But: I think one (tragic) thing about all this is that in philosophy, charitably speaking, it is (due to the complexity of life) all-too-easy for people to fasten up on a single true aspect and talk past a more complicated whole (cf., much of this thread)… while in writing, well: fuck-it, even if you’re spouting dumb-assed, hippy-dippy ideas… they’re your characters’ ideas—and who hasn’t met with enough of those to identify with their reality? Or, what’s more, who doesn’t realize that there are enough of those to self-identify with your characters and make you a ‘star?’ Oh shit, I miss DFW…

As I said… depending on your constitution (oh no: the whiff of essentialism, subsequently, cue Kripke’s “Naming and Necessity”), that’s either a blessing or a curse.

[UPDATE: I just noticed that comments automatically closed. I guess each of us said our piece. HH, just wanted you to know that I didn’t turn it off manually so as to deprive you of the last word. I don’t think I actually need to email Kieran for instructions on how to override the auto-close-comments function. Sometime later we will be able to leave a comment somewhere else again. Or HH can leave his last word in my “how much music” post comments, which hasn’t expired yet. He has my permission, and I promise to read it. – JH, intervening in Joel’s final comment.]

But you all charitably interpreted it that way, anwyay—I’m sure (as, in fact, it’s the only way it would make sense: what kind of advice would it be to stick to good reasons for dumb judgments?).

I think the interesting thing, from my standpoint as one-time, would-be philosopher, now writer, is that so many things in life really do work as a kind of “Gettier rowing Neurath’s boat on the ocean of Simon’s complexity.” Or: “Empirical fact, meet big-O notation Reality, on the NP-hard streets.”

Of course, it’s what makes writing (whether journalism or fiction or whatever) so much easier (or, depending on your temperament—so much more impossible) than philosophy: it’s one thing to make a clever observation, or a narrative series of them, and let them lie as such—it’s another to try to put together some sort of statement about “how things are” that is at once grounded enough in detail to be argued about (“the model of the argument is…”) and at the same time not subject to the constraints of the structural complexity of actual life (because, after all, what is all the humor of philosophy about—much of it wickedly funny—if not for that beautiful moment when the model is upended with a counter-example, a mode itself recapitulated in Keaton and Chaplin and cetera?).

Of course, this is what’s so fascinating about the early Socratic dialogues, no? Once Plato “found the answer” in the forms (and our access to them via anamnesis and mathematics [cough] {dual cough for oversimplification and for, well, the idea that that was ‘the ticket’), the pliancy of reality got turned into a stricture. But in the early dialogues—and flashes even in later ones like Theaetetus—it’s wide-open and unresolved.

OK, really… I’m now out of my depth and (more importantly) past my bed-time.

I say HH should leave off quarreling with and go attack this guy:

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODM4MWJiMzU5ZmUzNmNhY2I4YjY3MjQxMTBiMzlmYjE=

He’s easy pickins! Probably that’s why he doesn’t have a comment box. He knows he’d be extinct if he did.

As one of my undergraduate advisors in Philosophy once said, “A wise person often trusts their judgments much more than their reasons for them. If they’re in error, it’s far more likely to be on the side of the former than the latter.”

OK: back to arguing about how memes have replaced the necessity of studying Plato… it’s fun to watch.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=954398

Some basis for a version of “anamnesis” in language and morals… as yet unresolved status of the Unity of the Virtues… I don’t know: who’s to say that Plato and Aristotle didn’t get quite a lot of things pretty damned right?

Of course, one does wish they’d had the chance to read Timothy Williamson (or that John Beversluis had been able to whisper into, say, Theaetetus’ ear)!

Well, that’s no reason to blame the messenger of empiricism.

“We have vastly more knowledge of what governs the survival fitness of memes – including the virtues. ”

That’s as may be, but – if so – perhaps you could have brought some of this stuff up earlier. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if you are aware of a compelling empirical model according to which notions of virtue ‘evolve’ through natural selection, according to degrees of survival fitness, then why not put it forth? I might note that in the last few comments, you have retreated to conceding that other models – say, models according to which virtues are not ‘selected for’, in some blind watchmaker way, but ‘selected by’ conscious agents, in some rational way – might have merit. These are very different sorts of models, to say the least.

“You are using a rigorous standard of empirical validation as a disputative assault weapon. Few philosophical beliefs could withstand this withering fire.”

It is my view that few philosophical beliefs should withstand this withering fire. Most philosophical beliefs aren’t very good, after all.

