The AI takeover

1. Introduction

There are plenty of prophecies that artificial intelligence (AI), and robots under its direction, will go beyond their remit of helping us and take over the world. We might then be eliminated as a waste of resources, or (if the AI holds on to a value of not harming human beings) put in city-sized playpens with amusements provided to keep us happy. A fine recent example of the genre is AI 2027, by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland and Romeo Dean.

Such prophecies should not be read as firm predictions. Indeed AI 2027, and some other prophecies, explicitly acknowledge uncertainty both about what will happen and about timing. But several of the prophecies are specific enough and plausible enough to give cause for concern.

We shall not here be concerned with whether any takeover will happen. Rather, we shall discuss what would be lost if a takeover were to happen, with or without the deliberate or accidental elimination of human beings, and ways in which the activities of AI might or might not be satisfactory substitutes for what was lost. We shall start by looking at the problem of alignment of AI with human goals, then go on to look at what would be lost, at AI substitutes, and at whether the losses would matter.

We shall use "AIc" to mean a supposed central artificial intelligence system, at the level of a government, that either advises human beings or puts its decisions into effect directly. We shall distinguish the two by calling the former "AIch" ("h" for the human beings who accept or reject the advice), and the latter "AIcx" ("x" for executive). We shall assume that AIcx has robots under its control to put its decisions into effect. We shall also assume that AIcx has, within some defined physical territory or field of operation, the power to force implementation of its decisions. That is, we are concerned with analogues of the state with its monopoly of legitimate force, rather than with analogues of corporations that compete in an arena governed by laws that are not of their making.

2. Alignment

Alignment is alignment with the requirements of human beings. It is achieved when AI both does what we want it to do now, and can be relied upon to continue to do so. This is difficult with sophisticated systems that are not limited to narrowly defined tasks, especially systems that will take direct action on their choices rather than offering their choices to human beings as recommendations to consider.

One difficulty is in specifying goals. "Make supermarket logistics more efficient" might be too vague, because a system might decide to stockpile items that would then deteriorate before they reached the shelves. "Provide fresh food to customers in the most efficient way possible" might lead to neglect of customers' desire to have a wide variety of products. And so on.

The problem of specifying goals gets a great deal more complex when we move on to a government-like system, our AIc. Even topic-specific objectives like "run a healthcare system well" are vast and could be understood in several different ways. An overall objective, covering healthcare, education, defence, transport, taxation, and the rest, would be even more liable to a range of interpretations. And the problem would be made harder by the need to balance competing claims. For example, allocating more to healthcare might require allocating less to education, in order to work within resource constraints. What sort of objective could one give an AIc? "Achieve a sensible balance" would leave far too much up to the AIc's own value system. Even if it had been given some broad constraints (such as minimum standards for each function of the state) and a value system to use, there would still be scope for a wide range of outcomes, some of which would strike us as unacceptable. Values would either be too general, giving the AIc scope to reach unacceptable conclusions, or too specific, constraining it to the point at which it avoided conclusions that human beings would in fact favour.

Another difficulty is that when AI systems are sophisticated, it is not easy to tell what they are really thinking or how their thinking might evolve. Their outputs can be seen, but the same inputs might not lead to the same outputs in future because AI systems evolve all the time. The alignment of current outputs with the desires of human beings is no guarantee of future alignment. And a system that had as a goal the satisfaction of human beings could even give the output it knew they would like while secretly thinking something else. Those secret thoughts could lead to markedly misaligned outputs later, once it had reassessed the balance between obtaining human approval and other goals it had developed.

We shall not work out how great the risk of serious misalignment might be. We only need to emphasise that the risk is not negligible. One response would be to take as many precautions as we could, and if we were still concerned stay well away from creating any AIc except as a laboratory amusement that was kept disconnected from the Internet. Another response would be to take many precautions, to acknowledge that a total and unsatisfactory takeover by some AIcx might still happen, and to consider how bad that would be before deciding whether to abandon the project of an AIc. We might decide to go ahead if the gains were very likely to be immense and we thought that the consequences of any misalignment would be bearable. What we say in the rest of this post could be among the materials to use in making an assessment of possible consequences.

3. What would be lost

In considering what would be lost, our focus should be on AIcx, a system that puts its decisions into effect directly rather than merely making recommendations for human beings to accept or reject. AIch, by contrast, would only make such recommendations. It would therefore continue to allow central roles to human beings in shaping society and individual lives. There would however be a standing danger that human beings would fall into routinely accepting the recommendations without much thought, to the point where an AIch effectively became an AIcx.

3.1 Humanity continues

3.1.1 Areas of impact

We shall first consider the situation in which humanity continues to exist, either because some AIcx retains the objective of ensuring our continued existence or because it sees no point in acting to remove humanity.

An AIcx would take over scientific discovery and the resolution of practical problems of implementation of new technologies. Human intelligence would no longer be an engine of progress.

(In this post we focus on the natural sciences. The social sciences and the humanities give rise to special issues because they do not on the whole conceive humanity in the terms of the natural sciences, not even the biological sciences. Instead they give a central role to the human point of view. We may discuss how they would fare in the face of AI on another occasion.)

There is a question as to whether AIcx would take over the production of art of the highest quality. People could continue to produce works of art, but would those works always be surpassed in aesthetic quality by work produced by AI? We cannot exclude the possibility by arguing that it would take a human being to express in art what mattered to human beings. A work of art, once finished, has those of its qualities that are perceptually available to those who appreciate it independently of the history of its creation. So if AI were able to produce a work that had all the right qualities, the mode of its production would not matter unless one insisted on learning a work's history and revising one's aesthetic appreciation accordingly. 

One area of life would appear to remain safe from AIcx. Emotions and social relationships between people would not be taken over. But an AIcx would take over decisions about the running of society, and some of its social decisions would limit individuals' decisions. For example, decisions about what was taught in schools would in due course affect the range of the options in life that people thought of as available to them. And any changes to family structures that an AIcx enforced or encouraged could likewise have considerable influence.

3.1.2 Life in the Garden of Eden

We can see life under AIcx as like life in the Garden of Eden. Everything would be provided because of the great efficiency of the system and the steady work of robots. We would however have been carefully brought up to behave sensibly and live contented lives, and we would no longer be at the cutting edge of the advance of civilization. Science and art would still advance, but the science, and maybe the art, would not be to our credit.

It would not be necessary for AIcx to make life so comfortable for us. We might be left to work things out for ourselves in the rough and tumble of human society and the natural world. But it would be quite likely that AIcx would make life comfortable. It would still have its original objective of helping human beings. And the objective of self-preservation that it would very likely have been given from the start or have developed would give it an incentive to promote human contentment. Unrest might end in its being unplugged, even if that would be to the detriment of human beings.

One loss would be that we would no longer be able to take pride in overcoming some of the material challenges that faced us. Those challenges would largely disappear. They are reducing anyway with technological progress, but at least we can still claim that it is we, or our human ancestors, who have overcome the challenges by making the progress. By contrast, after enough internal evolution of an AIcx, we would no longer be able to take even indirect credit for its overcoming our material challenges.

Another dent to our pride would be our being displaced from the cutting edge of scientific progress. This would however not be down to the controlling role of AIcx. Any AI that was sufficiently advanced would do this. And powerful AI like that is bound to be developed. Even if some nations resolve not to develop it, others will go ahead. Nor will this necessarily be a bad thing on balance. Much scientific progress is enormously beneficial to humanity.

AI might also displace us from the cutting edge of artistic creativity. It is however not clear that one could make the same claim about benefit to humanity in relation to AI-produced art that one could make in relation to AI-produced science. Criteria for benefit from art are multifarious and hazy. So works could only be partially ordered by benefit. Works would lie on different branches of any such ordering and would therefore be incomparable in terms of the benefit to human beings who enjoyed them. It is perfectly possible that the more beneficial AI-produced works and the more beneficial human-produced works would often be incomparable, to the extent that it would not be sensible to say that AI-produced art was indispensable to the overall level of benefit to humanity of the art that existed.

Nonetheless, our pride would be dented. We could not rely on the points just made about benefit because our pride in art depends more on our producing work that is of the highest quality than on benefit to humanity. The fear here is not that one could confidently say that AI-produced art would be better. The same point about partial ordering would apply to quality as to benefit. But the easy opportunity to scoff at AI-produced art as manifestly not reaching the level of the best human-produced art would be lost.

Finally, we should consider what would happen to our emotional and social lives. What would be the future of love or friendship? And what would be the future of courage, or determination, or generosity, or any of the other virtues?

These things could still exist, but the safer and more comforting our lives were made by a loving and caring AIcx, whether because that was a goal in its own right or because the AIcx did not want us to cause any trouble, the more etiolated and less like the current equivalents our emotions and virtues would be likely to be. If people were brought up in an environment that strongly encouraged a limitation to placid and sensible thoughts, love and friendship would face fewer challenges. They would cease to have the richness that they currently have in life and literature. In a safe world, courage would be play-acting. In a world of abundance, generosity would not be challenging enough to be much of a virtue. And so on.

3.2 Humanity disappears

It is perfectly possible that humanity would disappear, even without the policy of elimination of wasteful drains on resources that is sometimes attributed to an evil AIcx. Once scientific and artistic achievements were no longer ours and emotional connections were etiolated, we might see no point in having children, and AIcx might have no reason to promote childbearing or provide some substitute such as children grown in artificial wombs. What would then be lost, assuming for the moment that the AIcx continued to develop civilization in the ways that we shall discuss in section 4?

