Alan Saunders: Hello, and welcome to The Philosopher’s Zone, I’m Alan Saunders. Now, on this show we deal with all sorts of philosophical arguments, and, as you might expect, I don’t always agree with all of them, but I usually try to be fair, to allow each argument to be presented as sympathetically as possible and to let you make up your own minds. This week, however, we’re looking at bad arguments, or to be fair, arguments that a lot of people think are bad, and to talk about that I’m joined by two philosophical connoisseurs of bad argument: Peter Slezak associate professor in the school of history and philosophy of science at the University of New South Wales and, from the same university James Franklin, professor in the school of mathematics and statistics, who’s also a philosopher. Welcome to you both.

James Franklin: Thank you.

Peter Slezak: Thanks, Alan.

Alan Saunders: Now, the reason we’re here doing this is that after a recent edition of the show I had an email from a listener who said, ‘Please have more discussion on computers and mind, but next time please get a guest who understands that the Chinese Room is the worst argument in all of philosophy.’

James Franklin: A big claim.

Alan Saunders: Well, I was going to say, if it is it’s up against some stiff competition, but Jim Franklin, you I believe don’t think it’s a bad argument, so we look to you for a sympathetic exposition of the Chinese Room argument. What is it, exactly?

James Franklin: It’s an argument that is supposed to refute the view that there’s no more to thinking in humans than there is to being like a computer. So, computers are being offered as a model of the mind. Searle’s argument is supposed to…

Alan Saunders: This is John Searle, the American philosopher.

James Franklin: This is John Searle, the American philosopher. His Chinese Room argument is supposed to show that that can’t be right and that there’s some very essential difference between what computers do and what humans do. His argument is that you imagine a room with a person in it. That person accepts instructions, symbol strings in Chinese, a language that the person in the room doesn’t understand. He can tell one symbol from the next by their shape, but that’s all. He looks at these strings of symbols, he looks up a rule book on what he’s supposed to do with each of the symbol strings and he then outputs according to that rule book another set of symbol strings in Chinese. Now, Searle says there is nothing in there that understands Chinese. Nevertheless, it looks from the outside that there is an understanding of Chinese. Therefore he says that there must be something essentially different to what a person does that really understands Chinese and what the computer or a Chinese room that merely appears to understand is doing. Therefore, he says, thinking is essentially something different to following arbitrary rules.

Alan Saunders: So, we have the Chinese fed in and you get not just answers but appropriate answers?

James Franklin: Yes, it seemed to be appropriate answers to someone who understands Chinese.

Alan Saunders: Peter Slezak, you don’t like this argument. What’s wrong with it?

Peter Slezak: No, I think it’s terrible, and in a way it surprises me that it’s had such a long life, because I think what’s wrong with it is more or less obvious if you don’t describe it in the tricky way that Searle describes it. I mean, as Jim rightly pointed out, the story depends on a person, Searle, an intelligent person, in the room, and Jim didn’t complete the story, although he implied it, that the contrast with getting the meaning to the symbols and not understanding them and mechanically as it were feeding out answers that look meaningful, the contrast that Searle makes is the case in which the messages that come into the room are in English, which he does understand, and so he says, ‘Now, look at the difference between the case in which there’s no understanding going on’, and he’s particularly of course focusing on the idea of symbolic computation, which is the model of computers, as Jim rightly said, and he contrasts that with a case in which he does understand the symbols by looking at them, because he’s a speaker of English, and he says, ‘Now, look at how different these two are.’ Now, the quickest way I can point to what I think is the flaw in this, is the question is, what the hell is Searle doing in the room and why is the criterion of whether a system understands, whether an intelligent person inside the system has understanding? This is a version of what’s well known in philosophy and elsewhere as the homunculus fallacy.

Alan Saunders: This is the notion that when I perceive the world there’s a little man inside me who’s as it were looking at this movie screen projected through my eyes.

Peter Slezak: Exactly, and the homunculus fallacy is the fallacy of explaining something by begging the question, by really postulating the very thing that you’re trying to explain. Now, that’s the quickest way I can kind of indicate what I think the problem is, and I think it’s a much more widespread problem, and a very compelling mistake to fall into, when you think that you can explain something by relying on the very ability, which is the one in question. In this case, Searle is relying on his own ability to understand as if it’s relevant. Now, if I could quickly indicate the proper way to run the test. If it’s appropriate to put a homunculus into the symbol system and ask whether you, Searle, can understand it, the appropriate analogy would not be with English coming into the room, but it would be with Searle, as a homunculus, going into a system which we know has intelligence, let’s say a brain, and asking the same question in a brain, which everybody agrees is an intelligent system with meaning and intentionality, as they say. Clearly, if he did the same experiment in a brain, there’s no level in a brain in which he would find anything more meaningful than the Chinese symbols. It would be equally unintelligible at any level that you choose to pick within a brain, and so in a system which everybody agrees is intentional, Searle’s test also fails.

