And since theoretical work is regarded with distrust, the relevant data tend to be restricted to those collected by workers in your own specialty, narrowed even further (when there are significant controversies about which empirical procedures to follow) to data collected and analyzed by workers in your own research group or faction. Since Walter Foddis and I have taken on Roy Baumeister's program of research on self-esteem in some posts to this list, I'll use him as an example. Baumeister is not a radical positivist--in his talk at the Positive Psychology Summit he explicitly conceded that the question of free will vs. determinism is a legitimate question, yet it is not resolvable by collecting data. But in his work on self-esteem over the years he has insisted that the definition of self-esteem should accord with the measurement procedures used by most academic psychologists, regardless of what some theory of self-esteem might say. That, of course, is operationist reasoning. If you reject operationism, you are going to find some element of theory in virtually all cases of psychological measurement (because you will be evaluating how well some procedure measures self-esteem in terms of some theory of what it's supposed to be measuring). Baumeister has also insisted on approaching questions about human good and evil in strictly "scientific" terms--i.e., relying on the data collected by academic social psychologists. From his point of view, neither philosophical argument nor the experience of clinical practitioners is of any value in providing scientific answers to such questions. Good and bad critiques of positivism Although psychology really does need to shake itself loose from positivism, not all critiques of positivism in the psychological literature are constructive. When faced with any source that speaks negatively about positivism, look at the critic's treatment of natural science. And watch out, if the critic doesn't recognize that positivism is a lousy philosophy of natural science. Positivism is neither an accurate description of how natural science is usually done, nor a good explanation as to why anyone should credit either the process of science or its current results. Lots of working natural scientists never bought into positivism, and most academic philosophers of science now reject both the 19th and the 20th century varieties of it. But what proponents of hermeneutics or "critical theory" or social constructionism generally presume is that the natural sciences operate positivistically. Most hermeneuts take the view that positivism works just fine in physics. Critical theory types and social constructionists usually maintain that the natural sciences are not really doing what positivism says they ought to be doing. But for them this means that the natural sciences have forfeited their claim to be anything but a "hegemonic discourse." Via one path or another, such critics conclude that positivism is bad for psychology, "therefore" psychology can't be a science. Whereupon they put forward hermeneutics or critical theory or social constructionism as the "only" alternative to this manifestly deleterious way of proceeding. There's a lot more to be said, naturally, about the philosophy of science that would be best for psychology. Contemporary philosophy of science is itself highly fragmented, most specialists in the field are focused on one of the natural sciences, and in some quarters metaphysical claims are still seen as matters of faith or commitment. Nonetheless, I think that many of the materials for a more adequate philosophy of social science are readily available today. Robert Campbell Link / Noodles / Trackback

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