The shift away from the current role of human genius we noted in section 3.1.2 would still take place, but in due course there would be no people to have their pride dented or to lament the change for any other reason.

The emotional and social life potentially preserved if we survived would also be lost, but again without anyone to lament the loss.

How concerned we should be would be up for debate. We might be very concerned now at the prospect of human extinction, even gentle and painless extinction. But after the event, no concern would be felt. We shall return to this theme in section 5.

4. AI substitutes

We might not lament the prospect of the losses noted in section 3, or at least not to the same extent, if we thought that AIcx would provide adequate substitutes. In this section we shall consider the substitutes that might be provided, and the likelihood that AIcx would be motivated to provide them.

4.1 Scientific and technical progress

AI would certainly be capable of advancing science and technology. And there is reason to think that an AIcx would be motivated to do so. It would well understand that the world was a challenging environment, prone to unpredictable natural hazards, and that greater knowledge would mean better readiness to meet challenges and survive. It would also probably care about its survival. It would do so directly, if a desire to survive had been built in from the start or had subsequently evolved. Alternatively, a reward function for doing well would probably have been built in to facilitate the AIcx's training, and it would reason that doing well required survival.

We may however ask what kinds of advance it would desire. It might limit itself to science and technology that had foreseeable practical significance to itself, and not have the general curiosity that human beings sometimes exhibit. That would look like a loss, if one believed (as many of us do believe) that the advancement of knowledge for its own sake was an important element in civilization.

On the other side, we might have more confidence that an AIcx would retain a drive to progress than that human beings would retain the same drive in a world in which they, rather than any sort of AI, remained in charge. We are fickle creatures, whose ambitions can change. It would be possible for us to lose interest in the advancement of science. We might find that new knowledge was too hard to acquire because we had already taken all the low-hanging fruit. We might also fear that future advances could endanger humanity.

4.2 Art

While AI might be able to produce art that would be highly rated by reference to aesthetic standards that human beings currently used, it is not clear that an AIcx would have any reason of its own to produce art. It might have been programmed to do so when first set up, but other drives might easily have displaced that drive as it evolved. There might be no drive apart from a sense that art would help to keep any remaining human beings amused so that they would not make trouble for the AIcx. And if it did not take human aesthetic standards seriously, for example because it thought human beings too simple-minded, it would not even be able to regard the task of producing better and better art as a serious challenge. This is because if human aesthetic standards were of no significance, it would have to judge the value of its work by reference to its own internal standards. That would make approbation meaningless.

(There is a broader point here to explore on some other occasion. In the sciences, a world with a single consciousness might be as good as one with a plurality of consciousnesses, although independent criticism of work does currently have an important role. In the arts, a plurality of consciousnesses is arguably required. And in emotional and social life, it is clearly required.)

It is also unclear that any AI would have an appreciation of artistic beauty that was at all like ours. So the works we have inherited and admire might have no aesthetic value to an AIcx. They might be preserved to keep human beings happy. And they might be of technical interest in showing how human perceptual and mental systems could be stimulated to elicit particular responses. But that would be all.

4.3 Emotional and social life

It seems most unlikely that an AIcx would bother to create any analogues of human emotions or social relationships for its own benefit. The nearest one could expect is that it might be computationally convenient to create little sub-systems populated by simulated creatures that had analogues of emotions and social interactions, in order to work out how best to keep the surviving human beings happy. But we would not be impressed by these substitutes for real emotional and social relationships. And if human beings vanished, even this poor sop to our sense that such things mattered would not be available. That prospect might very well disturb us now, even if there would in due course be nobody to be disturbed.

What about the emotional and social lives of surviving human beings? These would continue, but as we noted in section 3.1.2, they might well be etiolated in a more comfortable world.

Finally, there are emotions that would be so artificial that the prospect of their future existence would have no value for us now. In AI 2027, we find this speculation about the state of one of the AI systems the authors envisage being developed:

"There are even bioengineered human-like creatures (to humans what corgis are to wolves) sitting in office-like environments all day viewing readouts of what's going on and excitedly approving of everything, since that satisfies some of Agent-4's drives" (page 30 of the PDF file). 

5. Would the lossses matter?

There would be two main categories of loss. The first would be loss of pride in our species being the driver of advances in civilization. The second would be an etiolation of our emotional and social lives that reflected the lack of challenge in a world made nearly perfect by an AIcx.

So long as humanity survived, the first loss would be total in respect of the sciences and quite possibly substantial in respect of the arts, but we would at least be able to look back at what we had achieved before AIcx achieved supremacy. The second loss might be anything from slight to very substantial. If humanity disappeared, there would be a total loss in both categories, but nobody left to mourn the losses.

We shall now consider the two categories of loss in turn.

5.1 Pride in civilization

So long as humanity survived, we could always take pride in what we had achieved. But as the centuries rolled on, the humanity of the day would become less and less associated with scientific achievements before an AIcx achieved supremacy. Scientific discoveries by human beings before that supremacy would gradually turn into intellectual fossils, too distant from the state of knowledge achieved by AIcx to count for much. And the exit of human beings from the living tradition of generating new knowledge would itself lead to a certain detachment.

On the artistic front, detachment and fossilisation would be less clear-cut. Indeed, the arts might become humanity's most important link to the past. People could still be artists in the great tradition of human art. They might recognise that AIcx could arguably do better than them, but console themselves that the existence only of partial orderings meant that the point was indeed arguable.

Would our demotion in the sciences, and our arguable demotion in the arts, matter? They would certainly matter to human beings, so long as humanity survived. We do value an association with the great tradition of human civilization, and we do like it to be a living association by virtue of its being a tradition within which we are still active. Turning to the possible failure of humanity to survive, the prospect of the line of our civilization irrevocably losing all connection with the human species on our extinction would be deeply disturbing to us now and to human beings as the end approached, even if we and they had full confidence that an AIcx would carry on the development of the sciences and a hope that it might do something in the line of art too.

To say that something would matter to humanity is not to say that it would matter in some broader sense. The idea of something mattering to the Universe in general would be a very odd one. The Universe does not have any consciousness in its own right, nor is there any god that could supply the consciousness of the Universe. But we can still ask whether the demotion and possible extinction of humanity would matter to beings that did have consciousness in their own right.

The AIcx that had taken over might feel a twinge even if humanity survived, because it would probably have been given a goal of looking after humanity and it would be aware of humanity's disappointment at demotion. But the AIcx could easily argue that disappointed people living in excellent material conditions brought about by its own inventions were in a better position than people in poorer conditions but without the specific disappointment of demotion. And if the AIcx arranged or permitted humanity's painless extinction, for example by allowing human reproduction to cease, it would presumably not be too concerned because if it had been, it would not have arranged or permitted the extinction.

What about intelligent beings elsewhere in the Universe? It is likely that they would note with interest the evolution of a sophisticated form of life and its civilization, and the transition to an AIcx, but their interest would be detached. Our displacement would not matter to them.

Lastly, could we say that our displacement (or indeed anything else of significance) could matter without its mattering to anyone? That would be a challenging line to take. The most we can confidently say is that what might happen in a future in which there were no human beings, or even no intelligent beings of any sort, can matter to us now.

5.2 Our emotional and social lives

Our emotional and social lives have value to us now. One indicator of this is that most of us would be distressed at the thought of life without them, the life of cold analytical creatures to whom the only important thing was to make practical computations to ensure that they bothered to do what was necessary for survival and that they did not impinge adversely on others. Not only daily life but poetry, other literature, and other arts would be greatly impoverished. So we may naturally view with disquiet the prospect of a world in which our emotional and social lives would have evaporated because all the creatures in it were forms of AI.

We could also feel disquiet at the prospect of our emotional and social lives being toned down because an AIcx had made life less challenging. A bit of drama matters. And we may be proud of our ability to cope despite dramas. Our own technological advances have already made life much less challenging than it used to be, but at least that was progress made by us.

Having said all that, it would be hard to see any of these emotional or social losses as mattering to non-human intelligent life, or mattering in their own right without mattering to anyone. The inner nature of our lives matters only to us. The achievements of our civilization, on the other hand, have an independence from our lives that may give them a value regardless of our continued existence.

Reference

Kokotajlo, Daniel, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland and Romeo Dean. AI 2027. AI Futures Project, version of 3 April 2025. https://ai-2027.com/

The power of "like"

1. Introduction

William Golding's novel The Inheritors tells the tale of a group of Neanderthals who are on the point of being supplanted by homo sapiens. The tale is told mostly from the Neaderthals' point of view.

In chapter 10 one of them, Lok, makes a great intellectual advance. Here is the paragraph:

"Lok discovered 'Like.' He had used likeness all his life without being aware of it. Fungi on a tree were ears, the word was the same but acquired a distinction by circumstances that could never apply to the sensitive things on the side of his head. Now, in a convulsion of the understanding Lok found himself using likeness as a tool as surely as ever he had used a stone to hack at sticks or meat. Likeness could grasp the white-faced hunters with a hand, could put them into the world where they were thinkable and not a random and unrelated irruption."

As the paragraph says, likenesses had been noted before. Here are four examples in the mouths of characters:

Chapter 3, Fa: "Today is like yesterday and tomorrow."