Alan Saunders: Jim Franklin, you’re Searle’s representative on earth here. What…

James Franklin: I don’t believe the homunculus being intelligent is an essential part of the argument, that it could be just a monkey or anything that will be able to follow the rules; in fact, a computer. What the argument is supposed to demonstrate, is that there must be something different in the case of thinking. Wouldn’t his argument still be there if there’s a zombie brain or indeed a computer in there following the Chinese rules? He would say from the outside, you can’t see any of that, the room still appears to be intelligently answering in Chinese, but you know, because you’ve set up the experiment, that there is nothing in there thinking or understanding. Therefore thinking or understanding must be something essentially different.

Peter Slezak: But you only know because of this thought experiment where you have a criterion, you have a test. I think Searle’s experiment relies inherently on him or us being able to understand. That’s what it turns on, I’m sorry, in one case not being able to understand, in the case of the Chinese symbols, but being able to understand in the case of English. So that’s the contrast which tells Searle that one is missing something, that it’s not intentional or intelligent.

James Franklin: Well, you’re supposed to know that you or Searle, whether you’re in the room or not, when you understand language, you do understand it.

Peter Slezak: Let’s see if I can restate it. It seems to me that the question is whether a system, as you said to begin with, that is a computer, is an appropriate model for humans for our minds, and the computer model is one that depends on symbols, which are meaningless according to the official story. They’re meaningless squiggles, as he calls them; squiggle, squiggle. That’s the story, and so his way of refuting this is to say, Well, squiggles that can’t be understood tacitly or explicitly by him in the room can’t count as an intentional conscious system, whereas the case in which he can understand them because they’re not squiggles. So you see, in the two cases that he’s contrasting are one in which on the one hand they’re meaningless symbols, and he says even from the outside it’s indistinguishable, from the inside he knows. In the one case, and in the other case that it does or it doesn’t have.

James Franklin: Yes, but he knows that because he, Searle, is like you and me, a conscious being who understands.

Peter Slezak: Exactly and what the hell’s he doing in there? Yes he is, and that’s the problem.

James Franklin: It doesn’t matter. No, I don’t believe it matters whether he’s in there or not. It’s not essential that the person is in there…

Peter Slezak: But if you’re only on the outside, if there’s nobody in there to tell this story, then from the outside on his own account you can’t tell the difference.

Alan Saunders: Why can’t I simply say, ‘Well look, I’ve got these meaningful messages in English, say, going in to the room, and meaningful answers coming out of the room and I think, hey, I’m told this is just a computer, but this is obviously a computer that is thinking, that is processing this information’, you then open the door and lo and behold it’s a zombie with no inner life at all. What’s wrong with that?

Peter Slezak: Well now, this is combining two related but different philosophical puzzles. The zombie question is strictly a question about consciousness, and that’s I think a parallel argument. Searle strictly speaking is not talking about consciousness, actually. He’s talking about what philosophers call intentionality, but it’s the idea of meaningfulness. He’s talking about the claim that symbols could be the substrate for meaning, and consciousness is really something slightly different, so it complicates it. If one wants to bring consciousness in again and the whole notion of a zombie, which is kind of a parallel argument, that there may be nothing inside a machine, but the notion of a zombie is slightly different from this.

Alan Saunders: Okay, look, I think we’re going to have to move on or we’re going to spend all the day just talking about this one example, so let’s turn to a much older argument and one which has attracted a lot of criticism – also, I believe, another one that you don’t like, Peter Slezak - Pascal’s Wager, the wager proposed in the 17th century by the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal. Jim Franklin again this is an argument that you approve of and that you think has been caricatured by its enemies, so can you tell us what it is and why you like it?

