Schopenhauer and free will

1. Introduction

Schopenhauer remarked that the only freedom of the will we can coherently have is freedom to do what we will, not to will what we will.

More recent philosophers have not all respected the boundary that Schopenhauer drew. Some of them have defined the freedom of the will that they defend in terms that push in the direction of being able to will what one wills.

In this post we shall start by touching on a few well-established positions (section 2). Then we shall look at the option of choices being random within a constrained range (section 3). Finally we shall explore one feature of human beings that may promise to place them close to willing what they will. This is the ability to choose to make changes to one's own character (sections 4 and 5).

Our concern is with ways to look at the human experience of making choices and acting on them. We do not seek to study what happens in the way that psychologists would study us. Our approach is philosophical, rather than scientific.

We do not claim originality for the various theories that we shall use. They have mostly been around for quite some time. But we shall offer a way to put some options to work against the background of Schopenhauer's remark.

2. Theories of free will

2.1 Choices as the focus of theories

We take freedom to be freedom in choice of action. Two questions that are regarded as absolutely central by some philosophers, and unimportant by others, are these:

(a) Could the subject have made a different choice?

(b) Was a choice truly the subject's choice?

The focus on choices leaves some things out of account. On the side after a choice, we shall take no interest in whether a subject is physically restrained or otherwise incapable of carrying out a chosen action. On the side before the choice our focus will not be on the origins of subjects' desires, except when we consider choosing to change one's character and therefore the desires that may carry weight on future occasions of choice. Apart from that, we shall be happy to take desires as given. We shall not be concerned with whether it is physically determined that a given subject shall have any particular desire. We shall however be very concerned with the mechanism by which desires and perhaps other things give rise to choices.

2.2 Schopenhauer

In chapter 1 of his Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will, Schopenhauer starts by pointing out that the concept of freedom from physical restraint makes perfect sense. Such freedom means that one can do what one wills. He then points out that freedom to will what one willed would demand a will that chose in one way rather than another without grounds for its choices. The rest of the essay is largely an attack on the view that we have or even could have such a freedom.

In chapter 2 he examines the role of motives, arguing that the way to provide a ground for the will's choices would be for the will to choose on the basis of the strongest motive, not to be free to decide whether to be guided by motives. He also refuses a half-way position in which motives would incline but not determine the will. And he points out that self-consciousness only reveals our choosing as we will, in response to our motives, not any trace of willing as we will. (There is here a dependence on Schopenhauer's more general doctrine of the Will, in which a person is his or her will.)

Moreover, while we can wish for several contradictory things, we can only will one of them. The possibility of wishing does not mean that we could in fact have willed differently without any reason (such as a stronger motive) determining us to do so. And in that case we could not have willed the option we in fact chose.

In chapter 3 Schopenhauer sets out the necessity of the effects of causes, up to and including motives as causes, even when they are the motives of human beings who can rationally consider the past and the future as well as the present when deciding how to act. He adds that an effect, a human action, will not follow without a cause, a motive. And he goes on to explore the notion of a person's character. It is the combination of character and external circumstances that will determine the choices made. The fact that the choices made cannot be reliably predicted by the subject does not mean that other choices could have been made. 

In chapter 3 Schopenhauer also sets out his view that a person's character is unalterable. Apparent changes merely result from being at different stages in life. And a change in conduct results not from a change in character but from increasing knowledge of the consequences of different choices. Moreover, the idea of a free will unbound by anything at all, a will that could will what it willed, would not only be incompatible with having a definite character. It would prevent such a character from being developed over a life.

Chapter 4 is a survey of views expressed in theology, philosophy and literature in the past.

In chapter 5 Schopenhauer rounds off his essay with an attribution to each of us of moral responsibility for our actions, despite their being determined, precisely because each person's actions are determined by his or her character. Here he comes close to basing moral responsibility on the guidance control that is now favoured by many compatibilists.

2.3 Compatibilists

Compatibilists, who seek a freedom that is entirely compatible with a deterministic physical world and the supervenience of the mental on the physical, have on the whole respected Schopenhauer's boundary. Guidance control, one's own brain and character having significant roles in the causal chains that lead from circumstances to actions, is enough for many compatibilists. It is a formulation of freedom to do what one wills which places emphasis on the will having substantive content and playing a significant role.

2.4 Incompatibilist libertarians

Incompatibilist libertarians maintain that a deterministic universe would be incompatible with the free will they seek, but that we have that free will anyway. If we ask what the implications of such a freedom would be, we find that we at least edge toward the freedom to will what one wills that Schopenhauer wanted to deny us.

A great deal hinges on the mechanism by which it is alleged that we make free choices. What mechanism could there be which would give freedom without degenerating into randomness?

There is not usually any suggestion that choices are random and inexplicable. To that extent, Schopenhauer's warning is heeded. But the deterministic physical world cannot be allowed to have total control. Nor can it be the sole guiding factor, leaving a residue of mere randomness, for that would leave us with a disrespectful vision of the subject who chooses.  And given that the link from willing to acting is within the physical world and therefore deterministic or subject merely to vagaries of the world by virtue of which results happen not to be what was intended, there would have to be a guiding factor before the willing of a particular action. To that extent the subject would need a method to will what he or she willed.

The deterministic physical world may be allowed to set some limits, even at the level of the neurons that embody decisions, but there is also a role for some rational influence on choices that does not supervene on the physical - and must not supervene on it if the incompatibilist libertarian position is to survive.

One candidate for such a rational influence is the subject's character. Another is the reasons for possible choices of which the subject is consciously or subconsciously aware. (We shall call these the available reasons, which may not be the full set of reasons that would be relevant to a decision.)

The avoidance of supervenience on the physical may be achieved by a denial that such things do supervene on the physical, perhaps on the basis that characteristics and reasons are inherently mental things. Then their causal efficacy may be achieved through some physical force of agency that characteristics and reasons invoke in favour of a particular choice. Alternatively characteristics and available reasons may supervene on structures in the physical brain, so that they are as determined as anything else, but some force of agency that is not part of a closed physical order of causes and effects may select and put into effect options chosen from a range that is already narrowed down by characteristics and available reasons. These may not be the only possibilities, but they indicate the kind of thing that would be needed.

A physical force of agency that was invoked by something not supervenient on the physical or a force that was itself not part of a closed physical order of causes and effects would be somewhat mysterious. But the idea of a force that operates within limits laid down by characteristics and reasons, whether or not those characteristics and reasons correspond to structures in the physical brain, does give us a clue to an approach that would avoid the need for a mysterious force. This approach is constrained randomness, and we shall now turn to it.

3. Constrained randomness

3.1 The basic idea

Suppose that a subject who faces a decision has a reasonably set character and a range of available reasons to prefer options. And suppose that the reasons cannot all be added up on a single scale to yield a clear conclusion as to which is the best option. (Such a computation would indeed often be impossible.) Then there would seem to be scope to make a free choice between a limited range of options. How would it be if that choice were random?

3.2 Kinds of randomness

We must first think about what we have in mind by way of randomness. It might be genuine physical randomness, such as is seen under some interpretations of quantum mechanics, triggering or not triggering neurons. Or it might be the result of some deterministic physical process, such that the selection of one option rather than another from within the range set by character and available reasons could not be explained in terms of the relative weights of characteristics of the subject or the weights of available reasons because there was no even remotely comprehensive way reliably to link the relevant physical process to any such explanation. (The writings of Donald Davidson on anomalous monism and of Christian List provide a point of comparison here. See Davidson, "Mental Events", as a starting point, although there is much subsequent discussion; List, Why Free Will is Real.)

Genuine randomness and non-explanatory determinism would be equally good for our purposes, because our concern will be with how things are when a subject's choices are not to be explained entirely in terms that look like respectable ways to explain choices - broadly, in terms of characteristics and reasons.

3.3 Assessing constrained randomness

How would constrained randomness look? Would it keep the worry of a lack of explanations of choices at bay? And would it give rise to a different worry, by constituting an attack on the unity and the reflexive transparency of the self?

3.3.1 Randomness and explanation

Constrained randomness would mean that people generally acted in character, and were not often liable to make strange choices that would lead observers to regard them as out of control. To that extent, it would fit our observations of how people act. It would also be a good fit with the observation that there is a degree of unpredictability in people's choices, however well one knows their characters and the ranges of reasons available to them.  And the restrictions imposed by characteristics and available reasons would accommodate the point Schopenhauer made that we can think of all sorts of implausible choices (which could happen through a deterministic exercise of imagination), tell ourselves that we could make them, but in fact find it difficult to the point of practical impossibility to do so (Schopenhauer, Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will, chapter 3).

How would constrained randomness seem from the inside? One might anticipate a sense of lack of control when the randomness took effect, which would certainly be disturbing and would undermine one's self-conception as a free subject steering one's own life. But actually a sense of lack of control should not be expected, even though there might be justification for attributing lack of control.

Justification would require the detection of randomness. It could be detected in the following way. If we think about choices we have made, we may give explanations by reference to characteristics and available reasons. An ability to give such explanations allows us to see ourselves as captains of our lives. But what we may not notice is that we could have given equally good explanations had we made other choices. If we do notice that, we can expect to notice a residue of unexplained choice of one option over another.

Despite this, one would still not expect a sense of lack of control. The sensation one had as a choice was made would be the same, whether the choice was made by virtue of something random or by virtue of a mysterious force of agency. So the randomness would be hidden from the subject at the time of decision, even though it could be appreciated later.

