Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Timothy Williamson: Philosophy’s Most Formidable Living Mind

Starting point is 00:00:00 I don't think that physicalism is likely to be true in a very strong sense. There are all these positions that you can take where you can think of yourself as somehow more enlightened than anyone else. And that isn't really a great cause for complacency or self-satisfaction because such positions are so cheap and there are so many of them. This is a tour to force through what reality is. We'll talk about the topics of logic, the self. consciousness, language, and toward the end, even art and free will.

Starting point is 00:00:35 Professor Timothy Williamson is Oxford's Wickham Professor of Logic and one of the most cited living philosophers. His name appears constantly on lists of contemporary thinkers who will go down in history. On this channel theories of everything, my name's Kurt Jymongle and I interview researchers regarding their theories of reality with rigor and technical depth. Today, anti-reductionist Williamson dismantles positions across the board. We cover the Soraitis paradox, so the paradox of the heap. He dissects solipsism and also examines what meaning means, eventually tackling whether AI can genuinely know anything at all.

Starting point is 00:01:12 Stick around until the end because he talks about why true monists are philosophically confused. Professor, what's something you believe that most of your colleagues fight you on? Oh, perhaps a good example is my view of vagueness. what to say about questions like, you know, how many grains make a heap or how many hairs makes someone not bold or whatever. And in my view, there's a truth of the matter. There is a particular cutoff point between heap and non-heap or between bold and not bold. It's just that because of the way the term is used, we're not in a position to to identify what the cut-off point is. So, I mean, that's a contrast with what a lot of people think, which is that vagueness in thought and language requires some kind of modification of logic or of the distinction between truth and falsity,

Starting point is 00:02:19 maybe going to a continuum of degrees of truth or something like that. And in my view, none of those revisions of standard logic, and of the distinction between truth and falsity are needed at all, that you can understand vagueness much better just by understanding it as a type of ignorance of facts that we just don't know. So the claim is that it's something like 310 grains of sand, but we just can't actually know that it's 310 or what? Yes, I mean, that's the idea.

Starting point is 00:02:51 I mean, it might perhaps vary from one context to another, but at least in, let's say, in our present context, It might be that the cut-off is between 310 and 309. Of course, it also depends on things like exactly how the grains are put together and things of that kind for it to be a genuine heap. But we can reason about it in a completely classical way. And the fact that it's a vague term so that we don't know what this number is, that's just our ignorance. and that doesn't prevent us from using standard logic. So what you're referring to is called the Soraitis Paradox,

Starting point is 00:03:35 and people may have heard that. And I'll leave the link on screen to the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on that. Now, you use the word identify. Now, the Sorides paradox is to what makes something, well, how many grains of sand? If you just have three grains of sand, you would just say it's a collection of grains of sand. But at some point, if you have a whole heap,

Starting point is 00:03:53 you'll use the word heap. And one of the standard responses is from Wittgenstein that says it's a foolish endeavor to try to investigate. Is 157 grains of sand a heap or not? It's just the way that we use language. So I know that I may have imprecisely characterized Wittgenstein, so please feel free to precisely characterize him. And then tell us why is he wrong in your mind and what this has to do with identity, like the self. Oh, yeah. So it doesn't, when I said identify, I wasn't talking about the self. I just meant that discovering, basically, what the number is. And that's something that we really have no idea how to do. And so, so, so Frankenstein at least is at least a little bit right in that we would be wasting our time if we, if we try, to discuss, you know, exactly how many grains are needed.

Starting point is 00:04:59 Well, actually, there's an interesting thing here, which is that there's much more of a scientific aspect to it than philosophers have tended to allow. I mean, in fact, I mean, scientists do study heaps because they're interested in things like the development and movement of sand dunes in the Sahara, desert, which is quite a serious issue because of desertification and so on. And so there, I mean, there actually is a science of heaps, which I suspect that Wittgenstein wouldn't have

Starting point is 00:05:35 thought that could be. And there's even an argument which the philosopher W.D. Hart, Bill Hart made that in fact we can know the cutoff point. And the answer, is that the minimum number of grains that you need to have a heap is four, because basically when you look at the physics of heats, what is relevant is that you have one grain stably resting on others. And you can't have that with three because you'd have to have two and then somehow one balancing on them and that wouldn't be stable. but with three you can have a little triangle of three

Starting point is 00:06:23 and then one on top of the triangle and that's a stable setup. So it might even be that we actually, in the particular case of heaps, we can know. But then, of course, that isn't going to solve the general problem of vagueness because we could switch to some expression like fairly large heap.

Starting point is 00:06:46 And probably you can't get a similar argument going about exactly how many grains you need for a fairly large heap and so on. So that the general problem is still there. But I think it's worth remembering those kinds of ways in which just the talk of vague, ordinary language terms, it can interact with science because it's an indication that, you know, one shouldn't be too confident about assuming that there will never be any way of answering these questions. I mean, you know, science does find ways of answering questions

Starting point is 00:07:26 that initially seemed completely hopeless. Now, the reason why I brought up the self and its relationship to the Soraitis paradox is that it seems to me that both exploit some tolerance or intolerance to incremental change producing something completely different. So are you the same as who you were yesterday or even an hour ago, that's not clear. Is it clear in your mind? Does a solution to the Soraitis paradox have any bearing to the problem of identity? Well, I mean, it's clear to me that I'm 70 years old, which means that I've been

Starting point is 00:08:06 around for 70 years, and I've changed quite a lot over that time. And so, I mean, the fact that I have different properties from the ones that I had yesterday doesn't mean that I'm not the same person. It's just that it's one person who persists through change. And there's no contradiction because I have, let's say I have the property of talking to you today and I didn't have that property yesterday. But it's really a misapplication of logic to think that that means I'm not exactly the same person as I was yesterday. I mean, there's just one person here who's been around for a fairly long time. And when the changes add up to something more drastic, then you can get Soraitis paradoxes for people.

Starting point is 00:09:03 And in fact, the American philosopher Peter Unger once published an article called, I Do Not Exist, where he used as Soraities a paradox. about a person rather than a heap to argue that there was really no such thing as him. I mean, I think it's a fallacious argument, but it is true, of course, that if you subtract an atom from a person at a time and then go on subtracting atoms, if you do it fast and long enough, you will eventually end up destroying the person, assuming the atoms are not being replaced. And of course, it's not clear exactly at what point that will happen.

Starting point is 00:09:54 And there are all sorts of issues in medicine about how the exact time of death should be fixed and exactly what criteria should be used. But I don't think those really cast any serious doubt on the existence of people, any more than the serious doubt about the existence of tables and chairs, which are also subject to arguments like that. I mean, you can remove one grain after, one particle after another from a table, and eventually there won't be a table there.

Starting point is 00:10:35 But, you know, as macroscopic objects, we're not immune to these kinds of paradoxes. But I don't think that the fact that we have difficulty fixing the time of death should lead us to think that the person was never alive. Right, right. Okay, now people who are just tuning in at this point, maybe they skipped forward or maybe this is its own standalone clip. This podcast is called theories of everything. and in this I generally speak to theoretical physicists who are, well, exploring what reality is from a physics angle. But other aspects of reality that are meaningful to people are meaning. So, meaningfulness and what is meaning and potentially what is logic, what is the self, mentality, in the sense of mental states, perhaps consciousness, perhaps language.