James Franklin: Yes, I… It has legs. Pascal says that initially you perhaps don’t know whether there exists a God or not, or some particular religion, he’s thinking if the Catholic religion is true or not, but maybe there’s some evidence for, some against. You’ve got to bet one way or the other, you’ve got to make a choice with your life whether you go with it or not, and he says the payoff if it happens to be right is enormous, well, perhaps even infinite. So therefore, he says, it’s worth investing in just as a bet, because the bet the other way, you’ll just lose the finite amount of atheist life if you commit to religion. Now, what commit to religion means is a little bit tricky. He doesn’t mean that you should force yourself to believe; he means that you should, as he puts it, go to masses and the rest and wait for God’s grace; take some serious action that will lead you to believe if it turns out to be true. It’s a good bet.

Alan Saunders: Yes, I think this is an important aspect of the argument, it’s partly about decision theory, but it’s also partly about putting yourself in the way of belief. It doesn’t naively assume that you can bet yourself, as it were, into a position of belief. Peter Slezak, what’s wrong with that?

Peter Slezak: Well, generally, I think it’s taken to be an argument in favour of belief in God. This may be my lack of scholarly knowledge on this, but certainly when the argument’s run that way it’s terrible. They fear that if they’re in some sense not believers they’ve made the wrong bet. Now, I certainly think that in life generally a calculation of this sort—a kind of a expected utility calculation of ‘given the possibilities what’s the best course of action’—it works everywhere except where belief is concerned, and Jim perhaps rightly excluded that, but I think that’s an important point nevertheless, because some people, even in the case of belief, feel that they ought to believe in God because of the potential consequences of not believing. Belief doesn’t work that way.

James Franklin: No, I agree, belief is not subject to the control of the will that way. On the other hand, investigation of evidence is. The suggestion of Pascal’s Wager is whatever you think are live options in religion, there’s something to be said for investing your effort in looking into the live ones that might have a good payoff. So are you going to look into some?

Peter Slezak: Yes, I do, I spend a lot of my time looking into it or arguing about it, and I think that makes perfect sense.

Alan Saunders: But you do, don’t you, Peter, you do find that you encounter quite a lot of bad theological or God-centred argument?

Peter Slezak: I think they’re all bad. I mean, I think all of the arguments that are...

Alan Saunders: Some are worse than others, presumably?

Peter Slezak: Yes, some are worse than others, but I think they’re all bad, but they’re all very compelling and people find them persuasive. I find with my arguments with students and others, if you run it in a domain that they don’t have a personal commitment to, they see quickly that the argument’s flawed.

Alan Saunders: This is quite common, isn’t it, Jim? I mean, there’s a famous fallacy called the Monte Carlo fallacy whereby the roulette wheel is spinning, 12 hasn’t come up in the last 38 spins of the wheel, so you assume that 12 must be due to come up, but, of course, the ball doesn’t have a memory. There’s no reason to suppose that even if it had a memory it would be interested in helping you to win a lot of money, so this is a complete fallacy which you might not make if you weren’t committed to the idea of winning.

James Franklin: Sure, sure, we all have confirmation bias that we look for evidence for what we’d like to believe and against what we don’t. Still, you have got to be serious about finding the evidence on both sides.

Alan Saunders: On ABC Radio National you’re with The Philosopher’s Zone and I’m checking out some bad arguments, or let’s be balanced and say allegedly bad arguments, with James Franklin and Peter Slezak, both from The University of New South Wales.

Peter, there are various styles of bad argument, and one way of arriving at a bad argument is by way of a non sequitur, where you say, ‘B follows from A’, and really B doesn’t follow from A, and another great 17th century French philosopher Rene Descartes has been accused of this, hasn’t he? Tell us about that.

Peter Slezak: Yes, he has. One of his most famous arguments for the existence of his soul and the distinctness of his soul from his body is based on his idea which we can all share that he can conceive of his mind as distinct from his body. His whole argument in the Meditations is roughly of that form, and he says it explicitly. He can imagine that his mind is distinct from his body, and he concludes from that that therefore in actuality it must be distinct, and more or less obviously that’s a bad argument. What you can imagine isn’t necessarily true, but what I found interesting about it and nowadays explicitly acknowledged as such, one of Australia’s perhaps most famous philosophers, David Chalmers, runs an argument very similar for essentially the same conclusion. He’s famous now for arguing a version of dualism, or at least a criticism of materialism and there’s now a very large technical and sophisticated arcane literature on conceivability and how you can make inferences from what’s conceivable to what is possible, as philosophers call it, modal arguments, and what is therefore in some sense metaphysically the case. And they, in the footnotes, actually credit Descartes. I haven’t noticed that they’ve actually acknowledged that the scholars regard this as a notorious non sequitur, but they all give a footnote that Descartes made a similar argument as if this is a compliment, but I’m not sure that it is.