3.3.2 The unity and transparency of the self

While constrained randomness might fit the data on what people do, and while it might also be consonant with the impression of choice that one has from the inside, there is a concern. Choice through such a mechanism might seem to undermine the unity and the reflexive transparency to oneself of the I that willed.

It is natural to think that there should be a central locus of control which sees all, or at least sees everything that makes a substantive contribution to choices (so that its own contents, perhaps not transparent to itself save in the form of an inactive copy that may not reflect current operations, are merely formal and do not have substantive content).

If such a central locus of control were to see a source of randomness, that would preserve the transparency of everything outside itself to the extent of recognising contributing entities. But on the other hand the source of randomness would be something outside the central locus's control. And its internal workings would have to be opaque in the sense that they could not be seen well enough for its outputs to be predicted reliably in specific cases, because that would eliminate randomness and reduce us to the determinism which provokes incompatibilist fears and drives those who have such fears but who want a strong form of free will to posit mysterious forces of agency.

(There might however be enough transparency of the source of randomness to allow statistical predictions about the relative frequencies with which different outputs would arise. That would not impugn the indeterminism achieved on individual occasions. To that extent the objection that agent-level compliance with the implications of micro-level statistical laws would be a wild coincidence, an objection set out in Pereboom, Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life, pages 66-69, may be one that can be ignored.)

Moreover, in order to fit the picture of constrained randomness, it would have to be impossible for the central locus to disconnect the source of randomness so that it had no effect on choices. If that happened, we would be back to a purely deterministic mechanism which would leave nothing that might satisfy the yearnings of those who feared incompatibilism. Nor would it make sense to allow the central locus a substantive as opposed to a merely formal contribution to choices, on pain of either losing transparency or falling back into the picture of willing what one willed that Schopenhauer found unsatisfactory.

We could of course give up on the unity and the transparency to oneself of the I that wills. We might say that imperfect unity and transparency were good enough. We could even say that imperfection here was a good fit with our first-person observation of ourselves. Sometimes we and our choices are puzzles to ourselves, and it is through living, making choices, and acting on those choices that we engage in an unending process of self-discovery.

4. Choosing to change one's character

4.1 The scope to change

There is another way in which a subject's presumed central locus of control might be given a role. This would be to consider deliberate changes of character. We would here exploit a scope for flexibility in character that Schopenhauer denied (Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will, chapter 3).

What we consider here would not satisfy the incompatibilist libertarian as he or she focused on individual decisions, but it might still allow us to go beyond the mere guidance control of the compatibilists and safely edge a bit toward a subject's being able to will what he or she willed. And we would do so without any need for randomness, whether constrained or unconstrained. 

A human being is capable of standing outside himself or herself, contemplating his or her own character, and considering whether changes would be appropriate. One cannot stand entirely outside oneself, because the standpoint is within oneself. There is no Archimedean point on which to stand. A subject engaged in changing his or her character is in the position of repairing a raft at sea. The raft can be repaired piecemeal, but one must always stand on a part that it not currently under repair. (It is not clear whether there is any part of a personality that by virtue of its centrality can never be changed. In that respect things may be different from how they would be on a raft, in that the part of a raft where one was currently standing could always be repaired later.)

Inability to stand outside oneself means that unity and reflexive transparency of the subject cannot be perfect. But a degree of detachment is possible. Then it is possible to make a plan to change one's character, not by giving direct orders to oneself (which are likely to be ineffective) but by adopting habits that will in due course effect the desired changes. Success in this is never assured, but it is not out of reach.

4.2 Willing what one wills?

To the extent that one does succeed and that one's choices on individual occasions are constrained by one's character, there is a form of willing what one wills. The willing does not relate to any immediate choice, but to future choices. It is a willing that in certain circumstances one should have a will to do certain things and not others. At the present time, one only wills that one's character should change in certain ways, and freedom at that point consists in one's being able actually to promote those changes, to do what one currently wills. We would not have a case of freely willing to will to change one's character.

The modest nature of the claimed victory over a supposed inability to will what one wills, a victory that relies on separating in time various elements in an individual's psychic history, means that it would not matter if the process of deciding to make certain changes to one's character and then acting to make them was deterministic, rendered inevitable in every detail by supervenience on the physical universe. And it would also not matter if the process were supervenient on a physical universe that incorporated a mixture of determinism and randomness. It would suffice for the choice to make certain changes to one's personality to be one that was internally driven, along the lines of the guidance control beloved of compatibilists.

4.3 Two-layer structures

To what would this victory amount? Would it provide any comfort to someone whose natural inclination was to be a libertarian but who felt unable to sustain that position because of its seeming incompatibility with the nature of the world as viewed scientifically?

One point of comparison is the structure of first-order and higher-order desires that has been set out by Harry Frankfurt and that has been seen as providing comfort on questions of free will (Frankfurt, "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person"). A subject can have first-order desires to do different and incompatible things, for example to eat delicious food and to stick to a diet. But a subject can also have a higher-order desire, that the desire to stick to the diet should prevail. The effect on conduct of having a higher-order desire that was strong enough to ensure that the preferred first-order desire would prevail could be seen as comparable to the effect on conduct of having a certain characteristic. And in Frankfurt's view, acting on first-order desires that are in conformity with higher-order desires is a sign that the actions really are one's own, and are in that sense free. The subject wills certain choices (at the first-order level) and wants (at the higher-order level) to will those choices. This is not the willing what one wills to which Schopenhauer objected, because the desires of the two orders are different and the higher-order desire has substantive content.

Comparability of effect should not be assumed to imply comparability of underlying source of the effects. There is a difference between a conscious higher-order desire, cited at the time when first-order desires are in conflict, and a standing disposition, perhaps unconscious, to choose to satisfy certain first-order desires rather than others.

When however we restrict our comparison to conscious higher-order desires at the moment of choice and characteristics that were at some time in the past deliberately developed, they do seem to come together as examples of a limited form of willing what one wills.

They come together because the form of willing is in both cases willing that there be an efficacious rule concerning how to decide on specific actions, a rule that is separable from those decisions on specific actions. A characteristic, whether deliberately developed or not, gives a rule that can be applied over and over. Likewise a higher-order desire is a rule that can be applied repeatedly. Unlike a characteristic, it might not be so well established that it would be applied reliably. It might come to consciousness on only a few of the occasions on which it was relevant, and might sometimes arise but be too weak to have the effect it promoted. But it would naturally be thought of as a rule to be applied repeatedly. And any thought that a higher-order desire was only meant for occasions when the first-order desire to be opposed was not especially strong would be odd.

This is however only a limited form of willing what one wills because we still find no reason to see the end results as entirely optional. It is perfectly possible, indeed highly likely if the mental supervenes on the physical, that the only way things could have turned out differently, either inside a subject's head or in his or her conduct, would have been by virtue of random processes that were in no sense under the subject's direction.

We may compare choices of characteristics and conscious higher-order desires with Robert Nozick's approach, which could be seen as a programme for the establishment of higher-order desires on the fly. Nozick speaks of a decision as setting a precedent under which it is itself subsumed (Nozick, Philosophical Explanations, chapter 4, section 1). He sets out how we assign weights to the various considerations that might bear on a decision. The assignment of weights on one  occasion will influence assignments on future occasions by setting a precedent, but not an inviolable one. Nozick also argues that the assignment of weights on a given occasion can set a precedent under which that assignment is itself subsumed (pages 300-301). He also addresses the risk of seeing our choices as random and uncontrolled by arguing that a choice can be explicable without its falling under a covering law, and in making that argument he uses our own experience of choosing (pages 301-306).

4.4 The advantages of two-layer structures

How much comfort does a two-layer structure give, whether the upper layer is chosen characteristics or higher-order desires?

It does not suffice to allow that things could have turned out differently, save by the unflattering subjection of subjects to randomness. But it does look significantly different from a single-layer picture in which a subject, faced with a given situation, automatically follows the tramlines of the world into a particular choice. It is a modest form of willing what one wills, and one that it is unsurprising Schopenhauer did not develop given his conviction that we have settled and invariable characters.

What is perhaps most comforting about a two-layer structure is that it makes explicit that we are subjects with directed and consistent lives which are not random, while we still have the option to change direction. At this point the idea of a rule to be applied repeatedly becomes important. We can create our future selves, at least to a limited extent, and the choices made in that process of creation are validly our own even if they were inevitable. Moreover, when it comes to choosing characteristics, the chosen characteristics can eventually seep into our bones, so that they do indeed become aspects of who we are.

It is here important to reflect on the process of deliberately moulding character. One consciously makes certain choices. This is an instance of a higher-order desire to take on some new characteristic which will in due course direct choices that may be influenced by first-order desires. Eventually the habit of choosing in what the subject considers to be the right way becomes automatic. In this respect the process of choosing characteristics has the edge over higher-order desires that operate by coming to consciousness on specific occasions of choice. Those higher-order desires do not seep into the bones of the subject, and there is a marked risk that they will not arise or not be strong enough when they are needed.

A further elaboration is possible, whether or not one accepts the supervenience of the mental on a physical world that may be entirely deterministic or perhaps deterministic with a bit of randomness. Within the range of characteristics that a subject might aim to develop through the practice of appropriate habits, there may be higher-order and lower-order ones. Examples of higher-order characteristics would be being thoughtful rather than impulsive, and not being indulgent in relation to pleasures in general. Examples of  lower-order characteristics would be not making assumptions about people newly encountered, and refusing foods that would be bad for one's health.