Starting point is 00:11:25 You've written on virtually all of these topics. And physicists tend to be reductionists. You're known for being a non-reductionist, maybe an anti-reductionist. So I'd like to also explore that. How can you make the case that reductionism is false? Well, I mean, there are a lot of different views that go by the name reductionism. I mean, I think, you know, the most drastic sort of view is perhaps that the only things that really exist are, absolutely fundamental particles, and there's nothing else at all. To be honest, I don't take such

Starting point is 00:12:12 views very seriously, but I mean, of course, an awful lot of physics is concerned with features like mass, where they're interested in attributing those to macroscopic objects. But also, I mean, another reason for not being a reductionist in the sense of thinking that all or are these physically fundamental things is that physics depends on mathematics, and mathematics depends on set theory or something like set theory. And of course, in set theory, you're talking about the existence of sets, and it's just a consequence of a standard theory of sets, that there are far more sets than there are fundamental particles. And so physics itself is in some way assuming the existence of objects that are not physically fundamental like sets.

Starting point is 00:13:09 I mean, of course, people try to wriggle out of those kind of commitments. But if you just take things at face value, that's what mathematics is committing you to. And physicists are very happy to rely on mathematics and don't feel the need to somehow explain how mathematics is okay, even if it's fundamental axioms are false. And so I think they're not really in a good position to be reductionists of that very extreme kind. But maybe you had in mind less extreme forms of reductionism. Well, does this then make you not a physicalist? Well, there's a notorious problem, actually, in trying to get precise about what

Starting point is 00:14:02 what physicalism says because, I mean, presumably it says something like everything is physical. But it's very hard to define what it's meant by physical, because if you try to define it in terms of current physics, then it might well be that there are all sorts of things which are not yet recognized by current physics, but will be recognized by the physics of, you know, 200 years ahead of us. And so it seems wrong to tie the idea of the physical to this specific point at which physics has got to right now. But then if you just say, well, physical things are whatever things will be recognized by the physics of the future, that's even worse because that's assuming that we know what will count as physics.

Starting point is 00:15:10 And who knows what, you know, how the word physics will be used, you know, in a few thousand years when people are speaking a different language. What the professor is referring to here is something called Hemples Dilemma, which I outlined in my lecture at Niagara University on why I don't buy the simulation hypothesis. or physicalism, link on screen and in the description. So I think, I mean, the idea that everything is physical is anyway somewhat ill-defined. But, I mean, I tend to think that there are various kinds of mathematical object and so on, and that there's no reason, for example, for thinking of the empty set as a physical

Starting point is 00:16:00 object. So, you know, I don't, I don't think that physicalism is, it's likely to be true in a very strong sense. I mean, it's not, you know, it's not, it's not, it's not that I believe in, in souls or, or anything like, like that. I mean, the usual kind of things that, that people who, who don't like physicalism appeal to, but I don't see really any very good arguments for physicalism. And I think another thing that sort of doctrinaire of physicalists often don't really take into account is that the theory that there are only physical things is not at all the kind of theory that the methods of physics are well adapted to testing or assessing. I mean, you know, that it's not the kind of thing that you could test.

Starting point is 00:16:58 by getting some quantitative predictions out of and then seeing whether they're verified or falsified. I mean, the theory that there's nothing else apart from physical objects is one that it belongs pretty obviously in the branch of philosophy called matter physics, which is not a branch of of physics at all. And so I think the people who say that there are only physical objects, they're effectively committing themselves to a metaphysical doctrine which can't be vindicated by physics. I mean, it might perhaps be vindicated by philosophy, but physics isn't the right thing to use. I imagine the physicalist who's listening, or the physicist, and they believe themselves to be a physicalist who's listening,

Starting point is 00:17:58 would say something like, look, let me make one of two moves, maybe both simultaneously. One, you've already indicated that we can have vagueness, and it's just our own property, it's our own ignorance, but it doesn't mean there's vagueness in the world itself. So what you've outlined,

Starting point is 00:18:16 which is that we don't know the future ideal physics, and physics is ill-defined, maybe ill-defined is slightly different than vagueness. But I imagine they could say, can we not turn your own argument on its head and say, no, no, there is something well-defined about physics. We don't know exactly what it is because we're making an appeal to something future and ideal,

Starting point is 00:18:33 but it's still there. So I imagine they could make a move like that, and I would like you to respond to that just a moment. And another move they may make is to say, if someone is going to claim that there is something outside of physics, what is it? Point to it. Is it this cup? I can investigate this cup using the tools of physics,

Starting point is 00:18:51 so most people wouldn't say the cup outside of the purview of physics, so they may say, okay, burden of proof is on someone else. So how do you respond to those two moves? Yeah. So I'm certainly not saying that the term physical is meaningless, and I think it's absolutely fine for them to apply my views on vagueness, at least dialectically, to the term physical and so on. But if they do that and they and they say, well, look, it's, you know, we don't exactly know which things count as physical and which things count as non-physical, then it sounds as so they're actually allowing for the possibility of non-physical things.

Starting point is 00:19:43 So that's what I'd say to your first point. To the second point, well, I did, you know, the challenge to say, oh, well, if there are non-physical things, what are they? And I did actually offer a candidate, which was the empty set. You know, I think one can offer other kinds of candidates as well. I mean, so that, you know, for example, it's not very obvious that the, let's say, that the novel pride and prejudice is a physical thing. it's you know of course the a particular copy of a book of prided prejudice is a physical thing but when we're talking about the novel we're not talking about any particular copy of it but at the same time we can I think say meaningful things and true things so for example that

Starting point is 00:20:43 Jane Austen completed six novels and so you know if novels are things that you can count than they exist, if the number of them is more than zero. And so it's not even clear that really that when we talk about something is, in a way, ordinary as a novel, that we're actually talking about a physical object. Fresh.com. Professor, I'm not sure if you know of a website called Reddit. Have you heard of it? Yeah, I've heard of it.

Starting point is 00:21:13 I've very occasionally looked at it. Well, on Reddit, there's various words. rooms of Reddit called subreddits, and they're just different categories for people to congregate and talk about a certain topic. One of those rooms is called Ask Philosophy, so R slash philosophy is what it's referred to as, and it's a great subreddit for philosophical topics. And your name is often brought up as one of these people who are living philosophers who will go down in history. You're one of the most cited philosophers who are living currently. What is it about you, your work that that resonates so much with other philosophers, or maybe it's a combination

Starting point is 00:21:59 of resonating and contention, I don't know, or what is it? Well, yeah, it's a bit awkward to be asked why I'm so great, but... Especially to a Brit. Yes, trying to take a sort of an observer's perspective. I think it's a variety of things that I mean, I do write quite a lot and I write on quite a lot of different topics. And I generally take views that people find quite provocative. And I mean, the reason for that is that if it's a topic on which I think the sort of current consensus, consensus is broadly speaking correct, that I'm not motivated to write about it. The things that I'm

Starting point is 00:22:56 most motivated to write about are ones where it seems to me that people have really got hold of the wrong end of the stick. And I think often ones where there's actually a simpler, more elegant and sometimes even more commonsensical, well, not always, view that is one way better than the kind of elaborate theories that people have been constructing. And so I like showing how, you know, a much simpler view will, in fact, handle all the difficulties. And I suppose another thing is that I like to think about philosophical problems in terms of their underlying structure, which typically had some sort of logical structure. And so I like to develop whatever view I've got in a way that is formally quite rigorous and doesn't just sort of come to pieces in your hands.

Starting point is 00:24:04 And so in that way I hope that what I've done tends to be fairly robust because there is an underlying logical structure. to what I'm staying, and so it's not as though it's all just going to fall apart as soon as you prod it. I'm sure you've heard of Boss von Frosson. Yes, yes, absolutely. I've met him. I know him. Yes, great.

Starting point is 00:24:34 Well, he was just on the podcast and he said that he's an anti-realist. You are a realist, which means to me that in your discussions privately or publicly, you have perhaps vehemently disagreed with him. And I'd like to know why, what position of his is incorrect in your estimation. I'm a realist in the sense that I tend to think that in our cognitive lives, we're dealing with realities that are mostly more or less independent of our will and independent of what we think about them, and that we are capable of gaining knowledge

Starting point is 00:25:19 about the world around us, and not simply about the way it looks to us, but the way things actually are. Part of Van Frasen's view is that all that science really aims at is getting theories, that are, you know, empirically adequate? Accurate.