Alan Saunders: If we move from the conceivable to the actual- we suppose that because something is conceivable it must be actual - we’re in the same territory as a quite notorious argument which is the ontological argument for the existence of God, aren’t we, which is always simplified hideously, and I’m about to simplify it hideously now. We owe it to St Anselm, and basically the idea is can you conceive of a being than which there is no greater? Yes, you can, you can conceive this in the mind, but if it exists only in the mind then it is not a being than which there is no greater. An actual being than which there is no greater must be greater than the one that you’ve conceived in your mind, which is a contradiction. Therefore God must exist, there must be this greater being.

I’m not fully convinced that that’s a bad argument, I think it’s actually quite a complex argument. I think St Anselm said that he wanted to arrive at an argument for the existence of God that would also explain the essence or some of the essence of God, and I think it’s an argument for believers, and I don’t know that it’s ever convinced anybody to believe in God.

James Franklin: It didn’t convince Aquinas, and he’s a serious believer.

Alan Saunders: It did convince Descartes, though, so perhaps he just liked non sequiturs, I don’t know.

Peter Slezak: A lot of these arguments are very compelling, and in the case of the ontological argument, what’s interesting and historically well known, the same argument can lead you to the conclusion that the devil exists, because you don’t have to run it only on the greatest conceivable being, you can run it on the worst conceivable being.

Alan Saunders: Many popular bad arguments tend to occur in the huge area of what we might call the meaning of life. Peter, tell us what the American philosopher Thomas Nagel has to say about the meaning of life.

Peter Slezak: Nagel has a wonderful paper called ‘The Absurd’, where he looks at the concerns we all have, to some extent, and we all at some point in our life, I suppose, think and wonder about the meaning of it all, and the possibility that our existence is absurd in some sense, and he gives a nice account of the reasons that people offer for thinking life is absurd. One he gives, which is very common, when you become aware of the vastness of space and time and our own insignificance, and he says, why does that make it meaningless? Would it help if we were bigger, or if the universe was smaller? And he answers these arguments with a kind of a parody, a kind of a reductio ad absurdum, which helps you to see that there’s something wrong with these reasons that people typically give and we all share it in some sense.

He gives another example, it’s very common and I see it all the time, and I think I’m also subject to some extent to these feelings. We feel that our life isn’t meaningful because we’re mortal and we die, and perhaps there’s no afterlife, and certainly many students and many people find that what gives their life a meaning is the existence of a God, and it’s God’s purposes for us that makes our life meaningful, and he parodies this by saying... Well, he gives one example which is rather cute, he says, ‘Look, the meaningfulness of the chicken’s life doesn’t come from becoming our coq au vin’, and he makes you see that perhaps the meaning of one’s life can’t come from somebody else’s purposes; it has to come from within, and it has to be meaningfulness to yourself.

Alan Saunders: Well, I might want to say what more meaning could I give to the life of a chicken than by carefully cooking it and eating it with pleasure and appreciation.

Peter Slezak: But Nagel actually says how would you feel if we discovered that there were some other extraterrestrial beings that were preparing us for such a fate?

James Franklin: No, but you might find your life more meaningful if they had more cooperative designs. I think if I was not only doing what gave meaning to my life, but I discovered that I was part of some pattern that gave meaning to, well, even other human’s life but also other...

Peter Slezak: But that’s because then it could become meaningful for you, but let’s say that...

James Franklin: No, I’d like meaningful full stop. I wouldn’t expect to give my life meaning to myself. Either life is meaningful full stop or it isn’t, not meaningful to me.

Peter Slezak: Oh, I don’t accept that, I don’t think it makes sense to talk about meaningfulness full stop, I mean, in the sense in which we worry about this. I’m following Nagel here, I think meaningfulness can only make sense in terms of one’s own values and purposes and happiness, and if you’re told that somebody else has purposes for you, that doesn’t make my life meaningful.

Alan Saunders: I sense profound disagreement here which I would very much like to explore, but we have to move on. I’ve left the worst till last, the worst argument in the world. James Franklin, your teacher David Stove claimed to have discovered the worst argument in the world. In fact, he ran a competition to see who could nominate the worst argument in the world and he was the judge and he gave the prize to himself. What is the argument?

