Kinds of External Worlds

One of the things that makes Hume's Treatise of Human Nature 1.2.4 important for examining the philosophical question of the external world is that (building in part on an insightful understanding of prior arguments about the question, particularly as found in Berkeley's work) it recognizes that we can analyze an account of the external world into three 'layers'. When we talk about the world outside us, the 'outside us' typically indicates three things:

The world is something we are in, and is external to us.
The world is something existing in some way independently of minds.
The world is something continuing to exist when we are not perceiving it.

Externality is a phenomenal characteristic -- it's a way the world seems, and as is often the case with appearances we can hold that it seems that way either because of the way the world is or because of the way our minds make it. Call the former received externality and the latter constructed externality.

The externality of the world can be taken as a given, on either explanation of it, but independence and continuance are much harder to ground, and problems have occasionally been raised for each by this philosophical position or that. Given this, there are eight kinds of ways we could take the external world to be.

External World Possibilities

------	Received Externality?	Independent?	Continuant?
1	Yes	Yes	Yes
2	Yes	Yes	No
3	Yes	No	Yes
4	Yes	No	No
5	No	Yes	Yes
6	No	Yes	No
7	No	No	Yes
8	No	No	No

EW1, overwhelmingly the most common position, is external world realism in a strict and proper sense: the world continues to exist as an entity distinct from and independent of any mind, and it seems like it is external because it is. As far as I know, nobody has ever proposed an EW2 account, in which the world is really external to us and independent of us but only exists when we perceive it, for the obvious reason that there would need to be some explanation for how the world always ends up existing when we perceive it, and only when we perceive it if its existence does not depend on us. An EW3 or EW4 account would be only marginally less puzzling, because of the difficulty of explaining how externality is not mentally constructed if the external world's existence is dependent on a mind.

Berkeley's idealism is an EW7 account: our sense of the externality of the world is built out of our understanding of the 'grammar' of how our ideas are associated with each other, the world (since it consists only of ideas) is entirely dependent on minds, but it continues to exist in God's mind when we are not perceiving it. An EW8 account seems to require solipsism, or something practically distinguishable from it. Transcendental idealism, or at least some version of it, would seem to be an EW5 account. EW6 seems to run into problems analogous to those we find in an EW2 account.

But there is actually very little work done on the general shape of the external world problem as a whole, or about the internal dynamics of possible accounts of the external world.

George Gordon (Lord Byron), Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Introduction

Opening Passage:

Oh, thou, in Hellas deemed of heavenly birth,
Muse, formed or fabled at the minstrel's will!
Since shamed full oft by later lyres on earth,
Mine dares not call thee from thy sacred hill:
Yet there I've wandered by thy vaunted rill;
Yes! sighed o'er Delphi's long-deserted shrine
Where, save that feeble fountain, all is still;
Nor mote my shell awake the weary Nine
To grace so plain a tale--this lowly lay of mine.

Whilome in Albion's isle there dwelt a youth,
Who ne in virtue's ways did take delight;
but spent his days in riot most uncouth,
And vexed with mirth the drowsy ear of Night.
Ah, me! in sooth he was a shameless wight,
Sore given to revel and ungodly glee;
Few earthly things found favour in his sight
Save concubines and carnal companie,
And flaunting wassailers of high and low degree.

Summary: To sum up Harold in a phrase, we could say that he is bored and unrepentant. Thickly coated in a life of self-indulgent pleasures, he has become alienated from the world, all those pleasures adding up and, eventually, no longer differentiating themselves. Seen through the accumulated residue of self-indulgence, everything seems remote, detached. As a glutton experiences dyspepsia without nonetheless being penitent, so the pleasure-seeking eventually experience alienated boredom of satiety without any real desire to become something else. But it is worse for Harold, who is intelligent with no adequate task for his intelligence and in love with a woman who can never be his -- his is the life of one with the potential for greatness, for whom the actual greatness seems ever out of reach and, worse, ever out of reach because of his own voluntary choices. And so he wanders Europe, he who is not able to change within, in the hopes of finding a change without. And slowly he circles around to Rome, which, like himself, indicates greatness without being great, and is all ruin without redemption.

A childe is a candidate for knighthood -- a young lord who as yet has won no spurs. This plays a larger role in the poem than I think is generally recognized. The poem is written in Spenserian stanzas, and, like Spenser although not so extremely, filled with archaisms. Spenser's knights wander to fulfill themselves as nobles, achieving their proper glory by completing heroic tasks, and in so doing exemplify virtue. But Harold is not a knight but a childe, and although noble he exemplifies no virtues, but only better-bred vices; and his wandering is a journey of finding no heroic tasks. Harold is perpetual childe, and a never-knight.

