Problems of the Self

bernard williams is an interesting kind of philosopher-- always strongly suggesting or carefully cautioning or widely gesturing toward, but rarely doing those things that are taken to be the ideal end of analytic philosophy-- firmly concluding, neatly tying up. this, his strength, is ultimately his weakness, too. it's like that with everyone-- which is just the sort of messy truth, the sort of grand unsolvable situation, that he is constantly sweeping out from under the rug.

snoozefest

The more I read Williams, the more I fall in love with his mind. He is able to bring forth the framework assumptions of any philosophical debate he addresses, and to formulate positions regarding these assumptions that are high plausible. All of this is topped off with his gorgeous literary style, which is as pleasurable to read as it is rigorous. I didn't finish all the papers in this collection, but let me summarize the one that I focused most on.

In “Deciding to Believe,” Bernard Williams asks what it is to believe something, and whether we can voluntarily control our beliefs, or decide what to believe. Williams answer is ultimately no. We cannot choose our beliefs, because the defining function that makes a psychological state a state of belief, rather than of other psychological attitudes, is that this state aims at truth. Truth here, implicitly, is settled by how the world already stands, which is an issue that is independent of and prior to whatever we can will, desire, or decide upon. In brief, Williams’s argument goes as follows: (1) Belief essentially aims at the truth, (2) If belief were voluntary, this would amount to that we could willfully choose what to believe, with full awareness that we are choosing as such, (3) Such voluntariness of belief is incompatible with belief’s essential aim, (Therefore) We can conclude that belief is not voluntary.

Williams clarifies that he is interested in belief as a type of psychological state, rather than the contents of any particular belief. He ascribes to belief five key characteristics and defends each; in the process, he extract facts about belief that help us settle this question of whether belief is voluntary. First, Williams claims, belief aims at truth. The norm that ultimately defines belief, and which we draw upon for assessing any belief, is that belief should be truthful. So if we realize that a certain belief of ours is false, we will discard it. We may contrast this with imagination; we can imagine anything we fancy, and it could still be successful and endorsable even if isn’t truthful (e.g., I imagine that that the majority of people who identify as the left and the right can trust each other).

Second, the most elementary or basic expression of a belief is an assertion that p. An assertion, for example, is “The worm over there is wiggling,” while a less elementary expression of belief is “I believe that the worm over there is wiggling.” Third, an assertion that p is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition of belief that p. It isn’t necessary because we can have beliefs which we never make public, and it isn’t sufficient because assertions can be insincere. This point extends to any sort of overt expression of belief. So belief can’t be defined in terms of overt expressions of them. Instead, belief is of a different category of overt expressions of belief; it determines whether these expressions are sincere or not, rather than counting as some non-overt or special sort of expression on par with those.

Williams argues that it is a necessary condition for a creature to be capable of making insincere assertions in order to be capable of having belief. We can imagine a machine that has a direct and mechanical route of producing assertions on the basis of perceptual input. If there is a bug in the program, the machine could produce a false assertion, but this couldn’t be insincere. In contrast, such a machine could have knowledge, which requires less prerequisites than belief. As long as the machine’s assertion that p is true, it matches up with our commonsense intuitions to say that the machine knows that p.

So if it seems that belief doesn’t essentially aim at the truth, because we can utter insincere assertions without a problem, this fails as an objection. Assertions are not identical with beliefs.

Fourth, factual beliefs can be based on evidence. This means that evidential propositions can be used as support for the content of a given belief, or a particular person’s belief is based on evidence that they already have. So if they came to reject that evidence, they’d also reject the belief supported by it. This supports the idea that belief is truth-sensitive. Fifth, belief is an explanatory entity. We explain what a person does by appeal to their beliefs and commitments. We can predict their actions on the basis of their beliefs and commitments.

This supports the claim that we can’t decide what to believe, but only what to express. Our believing any proposition is not within the set of activities that are responsive to the will. This isn’t a contingent matter. Blushing, for example, is only contingently not responsive to the will; we could ultimately get ourselves to blush by going through an intermediary step of remembering something very embarrassing that we did. In contrast, it is a definitive feature of belief that it aims at truth. If we could acquire belief at will, then we could acquire it regardless of the truth, since our will is not necessarily responsive to the truth (e.g., we can will for things that don’t yet exist and that are unlikely). If we acquired a purported belief with full awareness that we are manipulating ourselves into it, and this process is insensitive to truth, we couldn’t seriously consider this state as a belief, something that is supposed to represent reality. If we could believe at will, there’d be no more regular connection between the environment and beliefs, which is necessary for us to have any beliefs at all, about more abstract or complex matters, which are ultimately supported by beliefs about our environment.

What if we used a strategy like hypnotism to get ourselves to have a belief that we desire, and this strategy also includes that we forget this process by which we arrive at the desired state? Would our resultant state count as belief, and would this serve as a counterexample to the thesis that belief is involuntary? Williams distinguishes between two senses of wanting to believe something. We can have “truth-centered” and “non-truth-centered” motives. On the latter, we want to find ourselves in the mental state of believing that p, and in contrast, on the former we want p to actually be true. This hypnotism strategy could only satisfy non-truth-centered motives; this strategy would make no dent on the fact that p remains false. No such strategy of self-deception could help satisfy a truth-centered motive, since this involves a desire about how the world stands, not about how our psychological lives are configured.