James Franklin: By worst he meant that it had to be extremely bad logically, and also it had to be very widely believed, and the argument, he says, is this: we can know things only as they are related to us, or under our forms of perception and understanding, or insofar as they fall under our conceptual schemes, or as we’ve been educated to in our culture, etc. Therefore, we cannot know things as they are in themselves.

When you first hear it you think, ‘I haven’t quite heard that’, but when you look around you start seeing it everywhere, so Stove himself says that the products of a typical modern high school are always telling you that they’re not committed to any of their opinion, it’s only their opinion. So why don’t they believe their opinion, and the reason is because it’s their opinion, full stop. He says just because they think they have an opinion, therefore there is no possible external justification for it. It’s an argument very well caricatured by another Sydney philosopher Alan Olding. He said, ‘It’s like saying we have eyes therefore we can’t see.’

Alan Saunders: Well, let’s see what’s wrong with this argument. If the premise is that we can know things only under forms of, certain forms of perception and understanding, then we cannot surely draw from that, I agree, the conclusion that we cannot know things in themselves, because perhaps we can, perhaps we’ve got lucky, but we certainly can’t know that we’ve got lucky, can we? So isn’t there a grain of truth in this bad argument?

James Franklin: The only grain of truth is that there does need to be some explanation of how knowledge works, but there is reasons for believing in the kind of knowledge we have. A substantial reason for realism is inference to the best explanation. There being stuff out there, much as you think it, is a very good explanation of the experience you have of there being things out there. If you kept being brought up short and surprised, then you might have a problem, but the fact that your knowledge checks out is evidence that you’re on the right track.

Alan Saunders: Peter Slezak, do you think this is the worst argument in the world?

Peter Slezak: Well, yes and no, I agree with Jim, and I agree with Stove in one sense that it’s a bad argument, but of course it’s like many of these arguments, very widespread, and there’s something again very compelling about it, and the question is to understand what’s right about it as well as what’s wrong. In fact, in my interest in psychology and cognitive science, just about every theory in psychology has that structure where clearly your access to the world is through your senses, and you don’t have, it seems, direct access. This is a longstanding argument in philosophy. There’s something right about it, and then the trouble is how to get out of it and how to avoid what appears to be the consequence that Stove and of course Jim rightly are concerned about, as I am. But it has to be acknowledged, the argument is very compelling, and there’s something very deeply persuasive about it, because it’s sort of right, too. The premise, if it’s stated in a certain way, is true, and that’s, in the whole history of philosophy, I think is in a sense bound up with just that problem.

Alan Saunders: And indeed it has been an argument that has been accepted or advanced by some highly intelligent philosophers. Jim, tell us about one form of the argument which Stove refers to as the gem?

James Franklin: Yes, this is the idealist philosopher George Berkeley.

Alan Saunders: This is in the early 18th century?

James Franklin: In the early 18th century, yes, who concluded that there isn’t anything out there to see, that you are trapped in your own experience, and his argument, which Stove calls the gem, is that the mind is deluded to think it can and does conceive of bodies existing unthought of or outside the mind, though at the same time they are apprehended by or exist in itself. So, you cannot have trees outside the mind in mind without having them in mind, therefore Berkeley says it must in a sense be an imagined tree; there are no unimagined trees.

Alan Saunders: But the tree does exist, doesn’t it? It exists in the mind of God as well.

James Franklin: He has a little out there which most people since wouldn’t follow him with, I think.

Alan Saunders: Peter, do you go along with rejecting the good Bishop Berkeley’s...

Peter Slezak: I do, but for me what’s interesting about it is that I’ve been looking at forms that the argument takes in modern psychology and cognitive science. I think Gerry Fodor and leading philosophers who are talking about cognition end up with a version of Berkeley’s idealism when they try to explain how cognition could function when it has representations, as they now call them, instead of ideas as the empiricists call them, and the problem becomes all over again how to connect the representations with the world, or how to connect us with the world, because of the intermediaries that are our representations, or, in Berkeley’s case, the ideas. And it’s very interesting for me to see how contemporary, sophisticated, technical philosophy of cognitive science essentially rehearses the arguments of Berkeley and Malebranche and these others.

Alan Saunders: James Franklin and Peter Slezak, thank you very much for joining us. The show was produced this week by Polly Rickard with technical production from Andrei Shabanov and Leila Schunnar. I’m Alan Saunders. I’ll be back next week with another Philosopher’s Zone.