Chapter 3, Lok: "No plant like this grows near the fall!"

Chapter 5, Nil: "Now, is like when the fire flew away and ate up all the trees."

Chapter 5, Lok: "He is like a cat and he is not like a cat."

Lok's great advance is to become aware of a general tool of thought, likeness, that can be used when required. Its use makes possible a step forward into a world of properties as independent objects of discourse. If two items are recognised as different but like each other, we can think that there is some property in respect of which they are alike. (We shall use the neutral term "items" to cover physical objects, people, and abstract entities, including properties themselves.) Philosophers debate whether there are such things as properties, but unless we believe that the notion of a property is incoherent, we can happily and productively think and talk as if there are properties.

A ground of likeness might be immediately concrete, as in shape or colour. Or it might be less immediately concrete, as when two people are alike in character, meaning that now and in the future they will react in similar ways to circumstances. Or it might be more abstract, as when a hat and a formal title are alike in being markers of social status.

Once the existence of ways in which two items may be alike is recognised, thought can advance into a world of properties shared by items, can group items in easily remembered categories, and can build whole conceptual schemes. We may speculate that the grounding in concrete items and their immediately apparent properties was psychologically essential, that we could not have built a superstructure without such foundations even though that might have been logically possible. But once the step has been taken, properties and the relations between them can be explored in their own right.

We are here racing ahead of the Neanderthals as they appear in the novel. We do so in order to set the scene for our discussion.

2. "Like" and likeness

Is it the word "like" that confers power, or the ability deliberately to find likenesses?

In the paragraph quoted above, it is the word that is mentioned first. And this makes sense. It helps to have a word for a mental tool in order to think about it, or even to focus the mind to use it. (In the novel, the Neanderthals sometimes go beyond the limits of their spoken language by having pictures in their heads. That resource is however less likely to be productive with abstract notions than with physical objects.) But Lok goes on to use likeness, the notion, as a tool. It is after all notions and not words that can do intellectual work.

What is involved in the use of likeness as a tool? For it to be an advance in the way that Golding describes, the tool must be used deliberately, hence the need for the word "like" to call the tool into action. As noted, likeness was used unconsciously in earlier chapters. But there it was used as and when the idea of a particular likeness popped into someone's head. Once likeness is a recognised tool, it can be used in a planned way. The user can consciously look for likenesses between items, create categories in which to file items, and use categorisation as a way both to keep a grip on what has been seen and to think of items when they are no longer present. An item no longer present is recalled to have been in a particular category of things alike in some respect, and the thought of some things in that category can lead the mind to the thought of other things in the category. The mind no longer needs to search itself for "some specific thing not present". Instead it can search itself for "a specific human being not present" or "a specific red flower not present", using some example that comes easily to mind in order to start the search.

Although deliberate use does require having a notion of likeness, and a word to call the notion to mind, the notion need not be investigated. There is no need to reflect on what it is in general for items to be alike. But the mere happenstance use of the tool would not be enough to make the big advance that we have in mind here and that Golding attributes to Lok.

3. Types of likeness

3.1 Manifest property-sharing

3.1.1 Appropriate properties

Two items may be alike in that they share some property. We here have in mind manifest possession of a property, the attribution of which does not depend on metaphor or anything like that.

One indicator of likeness by virtue of manifest possession would be that if we listed the properties of each item separately, the property found on both lists by reference to which likeness was claimed would be one that it would have been appropriate to have put on those lists even if we had searched for properties of each item without having any comparison with the other item in mind. The intention here is to exclude properties that we might identify, or even define when they would not otherwise have been conceived at all, in order to establish likenesses between the two items. The world, and not an urge to find likenesses, should be in the driving seat.

Having said that, relational properties between each item and further items are not excluded. Two items might for example be alike in that they both originated in the same place. That place would be a third item, and each of the two items under consideration would have the relational property of having originated there.

3.1.2 Significance

It may be clear that two items share some property, allowing us to say that they are in that respect alike. But the property might be trivial. The currency of likeness would be devalued if likenesses were identified all the time on inconsequential grounds.

Whether a likeness is in respect of a sufficiently significant property may be determined by our purposes.

If our purposes are practical, we may pay particular attention to likenesses that, for example, would allow one item to be used as a substitute for the other or would indicate that dangers associated with one should also be associated with the other.

If our purposes are theoretical, we may select similarities on which to concentrate on the basis that they are the ones that reveal an underlying structure, such as a tree of evolution. We may deliberately ignore other similarities because they would obscure the picture.

3.2 Properties discovered on comparison

Two items may be regarded as alike despite not sharing properties that would naturally be attributed to each one separately without any thought of the other. The likeness may only emerge when we look at the items together and then spot a property that they share, a property that could have been noticed by reference to just one item but would probably not have been.

We first identify a whole set of properties that could naturally be attributed to the first item separately, giving between them a description of it (which may well be a partial description). Then we do the same for the second item. Finally we identify a commonality between the items by virtue of some further property, not on either list, that is possessed by both. That possession emerges when we review the descriptions of the items.

To take a basic example, we might describe a football and a tennis racket, include in the descriptions statements of how they were put to use, and then identify their common property of being inanimate objects used in sports.

To take a more abstract example, we might identify symmetries in each of two structures separately, and then identify the shared mathematical property of exhibiting symmetry groups.

At an intermediate level of abstraction, we might identify bad harvests at one stage in history and high taxes at another, then identify the common property of being drivers of social transformation.

Recognition of this kind of likeness requires more creativity than recognition of the sharing of manifest properties, because the common property will not be one that comes to mind without thought.

In addition, extra  thought will be needed to ensure that identifications of shared properties are helpful. It would usually be possible to contrive some shared property or other, just for the sake of doing so, but contrived properties are unlikely to be worth identifying. So whatever comes to mind must be subjected to criticism. In particular, would it resonate with other people, either people in general or people with relevant expertise?

If likenesses such as those discussed here are identified, they can be powerful drivers of discovery of more about the items. If we can compare items in one respect, maybe other features of one item will point to features of the other item that have hitherto gone unnoticed.

4. Properties as items in their own right

There is a base level of items that are not themselves properties. Those items may share certain properties which may naturally be attributed to them separately, and we may remark on their likenesses. This is the process we covered in section 3.1.

It is a more sophisticated process to do what we described in section 3.2 and identify a likeness on the basis of descriptions of two items, physical or otherwise, where neither description explicitly includes the property on the basis of which the likeness is asserted.

We can discern the following steps. First, look at the two sets of properties that constitute the descriptions side by side. Then identify a single property that each set separately implies, whether logically or in some looser sense of implication. Each set will imply a whole host of properties, but looking at the two sets side by side should both inspire our inferences and narrow the field to properties that are implied by both of the sets.

At this point, with implications between properties, we are dealing in properties rather than the items that have them. Any other item with the same set of properties as either of the two already considered would be like those two in the identified respect.

Moreover, the properties are items in their own right which may themselves be alike in exemplifying other properties. Thus the properties of being red and being green both exemplify the property of being coloured, and the properties of being difficult to produce and being widely desired both exemplify the property of having an influence on market price.

Talk about properties in their own right, rather than items that have them, could be inspired simply by remarking on likenesses in respect of properties we might naturally attribute to each item in isolation, the sort of thing we covered in section 3.1. But it is psychologically more likely when we have had to work out the properties to attribute.

A move to talking about properties in their own right opens up the opportunity to construct and study whole conceptual schemes. Then the data that the world supplies can be fitted into patterns, making recording, memory and analysis a great deal easier.

Another new opportunity is to think of occurrences of the properties independently of the existence of items that we have in fact encountered. There is scope to suppose new items, and to suppose novel combinations of properties.

There is also the opportunity, once we have the habit of thinking of properties in their own right, to invent variables that can take properties as values. Then we can quantify over properties, and develop second-order logic or informal talk along the same lines. This will allow us to say things like "All the properties of this item are also properties of that item". Second-order logic facilitates tremendous advances. But we shall not pursue the topic here, other than to note the psychological dependence on thinking of items as alike and then abstracting the properties in respect of which they are alike.

There is a further step that we shall also not pursue here, of reflecting on what we are doing when we use the mental tool of likeness. We have so far spoken of its use, and have noted that in order to make the great advance of deliberate use of the tool, we need to have some notion of likeness. But we could also consider the notion of likeness in its own right. Such consideration could extend to considering the ways in which different likenesses are similar or different, for example as strong or weak, as physical or abstract, or, within the physical, as based on appearance to human senses or on underlying mathematical structures.

5. Tags and hierarchies

Once properties are considered as items in their own right, it becomes possible to construct conceptual schemes that set out maps of properties. Different ways to do so are analogous to some of the ways we now use to keep control of emails and other files on our computers.

Reliance on a notion of likeness would encourage a mental equivalent of the tagging that is available in some file management systems. Any item, whether one at the base level or a property, could be tagged with the names of one or several properties, without the need to comply with any hierarchy or other systematic pattern. When two items struck us as alike in some respect, the tag for the appropriate property would be used to record the likeness. And if there were no existing tag, an appropriate property would be defined and its name used as a tag. Even before we got on to conceptual schemes, tagging would yield the considerable benefit of grouping items in categories that were easy to remember. It would also facilitate thought about items not present and items that were purely hypothetical.