So self-deception could help us satisfy non-truth-centered motives, but in these cases, we don’t care about the truth at all. We just want to be able to believe in something because it makes our lives more comfortable, is more fashionable, helps us fit into society, or satisfies some other practical end that is insensitive to the truth. Thus, Williams concludes that belief is involuntary; belief aims at truth, and truth is settled by how the world stands, not by how our psychological states are configured, or our desires regarding that configuration.

It's interesting how Velleman and Shah's famous position that belief is voluntary (e.g., "Doxastic Deliberation") stands in opposition to this. These authors agree with Williams that the essential characteristic of belief is that it aims at truth, but they hold that it is possible for us to voluntarily elect when a psychological state ought to be subject to this norm or this essential purpose. It's up to us to take up this purpose. This reflects, I think, a deep difference between how these authors and Williams conceives of what it means for a mental state to have an aim. An aim could be a goal that the person who possesses the state consciously holds in mind; or, it could be a norm that constitutes the state itself, perhaps even regardless of how the person relates to that state.

Velleman and Shah admit that sometimes we can't succeed at choosing whether a mental state is one of belief; for example, I could try to believe that I am a parsnip, but I cannot genuinely get this state to be one that aims at the truth. They don't explore why states are sometimes resistant in this way; it'd be interesting to examine the conditions that predict or determine this resistant quality. I wonder if at the end of the day their view could be made compatible with Williams's. Perhaps this pre-conscious or pre-reflective status of a state as aiming at belief or not (Williams's version) is one such condition that determines whether we can consciously hold ourselves as aiming at the truth, by virtue of manipulating this mental state (Velleman and Shah's version). Maybe Velleman and Shah are onto something in pointing out that sometimes we can alter other conditions in place that gets this constitutive norm of truth to determine or all a sudden vanish from the structuring of a mental state. It makes sense, intuitively, that if there's an imaginative state with contents that are somewhat fantastical (e.g., I'm wishfully thinking about someone I like), this could at first show up like a belief, as aiming at truth. But with further reflection, and explicitly making salient to myself facts that are in favor of the contents of this state as being uncertain, as warranting my lack of high credence, then this could flop into a non-belief state.

What it means really for a constitutive norm of truth to constitute a mental state; and what is really going on when we can seemingly voluntarily toggle with the power of this norm--these are open questions which I'd like to think about further.

اهتمامي بكتاب "مشكلات النفس" لبرنارد ويليامس منصب على فصل واحد منه هو الفصل الخاص بالمساواة
The Idea of Equality, pp. 230-249, Cambridge U.P. 2006.
وكنت قد اطلعت على جانب من رؤية ويليامس خلال قراءتي لكتاب
By Nature Equal: The Anatomy of a Western Insight, by J. Coons & P. Brennan

ولفتت نظري مناقشته العميقة للمساواة في معناها الوصفي ، اي تكافؤ البشر كحقيقة سابقة للدعوة اليها. فعلى الرغم من انشغال ويليامس بالتطبيق السياسي لمبدأ المساواة ، الا انه قدم مجادلة فلسفية فريدة في موضوع اغفله كثير من فلاسفة السياسة المعاصرين.

Essays 1 and 3–6 alone make this volume worth the price of admission. I was reading up on the philosophy of death and immortality and chanced upon Williams's "The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality" and was impressed. In the rest of the essays just mentioned, Williams conclusively, to me, argues for the untenability of nonbodily criteria of personal identity (essay 2 is a response to a reply and hence isn't as essential as the others). Throughout, Williams employs a thoroughness that is more philosophically illuminating than pedantic, but his postwar-Oxbridge-don writing style is pretty stodgy, full of "I shall be..." and "a man who..." and so on.

The rest of the essays held various levels of interest for me, none nearly as much as the first several. He pretty much wipes the floor with Strawson and tells me enough that at least I can be confident in passing him over. "Imperative Inference" wrestles at length with an issue upon which I could not for the life of me figure out what else would hinge, and I didn't even finish it. It did end up having some relevance (even if not essential) to the general theme of the final group of essays, which revolve around ethics, consistency, and equality. Most of these essays make some worthwhile points, although "The Idea of Equality" just seemed like a lot of what at least today we would consider truisms and platitudes.

So, some of it is a bit "dated" in various ways, but where it isn't (and even sometimes when it is), there are plenty of penetrating insights to be found here.

The Platonic introjection, seeing the satisfactions of studying what is timeless and impersonal as being themselves timeless and impersonal, may be a deep illusion, but it is certainly an illusion.

As usual, Williams is clever and thought-provoking even when being tedious or unconvincing. This collection of essays, mostly covering issues of personal identity and ethics, has some true classics, including "The Self and the Future" and "The Makropulos Case," as well as a few sleepers. While some of these essays are closing in on seventy years old, most haven't lost their relevance or power to stimulate careful consideration—though I wouldn't go so far as to say that they're ultimately persuasive. His argument that personal identity amounts to bodily identity is almost certainly wrong.