When reading, I found the political descriptions, which are common, to be usually pompous (unlike the descriptions of art or nature, which are all usually excellent), but, looking over the entire work, they play an important role. Harold wanders Europe, and it's not that he finds no heroism. He finds the traces of heroic action everywhere. Reflecting on Napoleon, for instance, who, for all his failings and flaws, did extraordinary things, only puts into greater relief the life of Harold, so ordinary and turned in upon itself and insulated from the world. Much of the strength of the poem lies in Harold's own recognition of this. He is not a hero; he is not even really an antihero; he is just a nonhero, and must bear the cognizance of his nonheroism.

Favorite Passage: There are lots of excellent passages, but this one stuck out this reading, reflecting on Roman gladiators -- and all of us who are like them:

What from this barren being do we reap?
Our senses narrow, and our reason frail,
Life short, and truth a gem which loves the deep,
And all things weighed in custom's falsest scale;
Opinion an omnipotence, whose veil
Mantles the earth with darkness, until right
And wrong are accidents, and men grow pale
Lest their own judgments should become too bright,
And their free thoughts be crimes, and earth have too much light.

And thus they plod in sluggish misery,
Rotting from sire to son, and age to age,
Proud of their trampled nature, and so die,
Bequeathing their hereditary rage
To the new race of inborn slaves, who wage
War for their chains, and rather than be free,
Bleed gladiator-like, and still engage
Within the same arena where they see
Their fellows fall before, like leaves of the same tree.

Recommendation: Recommended, although it is very much a work for when you have a considerable amount of leisure.

Yet One Rich Smile

November
by William Cullen Bryant

Yet one smile more, departing, distant sun!
One mellow smile through the soft vapoury air,
Ere, o'er the frozen earth, the loud winds run,
Or snows are sifted o'er the meadows bare.
One smile on the brown hills and naked trees,
And the dark rocks whose summer wreaths are cast,
And the blue Gentian flower, that, in the breeze,
Nods lonely, of her beauteous race the last.
Yet a few sunny days, in which the bee
Shall murmur by the hedge that skirts the way,
The cricket chirp upon the russet lea,
And man delight to linger in thy ray.
Yet one rich smile, and we will try to bear
The piercing winter frost, and winds, and darkened air.

Implying Bottom

Stephen Maitzen, "The Problem of Magic":

Instead, any theistic explanation of the operation of the laws of logic must say at least this: If God didn’t exist, then the laws of logic wouldn’t hold. But no sense at all can be attached to the consequent of that conditional. What could it mean for the laws of logic not to hold? Would it “mean” that the laws of logic never hold and yet sometimes hold? Would it “mean” that the laws of logic sometimes hold, never hold, and neither sometimes nor never hold? If it wouldn’t have either of those pseudo-meanings, why not? Presumably not because the laws of logic would prevent it! No one can make any sense of what would be implied by the failure of the laws of logic, and therefore no one can make any sense of the supposition that the laws of logic might not hold. In the face of that senselessness, one might retreat to the claim that without God only some rather than all of the laws of logic would fail. But which laws would fail, and why only those? I can’t see any plausible answer to those questions.

This is a truly baffling line of argument. Surely the obvious point being made by the position being criticized is that, in fact, the denial of "the laws of logic hold" is incoherent. Nor is there in fact any problem with this, if we can make sense of "The laws of logic hold" -- which Maitzen's argument requires. There is no logical or philosophical problem with a claim implying what is usually represented by the Bottom operator (incoherence, or contradiction, or impossibility, usually represented as a ⊥, and also called falsum); that just establishes, assuming the conditional is true, that the opposite of the antecedent is a necessary truth. In fact, in logical systems that are made specifically for dealing with necessary truths, it's fairly standard for negation to be defined as the implication of Bottom; anything implying Bottom is false. You can create analogous conditionals for any necessary truth.

The tricky thing would be establishing the truth of the conditional, of course, but this is not something that can be seen by looking at its consequent. Rather, one would have to look at the conditions for the contradictory of the consequent to be true -- in this case, looking at what it means for "The laws of logic hold" to be true. Which is, of course, precisely what common sense would suggest.

The Philosopher and the Poet

As Syme strode along the corridor he saw the Secretary standing at the top of a great flight of stairs. The man had never looked so noble. He was draped in a long robe of starless black, down the centre of which fell a band or broad stripe of pure white, like a single shaft of light. The whole looked like some very severe ecclesiastical vestment. There was no need for Syme to search his memory or the Bible in order to remember that the first day of creation marked the mere creation of light out of darkness. The vestment itself would alone have suggested the symbol; and Syme felt also how perfectly this pattern of pure white and black expressed the soul of the pale and austere Secretary, with his inhuman veracity and his cold frenzy, which made him so easily make war on the anarchists, and yet so easily pass for one of them. Syme was scarcely surprised to notice that, amid all the ease and hospitality of their new surroundings, this man’s eyes were still stern. No smell of ale or orchards could make the Secretary cease to ask a reasonable question.