Starting point is 00:25:47 Yes, in the sense that they don't make, they don't make predictions about observable things that we can simply refute. And he seems to think that scientists don't aim at trying to discover the, you know, what the underlying reality is, you know, below the stuff that we can actually observe. And I mean, it seems to me a bit odd that he's laying down what scientists are allowed

Starting point is 00:26:17 to be aiming at. I mean, I would have thought that's for scientists themselves to decide. But my strong impression is that most scientists are not just interested in making predictions that get verified, but that they really want to discover what the world is like out there. and that seems to me a perfectly defensible view, I mean a perfectly defensible aim for them to have. And in particular, I think where he's going wrong

Starting point is 00:26:55 is in the way that he gives a special kind of epistemological privilege to appearances. So as I understand him, he thinks really that's all that we can investigate is how things, as it were, appear to us. And I think that's a mistake. In part because, you know, I think he's, of course, he's very aware of how we can be wrong about how things really are, that it's always possible for us to be mistaken about that, which, of course, is true. But I think the same is true of appearances themselves, that we don't have any kind of infallibility even about how things appear to us. We can mischaracterize the way things appear to us. And for example, when you're just sitting in a room maybe with a bunch of other people, the challenge

Starting point is 00:27:57 to say how things appear to you is pretty much as hard as a challenge to say what is actually going on in the room. I mean, it's kind of easier to know about tables and chairs and where people are sitting and things like that than to know about your own subjective states of being appeared to by the world, as it were. And so I think that the idea that appearance has any special epistemological privilege is really a mistake. What's meant here by appearance? Well, so appearance, I think, is meant to be something that is just, as we're, subjective in the sense that it just has to do with what kind of. of, as you were, internal state of mind the person is in. So, for example, if we're talking about how, you know, a particular, let's say,

Starting point is 00:29:09 painting looks to you right now, then that's supposed to be just a matter of appearance, whereas if we're talking about how it is, you know, independently of how it looks to you right now. I mean, because after all, there's lots of aspects of it that you can't see maybe from your position or you're slightly misperceiving. That's to do with how it is rather than how it appears to be. And, you know, some of the time when people talk about appearances, they're really just talking about, you know, the way that we're inclined to judge things to be. But that also is a matter that we, you know, it is not in any special way. epistemologically privileged, because if we're talking about, you know, what our own

Starting point is 00:29:58 inclinations to make judgments are, I mean, those are things which, again, we can be wrong about. We can misunderstand our own inclinations and dispositions. You know, I mean, self-knowledge is quite hard to get. And, you know, I think there are different ways that people draw the line between appearances and other things. But however you draw it, the appearances are not going to turn out to be something, some little kind of cozy realm where whatever we think is the case, is the case. I mean, where we're kind of on-is-eat. I imagine if we take the fallibility of appearances seriously,

Starting point is 00:30:40 we then land on something like the problem of skepticism. Do we? And what is the problem of skepticism? skepticism for those who don't know what that is. Yeah. So there are probably several interlinked problems of skepticism. But I mean, the way I think about it is this, that there's a very healthy sort of instinct that people have to sometimes to question their own beliefs and to be somewhat self.

Starting point is 00:31:18 critical to try to step back from something, maybe something that they were brought up to believe and ask whether it's really correct. And then what they're doing is they're trying to assess it on the basis of everything else that they know or believe me about the world. And we think that it's surely a good thing because we don't want people to be completely lacking in the power to to criticize their own beliefs. The trouble is that if you take that too far, then it ends up in complete paralysis because, you know, if you start worrying that maybe all your beliefs about the world are mistaken, then you don't really have the basis on which to assess your beliefs about the world if you're kind of trying to step back from

Starting point is 00:32:17 all of them. And in fact, it seems like a really pretty dumb idea to try to assess all of one's beliefs about the world simultaneously because you're not left with any standpoint from which you can assess them. I mean, you're basically throwing away all your resources or distancing yourself from them and with nothing left. And so we're in a situation where, you know, a little bit of self-criticism is good, but too much self-criticism is just bad and, you know, and kind of hopeless. And it's difficult to know what the right amount is. And I mean, it's like being, being handed a bottle of pills where someone tells you, look, take these pills. You just take a few, but if you take too many, they will be really, really bad for you. But I just can't tell you how many.

Starting point is 00:33:34 It doesn't say on the bottle how many you should take. And so it's a kind of difficult situation like that. But, and I think that the people are, they're over-impressed by skeptical arguments. But the reason that skeptical arguments do get a bit of a grip on us is because they're just an extremely exaggerated form of something that in very small doses is really quite a good idea. And it's difficult to know exactly how to handle that. But I think that drawing skeptical morals from that is exactly the wrong way to go. And I mean, I think what skeptics are very clever at is kind of imposing their own rules of the game. so that they make it seem that if you can't, if you can't persuade the skeptic that they're wrong

Starting point is 00:34:43 and that their doubts are misplaced, then the skeptic wins. And of course we know that if someone is going to play the skeptic thoroughly enough, you'll never be able to convince them that they should give up their skepticism. Because after all, you know, one easy, form of skepticism that somebody could profess is skepticism about reason, that, that, you know, you could doubt that anything is a reason for, for anything. And, and then if you try to to give people, to give this skeptic about reason, reasons to give up their skepticism, they'll

Starting point is 00:35:29 just say, oh, look, you're begging the question because, because you're giving me reasons, whereas my whole skepticism is bait is skepticism about reasons. And so that's no good. And so if we were to play the skeptical game with a skeptic about reasons under those rules, then the skeptic would automatically win. But we just shouldn't accept that those are the right rules. I mean, the way I would think of it is that the skeptic has, got themselves into a hole that they can't climb out of.

Starting point is 00:36:10 And there's nothing that we can really do to get them out of their hole. But the fact that we can't get them out of the hole doesn't mean that we have to jump in there with them. I mean, what we should be doing is avoiding that hole. How do you know how many pills to take? I don't. I mean, I... Okay, let me say it like this. if you take enough Tylenol,

Starting point is 00:36:35 a Tylenol is actually quite poisonous, quite fast. I didn't realize that. If you take four or five of them, it could send you to the hospital. Okay, so you can notice bodily signs. That's for the body. But as a philosopher,

Starting point is 00:36:51 is there something that triggers you to know, okay, I'm taking too much of this skeptic or skepticism pill? Is there some warning sign that you see? Unfortunately, there's no, as a rule that you can apply. By the way, I'm not talking about a rule I can apply. I'm talking about Timothy. Yeah. So, well, there's no rule that.

Starting point is 00:37:21 So, for example, in some of my recent work, one of the things that I've been interested in is the extent to which philosophers have gone. gone wrong by relying on cognitive heuristics, which are kind of cheap and dirty ways of answering questions that are reliable most of the time, but that sometimes give wrong results. And, you know, I mean, a lot of human cognitive life depends, in fact, on using heuristics. And then so I've been calling into questions various things that some philosophers just, well, many philosophers have just regarded as data, and including in the case of vagueness.

Starting point is 00:38:10 And so, of course, I'm thinking, am I getting a bit too skeptical here? And as well, I don't have a red light flashing in my mind at this point, it seems to me that by going cautiously, by making sure that it's not just a matter of question, thing, questioning things at random, but by, you know, actually identifying what the heuristics are that we, that we're relying on and showing that these heuristics cannot be 100% correct, that, that, that, you know, I can keep the, the doubts, you know, down to reasonable levels.