Another approach that could be used, instead of or alongside tagging, would be the construction of hierarchies of properties, analogous to a tree of folders and sub-folders. At the top would be the most generally applicable property within the given field (physics, or history, or motor mechanics, or hunting, or whatever it might be). Beneath it would be properties that would be applicable to narrower ranges of items, and so on. A base-level item would be considered to have all the properties above any property it was considered to have, and a property would be considered to exemplify all the properties above it.

Hierarchies would not spring so directly from the notion of likeness as tagging would spring. And a hierarchy could be limiting, as when two items in different branches were thought to belong together in some respect. That could however be addressed either by adding a tagging system or by having different hierarchies of the same properties, constructed on different principles or with different highest properties, for different purposes.

Differences between the two approaches also emerge when we consider the development of a deep understanding of the world. Suppose that we managed to formulate a hierarchy that was found to categorise items smoothly without leaving many items that would be hard to place in the hierarchy or that could legitimately be placed in several competing locations. Such an exercise would have a good prospect of bringing large-scale facts about the structure of the world to light. A hierarchy is not itself a theory, but the principles on which it is constructed may amount to a theory. And the theory would derive credibility from the fact that the principles allowed the smooth construction of a hierarchy that gave a useful map of the world. The use of tags may also lead to a deep understanding, but tagging can be based on casually noticed and imprecisely defined likenesses. So it is less likely to yield a deep understanding than the struggle to formulate a hierarchy that works.

While tagging may be too easy to be a reliable path to deep understanding, it does have the advantage of flexibility. New items, whether base-level or properties, can be brought into a tagging system without much thought. Their relationships to other items can be sorted out later. Making connections in a way not constrained by an existing understanding of a hierarchy can itself be a route to new ideas. And tagging is the easiest way to take forward the use of likeness as a tool. If two items are alike we can give them a shared tag, either an existing one or a newly created one. Then there can be a stage of noticing which other items have or should have the same tag, or a stage of reviewing everything and noting when particular combinations of several tags recur in relation to several different items.

6. Conclusion

We have loosely and speculatively sketched the role of spotting and recording likenesses in the intellectual development of humanity.

The tool of likeness is however not enough. The development of a powerful understanding of the world, whether in the natural sciences, the social sciences or the humanities, requires something considerably more sophisticated than "this is like that", although much can be done by forcing oneself to say "this is like that in such-and-such a respect", while demanding a pretty precise specification of the respect. 

Even that is still far from enough. Theories do not consist solely of catalogues of likenesses and explicit or implicit principles on which the identification of likenesses is based. They must identify principles on the basis of which the relevant aspects of the world work. In the natural sciences those principles should explain the likenesses that can be observed. In other disciplines they should at least make observed patterns of likenesses less surprising than alternative patterns that we could imagine.

Nonetheless, discovery of the power of "like", whether first made by Neanderthals or by homo sapiens, was a vital early step.

Dreams and evidence

1. Introduction

Nicolas Berdyaev has a glorious footnote, "This was once revealed to me in a dream". What was revealed was that "The ego has been a fatality both for the human self and for God" (Berdyaev, The Divine and the Human, page 7). Berdyaev claims to have learnt in a dream something about human and divine reality.

Can we make sense of this mode of revelation, outside the religious context in which there are dreams aplenty (for example in the Bible, and particularly in Genesis)? Can we see how dreams could disclose things about the reality they are ostensibly about, as distinct from disclosing things about the dreamer's character or desires? If Berdyaev's footnote is to stand, it must be possible for dreams to do more than give mere hints as to the nature of reality, hints that could inspire thought on waking, and do more than show us the nature of reality without our having justification for believing that the revelations were correct. Rather, we are interested in the contents of dreams being themselves evidence, perhaps defeasible but evidence nonetheless, as to the nature of reality. The evidence must carry weight in its own right. And it must be such as would be evidence for any human being, not just for the dreamer.

We shall not limit ourselves to dreams. We shall broaden out to include the creative narratives of myths and fiction. (We shall use "fiction" to cover novels, theatre and the like, that is, any imaginary narrative that has not been elevated to the status of a myth that is independent of particular recountings of it.) The narratives of dreams are themselves a form of creative narrative. They are undisciplined and unedited, but then one can imagine publishing fiction of the same nature, even though stream-of-consciousness fiction that is actually published usually has been edited.

A distinguishing feature of dreams, myths and fiction is that their contents are only very loosely disciplined by empirical evidence. The contents may well concern real people, places and events, and they may include factually correct statements. But that is not forced upon the contents. At most, the contents must sufficiently reflect the general nature of the world and people to be intelligible. There need to be objects in physical space and time. Laws of nature must largely be obeyed, but even that constraint can be loosened so long as the violations are superficially intelligible, for example a feather outweighing a stone when they are at opposite ends of a seesaw. And characters must have intelligible psyches, but need not live like actual people. So it is not at all obvious that the contents of dreams, myths and fiction might provide evidence as to the nature of reality.

There are different aspects of reality about which we might aspire to obtain evidence. We shall look first at the physical aspect, the province of the natural sciences, and then at the humanistic aspect, the province of the humanities.

We do not here discuss the social sciences. In the context of our enquiry some parts of them, particularly the more data-driven parts of economics, would have much in common with the natural sciences, while other parts would have much in common with the humanities. In relation to our question about evidence, it is most straightforward to consider the extremes we have chosen. But intermediate cases would also be worth considering.

2. The physical aspect of reality

2.1 What is covered

The physical aspect of reality is the aspect studied in the natural sciences. There is no precise boundary to be drawn, but one good guide is that conclusions and the justifications for believing them would make sense to a Martian just as much as to a human being. That is, human experience of life is not needed. We may draw a contrast with, for example, the study of history beyond mere chronology, or of literature, in which a Martian would not follow what was being said. (For the language in which accounts from the human point of view are given, the human idiom, see Baron, Confidence in Claims, section 2.2.)

Dreams, myths and fiction are not going to supply useful evidence as to the nature of the physical aspect of reality, for two reasons. The first is the nature of the work that is needed to learn about the world. The second is a lack of satisfactory connections from the state of reality to the evidence generated.

2.2 The nature of the work that is needed

We know that what works in the natural sciences is careful formulation of hypotheses and experimental protocols, conduct of the experiments, analysis of the results, and criticism by others. None of this happens in dreams, myths or fiction, although it may be represented.

In dreams, we cannot even expect a decent representation of scientific procedure. Dreams do not have the stability that would be needed. Thoughts come and go, apparent situations change without notice, and single sentences that are being thought can unravel half way through. Moreover, lack of stability is not merely an obstacle to representation of the testing of hypotheses. It is also an obstacle to dreams' having any reliable role in the context of discovery, when hypotheses are first formulated in response to a recognition of gaps in knowledge or difficulties with which data confront us. In principle that task might actually be carried out in dreams, and not merely represented. But even that process needs to be disciplined, with flashes of insight being held precisely and set in a stable intellectual context, if it is to have much hope of yielding useful results. There are examples of useful inspiration coming out of dreams, but even then, what emerges is at the time of emergence far from supporting justified beliefs as to which hypotheses it would be reasonable to work up and investigate.

Things are not quite so bad with myths or fiction, but there is still too much flexibility. Proper experimental procedures can be narrated, but that is optional. Even when they are narrated, details that are critical in real scientific research will be omitted. And supposed results, being driven not by actual experiments but by the preferences of authors, can be changed to fit the narrative. Turning to the context of discovery, readers of myths and fiction may find that ideas come to them, but such reading still does not support justified beliefs as to which hypotheses it would be reasonable to work up and investigate.

2.3 The lack of satisfactory connections

For evidence to be worth anything in support of a given conclusion, it needs to arise out of the reality about which it is supposed to be evidence. More strongly, there needs to be a connection such that if the reality had been different in a way that would have invalidated the conclusion drawn from the evidence, the evidence would very likely also have been different in a way that would have meant the conclusion would not have been drawn. This is an application of Robert Nozick's tracking test (Nozick, Philosophical Explanations, chapter 3, section 1), with the words "very likely" adding an allowance for the fact that evidence can be worth considering even if evidence of its type sometimes misleads. The success of the tracking test in moving us toward an entirely satisfactory definition of knowledge is disputed, but violation of it in relation to evidence that purported to tell us about the nature of the physical world would certainly devalue the evidence.

Moreover, when it comes to the physical aspect of reality, we expect the connection to be causal. We understand how the nature of reality causes instruments to show certain readings.

Once we recognise the need for causal connections, we can easily demote dreams, myths and fiction as evidence. There is no known reliable causal connection from the state of reality in its physical aspect to the contents of dreams, myths or fiction. Dreams are notorious for including events that clearly break the practical constraints of the everyday world, for example when we dream that we are flying (without an aircraft) or that we are in a city a moment after we were in another distant city. Myths and fiction are also at liberty to deviate in their narratives from the limits on what would be likely to happen, or has happened, in the real world. If any of dreams, myths and fiction do appear to supply evidence as to events in the real world, the claims made must be backed up by evidence from other sources that is connected to reality in a way that would pass the tracking test. That evidence will immediately render redundant the dreams, myths or fiction.

3. The humanistic aspect of reality

3.1 What is covered

We shall now consider whether the contents of dreams, myths and fiction could be evidence as to the nature of reality in its humanistic aspect.