Higher-order characteristics would be of wider application than lower-order ones. But they would be of less certain application to specific choices. This would be both because their lack of much concrete content would make it hard to compute precise recommendations, and because a subject who did not relish the choices they indicated would have scope to argue internally that other choices more or less complied with their imperative content. Indeed, higher-order characteristics might largely take effect through their influence on the selection of lower-order characteristics, which would have enough concrete content to be of reasonably certain application to specific choices.

This point about influences of some characteristics on the selection of others brings out an advantage of having interactions between different characteristics in the process of their being chosen or otherwise coming to accrue to a subject. Such interactions can enhance the coherence of a set of characteristics, with some possible characteristics failing to accrue because of their conflict with other characteristics. And such interactions would not be limited to downward influences through hierarchies of characteristics. They might include influences upward, or influences back and forth across a network that might not have a clear hierarchy. Nor should we ignore a broader picture of influences, as set out in Michael Bratman's discussion of the formulation of coherent plans to be implemented over time (Bratman, "Planning Agency, Autonomous Agency").

5. Stability and flexibility of character

5.1 The importance of stability

While we have made use of the ability deliberately to change one's character, it would be undesirable if people's characters did not have considerable inertia, resisting change. Fortunately, they do have such inertia.

If a subject's character has inertia and hence stability, we can speak of the subject's personality. If the character fluctuated widely, either over the full range of possibilities for someone of that age, sex and culture or over some narrower but still reasonably broad range, we would have to say that the subject had no personality in particular. And that would be an attack on the very notion of a human subject. It would also make social interaction difficult, because people like that would be a good deal more unpredictable than people in general actually are.

Another aspect is that a degree of settled personality is required for whatever freedom of the will we have to be something worth having. A subject exercises his or her will to carry out his or her projects, in accordance with his or her own ideas of what is valuable. If the subject had no stable character, the subject could not say "I did this" with any more than an etiolated sense of "I". For a subject's utterance of "I did it my way" to carry weight and be a source of satisfaction, the way has to be the subject's in the sense that it reflects how the subject actually is. And if the subject is unstable from moment to moment, it is not possible to say how the subject is in a sense that would allow him or her to look back on something done and affirm that it reflected how he or she really was at any time other than the moment of action. Even potential great instability which had not been actualised would cast doubt on a claim that the action reflected how the subject really was, because truly having one's characteristics requires having them securely.

Stability is also needed for the compatibilist view that is based on guidance control to be at all appealing. If satisfaction comes from being able to claim that a subject's choices and actions reflect substantial causal roles for the subject's own brain and the psyche that supervenes on it, the psyche had better be stable for the claim of substantial roles to have much significance.

5.2 Layers and networks

Layers or networks of interacting characteristics may be a source of stability. An isolated characteristic is at constant risk of losing its grip on choices and conduct, prompted by some immediate temptation. But if different characteristics, vulnerable to different temptations, interact, any one characteristic may be kept at its task because a tendency for it to lose its grip would be corrected by the fact that this would be inconsistent with other characteristics to which it was related. This might be so either within a non-hierarchical network or, in a specifically top-down way, within a hierarchy of  higher-order and lower-order characteristics. Indeed the higher-order characteristics, having only limited concrete content, should be relatively invulnerable to temptations to relax their grip, although on the other hand their grip at the level of specific choices and conduct would be limited by the very fact that they were short of concrete content.

5.3 The balance between stability and flexibility

We can reflect on the balance between the twin desiderata of stability of character to give ownership of our choices and freedom to change character. Here we stop thinking about how to conceptualise what we actually have, or what it is that we actually have, and consider what we might like.

We can imagine a horizontal axis of fixity of personality, going from great changeability on the left to great fixity on the right. A vertical axis can measure desirability. One curve, representing the benefit of flexibility, can run downward from left to right. Another, representing the benefit of stability, can run upward from left to right. The curve representing overall benefit can be some function of values indicated by those two curves, perhaps addition or perhaps something more complicated. Then in designing a world that would be ideal, we could identify the point at which the curve representing benefit achieved a maximum.

(What constituted benefit would be a separate question. It might be contentment, or degree of respect for oneself or for human subjects as agents, or something else.)

This picture of a graph is of course somewhat fanciful. It is not at all clear how the relevant variables could be quantified or the function defined. And even if those obstacles were overcome, there might be no unique point of maximum benefit. But the picture may bring out how conflicting desiderata can be related to one another.

6. Conclusion

We have not found a coherent notion of willing what one wills that Schopenhauer would consider admissible. Nor have we come up with anything that would entirely satisfy the incompatibilist libertarians, because constrained randomness is tainted by randomness, something that does not look compatible with human dignity, and because what appeared in hierarchies of desires or characteristics could still be fully determined by the merely physical. What would still be lacking would be a will that was neither determined by the physical world nor undetermined, but determined by the subject.

What we can do is move a little way in the direction of willing what one wills, giving more freedom than either Schopenhauer or compatibilists would allow, without exposing ourselves to Schopenhauer's complaint of incoherence. But central to this move is a rejection of Schopenhauer's belief in the unalterability of human character. If we see character as changeable, and in particular as open to deliberate moulding by the subject, we can exploit the passage of time to let what is willed at one time have influence not only over what is done at a later time, but also over what is willed at a later time.

References

Bratman, Michael E. "Planning Agency, Autonomous Agency". Chapter 1 of James Stacey Taylor (ed.), Personal Autonomy: New Essays on Personal Autonomy and its Role in Contemporary Moral Philosophy. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Davidson, Donald. "Mental Events". Essay 11 of Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events, second edition. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2001.

Frankfurt, Harry G. "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person". Chapter 16 of Gary Watson (ed.), Free Will, second edition. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003.

List, Christian. Why Free Will is Real. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2019.

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

Pereboom, Derk. Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will, edited by Günter Zöller, translated by Eric F. J. Payne. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Truth becomes fiction

1. The couplets

In chapter 1 of the truly wonderful eighteenth century novel by Cao Xueqin known as Dream of the Red Chamber, and alternatively as The Story of the Stone, we find this (in the David Hawkes translation):

"Shi-yin took the object from him and saw that it was a clear, beautiful jade on one side of which were carved the words 'Magic Jade'. There were several columns of smaller characters on the back, which Shi-yin was just going to examine more closely when the monk, with a cry of 'Here we are, at the frontier of Illusion', snatched the stone from him and disappeared, with the Taoist, through a big stone archway above which

THE LAND OF ILLUSION

was written in large characters. A couplet in smaller characters was inscribed vertically on either side of the arch:

Truth becomes fiction when the fiction's true;

Real becomes not-real where the unreal's real."

Then in chapter 116 (in the John Minford translation), we go back through the arch.

"On the lintel of the arch were inscribed in large characters the words:

THE PARADISE OF TRUTH

A couplet in smaller characters ran down on either side:

When Fiction departs and Truth appears, Truth prevails;

Though Not-real was once Real, the Real is never unreal."

2. Our enquiry

2.1 This post and the novel

This post takes its rise from the first couplet, and makes brief reference to the second. We shall however not analyse the couplets in their context. A huge amount has been written about Dream of the Red Chamber, to the point where there is a recognised discipline known as Redology. We do not expect to add anything within that discipline. Instead we shall make connections between the first couplet and ideas culled from elsewhere in order to find some philosophical relevance of the couplet to life. We should in any case be wary of relating what we say to the novel itself, because we shall use the English terms "truth", "fiction", "real" and "unreal" without heed to their degree of correspondence with the Chinese terms.

2.2 The relevance to life we seek

On the one hand, we have the natural sciences. These work up from physics and, importantly, keep the human perspective out of their work. Whatever they say should make sense to non-human intelligent beings just as much as to us. That is one aspect of their objectivity. And associated with that, we tend to think of the things identified by them as real.

On the other hand, we have our own experience of life. Thinking about how we live requires that we find places for our self-conception as free agents and for values that we regard as more objective than they would be if they were merely chosen by us. These are not merely moral values. They include values that indicate the nature of human flourishing and aesthetic values.

(In the middle there are the Geisteswissenschaften and the notion of Verstehen. The middle ground would certainly need to be fitted into any complete picture, but we shall not attempt to do so here. We shall concentrate on a single tension between the extremes.)

Free agency and value appear to find no place in the scientific view, except in the etiolated form of observations about the unpredictability of human conduct and about what people say to explain the things they do. Even the use of explanatory language does not on its own make the things of which people speak real in the eyes of science. The words people use may be given meaning by their being or being related to words for scientifically recognised things, or they may derive their meanings from examples of their use in relation to circumstances or conduct and from their places in a linguistic structure, but they are otherwise void of scientifically recognised content.

This is hardly satisfactory. And the problem is not to be dissolved by saying that all we need is a way to talk about our human lives in a way that makes sense to us, and adding that we can make use of all the usual human vocabulary of choice, value and the rest without conflict with our scientific knowledge because it is simply a way of speaking to which no ontological significance need be attached. We need a sense of reality, not just of making sense, in order to give our understanding of our lives the force we need to validate our actions. Non-overlapping magisteria, to borrow Stephen Jay Gould's phrase, are not enough.

Our aim here is to be inspired by the first couplet to identify a way to allow this. Our proposal is imperfect but it may be as good as we can have for now, given that integration with our scientific knowledge still appears to be some way off.