Starting point is 00:38:52 But, you know, I, and I, so I'm trying to, to work in a way which isn't just going to generalise. because, I mean, sometimes people simply use what are basically just straightforward specific examples of instances of skeptical arguments, but where the same argument could be used about almost anything. And I think that's a warning sign when the reasons for skepticism are too generic so that they could be raised about almost everything. But I think, you know, I take it. that probably scientists have to deal with issues like this, where they're a bit skeptical about the data,

Starting point is 00:39:37 but they don't want to just dump it. And whereas it's not obvious what the right approach is. It's not, you know, maybe, you know, for example, data coming out of a lab that they don't completely trust and all these kinds of thing. And I think, you know, one just has to use one's judgment about this, which is what we're doing, for example, in social life all the time. I mean, you know, when people are making jokes, you know, there are various boundaries.

Starting point is 00:40:13 Well, they have the idea that, of course, sometimes with people can go too far in teasing or whatever it is. And there isn't any very obvious way of determining that except by using good judgment, which, you know, I think probably in every discipline, people, you know, part of acquiring the skills of the discipline is acquiring some sense of, you know, how skeptical you need to be about various kinds of data. How much does a performative contradiction enter into your analysis of a, maybe not a red light, like you mentioned, maybe a yellow light that you've gone too far? So, for instance, let's say that you're so skeptical you say the chair doesn't. exist, yet you go to sit on it. You're a solipsist, yet you try to convince other people that solipsism is true. Yes. So do you see that as an indication that someone is intellectually showing off or mentally masturbating at that point? How do you see it? Yeah. So, I mean, I think

Starting point is 00:41:16 I mean, those look like warning, warning signs. I myself, I'm not at all skeptical about the existence of tables and chairs. And my views are people who think that they can simply deny their existence. And I mean, they often talk about things like particles arranged table-wise and so on. But without really showing how they can dispense with all our normal ways of thinking about tables, I mean, that strikes me as they've gone too far. I mean, I don't want to put it down as, you know, too much to, you know, character defects on their part. I think it's just that some people, you know, are too willing to give up, as well, a lot of common sense stuff that we used to navigate the world on a somewhat flimsy.

Starting point is 00:42:23 basis. But, you know, I think it's probably a good thing for philosophy that different people have different points at which they would draw the line and feel that the skepticism is becoming crazy. And, you know, in the long run, you know, I think that we can judge, you know, not an end of a priori way, but just by looking at how productive different research, search programs are. I mean, you know, I guess, you know, there was a time when when people thought that denying that the world was at the center of the universe was, you know, a form of kind of crazy denial of common sense. But, I mean, it's, it has turned out to be the right move to make. And it's turned out that way because of that's part now, you know, and has been for centuries, part of a, you know, of very fruitful scientific research programs that are coming up with lots and lots of new knowledge about the world.

Starting point is 00:43:39 And, you know, so that, you know, I don't think that we should just try to, as were, ban ahead of time all these different, you know, ways of doing philosophy. think it's a matter of letting them develop and see what they come out with. And of course, skepticism tends not to come out with anything very much. When it's contrasted with less skeptical views that are producing a lot of knowledge, I mean, pretty clearly a lot of knowledge, then the skepticism just looks like as some kind of obscurantism or science denial or whatever. earlier you said that people seem to be impressed by skeptical arguments now i think you use the word people and not philosophers do you mean to say philosophers or do you mean the lay public tends to be more impressed by skeptical slash solipsistic arguments well i think it's more than just professional

Starting point is 00:44:41 philosophers um so you know i remember once teaching an undergraduate who was having his very first tutorial ever in philosophy. And he told me, oh, of course, in the philosophical sense of the word no, nobody knows anything. And I was thinking, how the hell do you know what the philosophical sense of the word no is? But with a lot of people, if you just, you know, people who have not been exposed to academic philosophy, at all. But if you just say, well, maybe we're all dreaming, or maybe you were dreaming, quite a lot of people react to that with thinking, wow, yes. I mean, yeah, for all I know, I'm dreaming. And so I don't know anything about the world because it could all just be a dream.

Starting point is 00:45:44 And so it's a kind of way that people can jump that doesn't require a lot of professional priming. I think it may be a bit more common amongst students in the humanities and students in the sciences. Just talking to other philosophers about their experiences, discussing, you know, skeptical arguments to audiences of undergraduates. The ones who are talking to audiences of humanity students tend to find that the students kind of immediately flock to the skeptical banner, whereas the people like engineers, for example, are a much less inclined to take skeptical arguments seriously. And so I think it does have a little bit to do with people's. disciplinary inclinations.

Starting point is 00:46:47 You know, I mean, some of that might be, you might say, well, that's the engineer is having more common sense, but it might also be that the humanities people, you know, have more empathy and so are, you know, are willing to kind of identify with this hypothetical dreaming subject in a way that people who are more concerned with nuts and bolts and are not. I mean, that's just speculation. Right. There are many confounding factors there between an engineer or the more math-y-sci-y people and then the humanities people. So that's less interesting to me than the rationale for people to adopt those views.

Starting point is 00:47:27 So what is it that the solipsists get wrong? Well, the... And also, sorry. And briefly, to the person listening, which is quite. quite a dangerous word here, but to the person listening, can you outline what solipsism is? Yeah. So solipsism roughly is just a belief that one is all that there is. That, you know, there's nothing in the world apart from me. So it's not really a skeptical view, because a skeptic would just be in doubt as to whether there's other stuff out there apart from

Starting point is 00:48:14 themselves, whereas the solipsist seems to be confident that there is only them. And, well, I think it's a blatantly false position. But I mean, if you're asking how do people get into these views. Besides psychedelics. Yes, yes. I think some of it is to do with people liking views that are kind of dialectically robust in the sense that if you start defending the view, there's pretty much nothing that anybody who's arguing with you can do to convince you that you're wrong. And, you know, that's true of skepticism because a skillful skeptic can just be skeptical about any arguments that are thrown at them. And an solipsist, you know, who's thinking, I mean, they can think, well, if your mother is telling you, you know, how dare you assume that

Starting point is 00:49:25 she doesn't exist, then you could, well, that's, that's just something that's going on in my mind. There's no, there's nothing else, like, such as a mother of mine out there talking to me. It's just, as it were, voices in one's head. Probably a serious solaceous. Shouldn't even allow for the existence of such things as heads. But it's a sort of provocative pose, you know, a way of annoying and shocking people where it's very, very difficult for them to, you know, to persuade, as it were, give arguments that are convincing from the point of view that you're adopting.

Starting point is 00:50:13 And so in a way, it's quite a fun position for people who like to be drastic and provocative and so on. But I think one mistake that they're making is probably to think that the best way of evaluating a position is to see whether you can, whether it can be refuted by the standards of the person who holds the position. And there are lots of very silly theories that can't really be refuted in that way. And that doesn't just include philosophical theories. It also includes lots of conspiracy theories.

Starting point is 00:51:04 If you show a conspiracy theorist, a newspaper report that's completely, incompatible with what they've said. Of course, they will just say that obviously, you know, the newspaper is part of the conspiracy and so on. And so there are all these kind of positions that you can take where you can think of yourself as somehow more enlightened than anyone else and where there's not much they can do about it. But, you know, that isn't really great cause for complacency or self-satisfaction because such positions are so cheap and there are so many of them that it really doesn't show very, very much. I think it's to do with the limitations of dialectic or argument in conversation as a way of assessing positions. Yeah, I wonder if someone

Starting point is 00:52:05 like Carl Jung, who would psychoanalyze someone, would say that your want to be enlightened and potentially even to be seen as enlightened is the secret, what's secretly behind your solipsism. Anyhow, as I say this, I realize there are various forms of idealism which teeter on solipsism. So Schopenhauer, for instance, where it's as if there's a single root and that root is all that there is and this root gives you. off these tendrils of the appearances of different identities, but it's actually the root that somehow is the true and only consciousness and that the individual minds are somehow the illusions. So do your arguments against solipsism expand to include the views of Schopenhauer,

Starting point is 00:52:55 or exclude the views of Schopenhauer, that is? Well, I don't think that anything that I say would have persuaded Chopinha to change his mind. And, you know, which is actually, you know, I mean, that's a fairly low bar for a theory to pass because it's also the case probably that nothing I say will persuade a conspiracy theorist to change their mind. And that doesn't mean that this is a view that deserves to be taken seriously. You know, that requires much more than just, as well, this kind of dialectical robustness that I've been talking about. Because somebody who takes, you know, a wrong-headed view can also, you know, consistently, being consistently wrong-headed, it will also make them wrong-headed in their evaluation of evidence and so on. I mean, that is very obvious with conspiracy theories.