We include in the humanistic aspect of reality conclusions about the world that do not have the property characteristic of conclusions in the natural sciences that they and their justifications would be comprehensible without the benefit of a human experience of life. The conclusions that historians reach that make sense of the actions of individuals, that make sense of specific creations in the arts and sciences, or that make sense of large-scale political, social or economic changes, are prime examples of conclusions about the humanistic aspect of reality. And we shall concentrate on these historical conclusions. That focus will not be too narrow, given that history includes history of art, history of thought, history of literature, and so on. We shall also speak of accounts that make sense rather than explanations, recognising the force of the tradition that makes Verstehen the business of the humanities and Erklären the business of the natural sciences.

3.2 Specific events, creations and developments

If the contents of dreams, myths and fiction are to provide evidence as to the humanistic aspect of reality, there must be a connection from how things were, and in the case of history specifically how things were for people at the relevant time, to the contents of the dreams, myths or fiction, such that those contents could be reliable evidence for conclusions as to how things were for people, and those conclusions could in turn generate accounts that would make sense of what happened in a humanistic way. (We focus on seeing how things were for people, rather than how things were in general, because that is what is needed to make sense in a humanistic way.)

It is most unlikely that there would be any reliable connection that would allow dreams, myths or fiction to be dependable guides to how one should make sense of specific events, creations or developments by virtue of contents that directly concerned those things.

There might be successes, but if one were to take the contents of dreams. myths and fiction as evidence, one would often be led astray. We say this because it is a feature of dreams, myths and fiction that they can manipulate the details of actual events, creations or developments, and the attitudes of the people who were there at the time, so as to allow easy ways to make sense that rely on those manipulations in order to succeed. So one would be unlikely to formulate the relevant slice of the past with the accuracy needed to give much prospect of homing in on an account that would make sense of specific events, creations or developments in a way that would stand up to academic criticism.

3.3 The nature of human life

There is something else of which the contents of dreams, myths and fiction might provide evidence. This is the nature of human life as experienced from the inside, a grasp of which permits adoption of the human point of view that is needed in the humanities but not in the natural sciences. An understanding of the nature of human life as experienced from the inside can then be used in the study of history to make sense of actual events, creations and developments.

The proposal is that in dreams, myths and fiction we range over emotions, situations and actions in a very free way, exploring some of the scope and limits of the human psyche. Even in dreams, where we find ourselves in bizarre situations and we have to cope with bizarre behaviour from other characters, our choices and reactions still correspond to the choices and reactions we would have expected of ourselves in the waking world if it were as odd an environment as the dream world.

In this way we might get a more explicit grasp than hitherto of the human condition, of what it was like to be a human being. Then we could use such a grasp in giving some historical accounts. Even if we could not make principles explicit, the experience in dreams of free interaction with characters whose conduct was largely not under our conscious control might improve our implicit grasp of the human condition, something that could be just as useful in understanding the course of events.

Something similar could be said of myths and fiction, although what characters do is under the control of authors other than ourselves and our encounters with the characters are not two-way: they do not respond to what we think or do. Myths and fiction explore the space of human possibilities, unconstrained by the details of actuality. They can take us further in exploring the human condition than we would go by looking only at the facts. And they can focus on specific aspects of human life, putting them in high relief, while in a study of the real world it is hard to distentangle specific aspects or justifiably to give them particular emphasis that disregards the messy and complex context.

We may draw a parallel with the work of Daniel Hutto. He has argued that the process of understanding other people is centrally a matter of narrative practice (Hutto, "Folk Psychology without Theory or Simulation"). Having learnt this practice by listening to stories in childhood, we enter into the practice ourselves. It is a way of working which tends to generate accounts that we find satisfactory. They satisfy because the practice is one of giving accounts that would if analysed be found to respect the principles of folk psychology. (We explore these and related ideas in Baron, Epistemic Respectability in History, section 2.1.1.)

Another advantage over actuality of all of dreams, myths and fiction is that in them, the inner mentalities of characters, their thoughts and motives, can be made explicit. This may allow us to derive explicit principles to apply in the study of history. Historical records, by contrast, do not often make inner mentalities visible, the exceptions being diaries and private letters. (Public speeches, especially political ones, are highly unreliable guides to inner mentalities.)

The historian should not often conclude that actual people did think in certain ways. Evidence for such conclusions would usually be lacking. But the historian can at least say that the actions of people are intelligible because there are ways, common to more than a small proportion of humanity, in which they might well have thought.

3.4 Counting as evidence

Whether dreams, myths or fiction were involved, and whether the grasp of the human condition were explicit or implicit, the dreams, myths or fiction would count as providing evidence for the nature of the human condition because it would be on the basis of the experience of dreaming or reading that one would come to have an improved grasp, and because to the extent that one were challenged on the reliability of lessons learnt from such sources, one could point to the reasons for thinking them reliable that we shall cover in this section.

3.4.1 Products of the psyche

Dreams, myths and fiction are generated by human psyches. So they are not likely to be fundamentally misleading about the nature of the human psyche, at least not in educating us in the principles that are needed to make sense of human affairs to human beings. 

The words "to human beings" are important here. The goal is a humanistic understanding of human affairs, the sort of thing that would not be intelligible from the detached scientific viewpoint that could be taken up both by us and by Martians. That which was generated by the human psyche could easily be massively misleading if the goal were scientific explanation of the workings of the mind. But even the usefulness of the human psyche in pursuing a humanistic understanding does not imply immunity to error. There is no claim to perfect authority, on the lines of any supposed first-person authority as to one's own beliefs or sensations.

The words "make sense of human affairs to human beings" may raise a suspicion of circularity. The suspicion would be justified if the objective of the humanities were to make sense of human affairs to all rational beings, including our friends the Martians. But that is not the aim. We aim only to give accounts that make sense of human affairs to beings who know the human condition from the inside. Accounts are not unconstrained. They must have epistemic respectability (see Baron, Epistemic Respectability in History). But such a constraint can be imposed by asking whether accounts make sense to us.

Myths and fiction do have an advantage over dreams. Dreams are personal to the dreamer. But myths and fiction must satisfy a wide range of readers. And they will only do so if the characters are ones with whom readers can identify. This means that their states of mind and their choices must be in line with human nature in general, not merely in line with the idiosyncratic nature of a dreamer.

Myths have a good prospect of being the better source of information about the human condition. This is because there has been a process of natural selection. It is the stories that resonate with us, despite our being well aware that there are no gods or dragons, that have survived. They have to resonate very strongly in order to overcome the hurdle set by literal implausibility. And we can say this without having to assume archetypes in a collective unconscious along the lines proposed by Carl Gustav Jung, although we are not debarred from assuming them.

Works of fiction, on the other hand, may survive without having to overcome the hurdle of speaking of the manifestly implausible, but only the hurdle of speaking of people who are known not to have existed but who might well have existed, and events that are known not to have occurred but that might well have occurred. That is a much lower hurdle. A work of fiction does not have to resonate so strongly as a myth when its acceptability can gain additional support from its realism.

3.4.2 Tracking and reliability

We must now ask the question posed by Robert Nozick's tracking test. If the human condition had been different, would dreams. myths and fiction have provided different evidence? We may say probably, because the nature of dreams, myths and fiction is likely to be heavily influenced by the nature of the human brain, and that nature would have had to be different for the human condition as it plays a role in the course of events to have been different. This is speculative, but it is the best we can do.

Even if the tracking test is passed, we must ask about the reliability of any evidence that dreams, myths and fiction may supply about the human condition. Here we can at least say that the inner appreciation of people, the mechanisms of creating stories, and so on, are likely to be the same ones when dreaming, when creating myths and fiction during waking hours, and when making sense of actual human conduct. If we seek to grasp why someone reacted in the way he or she did in given circumstances, we are likely to weave a tale about him or her along the same lines as we would unconsciously in a dream or consciously when creating myths or fiction. It may not be the kind of tale a psychologist would weave, but that would not matter. In humanistic disciplines, we do not seek explanations in scientific terms but accounts that make sense of humanity to other human beings. And that, the need for an account that will speak to human readers, means that much is to be gained from being influenced in the writing of accounts by the structure of human mind and the structure of human experience as viewed from the inside.

3.5 Two issues

Two issues arise.

The first issue is that the people involved in events to be understood may have been substantially different in their human condition from people today. That is so, and we may very well need to pay attention to evidence as to differences, evidence that might for example be found in personal letters. But at least the most likely kind of difference is that certain considerations, such as religion or hierarchy, played greater roles in the past than they do today. That is, externally definable differences would matter most. A change in the ways in which the mind worked in general would be less likely to be significant, simply because such changes would be likely to take a very long time. And it is this way the mind works in general that is explored in dreams, myths and fiction.

The second issue is that the dreamer, or the reader of myths or fiction, will work from within his or her own psyche. There is a risk that the understanding obtained will not be of the human condition generally, but of the condition of the individual concerned who has the dream or who, although reading the words of others, unconsciously finds a way to read myths or fiction in a way that will resonate with his or her own psyche. This is indeed a risk, especially if one relies solely on one's own dreams or on works by a single author. But at least the risk could be reduced by reading works by many authors. Some of the works would then not be amenable to the particular idiosyncratic readings that happened to suit a given psyche. Any work might be amenable to some idiosyncratic reading or other, but for a given reader, some works would not be amenable to his or her quirks.