If Syme had been able to see himself, he would have realised that he, too, seemed to be for the first time himself and no one else. For if the Secretary stood for that philosopher who loves the original and formless light, Syme was a type of the poet who seeks always to make the light in special shapes, to split it up into sun and star. The philosopher may sometimes love the infinite; the poet always loves the finite. For him the great moment is not the creation of light, but the creation of the sun and moon.

G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday, Chapter XV

Whewell on Veracity

If the morality is to serve as a supreme standard for the human race, it must protect and preserve common understanding and trust. But doing this adequately requires not just focusing on words, but also on deeds and intentions involved in communication. This gets us to a standard that could variously be called Truth, Truthfulness, Veracity, or Integrity (EM §120):

The part of the Supreme Rule which expresses the claim of this Virtue, is this: We must speak the truth: which may be farther unfolded, by reference to the origin of the principle, in this manner: We must conform our language to the universal understanding among men which the use of language implies.

As he puts it later, "a Contract to speak the Truth is implied in the use of Language" (EM §216), and by making an assertion one is implicitly recognizing some kind of broad right of those addressed to know the truth. The subjective disposition described by this Idea, of course, is the Virtue of Veracity, and the duties associated with it follow from this basic rule, understood broadly.

The dispositions associated with this Virtue are as you would expect. Fidelity or Good Faith is conformity of action to engagement, and if love is added to it, it becomes Loyalty. Freedom from fraudulent disposition is Probity. The person with Integrity has Simplicity or Singleness of Heart.

Obviously lying is a violation of Veracity, but so is promise-breaking and contract-breaking. We not only have the duty to avoid deceitful behavior but to cultivate a hatred of duplicity and a desire to be honest with others, and thus, as with the other Ideas, have the concomitant duties of moral culture. Thus our actions should not just be honest but convey the importance of honesty, so we have a duty not only to be truthful but to convey the "Spirit of Truth" (EM §220) in our truthful actions. Deceitfulness must be made unnatural to us.

There are Cases of Conscience for all kinds of duties, but the appearance of conflicting duties combined with the apparent clarity of the conceptions associated with the Idea mean that duties of Veracity are particularly likely to be considered in this context. Common understanding is a major issue here. For instance, a promiser should interpret his promise in the way he thinks the promisee is likely to take it, because that is the only possible common understanding between them (EM §280). In part because of this, promises are only relative duties created by the people involved; the promiser thus is not bound to a promise if released by the promisee. Immoral promises should be broken, but this does not do away, Whewell thinks, with the relative duty between promiser and promisee -- promising something immoral creates a conflict of duties for oneself, and promises morally made should always be kept. To take another example, fictions and polite expressions are recognized as such under common understanding, so they are not lies.

Because of the way he understands common understanding, Whewell has a peculiar view when it comes to what he calls Lies of Necessity, such as when you are faced with a choice of either lying or letting people die; and he regards them as excusable. But the standard of necessity has to be quite strict -- it has to be fear of immediate and inevitable death, although perhaps some non-immediate but inevitable cases might be allowable, and even such cases do not give a blanket permission. Excusable is not the same as blameless or admirable, and where it is admirable, as in some heroic cases, it is so for expressing some other moral principle. Cases may take us beyond our best rules and our usual duties; but they do not take us beyond the standard imposed by the Idea of Veracity.

States as moral agents of course have duties of Truth, as well, for instance, in upholding treaties, but Whewell does not spend an extensive amount of time discussing them. Likewise, while it is true of Veracity as with other cases that the Christian faith intensifies and incentivizes natural duties, Whewell takes the bulk of Christian duties of Veracity to be already also protected indirectly by other duties -- to love one's neighbor, to restrain one's desires, and the like.

Universal Doctor

Today is the feast of St. Albert the Great, Doctor of the Church and patron saint of scientists.

In investigations of nature, however, it is necessary not only to consider the changeable understood universally according to its common features, but it is necessary to get down to details so that the primary agent in each individual case may be ascertained, especially in sensible, animate things, because in investigations of nature we must discover the universal principles through singulars, since in such investigations the particulars are better known than the universals. It is through the singulars that we come to believe that it is convenient and necessary for universals and their principles to exist, since it is only those universals which are exemplified in particulars that we accept, while those which are not exemplified in particulars, we reject.

[Albert the Great, De animalibus IX tr. 2, c.4, ed. HernannStadler, in: BGPhlvfA5, Munster9 16'.T21, ll.16-21m as quoted in Leen Spruit, "Albert the Great on the Epistemology of Natural Science", p. 64.]