long and short

a quiet place of my own

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of years after I dropped out of academic philosophy, I began to reflect on a suite of philosophical problems that have several features in common:

their apparent importance, even cruciality,
controversy surrounding them based on differing philosophical commitments, intuitions, or assumptions, and, nonetheless,
persistent, empirical judgments regarding them, by most people, that don't go away, even when a skeptical philosophical argument against the intuitive position is accepted by a given person.

A central example would be the question of free will. It seems as though a lot would be riding on the answer, but I assert, in rather Moorean fashion, that ordinarily all humans feel and act as though they are in control of their own actions, no matter what theories they may espouse. Personally, I find epiphenomenalism somewhat compelling, the idea that our conscious minds may be "just along for the ride," but that can't change the factoid that we're in the driver's seat, and that sense is not going to go away even if I (for instance) become convinced that we don't "actually" have free will.

The epiphenomenalist view is interesting, because it helps to demonstrate in the sharpest way that the correctness of a theory of consciousness (and consequently of agency) doesn't change how things seem to go for us. Imagine that epiphenomenalism is correct, and my conscious experience and sense of deciding on my own actions is just an illusion. Because, however, I still have feelings of making decisions and acting on them in a way that is seamlessly coordinated with my brain states and my body's behavior, I will never have a confounding experience to refute this sense. For whatever whacky reason, my conscious awareness is along for the ride in just such a way that, like George W. Bush, I'm the decider.

Dennett argues against homonculus theories of consciousness and self. I'll need to review his position, but I suspect it doesn't have much to do with the condition I'm talking about, the inescapability of the homunculus pose within our own experience.

It will be important to point out that I'm not talking about the psychological deformations that can take place in an individual when they become convinced there is no free will. We can imagine one person trying real hard to do the right thing, in case the theory is incorrect, but another person might throw caution to the wind and commit atrocities, supposing that no compunctions they may feel have any real, ethical force.

The further objection that the latter rather proves, doesn't it, that our consciousness does have some effect on changing our actions, can be addressed simply: just because we're aware of our change in theoretical posture and we consciously support our having embarked on a life of crime doesn't refute epiphenomenalism or any other anti-free will theory. If epiphenomenalism were correct, everything would continue to be synchronized just so that we felt we were making efficacious decisions.

My preferred reaction to what I would call the Inescapability Principle is a peculiar form of philosophical quietism. The quietism I've been exposed to the most is Rorty's, in which he extends Wittgenstein's "whereof we cannot speak…" to include most of what is practiced in anglophone, analytic philosophy departments. He advocates a quietism that puts to rest theories about right and wrong, free will, and, indeed, anything about which we feel tempted to say, "This is the [right|correct|true] view," the reason being largely that arguing over truth is the source of strife, invective, and damage to others, and is an obstacle to collegiality and solidarity which are obvious desiderata.

I may talk about Rorty's quietism another time, but I think it differs from mine. He is saying that philosophical theory-making is a bane pragmatically and should be avoided, while I'm saying there's no getting away from certain fundamental impressions we tend to have in human experience and out of respect for which we act, or seem to, in certain ways. My quietism, on its own, doesn't lead to any prescriptions for how it would be better to think; it merely acknowledges that we do seem to think and sense in certain ways, and that this seeming, contra Hamlet, is enough.

The eventual essay would deal with other examples of the Inescapability Principle besides free will.

on the primacy of factual knowledge

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A note on the value placed on knowledge of facts in the intellectual landscape.

I often find myself disparaging the high esteem placed on knowledge of facts in both popular and academic culture. It's considered a mark of erudition, which in part it is, but it so often seems taken to be the whole ballgame. "Serious" and "critical" conversations so often turn into jousting matches in which the winner will be the one who recalls the juiciest fact in support of their opinion.

In pop culture, knowledge of facts is a kind of currency in establishing street cred. In My Cousin Vinny, Marisa Tomei's character wins the day in court through her knowledge of cars. Ken Jennings and other successful contestants on Jeopardy! are acclaimed. Well they should be, I suppose; what they have floating around in their skulls can be astonishing.

But I want to argue that facts are only fodder for argumentation, reasoning, the generation of associations, and interpretation. They are the beginnings of insight, not its endpoint.

One has to be careful not to disparage the importance of facts, especially in the fact-challenged world we suddenly inhabit. I'm not going to be dealing with whether there are facts (I believe there are) or whether there are "alternative facts" (what does that even mean?). In fact, we can stipulate that the only facts I'd be interested in discussing in an essay on this topic are the correct ones, the real ones. What I want to get at is not the validity of the concept of a fact but the poverty of facts in establishing interesting conclusions without considerable additional reflection.

Another danger with this topic is that it risks seeming obvious. But so many disputes in public—and everyday—life come down to who's got their facts straight or who has the best facts (the best "evidence") to bring into the argument, that we could be left thinking that only facts matter. When that happens, the poverty of facts alone can seem far from obvious.

the romance of the counterfactual

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Had wanted to write something about a personal, quasi-literary takeaway from my time in graduate school: the observation that Kripke's possible-worlds semantics of modal logic points up the central feature of the human condition: we alone among earthly animals are aware of what might be and what might have been.

Modal logic treats of "states" (states of anything; the notion can be harnessed to sundry domains). One could define the states of one's modal world, for instance, to be the stages of a four-stroke gasoline engine or the states a computer program can be in as it runs—or, really, anything you like that has an interesting sequential, state-like structure.

The modality of a state is whether it is possible, actual, necessary, or impossible. A possible state may or may not be the case. An actual state is trivially possible, which rings true intuitively: it's not just possible but happens to be actual. A necessary state is not only actual and possible but could not be otherwise. An impossible state is none of these and necessarily cannot be possible, let alone actual or necessary.

Although modality finds extensive use in computer science, the classic application of possible-world semantics in philosophy since Kripke has been time. States of affairs at different points in time can be laid out in the imagination and discussed in light of their possibility, actuality, and necessity. Kripke says something special about actuality and necessity that opens up a whole can of worms regarding metaphysics that we won't go into here, but what struck me about this seemingly esoteric subject was that focusing on the modality of events—if not outright obsessing about them—is so commonplace that we might say it's how we humans live our lives. It's what makes us human: we are the modalist species.

Faculties and emotions related to this phenomenon:

memory
planning
regret
hope
grief
denial

The list could go on and on, but it's all about contemplating things that might (or might not) have been in the past, how things are now, or what one might cause to be through one's actions.

Modalist thinking about the past is especially poignant, since most of us have our regrets, and many of us dwell on them to the detriment of our health and happiness.

The modal point about actions and events in the past is that they are actual and therefore irreovocable. No backsies! They may also be necessary in more than one sense, which may not be the same as saying they must have been necessary at the time they happened. It could still be that they were up in the air when they occurred (or slightly before), but now that they're a done deal, they're a necessary feature of the spacetime grid, because they can't be rerun. This is a controversial assertion, but I don't think anyone claims that past events can be undone unless they're willing to entertain the possibility of time travel.