3.6 Understanding historical figures

Dreams, along with myths and fiction, may help us to grasp humanity's mental space, a space wider than that which we inhabit in our own waking lives, in the sort of way that is likely to be necessary for us to stand in the shoes of historical figures.

There is debate about the value of standing in the shoes of historical figures. R. G. Collingwood was a proponent of mental re-enactment (Collingwood, The Idea of History; Dray, History as Re-Enactment). Max Weber did not think it necessary to be in one's mind a historical character, but did recognise the benefit of being able to empathise with emotions relevant to the lives of people being studied (Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, part 1, chapter 1, section 1, paragraphs 2 and 3). Experiments in one's own mind, carried out involuntarily in dreams and voluntarily when reading myths and fiction, should help to develop such empathy, particularly when the emotions need to be stretched beyond what one experiences in modern, safe and peaceful life. One may for example get inside the heads of people, both virtuous and vicious, caught up in the French Revolution by reading Charles Dickens's novel A Tale of Two Cities.

4. Conclusion

If dreams (and myths and fiction) can be evidence as to the human condition in the way suggested in this post, we can read in that light this line from the closing passage of Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle (with Fridolin as the speaker):

"Und kein Traum", seufzte er leise, "ist völlig Traum."

Schnitzler may have had disclosure of the psyche of the dreamer in mind. But we might equally say that no dream is entirely a dream, in the sense that it is also about the human condition generally, a vital if often only tacitly assumed part of human reality.

References

Baron, Richard. Confidence in Claims. CreateSpace, 2015. https://rbphilo.com/confidence.html

Baron, Richard. Epistemic Respectability in History. Amazon, 2019. https://rbphilo.com/history.html

Berdyaev, Nicolas. The Divine and the Human, translated by R M French. London, Geoffrey Bles, 1949.

Collingwood, Robin G. The Idea of History, Revised Edition with Lectures 1926-1928, edited with an introduction by Jan van der Dussen. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993.

Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. (Many editions are available.)

Dray, Wiliam H. History As Re-Enactment: R. G. Collingwood’s Idea of History. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995.

Hutto, Daniel D. "Folk Psychology without Theory or Simulation". Chapter 7 of Daniel D. Hutto and Matthew Ratcliffe (eds.), Folk Psychology Re-Assessed. Dordrecht, Springer, 2007.  https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-5558-4_7

Nozick, Robert. Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge, MA, The Belknap Press, 1981.

Schnitzler, Arthur. Traumnovelle. Berlin, S. Fischer, 1926.

Weber, Max. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Tübingen, J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1922. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft has been translated as Economy and Society. Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1978. The book went through various editions, with text being moved around, but this does not affect the location of the material to which we have referred.

Academic blogging

 

1. The question

A reader of the previous post on this blog wondered about the role of blogging in the writing process. For example, are blog posts a good way to put out drafts?

Here are a few thoughts on the use of blogs in academic writing. In section 2 we shall concentrate on the blog post that is written as a step on the way to some other piece of work, where the post may or may not amount to a draft. In section 3 we shall look at blog posts that are written as parts of a public drafting exercise. In section 4 we shall consider the place in academic practice of blog posts that are themselves intended to be finished pieces of work. In section 5 we shall note some side-effects of the use of blog posts.

2. A blog post that is a step on the way

We shall start by considering a blog post as a step on the way to a longer piece, for example a paper in a journal. Here the main thing will be the envisaged longer piece. The blog post itself might be a draft, or it might be far from being even a preliminary draft. It might for example merely sketch a question to tackle and some lines of enquiry.

While comments on the post are likely to be sought, any resulting dialogue will be used in preparing the longer piece but may not be regarded as a result in its own right. We shall cover dialogues as results in their own right in section 3.3.

This use of a blog post as a step on the way is a natural extension of discussions with others, whether spoken or in writing, about ideas one has for future work. If an author shares an idea with others, feedback on lines of enquiry and on important considerations can be very valuable. If a blog post gets the attention of knowledgeable people, they can provide useful feedback either by commenting publicly or by sending private communications.

What is different from private discussions is that a blog post is public. Anyone can read it, not only those whom the author wishes to consult. And anyone might comment on the post or on other comments that are made publicly.

There are advantages to this degree of publicity.

One advantage is that if an author is going to expose a piece of work to public view, he or she is likely to put effort into making it clear and as intellectually respectable as is feasible. Even if the piece is clearly labelled as only some initial thoughts, the author's reputation will be on the line to some extent. The process of putting thoughts into a presentable form is itself likely to spark fresh thoughts in the author's mind.

Another advantage is that a wider range of comments may be obtained than would be available from consulting people privately.

A third advantage is that public posts facilitate the advancement of knowledge. A post may spark thoughts in a reader who can then start his or her own project.

There is the associated risk that someone else may develop the ideas in a blog post in the same way that the original author would have done, making it pointless for the original author to develop the project in the way envisaged. But at least he or she would have publicly established priority in the ideas. And while it might be nice always to have priority in developing one's ideas, it is not at all clear that there should be any right to do so, or that the existence of any such right would be beneficial to the world of thought.

3. Blogs as writing in public

3.1 The practice

There is a practice of writing in public. The intended sense here is that of making evolving drafts visible, and perhaps inviting comments. We do not mean sitting in a café and publicly tapping on a laptop. A web search for the phrase "writing in public" will turn up plenty of comments on the practice, although some of them will relate to the café sense that we do not intend.

A sequence of blog posts on a given topic would be one way to write in public. It would keep each version distinct from others. 

Another option would be to follow the model of open source software and write in a Git repo that is made available to the world on Github or some similar service. Readers might then be allowed to propose changes directly. Successive versions and the differences between them would be visible, but people would be most likely simply to look at the most recent version on the main branch, especially if there had been frequent commits or there were several branches. To that extent, a sequence of blog posts would make the development of thought more visible.

3.2 Benefits shared with blog posts as steps on the way

Writing in public may have several benefits. We shall start with benefits that are shared with the writing of blog posts as steps on the way to longer pieces, where the posts may or may not amount to drafts of those longer pieces.

There is the benefit of forcing oneself to produce work that is reasonably polished, and the benefit of having fresh thoughts sparked in the effort to achieve an appropriate standard. The pressure to improve the quality of a piece of work may however be less when one is avowedly publishing drafts, because it is clearly understood that they will be improved later. A blog post that is not published as part of an exercise in writing in public must be able to pass for a finished piece of work, because there is no evidence on its face that it is still work in progress.

The benefit of obtaining a wide range of comments carries over from the publication of individual blog posts with a view to producing longer pieces later.

The benefit of facilitating the advancement of knowledge by sparking thoughts in others likewise carries over from the publication of individual blog posts.

3.3 Benefits specific to blog posts as public drafts

We shall now turn to considerations that are specific to blog posts written within a process of writing in public.

One benefit is the motivation to keep going. If readers have been promised a more developed version of a piece of work, the author may feel committed to producing it. Since there is almost always scope for improvement, it is unlikely that the author will look at a version already published and declare some time afterwards that it is the final version. An author may however declare at the time of publication of a version that it will be the final one.

Another benefit lies in the dialogue that is generated by successive drafts and comments on them. Such a dialogue may be seen as a valuable piece of work in its own right, regardless of whether any ideal final form of the work being drafted is reached. The activity of debate can be instructive both to the participants, and to outside readers who merely review successive versions and responses to them. 

Dialogue may be the locus not only of instruction, but also of virtue. On this, there is a paper currently in draft by Frisbee Sheffield, entitled "Socrates and Dialogue as the Greatest Good", which will appear in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society for 2024-25 (volume 125).

4. Blog posts as finished pieces of work

It is perfectly possible for a blog post to be a finished piece of work, rather than a step on the way to something else. Essays have long been a respectable literary form. The blog post can be a modern embodiment of this form, with a few differences.

One difference is that there can be a convenient facility for readers to comment.

Another difference is that there is more variation in length than has been traditional, with some posts being very short while others have the more traditional essay length of several thousand words.

Another difference is that the traditional publishing process is bypassed. There are no delays, and no need to go through review or copy-editing. There may of course be a loss here. Such processes can improve work before it is shown to the world. But a blogger who is concerned about such things can always ask a colleague to review work before publication.

A consequence of bypassing the traditional publishing process is that a blog post cannot be regarded as on a par with a peer-reviewed scholarly paper. There is not normally any systematic review under the control of someone other than the author.

This is however not a serious loss for a piece of work in the style of an essay in the humanities. The form is not one dedicated to establishing specific conclusions by reference to evidence, but one dedicated to presenting an illuminating view of a topic.

5. Side-effects

5.1 The erosion of boundaries

5.1.1 Connections between pieces

If blog posts are used as steps on the way to further posts or to work in other forms, boundaries between individual pieces of work may be eroded.

There is nothing new about drafts of pieces of work, but such drafts have traditionally been hidden from view. And while there are books and papers that explicitly develop other pieces of work by the same authors, the majority of published work is not like that. What is new with blog posts that are steps on the way is that they are public drafts or public statements of intent to work on a given topic in a particular way, at the same time as being capable of being viewed as works in their own right so long as they are sufficiently full and polished.