Starting point is 00:54:07 but I think it applies to philosophical theories as well. So that, I mean, we who have not been persuaded to take Schopenhauer's view, I mean, we can just point to the lack of evidence that are in favor of Schopenhauer's view. And that's a perfectly reasonable thing for us to do. And the fact that he's got himself into a position where he's going to be totally unimpressed by considerations of that kind. That's his problem. Are you a monist? Are you a pluralist, a dualist, or what?

Starting point is 00:54:55 How do you think about reality? Well, I think there are lots of different things out there. I mean, monism in the strict sense, is the belief that there's only one thing. And I remember having an argument, well, with a monist who just given a paper defending monism and saying there are all these excellent arguments in favor of monism and so on.

Starting point is 00:55:27 And he summarized monism as the view that there are no distinctions. And so I asked him if there was the distinction between good and bad arguments. And he paused for quite long time and then said no, because he realized he had to say that. But so it's a view that I'm not at all tempted by. I think that lots of different things out there that they're not just many of them, but of many, many different kinds. I mean, you know, I was, we were talking before about both about novels and the empty set and physical particles and, and there are, and, you know, and, you know, obviously that's, that's not even a, a remotely exhaustive list. So, so, so I think there's just, there's a whole lot of variety of stuff that is genuinely out, out there. and can't be, you know, reduced to just one thing. I mean, of course, in some sense, it is all part of a unified world.

Starting point is 00:56:48 It's not, it's not as though these things are all totally unconnected from each other. But, you know, in that sense, I'm some kind of pluralist. Hmm Does being an anti-reductionist commit you to being a non-monist And also does being a reductionist Commit you to being a monist? Well, the kind of monism

Starting point is 00:57:12 that I was talking about is very, very extreme And so, you know, somebody who thinks that I don't mean to be a monist about monism to say that there's only a single kind of monism. Yeah. But feel free if I'm speaking imprecisely, of course.

Starting point is 00:57:29 feel free to distinguish between different kinds. Yeah. Yeah. So somebody who thinks that all or is lots of fundamental particles is not a monist in the very strictest sense because in the strict, in the strictest sense, modinism is just a belief that there is only one thing. It might be monist, you know, in a slightly weaker sense, which would be the view that there's only one kind of thing. Of course, there's a question, well, what counts as a kind of thing? But if this is a minus two, I mean, someone who thinks that there are only, let's say, fundamental particles, then they've been reasonably specific about what the one kind of thing is. And so there may be forms of reductionism, which are like that. But, I mean, for example, I mean, somebody who's a reductionist in the sense that they think

Starting point is 00:58:31 that all knowledge can somehow be reduced to physics. They haven't yet committed themselves to being a monist about physics, because of course, within physics, there is a lot of variety. But it's still a view which sort of, as it were, drastically reduces the amount of variety in the world in some sense. I understand I'm committing a cardinal sin, a huge one, by speaking with Timothy Williamson and not asking him about what is logic and what is knowledge. Everyone does that.

Starting point is 00:59:13 I want to hear you expound on something that's rarely heard. What are your views on consciousness? Well, I think its philosophical importance has been drastically overrated. I certainly don't think that it's some kind of very ontologically special level of reality in the sense that some people think that consciousness is somehow made up of qualia or sort of things, something like conscious sensations which are independent of. of the physical. You know, I think that in talking about consciousness, it's much better to focus on issues about conscious, you know, being conscious of something as some form of cognition in the sense,

Starting point is 01:00:22 you know, I mean, right now I'm conscious of you, for example, and I'm conscious of the microphone in front of me. And so that's just a cognitive relation to, to things in the environment. And, you know, I think within epistemology consciousness has been overestimated because there's a tendency amongst people who would classify themselves as internalists to think that really all the action in relation to, for example, the justification of beliefs and so on.

Starting point is 01:01:07 one, has to be at the level of consciousness, whereas it seems to me that the evidence from psychology is pushing in the direction that, in fact, most of the action is outside conscious consciousness. And that although the consciousness as some kind of final workplace where we can deliberate about decisions and so on, I mean, there is. I mean, there's something to that, but that we shouldn't privilege it over, you know, all the stuff that's, that all the cognition that's going on that isn't happening at the level of consciousness. Just to sum up, I do not regard consciousness as such a big deal. And to bracket that, it's not that you don't regard consciousness as such a huge deal. You mean philosophically, it's not a huge deal.

Starting point is 01:02:07 Not that it's not a huge deal in people's lives. Philosophically, yes. I mean, obviously, if somebody were to tell you or me that where they're about to give us an injection, which will render us unconscious for the rest of our lives, I mean, we would not be happy at all. And it would be silly to be happy about that. but I think that it's somehow been given a kind of privilege by philosophers that it doesn't deserve. When people speak about beliefs and knowledge and understanding, those are often said to be mental states. Does a mental state presuppose consciousness?

Starting point is 01:03:08 I think it's not it's not. it's not very obvious whether that's the case. But, you know, if we came across some animals whose behaviour seemed to be much better understood by attributing, let's say, beliefs and desires to them and knowledge, than in any other way, then it would be reasonable to say that they did have beliefs, even if, let's say, that some kind of investigation of their brains suggested that they didn't have anything which kind of fits the philosopher's paradigm of consciousness. I mean, of course, there's a sense in which, you know, just by perceiving the environment,

Starting point is 01:04:13 we're in a way we're conscious of the environment, through perception, all the time, we're gaining knowledge of the environment. And if we were dealing with a creature which just wasn't conscious of anything at all in that epistemological sense, then it doesn't sound like a creature with a mind. So I think, you know, I think it depends on how much we model consciousness just on, you know, being conscious of something just on, you know, on perceiving things and how much on whether we want to put a whole lot more about the special role of consciousness into it. But if we put too much into the, what's required for consciousness, then it just won't be required for

Starting point is 01:05:04 for having mental states or having beliefs and knowledge. So then can an AI genuinely know facts, facts or understand models or what have you under your account? Well, I think it's, of course, it's not so obvious what to say about that. I mean, irrespective of what I've been saying, because of course, some people might all. also say that advanced forms of AI are conscious.

Starting point is 01:05:39 I think the forms of AI that people mostly have in mind seem rather inadequate for the attribution of mental states, really because their connection to the world is so is so limited, you know, that although they chat GBT or whatever it is, it's, you know, it's producing sort of reams and reams of prose. And the words in it are, do, in fact, refer to objects out there in the environment. And the reference is completely mediated by the human use of language. I mean, that they're using words which only, you know, If AI uses the word cat, that refers to cats because that's what humans mean by the word cat,

Starting point is 01:06:43 it's very different from a robot which is interacting with its environment, which has some form of, as it were, sense perception and is acting on its environment in much more extensive ways. And of course, it wouldn't, it's, we would. be so technologically difficult to combine AI with those forms of input and output that I think have a lot to do with whether we're actually talking about genuine mental states. And I'm skeptical about whether AI in exactly its current form really deserves to count as having mental states. But I think if we're talking about AI in systems that have more autonomy and more ability to interact with the world, then I don't see any clear argument for denying them at mental

Starting point is 01:07:49 states. And it might be that if the best way of, let's say, of understanding a robot's behavior is by attributing knowledge and belief and desires and so on to it, then that's evidence that it really does have those mental states. That's interesting. If the best way of us understanding something is to attribute something to it, then that's evidence that that thing has those attributes? Yes. Of course, it's not that it's up to us whether something else really has mental states.