3. Truth and fiction

3.1 Types of truth

Factual truths may be everyday, such as truths about which cities are the capitals of countries. Or they may be sophisticated, such as the truths identified in fundamental physics. Such well-established truths are not liable to become fiction, whatever fiction may be thought true. The closest one gets is when science fiction describes something that violates known laws of physics, but there is no temptation to think that the known laws are fiction. We are conscious that we are being invited to suspend disbelief.

We also speak of statements having truth in them, in the sense that they capture some understanding of how life is for human beings.

While this latter sort of truth closes in on what we want to have correspond to the fiction that becomes true, so that we can make use of the first couplet, we are not quite there. We need to bring truths under this heading into a relationship with straightforward factual truth to reach what we need.

The relationship is this. There are claims about human life that from within such a life seem to be both plainly true and important. And yet straightforward albeit scientifically sophisticated facts seem to be at variance with those claims. The reality of free will and the existence of objective values are leading examples.

It is not that the scientific facts are definitely at variance with these things. There may be modifications of our notions of free will and objective value that remove incompatibilities. Indeed, philosophers have for a long time been busy devising such modifications and testing them in argument. But arguments continue, and we have not yet definitively removed the incompatibilities.

The way forward we shall propose here, in line with the first couplet, is to park the inconvenient scientific truth as though it were fiction in order to allow apparent fictions that are essential to our self-conception and our way of life to be regarded as true, and to allow scientifically dubious features of humanity to be regarded as real.

3.2 Making truth become fiction

The problem with our beliefs in free will and objective value is that we do not yet have an indubitably satisfactory way to integrate these beliefs, and therefore our self-conception, with our scientific knowledge. There is a tantalising prospect that we might one day manage such an integration. But for the time being, we must make do with a way to park those elements of our scientific knowledge that give rise to difficulty.

To see the kind of conflict that is involved, we may take free will as an example. The physical universe seems to offer us only a mixture of determinism and randomness, or maybe only determinism, depending on how one interprets quantum mechanics. And there is every reason to think that our thoughts and actions supervene on the physical. If the physical could not be different, nor could the mental. But from the inside, we have a clear sense that we freely decide what to do. And we need a reasonably strong conception of free will in order to justify our attributions of personal responsibility.

There are responses other than just giving up on free will. One response is to cut down our conception of free will to something less ambitious. This is for example what is done by compatibilists, who favour mere guidance control (Fischer, "Compatibilism"). Another response, which takes the first line of the first couplet as an invitation to treat some physical truths as fiction, is to overlook the causal closure of the physical, the principle that every physical phenomenon that has a sufficient cause has a sufficient physical cause. This is the line taken in Baron, Deliberation and Reason, chapter 2. With some such approach, the fiction of free will can become true.

(The causal closure of the physical is more of a metaphysical principle than a scientific fact, but it is enormously plausible in the light of our scientific knowledge. That knowledge keeps on growing through the identification of sufficient physical causes, and does not suggest any plausible way to find non-physical causes to invoke when there are gaps in our knowledge of physical causes.)

Another example is objective value. We feel uneasy if we are told that our values are optional social constructs that would evaporate if most of us chose to abandon them. And this is so not only for moral values, but also for values that indicate the nature of human flourishing and for aesthetic values. But there is nothing in the physical universe that looks apt to be a foundation for values.

Again, there are philosophical responses. One response is to give up on the idea of values that are independent of what we choose to think. Another response is to say that there are evolutionarily successful principles of conduct, justified by their success and thereby given more solidity than they would get from our merely choosing them. But that would leave us vulnerable to the risk that values we do hold, such as personal freedom, might turn out to be evolutionarily disadvantageous. A third response is to say that while our values may not be objective, we can legitimately regard them as objective. Here we find positions along the lines of quasi-realism. And a fourth response, encouraged by the first couplet, would be to regard as fiction the depressing claim that there was nothing independent of our thoughts on which to found our values. Thus could the fiction of objective value become true.

In pursuing this last approach, we would not need to claim that there was something magical in the physical world. Rather, we would regard as fiction the claim that only the physical and what could be built on it was objective. That claim would be in a similar position to the claim of the causal closure of the physical: not a scientific fact, but a metaphysical claim that was highly plausible in the light of our scientific knowledge. Having said that, it would be plausible for a different reason. Here, the reason would be the fact that the notion of objectivity which motivates the search for a foundation for values includes stability and non-optionality within its content. That which was not deeply embedded in our scientific understanding could all too easily be a figment of our imagination, providing an apparent foundation which would be at constant risk of collapse.

Note that in both examples, we do not actively deny what science seems to tell us. We do not deny the causal closure of the physical, or the lack of anything that looks apt to be a foundation for value. Rather, we overlook these annoying facts. This does mean that we have to allow for a degree of mental dissonance. We know that we are not pursuing all the implications of a view that we have some strong form of free will, or a view that our values have objectivity. And ordinarily, it is good epistemic practice to pursue the implications of one's thoughts in order to see whether any of those thoughts are rendered unacceptable through modus tollens. But this modest dissonance may be the best we can do in order to ensure our mental equilibrium. We shall return to this theme of not pursuing implications in section 4.3.

4. Reality and unreality

4.1 Identifying the real

There is more than one way we could identify the real.

We could take the real to include the referents of our best scientific theories. But then reality would include unobservable entities, and would at least seem to be mutable as our scientific theories evolved. Here lies the debate in the philosophy of science between realism and anti-realism, with structural realism as another option.

We could take the real to include that which we must accept and understand in order to get on in the world, either in order to overcome practical obstacles or in order to discover more about the world. Broadly, the real would include that which demanded that we work with and not against its grain.

We could take reality to be that which existed whether we thought about it or not. Or we could take reality to be that which had its properties regardless of our thoughts about those properties. One special form of this would be to say that reality was that about which we could straightforwardly be mistaken.

So far we have suggested ways to identify the real, with the unreal to form a residual category. And while that would be the correct approach for some purposes, particularly ontology and the philosophy of science when undertaken within the analytic tradition, it is not the way most consonant with the first couplet and its context in the novel. Rather, the couplet and its context encourage us to start with the unreal. So let us now do so.

4.2 Identifying the unreal

The world forces us to recognise some things - shoes and ships and sealing wax, and cabbages and kings. Once we start to do serious science, we are forced to recognise other things - electrons, the cosmic microwave background, the enthalpy of chemical reactions, and metabolic cycles. We do not want to ask whether forced recognition betokens reality. Purported definitions of the real are apt to run into difficulties. And anything that fell short of a definition, such as a list of some examples of real things, would be a disappointment given that one naturally expects the real to be amenable to epistemically robust identification. But we can use the absence of forced recognition to identify an important category of things that we may regard as unreal.

The category we shall identify comprises items which we could coherently consider to be real but can, given our evidence, reasonably consider to be unreal. When we add the principle that good evidence for reality is required in order to recognise anything as real, "can reasonably consider to be unreal" implies "should consider to be unreal". So basing our category on mere permission to consider as unreal does not lead to an improper expansion in the category of the unreal, taking big bites out of the range of scientifically appropriate attributions of reality.

The exclusion of that which could not coherently be considered real keeps our focus on the unreal that might somehow become real, as proposed by the first couplet. We are not concerned with round squares. And the condition based on evidence does mean that we must regard our identification of the unreal as provisional. New evidence might come along. That would however not be the transformation envisaged in the second line of the first couplet.

The identification of this category is not meant as a formal definition. But a formal definition is less needful with the unreal than with the real, as there is no reason to think that the unreal is amenable to epistemically robust identification. And the category picked out has a good prospect of being a reasonably coherent one, not a ragbag of odd examples, because we have a reasonable sense of what it is for something to be a candidate for reality but a failed one. (Our focus on the unreal does not in this respect have an advantage over a focus on the real. Specific categories within the real, such as the physical, are also coherent and are not ragbags of examples.)

4.3 How the real becomes not-real

The real does not become unreal when it happens to suit us. It is a distinctive mark of the real that it does not do so, except by ordinary processes of dissolution over time. And the closing words of the second couplet, "the Real is never unreal", reminds us of this constraint. So to make sense of the first couplet, we must re-interpret the text that is translated as "not-real".

One option would be to say that real things become perceived as unreal. But that would require either the discomfort of knowingly false perception, or a dream-like state that might be what the novelist had in mind but that would place us out of touch with the world to the point where we could not get the kind of result we seek, some reasonably solid status for things that we find are important but for which science finds no place or at best offers no foundation.

Another option, and the one we shall pursue, is to shift from seeing real objects as unreal to seeing as ineffectual the constraints on our thought that the scientific view of the scope and nature of reality imposes. The reality that science offers is to that extent taken to be an ineffectual ghost. And it is the reality itself that is limited in this manner, not just our scientific theories, because those theories tell us about reality and they can only be regarded as losing any of their powers if reality itself is regarded as somehow different. If we did not go that far, we would only manage to stake out territories for non-overlapping magisteria of science and value.

Note that it is reality as a whole that is challenged in this way, rather than particular objects. The scientific view carries the implication that only the physical and what can be built on it can be integrated into reality. (We do here pass over Hempel's dilemma, which points out the difficulty of defining the scope of the physical when the content of science is itself mutable as we advance.) There is a claim of the total closure of the physical, whether in respect of causation or in respect of anything else. That imposes a constraint on what we can see as real. If we overlook the constraint, regarding it as ineffectual, we can find a place for the reality of some things that matter to us, and not merely the convenience of talking in terms that refer to them.