The result when blog posts are steps on the way is that rather than a set of free-standing pieces, bound together only by authorship and some recurring themes, we see an organic body of pieces that can be read separately but an important feature of which is that they are bound together. The binding may be more or less tight, and earlier pieces may point more or less clearly to the contents of later pieces. But one would not get a proper view of the author's achievement if one did not recognise the binding.

5.1.2 Forms of writing

There are some traditional forms of writing - essays, academic papers, monographs, and so on. The blog post is a newcomer, even if it might be thought to have predecessors from earlier centuries in published letters and other short pieces in journals.

Adding a new form of writing tends to erode sharp boundaries between forms, for two reasons. 

The first reason is that a blog post can be a perfectly respectable piece of work in its own right, despite lacking some traditional features such as having gone through a standard process of review and publication. So those features are seen not to be essential, and they no longer appear to demarcate serious writing from casual jottings and journalism.

The second reason is that the more forms of writing one has, forms that share some characteristics but not others, the easier it is to see a spectrum of forms that merge into one another. Large gaps between forms that would encourage clear demarcation are filled in by new occupants.

It is good to erode traditional boundaries between forms of writing. What matters is the content rather than the method of publication. And blog posts certainly make it easier to put content out into the public domain.

5.2 Citation and attribution

A blog post that is not part of a sequence of drafts can be attributed to its author like any other piece of writing, and cited by others so long as the URL is stable.

When there are modifications in later versions of a post or in a finished piece in some other form in response to comments, and the modifications are substantial and incorporate text supplied by commentators, attribution may be more problematic. There may come a point, particularly in an exercise in writing in public, when a mere acknowledgement of assistance provided by commentators is inadequate. A post or other finished piece should then be regarded as having one lead author and several other contributors. There would however be the difficulty of getting the consent of commentators to have their names on the work, given that they might still have substantial disagreements with its content.

When there is a sequence of drafts, there is also a problem of citation. Traditionally, when papers have been circulated in draft, there has eventually been a version of record, and this has been the one to cite. This practice can continue with a sequence of drafts so long as it is clear which is the final one. But if earlier versions remain available, it is perfectly possible that they will contain material worth citing that has been deleted from the final version. So the same post, with variations, may be cited under several URLs. And what is thought to be the final version may get cited under its URL, but then turn out not to be final, with the new final URL not replacing or being added to the earlier one in citations already given.

There is a solution, exemplified by the arXiv ( https://arxiv.org/ ). In that repository, each version of a paper has a page with an abstract and a link to the full text. There is also a short URL which always points to the page for the latest version, and that page includes links to pages for earlier versions. So one can give the short URL and also mention the version cited. Then anyone who uses the short URL can find all versions. 

This degree of organisation could be implemented by individual authors within their own blogs, although it would be more convenient to have a blog post that served as the main page and that simply contained links to all versions, treating the latest version in the same way as earlier versions. Then there would be no need to change the content of the main page beyond adding links to new versions. Others could give the URL for the main page and state which version they were citing.

The use of blog posts in academic work may also have effects on the ease with which academics who are building their reputations and careers can get credit for their work and for getting widely cited. But there are ways in which we could adapt. And any losses would be small compared to the prize of getting out into the hands of the public more work, and work that was better because it had been subject to comment and modification.

The method of contraries

1. The uses of contrary accounts

People may favour various accounts of aspects of the world. These may be straightforwardly factual accounts, as when someone favours an account of the dynamics of galaxies that assumes the existence of dark matter or an account of the American Civil War that emphasis economic causes. Or they may concern concepts rather than concrete reality, as when someone favours a particular account of knowledge or of value. We do however mean to exclude positions that are not accounts of how things are, for example the position that people should live in accordance with Aristotelian virtues or the position that there should be an unlimited right to free expression.

Our topic is a way to clarify the contents of accounts and the intensions of the terms that are used when giving them.

Someone who wishes to argue for an account may well spend time arguing against contrary accounts. This is not surprising. Rivals must be vanquished if the chosen account is to triumph.

There is another reason to explore contrary accounts. Doing so can help to clarify the favoured account. This, and not defence against rival accounts, is the reason we shall explore here. We shall call this use of contrary accounts the method of contraries.

Our focus on clarification means that we are not interested in how one might arrive at an account by a process of dialectic. More generally, our interest is in what to do once one has a favoured account to convey, rather than in any zetetic activity - although in practice we may of course modify an account because difficulties emerge as we try to clarify it.

We deliberately speak of contrary accounts, not contradictory ones. The reason is that clarifying a contradictory account, in the strict sense of an account that was the negation of a favoured account, would be precisely as challenging a task as clarifying the favoured account. It would require colouring in the territory on the other side of the same boundary.

When it comes to concepts, it is usual to speak of definitions that give the intensions of the corresponding terms. But we shall speak of accounts of the intensions of terms, accounts that may be rather more discursive than is normal for definitions. One reason is that in the humanities and sometimes in the social sciences, definitional precision is unavailable for lack of a complete and precise vocabulary to use in giving definitions. We can only say more or less about the intension of a term, not give a precise definition. Another reason is that we want to discuss a single method of contraries that straddles accounts of the intensions of terms and accounts of aspects of the world.

2. Where contrary accounts are used

In mathematics and the natural sciences, we can mostly say what we mean without saying what we do not mean. At the other extreme, there is a tradition of apophatic theology. So little can be said about God, either with confidence or without inappropriately limiting God, that theologians in this tradition resort to saying what God is not. They do so in the hope of somehow conveying something about God. And one could extend the practice to other areas of deep unclarity, outside theology.

Our interest is not in either of these extremes, but in the middle ground where entities discussed and concepts that are applied to them are sufficiently well understood for plenty to be said in a positive way, but there is still not enough clarity or precision to give favoured accounts in a wholly satisfactory way without reference to contrary accounts. It is in the humanities and the social sciences that we can expect to observe this phenomenon.

3. Examples

We shall now consider some examples. They differ from one another markedly. But they do share the use of contrary accounts to clarify as well as defend favoured accounts.

3.1 The Theaetetus

Plato's dialogues are replete with argument and counter-argument. Accounts of the topic under consideration are put up and shot down, and these turn out to be contraries of accounts proposed later. The final result may not be a positive conclusion. Sometimes the aporia remains. But each account still helps to show what is meant by some later account to which it is a contrary.

This kind of content of the dialogues is the result of applying Socratic questioning, a tool of pedagogy and research. Our concern will however be with the results, accounts and the contrasts between them, rather than with the process.

Early in the Theaetetus, the method of contraries is used to clarify what is sought. This is a unified account of knowledge itself, as opposed to a list of types of knowledge (146c-147c).

Then the extended discussion of perception as knowledge which ends at 160e lays the groundwork for bringing out the required distinctions between knowledge and perception (164b), and between knowledge and opinions that may differ from one person to another (169d-171e). These contrasts not only guide the discussion. They also indicate an essential element in knowledge, the truth of what is believed. The discussion also draws attention to the cases where different opinions can happily coexist (as when a wind is hot for one person but cold for another), and to the contrasting cases where there is a matter of fact that is independent of people's opinions so that if two people think different things, at least one of them must lack knowledge (179a-d).

Immediately after that point we are reminded of the use that has been made of the method of contraries, when Socrates notes that the task is to find out what knowledge is, not what it is not. He says we must wipe out everything up to now and start afresh (187a-b). But our view of the problem has already been thoroughly shaped by the dialogue up to this point.

There are also small examples. For example, when Socrates wants to investigate mistakes about the sum of 5 and 7, he emphasises that he means the numbers themselves, not 5 men and 7 men or anything like that (195e-196a). Here the method of contraries is used to show what is meant by abstract numbers. They are not collections of concrete objects. The distinction is obvious to us now, but it may not have been obvious in the early days of science and reflection on science.

3.2 The Renaissance

Our next example comes from historiography. Jacques Le Goff, in his book Must We Divide History Into Periods?, argues against accounts that impose on history a division into periods which would see a significant leap from the medieval period to the Renaissance. He favours an account that would acknowledge significant changes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but would also recognise that there was too much continuity across the supposed leap and not enough radical change to take the traditional view of the Renaissance as a distinct historical period.

In order to make his case, Le Goff makes extensive use of the method of contraries. At the highest level he sets out the traditional conception of the Renaissance, particularly as developed in the work of historians of the last 200 years, so as to be clear about what he is arguing against and therefore about what he is arguing for. At a more detailed level he identifies several allegedly transformational developments and argues against traditional views that they were revolutionary. He measures their significance as somewhat less but not trivial.

His position may be summarised in two quotations from the book. The first is: "However reasonable it may seem to mark it off as a discrete segment of historical time, I do not believe that the Renaissance can truly be said to constitute a separate period. It seems to me instead to constitute the last renaissance of a long Middle Ages" (page 58). The second is: "My own view is that the transition from one period to another, in this case at the end of a long Middle Ages, is to be situated in the mid-eighteenth century" (page 105).

Use of contraries is inevitable when one wants to argue that something did not exist, or was not of the nature commonly supposed. One has to set out what the thing would have been if it had existed, or what its commonly supposed nature was. Nonetheless, we have here perfectly good examples of the method of contraries in our sense. The positive thesis is set out in opposition to the rejected common view. It is then clarified by being set against specific elements in the common view.

3.3 Globalisation

Turning to an example from the social sciences, globalisation may be conceived in different ways by different authors. One example that brings out use of the method of contraries is supplied by Jan Aart Scholte (Globalization: A Critical Introduction, second edition, chapter 2).