Starting point is 01:08:28 I mean, the truth of the matter depends on what's going on with that robot or maybe non-human animal or whatever it is. So it's not that we get to make it, for example, conscious or non-conscious. It's just that when we're testing the hypothesis that it has mental states, we're going to test the hypothesis by, seeing whether this hypothesis gives much better explanations than any kind of alternative view of what's going on. And so if the hypothesis that it has mental states and specifically, you know, specific attributions of systems of knowledge and belief and desire to this entity, whatever it is, if that, if that, as you were, produces the experience, the explanatory goods, then that is evidence in its favor. But what we're talking about is how much evidence we humans have for attributing mental states to some other kind of system.

Starting point is 01:09:42 So this is interesting because the way that I would think about a mental state or consciousness or any of those sorts of attributes is a statement about the ontology of an entity rather than a statement about my best way of describing that entity. Yeah, I'm agreeing with that. Oh, okay. So, to give an example, I believe the Greeks thought that rocks wanted to be close to the earth. So it's as if they had this telos or this purpose of going close to the earth.

Starting point is 01:10:14 And we could have also conceptualized that as a want. It has a desire to be close to the earth. And I imagine that that's successful. Now it's not quantitatively successful. but maybe that was good enough for them at the time. And then that gets displaced with a different model and the model that Newtonium mechanics say doesn't have any variable called want or desire in it.

Starting point is 01:10:37 So then we eliminate that. So you just said that you're agreeing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so the thing is, you know, if somebody produced a, let's say a theory of gravity, where gravity was actually the result of things wanting to be closer to each other and the bigger they are, the more they wanted or something like that.

Starting point is 01:11:11 The larger of a heart they have, yes. That theory, it won't get everything wrong, but it doesn't really have the kind of explanatory power that we'd expect of attributing mental states to creatures. Because, I mean, the thing about, you know, the mind is that, I mean, the whole point, you know, from a kind of broadly evolutionary perspective of having a mind is in order to interact in flexible ways with an environment that's very complicated and that's changing very quickly and so on. And what we're expecting from mental state attributions is that they enable us to predict, you know, flexible behavior.

Starting point is 01:12:08 Because that's what the whole point of attributing minds is. And we wouldn't get that with rocks. And so we wouldn't really get the kind of distinctive, you know, explanatory benefits that we'd expect. that we'd want from, you know, attributing the mind. And, you know, and the kind of thing that we might expect, you know, for example, you know, that they do this by in some way representing their environment, that seems just, you know, completely inappropriate for rocks. I mean, they don't have to represent the bodies that they're gravitationally attracted to,

Starting point is 01:12:55 whatever, in order to be gravitationally attracted to you. Can you help me sort out in my mind the distinguishing factors between mind and mental states and consciousness? So which has another as a necessary condition and what is optional and so forth? So those are three, mind, mental states and consciousness. Yeah. So I think mind is just a abstract term that we apply to, to anything that has mental states. Right. So if you have mental states, then you have a mind.

Starting point is 01:13:32 And if you don't have mental states, you don't have a mind. So I think that's relatively easy. With consciousness, I mean, not all mental states are conscious. I think that's fairly generally agreed. And in a way, that's become part, of common sense. So that you, you know, we might, you know, somebody's describe somebody's behavior by saying that the way they're behaving is, you know, because, let's say, that they're still angry with their mother about something, even though they're not

Starting point is 01:14:16 at all aware of this. They may, I mean, they may be angry without feeling angry. But it might still be that all kinds of otherwise somewhat irrational behavior are, you know, are best understood by, you know, attributing to them an attitude of anger towards the mother of an unconscious kind. And so that's a mental state which is not conscious. And even when we're talking about what someone, for example, knows how to do, They have various skills. The knowledge doesn't have to be conscious knowledge. And so, I mean, for example, a lot of the knowledge that somebody has when they know how to ride a bicycle,

Starting point is 01:15:08 it's not knowledge that is running through their consciousness as they ride a bicycle. I mean, if it were running through consciousness, they'd probably crash. But so it's important for it not to be conscious. but it's still in fact stuff that they do know. And consciousness relations of being conscious of various things. If they're understood in the sense in which, for example, if something is conscious to you, then you're usually able to say something about it in words or whatever. That just isn't required for men.

Starting point is 01:15:50 mental states. It's, as it were, for a particular mental state, it's an optional extra. Can you know something without knowing that you know it, but outside of the tacit versus explicit division? Well, this is something that I've argued that you can do, that very roughly the argument is that in order to know things, you have to be sort of, roughly speaking, safely correct about them and so that you're not, as a word, too close to being wrong about them.

Starting point is 01:16:31 And so if you say that somebody knows something, you're just attributing one level of safety or, you know, I sometimes put it at one level of margin for error. Whereas if in order to know that you know something, basically you need two margins for error. And so that's a more demanding state. And so I think without worrying too much about issues of consciousness, you know, on broadly epistemological grounds,

Starting point is 01:17:00 you can argue that there's got to be a difference between knowing and knowing that you know. I mean, I should say that those arguments of mine are quite controversial, but that's something I do argue in knowledge in its limits. another work of mine. Is that your loneliest intellectual position, or is there another one that's even more held pretty much by you only? That one is not a very lonely position.

Starting point is 01:17:32 I think an awful lot of people agree with me about that. I mean, there are also some people who disagree and want to give models of the, of more. knowledge which don't have that consequence. But, yeah, I'm not feeling embattled. And that one, you know, although I think that the arguments I gave were new ones, I didn't have the feeling that I was going to be shocking people that much by taking that line. So I would think of that as one of, you know, as still a controversial view, but not as provocative as some of the other views that I have.

Starting point is 01:18:15 Many computationalists will look at vector embeddings, which are a component of how these LLMs work. So outside of the, well, you have to use some architecture along with it, but there are a variety of words or tokens. Some people may know that distinction. It doesn't make a difference. Then these words get placed into some higher dimensional space, and various relationships between the words are captured in this space,

Starting point is 01:18:42 where certain words that are close in meaning are closer together, but then also you could formally take additions and minuses of certain concepts and get what would also make sense. So queen minus female equals king or something like that. Now, I was speaking at this dinner for Oshanasi Ventures, and there were many other people in the audience who were in the AI space, and I was saying that one of the projects of this podcast is investigating, quote unquote reality, and part of that touches on meaning and what meaning is, what it means

Starting point is 01:19:19 to mean, and that's not such a clear-cut question to me. I don't know what meaning is. And then someone came to me, who was a computationalist and said afterward, just privately, said, Kurt, no, it's just vector embeddings. That's what meaning is. The meaning of a word is just its placement in a vector embedding. So I think this is called the distributional hypothesis, though, the person didn't say that. Does that account of meaning satisfy you? No. Speaking about knowing something without knowing it, to me, that isn't what I mean by meaning. But in order for me to then, I imagine the interlocutor at that conference would say, well,

Starting point is 01:20:01 what is it that you mean by meaning? And I would say something with words and they could use those words and then point to vector embeddings. So I wouldn't be able to convince them with my words. At least I don't think I could. Yeah. So I think that meaning has a lot to do with reference. And the reference is a relation which words typically have to things. which are not just in one's own head,

Starting point is 01:20:40 but are out there in the environment. And, you know, I mean, a very crude way of thinking about that is that, you know, when we're doing translation from one language to another, if we're looking for how to translate, let's say, the word dog, into another language, we'll be looking for a word in the other language. which has the same reference as our word dog. In other words, one which refers to dogs, and dogs are things out there in the environment.