As in section 3.2, this means that we decline to pursue all the implications that it would normally be proper to pursue. If scientific reality is not regarded as imposing certain constraints on our thought, it must be seen as less substantial than it is ordinarily thought to be. And that would be a challenge to what we know about reality. The relevant constraints might be founded on metaphysical principles like the causal closure of the physical or the general closure we have noted, rather than their arising directly out of scientific results, but it would still be a significant step to regard them as ineffectual.

5. Directions of determination

5.1 The real and the unreal

Once we regard constraints as ineffectual, we can see such important things as free will and objective value as real. But when we make this kind of use of the second line of the first couplet, we must not think that it is the unreal's becoming real that makes the real become not-real. Rather, thinking of the real as not-real allows us to think of the unreal as real. Likewise in relation to the first line, truth needs to be regarded as fiction to allow the fiction to be regarded as true. The novelist may have had the opposite direction in mind. Absorption in a fiction can make truth fade to fiction, and encounters with the unreal as real can make the real become not-real. But that is not our direction.

5.2 Reality and truth

In each couplet, the first line concerns truth and fiction while the second line concerns reality and unreality. We are invited to consider the connection between questions of truth and questions of reality.

In the sciences, it is straightforward. The reality was there first, and our thoughts have to tag along or be mistaken. Even anti-realists in the philosophy of science do not maintain that we can make a free choice of theories. To the extent that any discipline allows our ideas of what is true to mould reality to fit, the discipline is unscientific. This does not mean that disciplines which find space for an element of thought-to-world determination are worthless. It is only that they are not science.

It is in the realm of understanding the human condition (as distinct from the scientific understanding of human nature), in art, and in the development of values, that we might expect to find some thought-to-world determination.

What we propose here is however an indirect determination, not a reversal of the direct determination we find in the sciences. Our desire to have certain things true creates pressure for us to see certain features of physical reality as not-real in the sense of being unable effectually to constrain our thoughts, so as to create space for some of the unreal to be real. When we see reality and unreality in that way, it allows us to fulfil our desire that certain claims be seen as true. But perceived reality has to change to allow for these apparent truths, just as in the sciences reality would have to be different for the set of claims that were straightforwardly true to be different. Reality continues to play a crucial active role.

Despite this role for reality, there are two important contrasts with science. First, it is perceived reality, where our perceptions are steered by what matters to us, and not actual reality, that is the proximate determiner of perceived truth. And second, what matters to us plays a role as a distal determiner of perceived truth which it does not have in science. This role is to prompt us to take a certain view of reality.

6. Conclusion

6.1 The frame

We have used the first couplet to open up a space to think about ourselves in a satisfactory manner, with both a strong form of free will and objective values. In the novel it and the second couplet are instead used to frame a story.

 This difference is not only a matter of content. There is also what at first glance appears to be a structural inversion. In the novel, the couplets provide a frame within which mundane and therefore plausibly true action takes place, with the supernatural action outside the frame (although in accord with the mystery of the work the frame is permeable, with some of the mundane outside the couplets and some of the supernatural between them). This location of mundane and comprehensible reality within a frame and the mysterious supernatural story outside it is quite the opposite of what one finds in an art museum, where the free adventure of imagination is within the frame and mundane reality is outside it. We have followed the art museum in that we have used the couplets to create a space within the frame for that which could be argued not to be real because it is not yet indisputably integrated with reality as viewed by the natural sciences. The troublesome parts of physics, which we must take as accurately describing reality, are parked outside the frame. So our structure is the same way round as is found in an art museum.

At second glance, however, this is not an inversion at all. The mundane world within the frame in the novel is the world of life and love, desires, fortune and misfortune. We take all of these to be real and important, yet there is a message from outside the frame that this is an unenlightened path and that we should step above such things (see Levy, Ideal and Actual in the Story of the Stone, chapter 1). To be absorbed in life as we normally think of it, characters in the novel must ignore the message from outside the frame. Similarly, within our frame we find freedom and value, while from outside the frame physics cries that this is all illusion. To honour and be guided by vital elements of our humanity, we must overlook some metaphysical implications of scientific information.

6.2 Our options

There is a way to cope with the inevitable intellectual discomfort. This is to argue that even if we took there to be a frame with an inside and an outside, we should not think that reality was stably on one side and illusion stably on the other. There might in fact be no stable priority of one side over the other. Sometimes the inside would be reality relative to which the outside was illusion, and sometimes it would be the other way round.

One could choose to take either perspective, and give intellectual respectability to the right to choose by borrowing loosely from perspectivism in the philosophy of science. We could add that even if one side was truly superior to the other, both that fact in general and knowledge of which side it was could not be deduced by us. The argument would be that we could only deduce which was reality and which was illusion from some Archimedean point outside both, and that we have no such point. (Nor can we have recourse to Descartes' ever-helpful God, once theism falls by the wayside.) We can only grow into recognising which is the real world, rather than deduce which one it is.

With the options presented in the novel, the world of human passions and the world in which those passions are regarded as foolish errors, a person's growth into recognition of which world is real is intimately bound up with how he or she lives. Someone can grow into either the life of passion or the life of detachment. Indeed at the end of the novel the central character, Jia Baoyu, having grown into the life of passion and desire, makes a different choice and grows into detachment.

With the options we have considered, our choice is not so free. There are people who explicitly or implicitly deny physics in order to accommodate belief in a spirit realm or something of the same ilk, but that cannot be accepted. The denials they require are too close in kind to the affirmations they make, as when they posit physics-like forces with effects on the body without any evidence for those forces or way to make them cohere with physics generally. More broadly, to grow into regarding the world as presented by science as unreal would be to choose a manifestly mistaken path. What we can do is say that we will overlook the more distal implications of physics, sometimes transmitted in the form of metaphysical principles, in order to take the life of passion to be real. And while we do not in fact grow into that approach from a starting point of contemplating the implications of physics, we may grow into taking the life of passion to be real and then notice that we have all our lives been overlooking the more distal implications of physics.

We may however hope that the intellectual discomfort we have identified is only temporary. One day we may be able fully to integrate the scientific view with our understanding of human life from the inside, so that we no longer need to regard any truths implied by the natural sciences as fiction in order to take what currently looks like essential fiction to be true.

References

Baron, Richard. Deliberation and Reason. Leicester, Matador, 2010. https://rbphilo.com/deliberation.html

Cao Xueqin. The Story of the Stone, translated by David Hawkes and John Minford. London, Penguin, five volumes, 1973-1986.

Fischer, John Martin. "Compatibilism". Chapter 2 of John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom and Manuel Vargas, Four Views on Free Will. Oxford, Blackwell, 2007.

Levy, Dore J. Ideal and Actual in the Story of the Stone. New York, NY, Columbia University Press, 1999.

Preferences and research

1. Introduction

It is bad practice to adopt beliefs on the ground that they make us feel comfortable. We should try to find out how things are, even if they are not as we would like them to be. We should try to fit the contents of our minds to the state of the world - the mind-to-world direction of fit. It is otherwise with our desires. If the world is not as we would like, we should try to change the world to match the demands of our minds - the world-to-mind direction of fit.

We shall consider whether there is scope for something in between. We seek beliefs, in the formation of which preferences as to how the world should be may have a legitimate role to play. (It seems plain that the other things in between, desires in the adoption of which beliefs may have a legitimate role to play, are widespread. It is a good idea to be well informed about the likely consequences either of having or of fulfilling various desires.)

When we speak of preferences, we shall mean views that are not themselves conclusions reached legitimately in the course of study of the world. Existing theories about the world may guide current study, and such guidance is likely to be entirely legitimate so long as there is no dogmatic view that the existing theories must never be abandoned. We are instead concerned with preferences for how the world should be that are not themselves grounded in research. For example, a physicist might want the world to conform to particularly simple equations, or a historian might want his or her country to look glorious, or alternatively to blame it for past evils. The physicist, or the historian, might then collect evidence and draw conclusions accordingly. That would be a very dubious way to work.

2. Mathematics and the natural sciences

In mathematics and the natural sciences, there is assuredly no place in the formation of beliefs for preferences that are specific to the current research project. Preferences may lead us to choose areas of work, but once we set to work we must put up with whatever conclusions deduction and experiment force upon us. We may indeed take it as a mark of scientific respectability that preferences that are specific to current research projects have no role in the formation of beliefs.

Having said that, not all preferences are inappropriate. There may be a preference to work in ways that are regarded as respectable. Such ways might range from the most general, such as always testing a hypothesis on data other than those which suggested it, to ways specific to particular disciplines, such as checking the purity of any supplies of chemicals before using them. A preference to use ways of working that were regarded as respectable might adversely affect research if the ways were not really the best ones, but on the whole the preference would be a worthy one. There would also be some protection derived from the fact that general ways of working are very widely used, so if they were inappropriate on any more than a trivial proportion of occasions there would be a good chance that someone would have noticed and would have reported the problem. This would however not cover the risk that ways of working, while good in general, were for some reason not well suited to a particular research project.

3. The social sciences

It would seem that the same exclusion of preferences from belief formation should apply to the social sciences, disciplines that aim to understand the ways in which human beings behave. It may however be harder to keep preferences at bay. Few of us would like to see molecules behave in a particular way. Far more of us would like to see people behave in a particular way.

3.1 Hoping for certain results

We might be concerned that preferences would have a direct influence, with conclusions as to how people in a given society currently behaved being skewed simply in order to end up with a satisfying picture.

That would however be so plainly unjustified that it should be ruled out from the start by any honest researcher. And if it happened unconsciously, one would hope to hear harsh criticism from others who commented on the work.