Rigorous empiricism is an appropriate standard in this case. You are making very strong claims about matters that need rigorous empirical treatment. As I said at the start, I think the trouble is that you aren’t really an empiricist about this stuff. You think you can work out the outlines of the solution with vague a priori conceptual proofs. I say it can’t be done.

“unassailable, airtight empirical model of these markets in order to go beyond Plato’s understanding of virtue.”

I’m not asking for an unassailable, airtight empirical model. I’m asking for anything like an empirical model – any indication of what the selection mechanism might be. Because you have slid back into assuring me that there must be a selection mechanism by which unfit ‘virtues’ are culled from the human herd. Yet you have said not word-one about how to convert this evident Hegelian Skyhook of ‘evolutionary progress’ toward some unspecified standard of utlity or good into a grounded, empirical crane. I have read the same authors that you have – from Freud and Gladwell. I am skeptical that we know what you think you know.

I am grateful for your willingness to conduct both sides of this argument, but I really would like to get in a few words.

1. We do have a more sophisticated picture of intellectual markets and how they work. From Freud to Malcolm Gladwell, we have vastly more knowledge of what governs the survival fitness of memes – including the virtues. I don’t need to have an unassailable, airtight empirical model of these markets in order to go beyond Plato’s understanding of virtue.

2. There is a difference between positing a standard of good and a suggesting a mechanism for explaining why the standard of good CHANGES over time. Plato did the former; I am doing the latter.

3. You are using a rigorous standard of empirical validation as a disputative assault weapon. Few philosophical beliefs could withstand this withering fire.

Plato saw the world through a narrow window that did not afford him an understanding of complex systems and the unguided orderly phenomena that arise from them. Like most early thinkers, he saw man as largely in charge of himself and his society. We now know much more about how aggregated human behavior affects individual choices and how cultural and ethical norms EVOLVE.

And don’t say that the difference is that you have a more empirically sophisticated picture of intellectual markets and how they work. Because you have admitted that you don’t have an empirical argument for your view at all. You have an a priori proof that it is absurd to suppose anything else could be true.

And don’t say the difference is that you aren’t positing some independent standard of Good. You are using some unspecified, unless it is the Moliere thing, benchmark of utility, and that is every bit as empirically embarrassing.

And don’t say it is the people’s own standard of Good they are calibrating their notions of virtue to fit, because presumably their notion of what would be Good could be a function of their pre-existing notions of Virtue, so your ‘government’ thesis would be fatally undermined. Good would be determined by Virtue, just as much as Virtue is determined by Good.

The notion that Plato or Aristotle have as good a grasp of the meaning of ethics and virtue, unaided by everything we have learned since Darwin, as any latter day philosopher is incredible to me.

Darwin was speaking of the domain of plants and animals. Subsequent evolutionary theorists have extended the model of natural selection of living organisms to ideas, and it is a logical extension, with superior propagation of memes directly analogous to superior reproduction and dominance of naturally selected plants and animals.

Memes, ideas that are the evolutionary analogs to living creatures, are selected rationally. Human consciousness allows us to intervene in our own evolution in this respect, and to evolve the immaterial domain of our ideas. Virtues are such memes and they are governed by different evolutionary mechanisms of selection and propagation discussed by Dawkins:

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: `… memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically.

Why do humans choose to select or deselect various virtue memes over time? My argument is that they value virtues by personal and social utility, i.e., fitness for promoting personal or, more usually, socially desirable ends. For example, when chastity was seen to be unnecessary in preventing unwanted children after advances in contraception in the last century, the chastity meme lost competitive vigor in the meme pool. This is an evolutionary argument based on fitness, but not a Darwinian natural selection argument.

Until you give us a plausible, Darwinian selection mechanism we can believe in, you’ve got a skyhook. All you have done is notice that there appear to be some ‘correlations’. But there could be any number of non-Darwinian ‘evolutionary’ explanations of that, so long as by ‘evolutionary’ you just mean ‘change over time.’

What a pity you feel the need to disengage before delivering counterexamples demonstrating virtues uncorrelated with changing social circumstances and exigencies. I was eagerly awaiting this evidence.

Since we seem to be wrapping up, I should point out that the work of Darwin laid the foundation of evolutionary theory, but that evolutionary concepts now encompass much more than Darwin’s thought, thanks to the efforts of many thinkers who have built upon his insights.

You appear to believe that you have refuted the assertion that virtues evolve because you have established that they do not evolve by the mechanism of natural selection discovered by Darwin. I don’t think your understanding of evolution has evolved sufficiently.

And speaking of those waters of knowledge rising: if you have no answers to our objections, HH, then I think I’m going to have to take this opportunity to leave you to your fate. Seriously, study some Darwin.