Starting point is 01:21:18 Whereas thinking of meaning as just vector embeddings is making it something just sort of internal to the system. I mean, it's what seems closely related to what people sometimes talk about, as conceptual roles or inferential roles or something like that. But just talking about those kind of relations which are internal to the system doesn't get to the point of meaning, which is that it's something that we can communicate to other people and preserve in memory over time. And what we're communicating to other people

Starting point is 01:22:10 is not some kind of vector embedding because their vectors may be radically different from ours, but we can still communicate because we're triangulating on objects out there in the environment. So I think that what was being claimed there, presupposes a very inadequate sort of internalist conception of what meaning is. Are you referring to the symbol grounding problem? Well, that may be another way of making the same point.

Starting point is 01:22:53 I mean, it's just that, you know, looking, if you try, if you just try to look inside someone's brain for what they, what they mean, and just look at the brain in isolation from the environment that it's interacting with, then then you just will not be able to get at what they mean. What is the greatest philosophical problem? I, I certainly don't have a checklist of

Starting point is 01:23:41 philosophical problems that, you know, where I'm ticking them off or anything like that. You know, I think if, for example, if you were to ask a mathematician, you know, what's the greatest mathematical problem? They would probably tell you what the, you know, the one closest, you know, about some big problem that was closely related to their own research. And you'd get very, very different answers, I suspect, from different mathematicians

Starting point is 01:24:14 depending on which particular branch of mathematics they were in. And I don't think it's so, so different in philosophy. And, I mean, part of what's going on is that, and this might be actually a little bit different between philosophy and mathematics, is that in philosophy, the questions are being transformed as you work on them. So the things that you do, they don't answer a question that you had in mind right from the beginning and you just thought, okay, I'm going to work on this question. It's more that, you know, by poking around at problems, you know, individuals, you know, maybe quite small problems,

Starting point is 01:25:02 which, where it seems people have got something wrong and so on, you gradually build up a bigger picture that can explain a lot of things. But you don't really typically know in advance what the theory that you're developing is going to be able to explain and what it's not going to be able to explain. So, I mean, I'm sorry that's a slightly evasive answer. But no, that's fine. But how about this? make it more concrete by giving an example, a personal example, from your research of the past, say, 10 years.

Starting point is 01:25:37 Yes. So, for example, I've got very interested in the role of heuristics, which I mentioned earlier, in our thinking, and in how the heuristics that we rely on in a kind of, you know, possible, heuristics, which may even be humanly, you know, that we rely on in thinking about various things can lead us astray. The way I got into that was because I was very interested in conditionals and, I mean, that's if, if then statements and particularly counterfactuals, are kind of actual conditionals about, you know, if X had happened, you know, why would have happened, that sort of thing. And so I was one key issue there, although it's in a way it's niche, but it has a lot of

Starting point is 01:26:41 consequences, is what to make of what are called counterpossibles, which are counterfactual conditionals with impossible and seeds. So there are things like if two plus two had been equal to. to five, you know, what would have followed about physics or something. And so the standard view, which actually I think is the correct view, is that those ones, they're just vacuously correct because, basically because you can't have a counter example to them. But there are lots of cases where people have the, you know, strong feeling that some of these counterpossibles can be false. And so,

Starting point is 01:27:26 You know, one example that people use is, is that if the philosopher Hobbes had succeeded in squaring the circle, sick children in the mountains of South America would not have cared. Or, sorry, or would have cared, let's see. And which seems false. I mean, they just, those sick children wouldn't have cared. And so it seems, so it seems false to say that they would have cared if he succeeded. in this thing. But of course, it's an impossibility because, you know, the circle can't be squared in the relevant sense. And so people were saying that we had to completely revise our theories of how conditionals work in order to allow for false counterpossibles. And, you know, and I thought that was a rather naive reaction to these examples. And in particular, I realized that there was some kind of heuristic that people were used. using, which was to get these judgments, which wasn't that reliable. And then thinking about the

Starting point is 01:28:32 heuristic, I realized that what the heuristic I'd postulated was just a very special case of a much more general heuristic for assessing conditionals in general, and that one could show that this much more general heuristic was actually implicitly inconsistent, so that it can't give the right answer all the time. And that was how I got into thinking about heuristics in philosophy much more generally, and the role that they can play in, for example, making us wrong assessments of particular examples and then think that we've got a counter-example to a theory when in fact what the problem is with the example and not with the the theory. And so, and so I wrote a book a couple of years ago called Overfitting and

Starting point is 01:29:29 Huristics in Philosophy, and which is about the relevance of heuristics to philosophical method. Sorry, this is a rather long story, but it's because it's a long journey. And so I got into that because I was thinking about conditionals and particularly counterfactual conditionals and how they related to our knowledge of what could have been the case. But then I ended up with some conclusions about how we needed to rethink philosophical method, which was not remotely what I'd had in mind when I'd got into that train of thought. And that's not so unusual. So I've tended to work by sort of following the argument where it leads and trying to see where it has some kind of interesting implications, which might be very different from the

Starting point is 01:30:30 topics that I got into this issue by thinking about. And so, you know, in that sense, I'm quite opportunistic in the way that I, you know, do research. And so I don't at all do it by thinking, you know, such and such is a good problem. Let me try and solve it. Now, while we're speaking about conditionals and counterfactuals, can you please to the person who has taken a classical course in math or logic and they learn about classical logic, and in the first lecture, you learn the truth table that if you have an antecedent that's false, The whole condition will just be true.

Starting point is 01:31:16 Okay. And then the question is, well, how can we ever do counterfactual reasoning? Let's suppose you ate eggs for breakfast. But then if I say, if Timothy Williamson ate bacon for breakfast, then so and so. But it's just always trivially true. If Timothy Williamson ate Mother Teresa for breakfast, everything's trivially true. So how can anything consequential or of use come out of counterfactual thinking if the antecedents is already false.

Starting point is 01:31:45 Yeah. So, I mean, I think the answer is that the truth table, I mean, I would defend it for ordinary conditionals, which just, you know, if something, if X happened, then Y happened or whatever. But I think virtually no one would defend it for counterfactual conditionals. And that's because counterfactual conditionals, they have an extra. element in them, which is modal. It has to do with possibilities. And so, I mean, a classic example of the difference between ordinary conditionals and counterfactual conditionals is, you know, something we can definitely say is if Oswald did not shoot Kennedy, someone else did. That's obvious

Starting point is 01:32:38 because we know that someone shot Kennedy. So, you know, if it wasn't, if it wasn't Oswald, it was someone else. But if you say if Oswald had not shot Kennedy, someone else would have, you're making a very, very different statement and a much less obvious one because, you know, presumably you... Depending on your conspiracy theory of choice, yes. Yes. I mean, either there was a second, you know, backup assassin waiting or possibly, you know, somebody. might say that because they thought that, you know, Kennedy was somehow a kind of an assassination prone kind of guy. But you have to have, you know, some story like that. And so, so those,

Starting point is 01:33:26 those two types of conditional, I mean, the plain ones and the ones with a kind of wood in them are very different. And, and they have to be handled by different apparatus. And, I mean, my own view which, you know, which is also quite controversial, is that the if, the if part just does follow the truth tables that students are taught in logic.

Starting point is 01:33:55 And that the, the extra bit is just coming from the, the wood, which, you know, it's a word that there isn't simply used when we're doing conditionals. I mean, you know, when we, for example, we can say things like,

Starting point is 01:34:10 you know, oh, she would never betray a friend, where we're using the word would, but it's not a conditional. It's just something about what this person would never do. And we can, you know, say things like, oh, he would do that, wouldn't he? And so on.