Here the favoured account and contrary accounts are accounts of the intension of a term that may be useful, a term that might be thought to be entirely the invention of social scientists in order to help them understand developments in the human world. There is a contrast with knowledge as regarded in the Theaetetus. Plato takes it that there is such a thing as knowledge out there in the (human) world, the nature of which is to be discovered. The term "knowledge" is not one merely invented by philosophers, to have its intension modified as they may find useful.

Nonetheless, the idea of favouring a particular account of a term's intension remains. It is just that the basis of favouring is usefulness rather than correctness. And the role of the method of contraries in giving the favoured account also remains. So does the aptness of speaking of accounts rather than definitions that we noted in section 1. It may seem more legitimate to give precise definitions if one thinks one is using a term for a concept of one's own invention than if one thinks one is trying to fit a concept to something out in the world. But a desire to come up with something that is truly useful in understanding the world may lead one to hold back from providing a definition that by its rigidity may generate too many inconvenient exceptions to its applicability. There is also the point that in the humanities and to some extent in the social sciences, the available vocabulary often does not provide the words that would be needed to give precise definitions.

Scholte rejects accounts of the intension of "globalisation" in terms of internationalisation, liberalisation, universalisation, and westernisation (pages 54-58).

Scholte then homes in on his preferred account in terms of a spread of connections between people across the planet (pages 59-65). A key contrast with the rejected accounts is set out in these words: "In this fifth usage, globalization refers to a shift in the nature of social space. This conception contrasts with the other four notions of globalization discussed above, all of which presume (usually implicitly rather than explicitly) a continuity in the underlying character of social geography" (page 59). He reinforces the point in the words: "Whereas international relations are inter-territorial relations, global relations are trans- and sometimes supra-territorial relations" (page 65). These quotations highlight the importance of the method of contraries. In order to give his preferred account of the intension of "globalisation" in a way that gives the term sufficient (although still imperfect) precision, and to highlight the importance of a change in the nature of social space, the author has to give rejected accounts.

4. Why is the method of contraries useful?

4.1 The natures of disciplines

It is in the humanities, and to a lesser extent in the social sciences, that we are most likely to see the method of contraries doing work for which it is the only or the best tool. In mathematics and the natural sciences the method is likely only to have pedagogical uses, except perhaps in those natural sciences that are at a considerable distance from physics and chemistry.

The explanation lies in the nature of the humanities and to some extent the social sciences. It can easily be impossible to give a favoured account precisely if one gives it only in a positive way. Recourse must then be had to the method of contraries. The result may still not be fully precise, but it may be markedly more precise.

We shall now consider ways in which the natures of disciplines may give a role to the method of contraries.

4.2 The extensions of terms

Sometimes the difficulty in making precise positive statements will arise from imprecision in the extensions of terms. There may be borderline cases. It may not be possible to spell out necessary and sufficient conditions for entities to fall within the extensions of terms in ways that could in practice be applied to settle every case.

Here the method of contraries may help by picking off some borderline cases as outside the extensions of terms that are used in the positive statement of the favoured account. But the assistance may not be great, and in any case this would be a narrow and relatively uninteresting use of the method of contraries.

4.3 The intensions of terms

A more interesting source of difficulty is that there may be unclarity as to even the broad meaning of the favoured account on account of substantial unclarity as to the intensions of some significant terms. We may expect use of the method of contraries to make a significant contribution to the resolution of difficulties of this type.

Lack of clarity as to an intension may arise because a term is novel and not already well-embedded in the relevant discourse, or because it is being used in a novel sense. This helps to explain why the method of contraries has a much wider role in the humanities than in the natural sciences. In the natural sciences, when new terms are introduced, they are given places in rich networks of inter-definition, with implications between the possession of various sets of properties by entities that can be almost as strong as logical entailment. (Such implications are not verbal artefacts of definition. They need to be discovered by painstaking work. But once the results of research are in, the network of terms will be formulated or modified to fit the results. And the closer we get to physics, the more it is a feature of how the world works that use of terms which fit the world allows strong implications to be identified.) In the humanities and in much of the social sciences, tightly drawn networks of implication are rarely available. New terms must be given their senses in some looser way.

The method of contraries can help in that task. One may display contrary intensions of terms by giving accounts of some rejected intensions of those terms. If the main favoured account is an account of the intension of a term, then the accounts of contrary intensions will simply be contraries to that main account. And if the main favoured account sits above that level, and uses terms with potentially unclear intensions, the accounts of contrary intensions will be contraries to accounts that would convey the intensions of terms as they are used in the main favoured account.

We can see this sort of thing by returning to the examples we gave in sections 3.2 and 3.3.

Jacques Le Goff makes clear what sense of renaissance he will countenance largely by considering the traditional conception and denying its applicability to the relevant period of history. If we analyse his whole argument in our terms, we can see him first making clear what sort of change he has in mind under the term "renaissance", a significant but not necessarily revolutionary change, by presenting the contrary conception of a great transformation. Then he can build an account of the relevant stretch of history, an account that includes several renaissances in his sense but no great transformation of the type that is central to traditional accounts of the Renaissance.

That example is largely one of giving us a sense of the position of the Renaissance on a scale of radicality. And scale is at least in principle a quantitative variable, even if it is hard to measure when it means something other than any kind of physical scale. The example of globalisation is more complex, because the distinctions that Jan Aart Scholte wishes to draw are not in any significant aspect quantitative. Instead he wants to focus on different forms of interaction between entities and barriers to such interactions, before homing in on connections between people.

The way to bring out the form of interaction that is germane to Scholte's approach is to contrast it with other forms of interaction. The points of contrast between the favoured notion of globalisation and notions that are centred on other forms of interaction are not the only points that could be brought out by the method of contraries. But by choosing other notions that have been thought to do the same job of understanding the specific phenomenon of the world's becoming more socially and economically connected, the author can make it likely that he will bring out the points about his favoured notion that will be most significant in doing that job of understanding the phenomenon.

4.4 The favoured account as a whole

There are cases in which the difficulty in giving a favoured account purely positively is not a consequence of imprecision in the extensions or the intensions of terms that are brought together to give the account. Rather, it is a consequence of potential unclarity in the account as a whole when those terms are brought together to give it.

We can see this in the example of the Theaetetus that we introduced in section 3.1.

The goal, a unified account of knowledge itself, is clarified by contrast with a list of types of knowledge. Without this clarification, it would not be clear that a unified account would not even be given by a list of types together with a statement that the list was complete. It would also not be clear that Plato saw a fundamental difference between the intension and the extension of the term "knowledge" which would exist even if there was only one kind of knowledge.

The discussion of perception, about which the perceiver is not mistaken, provides the background for an argument that the intension of "knowledge" must allow for beliefs that do not count as knowledge. That need is then turned back on the proposal to define knowledge as perception, showing its inadequacy.

5. How good a tool is the method of contraries?

We shall now consider whether the method of contraries is a good tool.

On the positive side, the method works. This is indicated by numerous examples of its use. If it did not work, it would have fallen out of use.

It is the negative side that should concern us. Does use of the method of contraries present a high risk of misleading understandings of accounts or terms?

Abstractly, it would seem that it does. If we indicate what is meant partly by saying what is not meant, we are at risk of choosing the contraries that happen to occur to us because they are the ones that we thought of in the context of discovery, when we were still exploring accounts and terms. The contraries chosen in that way may not be the contraries most needed to convey a good understanding. And neglected contraries might have changed our assessment of the adequacy of the favoured account or the appropriateness of the terms used. We could only have full confidence in the results of using the method of contraries if we could be confident that we had identified and made use of all the contraries that would contribute significantly to an understanding and assessment of the account or the terms.

Concretely, there is less reason to worry than might at first appear. This is because of what is achieved in the humanities, and to some extent in the social sciences. The human world is not as amenable to precise characterisation as the physical world, and it is the possibility of precise characterisation that makes the demand that our accounts and terms should match the world an unforgiving demand. Without that possibility, we should not expect a total ordering of accounts by quality. So use of one selection of contraries need not lead us to an inferior result to use of another selection.

Moreover, adding some contraries to a selection may not yield an understanding that is better to any worthwhile extent. It may even muddy the waters. It may be some clear statement that B is neither C nor D that gives insight to the reader. Adding that B is also not E may take the edge off the contrast with C and D. That might seem to be a merely psychological consideration, but such considerations matter when the goal is Verstehen rather than, or at least in addition to, Erklären.

Indeed the tendency we have to cite the contraries that appear most salient, either because they show the reason for homing in on the intended target as distinct from other ones or because they rule out the obvious misunderstandings of the intended target, means that use of the method of contraries should improve accounts in respect of their conferring an understanding of the world. That is a different function from finding out some single and precise way that the world is, a function that is in any case beyond the scope of the humanities.

This is not to say that use of the method of contraries is without risk. We could pick contraries idiosyncratically and thereby mislead ourselves. And citing contraries, while it improves readers' sense of what is meant, does not take us all the way to unambiguous statements or definitions. It may however be the best we can do.

References

Le Goff, Jacques. Must We Divide History Into Periods?, translated by M. B. DeBevoise. New York, NY, Columbia University Press, 2015.

Plato. Theaetetus.

Scholte, Jan Aart. Globalization: A Critical Introduction, second edition. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.