This is not to say that such skewing would never happen. Our claim here is only that the mere desire for comforting conclusions would be seen not to suffice to outweigh the arguments against its having any influence. But another motive, to put results to practical use, might appear to justify a role for preferences even if it did not really do so. And in any case, a role for preferences might be found to be inevitable.

3.2 Using results

3.2.1 Desired changes to societies

A difference between the natural sciences and at least some of the social sciences emerges when we consider the use of results.

In the natural sciences, it is reasonably easy to maintain a clear boundary between getting results and using them. We find out how atoms or molecules or medications or large pieces of steel behave under certain conditions, then we decide what we want to do. In choosing what to do and then doing it, we use the knowledge obtained.

In the social sciences, it is harder to maintain a clear boundary. To say that a given society functions in a certain way under current conditions can easily be to make a moral comment on whether it functions as it should. That can in turn create pressure to act so as to change the society.

It is not necessary that such a train of thought should be followed. If one studies societies in general, or a large class of societies that happens to include one's own, one may easily remain detached from practical commitment. But if one concentrates on a society within which one has the capacity to act, practical commitment becomes more likely.

When certain conclusions would lead on to such commitments, preferences may come to influence the conclusions reached. One may have existing views on how society should be, and then work in ways which would make it more likely that one would reach conclusions that would encourage people to move society in that direction. If for example one had an existing view that significant economic inequality was deplorable, one might study its effects in ways that highlighted its adverse consequences.

The mechanism would not be to set a course directly to the desired conclusions. Instead it would be to choose approaches and concepts to use. Some approaches and concepts would be ruled out by their tendency to yield unsatisfactory results. But options would still remain. And the choice might well be influenced by one's preference to work in ways that would lead to certain types of conclusion. One could re-do the work using other approaches and concepts and compare the results, but it is unlikely that one would have the time to do so, particularly when different data would need to be collected under different approaches. Even if one did so, there would still be scope to regard results obtained using one's favoured approach and concepts as intellectually more respectable than results obtained in other ways. The social sciences do not tend to produce results that can be subjected to decisive experiment, so there would be scope to use judgement as to which were the better results.

One could still say that this should not be so, and that the correct method would be first to reach conclusions without any influence from preferences and then to choose any actions to take, based on a combination of those conclusions and one's preferences. In that way, preferences could be respected without their interfering with the study of a society. But there is a clear risk that such a noble course would not be followed.

3.2.2 The general practical emphasis

Not only preferences for particular changes, but also a general emphasis on the practical use of research, may open the door for preferences to influence the approaches and concepts used, and hence the conclusions reached.

Particular pieces of research in the natural sciences may be started for practical reasons, for example to discover how to build better aircraft or how to cure certain diseases. But there is still a sense of seeking some pure truth that would be worth pursuing for its own sake. In the social sciences, the primary motive will often be to solve some practical problem, and it is less obvious that there is an ideal of pure truth to inspire work. We might well work in the natural sciences without any practical goal in view. It is much less clear that we would bother with the social sciences if there were no social concerns to address. We might for example decide not to bother because there would be little prospect of reaching results that approached the robustness even of results in the biological sciences. That lack of robustness would put in question the very concept of a pure truth to which one might aspire.

Now suppose that work is indeed motivated by a desire to solve practical problems. Then conclusions will only be of much interest if there is a good prospect that they will help to solve those problems. Here we come up against the fact that researchers and the objects of study are all human beings, with priorities, values and attitudes. The priorities, values and attitudes of the objects of study must be respected in the formulation and implementation of any solution if it is to succeed. The easiest way to ensure such respect is for researchers to internalise those priorities, values and attitudes, so that conclusions reached are more likely to be usable in devising solutions that will work. Full internalisation might be out of reach, but at least a degree of empathy with the objects of study would be very helpful. And that would in turn be likely to sway the selection of approaches and concepts.

There would be another way to look at this, which might eliminate the need for empathy. It would be to say that researchers should remain detached, but that they should take the priorities, values and attitudes of objects of study to be features of them which entered into the definition of the problems to be solved. There would then be scope to reach conclusions like "For a society of people with such-and-such priorities, values and attitudes, such-and-such policies would be likely to produce such-and-such results". There would however be no guarantee that this alternative way would be chosen by researchers. And it might not be feasible to define the priorities, values and attitudes in a detached way, without having one's thoughts guided by the concepts that were used by the objects of study.

3.3 Might a role for preferences be inevitable?

Establishing that preferences that were specific to current research projects sometimes played a role in the formation of beliefs would not show that it was legitimate for them to play such a role. And it would be hard to argue that it was legitimate.

Having said that, preferences might have to play a role. Then we might still think the role illegitimate but would have to put up with it.

A role for preferences would be inevitable if that was the only way to choose between the approaches and concepts that remained available once the approaches and concepts that were known to yield poor results had been excluded.

It might be the only way because alternative approaches and concepts could not be ranked entirely in a detached scientific way. Rather, they would be ranked at least partly by reference to whether they seemed to focus on the factors that researchers considered important. The selection of such factors could easily vary with, for example, the political preferences of researchers.

It might also be that a given choice of approach and concepts could not be judged conclusively after the event, even if results obtained using other approaches and concepts were available for comparison. Such an inability to judge conclusively would follow from a lack of decisive tests of the quality of results that were independent of the approaches and concepts used in reaching those results.

If a role for preferences were inevitable and the results of choices made under their influence were not open to conclusive judgement, we would be faced with an influence of preferences that might in general be thought deplorable, but that could not be eliminated in particular cases. This would seem to degrade the relevant discipline as a whole, but without giving any practical recommendation for its improvement. We would then see a contrast with the natural sciences, in which it is a mark of good work that preferences which are specific to current research projects play no such role.

4. Politics

Someone in a position to influence government policy, whether as a member of the executive, of the legislature, of the media or even of the voting public, should perhaps work out the best thing to do in a dispassionate way, without giving priority to their own preferences. (Compare John Stuart Mill's view, in Considerations on Representative Government, chapter 10, section 1, that a citizen's vote "is strictly a matter of duty; he is bound to give it according to his best and most conscientious opinion of the public good".)

It is however very likely that when someone works out what he or she honestly believes to be the best choice for his or her country or municipality, he or she will in fact be influenced by his or her preferences more than by the preferences of other individuals or modest groups of individuals, and perhaps more than by any identifiable preference of the majority of the relevant population. And if he or she considers his or her own preferences to arise not out of considerations of personal benefit but out of a proper understanding of the public good, this is even more likely to be so because it will seem that the competing preferences of others are based on factual mistakes.

Would this be an example of a research project, the project of working out what to do, in which the answers obtained were influenced by preferences? And if so, would the influence be legitimate?

Our first question is, would there be any research project here? It would seem that there would be. There might not be a single correct answer as to which policy to adopt, but there would be some options that were plausible under most value systems, some that were only plausible under a fairly restricted range of value systems, and some that were implausible under nearly all value systems. So there would at least be the project of identifying relevant value systems and testing the plausibility of options.

Here, preferences could exert an influence. They would not lead directly to the identification of the better policies. Instead they would lead to the identification of value systems worth considering, or of value systems under which any policy would have to be plausible in order to be acceptable. Then policies could be measured up against appropriate value systems.

However, once people got past the stage of sorting policy options into those which were and those which were not acceptable by reference to appropriate value systems, and had to select specific policies, the process could no longer sensibly be called a research project. It would lack independent ways to judge whether choices were correct. Then it would be time to stop worrying about the roles of preferences in the way that we have been worrying, although we might have other worries about their roles.

The involvement of preferences in identifying value systems to use when sorting policy options into those to consider and those to exclude would appear to be intellectually respectable. But there would be an important constraint. Respectability would only be maintained if the value systems which were used to sort options had not been preferred so as to ensure that certain policy options remained in play while others were excluded. They should be value systems that would be preferred independently of the immediate policy question.

Respecting this constraint might not be easy. We tend to judge value systems partly by how they would apply in specific situations. And it would be possible for a value system that had hitherto led to perfectly acceptable conclusions as to what to do in specific situations suddenly to appear unacceptable, either because it would endorse what was intuitively an unacceptable option in the current situation or because it would lead to the rejection of what was intuitively a very appealing option.

Should we really exclude current situations from the resources we have for deciding between value systems, even when the message from a current situation about the merits of a value system is a very strong one? Or should we be tempted by the view set out by Robert Nozick (Philosophical Explanations, chapter 4, section 1, subheading Nonrandom Weighting)? He sets out how we assign weights to the various considerations that might bear on a decision. The assignment of weights on one occasion will influence assignments on future occasions by setting a precedent, but not an inviolable one. He also argues that the assignment of weights on a given occasion can set a precedent under which that assignment is itself subsumed. The relevance of this approach to our discussion is that it offers a way in which consideration of a current situation could legitimately influence a choice of values under which that case would be judged. We here leave open the question of whether it would be wise for us to make use of Nozick's proposal.

5. Legal judgements

5.1 The lack of certainty

There are legal cases in which, even when all the facts are known and agreed, it is unclear what the outcome of litigation will be. We can see this as cases progress up through hierarchies of courts, and higher courts sometimes reverse the decisions of lower courts on points of law without any new findings of fact.

The most general characterisation of what is involved here would be that the outcome of applying the law to the facts was not obvious. We might see a research project of finding out how the law should apply to the facts, and then ask whether preferences had any legitimate role to play in that research. We might rule out in advance preferences as to the outcome of the instant case, but still find a legitimate role for preferences as to how to apply the law so as to produce intuitively satisfactory outcomes more generally.