Starting point is 01:34:27 And so that, as it were, would, you know, it has a life of its own. And I think where a lot of theories of conditionals have gone wrong is by not understanding that the way to understand counterfactuals is by seeing them as a resultant of, you know, a plain conditional if, plus a what's called a modal operator, which is the wood. And I think if you take them apart like that, you can actually make quite good sense of how they work.

Starting point is 01:35:02 Speaking about possibilities, what do you hope is true? You mean, not about politics or whatever, but what view of the, Others where philosophical matters is true. Well, I, you know, I hope that my views are true. Let me put it this way. There's plenty that you have evidence for. There's plenty that you have knowledge about.

Starting point is 01:35:35 But there's also plenty that you're uncertain about. Let's speak about those that you're uncertain about, but you hope is true. What's something you hope is true? As you can see, it's a good question in sense of not an easy question. Not an easy question. So, I mean, I guess there are various things where, you know, I hope that some relatively simple elegant, powerful theory is true,

Starting point is 01:36:40 rather than it just being such a mess that it's hard to say anything to you about. I mean, that's my general attitude. I hope that the role of context in semantics of natural languages is comparatively limited because otherwise it will be much harder to get any kind of theoretical control over lots of things. So in a way, it's a hope that things are beautiful, even though, of course, lots of things are horribly ugly.

Starting point is 01:37:22 I'm sorry that my webcam is on. Anyhow, so what advice do you consistently give your students? Well, I don't give the same advice to all students because, I mean, different students need different things. I mean, so, I mean, for example, you know, some students are underconfident, but others are overconfident. And so I don't say the same things to the ones who need to be a bit more self-confident and to the ones who need to be a bit more self-confident and to the ones who need to be a bit less self-confident. I mean, I think, I mean, something that is true for really much everybody is that hard work is important.

Starting point is 01:38:15 And I mean, that's kind of obvious. But occasionally people think that, you know, in philosophy, really what matters is having some kind of, you know, brilliant insight that could be summed up, you know, in one line. and that that somehow, you know, you just have to sit around waiting for that to happen. And, I mean, and of course, that's never the case. And I quite often tell students not to worry about being original, but just by to worry about, you know, making what they say true. And that if they're sufficiently concerned with being accurate,

Starting point is 01:39:02 they will actually be forced to say things that are original in many areas because the received views are not correct. Can you expand on that? If you force yourself to only say what's accurate, then you're going to end up being original because the received views are often incorrect? Well, yeah, so that if the received views, are all incorrect and that looking carefully at, you know, and let's assume that looking carefully at them, you can actually see that they're incorrect, then the positive things

Starting point is 01:39:45 that you say can't be any of those received views, because if you're going to be accurate, because those received views are wrong. And so that forces you to think of another view different from them, which is not subject to the same sorts of criticism. And so, you know, I think that very often that is what drives people to force them to think of something new, because all the old stuff doesn't really explain some difficult examples or whatever it is. or doesn't have the right structural features. Do you find that for yourself personally,

Starting point is 01:40:34 much of your insights come more from one of the following that I'll list. So maybe you get the majority of your insights from showering or from walking or from talking with colleagues or from reading or from writing. Like one of those that I just said, or maybe it's something else occurs to you. Is there something that consistently gives you, professor, more insights than the rest? So I love walking, but I don't find it a particularly good way of getting new ideas.

Starting point is 01:41:16 I mean, the kind of walking I love most is walking in the Scottish mountains. And there you, if you're just, if you're just, concerned only with some philosophical problem, you're probably going to walk over a cliff or something. And so that it's not really a good idea. I mean, in fact, I like it because it's an opportunity where it's a situation where I basically can't think about philosophy. And it's nice just to have a few breaks from it. Quite often I have ideas coming out of discussion. but typically in a discussion I will say something

Starting point is 01:41:59 and after I've said it I think hey that's not bad there might be something in that and it gives me a clue to what followed what follow up I think someone said you know how can I know what I think until I hear what I say but you know there are the circumstances which are good for having a new idea there are there are also circumstances in which are good for sorting out some problem. Maybe where you've got a sort of an idea that feels as though it's on the tip of your tongue, but it's actually extremely difficult to articulate.

Starting point is 01:42:43 And then sometimes the shower can be a good place to work that out. I mean, I've had cases where I thought this is an idea. which I can almost grasp, but it's not quite there yet. And so in one case, I just filled a hot bath and told myself, I'm going to sit in this bath until I've worked it out. And after two hours, the water was getting pretty cold, but I actually had worked it out. Oh, great.

Starting point is 01:43:13 But the thing is, you know, often, you know, when it's something that people have been thinking about for a while, but it kind of needs time to settle. What they need to do is sort of relax, and then the thing will come to them when they're not really worrying about it. Then this is true, of course, of mathematics as well. But if you are too self-conscious about doing that,

Starting point is 01:43:46 and then you set up optimal conditions for being as we're able to clinch the idea, then it's very easy to have anxieties about, well, look, these are optimal conditions. So if I don't get it now, I'm never going to get it. So this is really high stakes. And so you somehow have to keep the stakes relatively low in order to be relaxed enough for the things to sort themselves out in your mind.

Starting point is 01:44:18 at a certain stages of working through a problem. But, of course, I mean, also, you have to spend just a lot of time. Well, if it's something logically, then you just have to be scribbling away on bits of paper. Do you have any sort of views on free will, libertarian free will in particular? So I'm one of the few philosophers who doesn't really care whether they have free will or not. I'm sort of inclined to think that free will is compatible with determinism. I mean, if we were talking about hopes, I mean, that's maybe something that I, I hope is the case. But, you know, if an Oracle were to tell me that free will is incompatible

Starting point is 01:45:16 with determinism, I would not be heartbroken. Even if I, if I, the Oracle also told me that determinism was true. I mean, if you think about artists and, and their relation to their works, you know, it seems normal and not at all bad if an artist says, well, I had to paint the painting this way because I just couldn't paint it any other way. I mean, you know, supposing it's a great painting. And, you know, in that case, the artist might say I just did, I had no free will in the matter. I just had to paint it that way. And we're not going to react to that by saying, oh, well, if you didn't have free will, then

Starting point is 01:46:00 you can't take any credit from this painting. Sorry. I mean, we might even be more impressed and think, well, you know, the first. fact that you couldn't do it any other way is kind of an indication of how secure your understanding of the sort of aesthetic constraints and so on was. And I don't, I'm not sure that the case of ordinary actions is so different. You know, if you have, for example, people who, who rescues, you know, a child who's in trouble. you know, let's say in danger of drowning in a pond or something, and who just, who doesn't,

Starting point is 01:46:44 who doesn't think about it, they just rush into the pond and rescue the child. And later on, they might, they might say, well, I, you know, it didn't feel as though I had any, any free will about the matter. It was just something I had to do. And that, that, that, that seems better than the person, you know, who kind of deliberates about it and is very conscious of the fact that, that, that, that they could just leave the child to drown and so on. I mean, you start to wonder, you know, if it was that closer call, you know, what's the matter with you? And interesting, you know, I'm not so so convinced that that free will is something, if it's assuming that it's not compatible with determinism. It doesn't strike me as anything particularly

Starting point is 01:47:35 desirable. I mean, of course, people go on about issues. about responsibility and so on. But I'm not a terribly moralizing kind of person, so I'm not very carried away by such considerations. Professor, thank you for spending two hours, greater than two hours with me. Well, thanks to you for spending two hours with me. It's been an honor, sir.

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Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Timothy Williamson: Philosophy’s Most Formidable Living Mind

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