We should not however stop there. It is worth thinking about how we might conceptualise the uncertainty of outcome.

5.2 Conceptualisations

5.2.1 The law as an incomplete algorithm

One conceptualisation would be that the law was an incomplete algorithm for computing decisions from sets of facts. It would be impossible for legislators to think of all possible sets of facts in advance. And the use of natural languages to write both laws and accounts of facts would make it hard even to define boundaries with sufficient precision to ensure that every case would be covered, for example by defining cases to which one rule applied and then saying that some other rule applied to all other cases.

Under this conceptualisation, courts would be seen as filling in the gaps. They would create law for instant cases and, if there were a system of binding precedent, for future cases. Then one could see a legitimate role for preferences at the level of deciding instant cases, but on the other hand doing so would hardly count as a research project. One could however identify a research project of working out the range of ways in which the law could legitimately be developed. And at that level there might be a role for preferences as to the standards of legitimacy to impose, comparable to the role for preferences in identifying relevant value systems that we mentioned in connection with politics in section 4.

5.2.2 Correct answers waiting to be found

A second conceptualisation would be that the correct answer on the basis of the instant facts was already given by the law, but judges sometimes could not see it. It would be implausible to think that the law already held answers written in invisible ink. But it would be perfectly plausible to think that what appeared to be courts creating the law by filling in gaps was in fact their attempt, sometimes successful and sometimes not, to discover the correct way to fill in the gaps, where there was in fact a single correct way.

(We might draw an analogy with advances in mathematics, where the correct new results are implied by the existing body of mathematics but one has to work hard to tease out the implications of that body. The analogy would however suffer from the defects that we cannot expect rigorous proof in questions of law, and that we should not take it for granted that there are single correct ways forward, as we usually although not always can take it for granted in mathematics.)

An obvious point of reference is Judge Hercules, whom Ronald Dworkin invented in chapter 7 of Law's Empire. Hercules studies the law to date, including all the previous decided cases, and works out how to decide a new case in a way that is consistent with all of the law to date. He has superhuman powers of reasoning to take him to the right answer. He works like a novelist who is writing and publishing a work chapter by chapter, and who must make each new chapter, each new development of a character, and so on, consistent with what has already been published.

This point of reference indicates, but does not quite capture, what we have in mind as our second conceptualisation. Dworkin fills in a specific constraint on Hercules' thought, the need for consistency with the existing legal tradition. This is right in order to take Dworkin's programme forward, but we would like to keep things more open and simply consider whether it might be possible to work out a single correct way to fill in what appeared to be a gap in the law, whether by seeking consistency with the tradition or in some other way (although consistency or a good justification for inconsistency would be expected anyway).

Now suppose that this second conceptualisation were used. Identification of how to fill in a gap in the law would then look like a research project. What legitimate role might there be for preferences?

One possibility would be a preference for working in a sensible way to establish how a gap should be filled in. This would be analogous to a harmless preference for sound scientific methods.

In principle, there should not be other legitimate roles for preferences. The premise of the conceptualisation is that there is a correct answer to be found. This makes it analogous to a scientific enterprise. The same consideration would rule out the idea that there might be scope to work in different ways that might lead to conflicting answers.

Having said that, there would be the difficulty that since human judges are not as capable as Hercules, even judges working in the same way might reach different conclusions. And even if they all agreed, it would not be possible to be sure that the correct answer had been found.

5.2.3 Answers automatically becoming correct

One might say that an answer automatically became the correct answer by virtue of its having been chosen by a suitably elevated court, at least in a legal system in which decisions set precedents. (There would be an imprecise echo of Robert Nozick's idea of setting a precedent under which the decision was itself subsumed.)

If one did say that, would there still be a research project? There would be, in the sense that the court would have to work out the options for filling in the gap in the law. Here one could see an application of the view that Dworkin took. Some options would be available because they would represent coherent developments of the law, while others would be ruled out because they would not fit with the existing legal tradition. And there would be a role for a general preference to do this job well by applying general standards of coherence that would apply in non-legal matters too. (That is, the law would not have its own special standard of coherence, although it would have ways in which incoherence could arise that were specific to legal matters.) But there would not seem to be a legitimate role for other preferences that had their standing independently of the relevant legal tradition, such as ethical preferences. What passed the test of coherence would be determined by standards which were independent of any such preferences.

After the options had been listed, one of them would have to be chosen. Then there might well be a role for ethical preferences, either in relation to the instant case or in relation to the foreseen consequences of setting one precedent rather than another. But at that stage there would no longer be a research project. We take it to be essential to a research project that conclusions should be constrained by considerations outside the researcher's psyche. We are exploring ways in which we might move a little way away from being entirely constrained by the world, so as to find some role for preferences. But in a research project, preferences need to play at most only a modest role. If there is scope for them to dominate, the work is no longer a research project.

6. Analytic philosophy

Analytic philosophy is a curious discipline. Questions are posed and correct answers to them are sought. But disagreement is widespread, and there is nothing analogous to decisive scientific experiments that could be used to rule out enough of the proposed answers to bring philosophers close to resolving disputes. (There is experimental philosophy, but it is primarily concerned with elucidating the views of a wider range of people than philosophy professors so as to draw conclusions about what is or is not intuitively clear.)

So does analytic work on a philosophical question constitute a research project? It would seem that it does. There is certainly a sense that there should be an answer out there in the world, to be discovered and then defended against objections, rather than a sense that one is only formulating views that one is inclined to express. And some possible answers do get ruled out by some philosophers, although some of those excluded answers may still be supported by other philosophers.

We should also consider questions where the conflict is not so direct. Rather than some philosophers believing that an answer is correct and others believing that it is mistaken, we may find some believing that it is adequate, or that the approach is appropriate, while others believe that the answer is inadequate, or that the approach is inappropriate.

The analysis of knowledge is a good example. The traditional analysis as justified true belief is now generally regarded as inadequate. But some epistemologists seek to modify it, adding additional conditions to rescue it from Gettier-like objections, while others say this is not the right way to study knowledge. They may want to take epistemology in a new direction such as virtue epistemology, or they may want to call a halt to the programme of analysis by taking knowledge as fundamental, as in Timothy Williamson's knowledge first approach.

Claims that some existing answer within a given approach is inadequate and needs to be supplemented present no challenge to the idea that a research project is being pursued. Here there would not appear to be a legitimate role for preferences as to what the answer should be. The only legitimate preferences would be for clear thought, the careful consideration of objections, and so on.

A choice between approaches might be a research project, but only after the approaches had been tried by oneself or by others. Approaches would be used in what would be research projects in their own right. Then the project of selecting a favoured approach would be taken forward by considering which approach had shown itself to be the most satisfactory.

In such a project of choosing between approaches, preferences might have a role. Approaches might be more or less satisfactory in several ways, for example the range of the issues they covered, the smallness of the range of areas of difficulty, the degree to which the conclusions to which they led appeared to be robust in the face of objections, and their goodness of fit with approaches favoured in other areas of philosophy. It would be perfectly possible for one approach to do particularly well in some such ways while another did particularly well in other such ways. Then the selection of an approach would require a sense of the relative importance of the different ways in which some approaches might be better or worse than others, and assignments of relative importance could reflect preferences.

We seem to have here a reprise of the position one may find in the social sciences when preferences may be necessary in order to complete a project of identifying the best approach, but the influence of preferences may still be deplored.

One might prefer to abandon the project of choosing an approach and instead keep all approaches in play, providing a toolbox from which one could take first one approach, then another. And given that the task of data collection is much less onerous in philosophy than in the social sciences, one could easily use several different approaches in parallel.

If one did use several approaches in parallel, one might be faced with contradictory answers to the same philosophical question. One might for example find that under one approach a subject in a given situation would be credited with knowledge, while under another approach he or she would not be credited with knowledge.

A possible response would be to fragment some relevant concept, such as the concept of knowledge. A subject might be said to have knowledge-under-justified-true-belief-like-approaches but not to have knowledge-under-virtue-epistemology.

That would however damage the coherence of an area of study. It is the idea of a single conception of knowledge that gives epistemology its shape and character, and similarly for other areas of philosophy. The dissolution of a problem is not always the ideal solution.

Writing and permanence

1. The flesh was made word

In Karen Blixen's book Out of Africa she tells of an occasion when a local man, Jogona Kanyagga, needed a written account of some events in his life for a legal case. She says that she wrote down what he wanted and read it back to him. She then explains how he saw the status of the document at the point where she got to his name:

"I had created him and shown him himself: Jogona Kanyagga of life everlasting. ... Here was something which Jogona Kanyagga had performed, and which would preserve his name for ever: the flesh was made word and dwelt among us full of grace and truth."

Blixen goes on to say that this is what happened with the gradual introduction of writing as a routine act performed by people generally, and not just by professional letter writers. She adds that it appeared to have been much the same when writing spread in Denmark a century earlier. She identifies a phenomenon shared across humanity, not one specific to Africa or to colonies.

2. How is permanence possible?

The occurrence of natural events, the existence of people, and the performance of deliberate actions, will leave traces. By "traces" we shall mean not merely consequences, but consequences from which facts about the past might be discerned.

These traces will decay in time, lapsing into mere consequences from which facts about the past can no longer be discerned. Detail is lost, connections with other traces that provided important context are broken, and so on. Sometimes the time is very long. Witness how far back geologists and palaeontologists can go. But their accounts of the distant past are sketchy. They cover some major events, which is not surprising because such events are more likely to leave substantial traces. (This is however not to equate being major with leaving substantial traces long after the event.) But most minor events, and some major ones, will be omitted from accounts written now. And any given trace is bound to decay eventually.

Writing, on the other hand, can preserve traces for as long as there are intelligent beings. The materials used will decay, like everything else physical, but recopying is in principle always an option. The option may not be exercised. Plenty that has been written down has been lost for ever. But the option is there.

Writing is special in this respect because the significance of marks on a medium is given by rules of syntax and semantics that are abstract, that latch on to a limited range of features of marks on media, and that are separate from the documents that rely on them. Moreover, while the rules are written down in various places, their content is not only in practice accessible independently of any particular instantiation but logically independent of all extant instantiations.

It is a tricky question whether the rules would be accessible in practice without any instantiations. It has been possible to recover at least some of the rules for writing in lost languages, but there is likely to be some connection with preserved languages, as when Linear B was decoded on the basis that it was a form of Greek. And what is recovered is unlikely to be a comprehensive set of rules.

We do not claim that even a comprehensive set of rules would suffice to pin down the precise meaning of every text. (Pinning down might for example be defined operationally by an ability to translate faultlessly from one language to another, or at least faultlessly to the extent not prevented by a lack of perfect synonymy between expressions in the two languages.) But that is not what matters for the purpose of the mere endurance of texts. What matters is that the rules are applied to a limited range of features of texts, and other features would not need to be copied. A copy will be an exact copy, so far as the meaningful content goes, because the features that need to be the same in order for a copy to be exact are for a given language limited in advance by a finite upper bound on their number. (One would not need to establish a least upper bound for this to hold, although one might happen to do so.) Typically what matters is the selection made of letters drawn from a finite alphabet. The font and the spacing may change when copies are made, but such changes are in many languages irrelevant to the meaning. And in languages where they do matter, one can define the artistic features that matter and take care not to change them, while being free to change other artistic features.

What about visual art, such as paintings? It would certainly be possible to make copies indistinguishable to the human eye. But there might be changes indistinguishable from one copy to the next in a chain which led to an example late in the chain being easily distinguishable from one early in the chain.

Writing also differs from visual art in the clarity and the stability of conventions of interpretation. Syntax and semantics are much better defined, and much more stable, than the conventions by which messages may be conveyed by works of art. So even exact copies of works of art could come to convey different messages over time much more easily than would be the norm for writing.

As we have just noted, even a comprehensive set of rules might not suffice to pin down the precise meaning of every text. Conventions of interpretation of writing are not guaranteed to be perfectly stable. Even if the rules of syntax and semantics are recorded in exactly the same form over time, the interpretation of those very rules could change. If the interpretation of the rules never changed, nor would interpretation of records of the rules because it would be under those very rules. But such a self-supporting circle would be no guarantee that there would never be change.

Moreover, sometimes one would make mistakes by interpreting a single sentence in isolation. Knowledge of context, including the rest of a relevant piece of writing, a wider corpus of writing, and the nature and history of the relevant society, may be required in order to get the semantics right. Hermeneutics is not an easy task.

Having said that, one may have a degree of confidence in permanence of meaning alongside permanence of the catalogue of features that matter to the preservation of meaning, typically the sequence of letters but not the font or the spacing. Straightforward descriptions of a person's ancestry, place of upbringing, and everyday actions would only change their meaning if syntax and semantics changed fairly radically, something that would not be likely to happen over the kinds of period of endurance from event to reading of the document about which human beings would care in any more than an academic sense of caring. And the period of endurance would often also suffice for the academic purposes of reading unvarnished reports of actions and events which did not engage in significant interpretation.

Would such limited permanence of meaning, without any guarantee of immortality, be enough to sustain the magic of writing that Karen Blixen describes? It could be. After all, while the duration would be limited, it would still be likely to be a good deal longer than that of interesting and complex natural phenomena (the phenomena themselves rather than traces of them) such as people, because of the difficulty of sustaining any complex entity in the face of entropy. So Jogona Kanyagga could be confident that he had achieved the permanence he required for practical purposes, including any practical purposes of the next couple of generations of his descendants.

3. Truth and permanence

There is a tendency to believe that which is written, unless there is reason to suspect deceit. After all, would someone have committed to a permanent statement on some perhaps uncertain or contentious matter without having full confidence in what he or she wrote? Writing is a more solemn and serious act than speaking, so one might expect people to be more careful about it.

Belief of even a single written source may carry a low risk of error when text concerns scientific matters, the author is an expert, and the specific area of the relevant science is free of scope for reasonable contention (for example nearly all of those parts of physics and chemistry that are far from the cutting edge of research and most of those parts of biology that are likewise distant from the cutting edge, but rather less of environmental sciences or psychology). Economic and political matters are however different. And while it may be safe to believe historical accounts that stick to chronicling events, texts that interpret are a different matter, especially when the history of the relevant time and place remains a matter of political controversy. Texts that merely chronicled events in an individual's life, such as the document that Karen Blixen wrote for Jogona Kanyagga, might likewise be reasonably safe. But when reading texts commissioned by individuals that are about themselves, one would have to be wary of the risk of deception to suit the purposes of the individual concerned.

None of this is to say that texts should be disbelieved by default. But belief without at least a little prior thought would also be unwise. Maybe the written word is on the whole more reliable than the spoken word. But that would not be enough to justify automatic belief.

This is not a serious issue for sensible people. It is easy to avoid being gullible in relation to individual texts. But there is another danger. Suppose that one has an inclination to believe unless stopped by something that comes up in the course of prior thought. And suppose that this prior thought leads one not to disbelieve a statement made in a particular text, but only to hesitate. Then some closely related statement which could give support to and receive support from the first statement comes up in a second text. Again one stops and thinks, but only hesitates. More related statements are found in a few more texts. An easy conclusion would be that while one or two of the different texts might mislead, it is unlikely that they all would, so the gist of the collection of statements as a whole should be believed. The fact that the statements were in writing would facilitate reaching such a conclusion for two reasons. The first would be a general belief that people think carefully before they write. The second would be that one could go back and forth over the statements, in a way that would not be possible with spoken statements, and notice the relations of mutual support.

The easy conclusion that the collective gist should be believed might however be unwise. Especially in political and economic matters, people tend to gather together in echo chambers. Then the different statements would not be independent. Their mutual support might well derive not from the authors having studied the world independently and in slightly different ways, but from a disposition of the authors to consult one another's work.

4. The benefits of permanence

Once thoughts are in an enduring form, some obvious benefits follow. The thoughts are available as starting points for the thoughts of other people, so intellectual progress can be cumulative. The comparison of thoughts is easier if they are recorded in permanent form. This facilitates the formation and application of general concepts. And commerce is greatly facilitated once orders for goods can be sent over long distances and accounts can be kept. Without writing, civilization would not have advanced anywhere near as far as it has.

There is another benefit in relation to records of human actions and their consequences. A written record that has been copied widely is hard to expunge, making it difficult to amend records of the past for political purposes in the way that is portrayed in George Orwell's novel 1984. This benefit is lost when records exist only in a centralised electronic database. But the existence of copies of files in many places, or of archives that record the original versions of pages which might get edited or deleted on the servers that first held them, may give some protection.

5. Plato and the disadvantages of permanence

The benefits of the permanence of writing far outweigh the disadvantages. But there are some disadvantages. Plato identifies two of them in the Phaedrus (274c-277a). He first uses a tale of Egyptian gods to argue that writing undermines memory. Then he contrasts the silent written word, which will not respond to questions, with the living word of speech which can adapt itself to the listener and enter into dialogue.

We may disregard concern over the weakening of memory. It is not that memory has ceased to matter in a world of libraries and web servers. We still need to hold in our heads enough to know where to look for information, and the more we hold in our heads, the more creatively we are likely to think. Rather, the wide availability of a huge range of information stored in books and online means that it is easy to build up the contents of our minds in whatever ways we please, filling in gaps as we notice them. This will in turn assist memory. When we have more information in our heads, we have more ways to connect new information to what we already know. That will aid retention. The written word has turned from being a threat to memory to being an improver of it.

The point about the living word is more serious. There would be a serious loss to humanity if all communications were both in writing and one-way (rather than a dialogue by instant messenger service), so that ideas did not evolve rapidly through interaction and those who sought merely to learn could not quickly clear up their points of doubt or confusion.

6. The moving finger writes

Among the best-known words in the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám are these:

The Moving Finger writes, and, having writ,  
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit                                                 
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,                                                
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

(Quatrain 51, the Edward FitzGerald translation)

The topic is not the permanence of writing but the immutability of the past. And a piece of writing can be washed out, so long as one can track down and destroy all of the copies.

Writing that survives is however always traceable. Documents may be mislaid in archives, but it would be possible to search archives thoroughly so as to find them. The content of a document is preserved on a specific sheet of paper or in a specific computer file, and it is all there unless it has been edited. The physical past, by contrast, cannot cease to exist but may still disappear from view irrevocably. It cannot be changed, and it will have effects that will endure, but it may become impossible to reconstruct past events from their long-term effects or attribute any specific effects to any particular past events.

So the past endures longer than pieces of writing are guaranteed to do. But the past may fade from view in a way that a piece of writing will not, save when all copies are destroyed or the writing becomes unintelligible because the relevant language is lost. What lies behind this contrast?

The endurance of the past, in the sense of its immutability, is given by nature. The progressive inaccessibility of the past is given by a combination of nature as it works between the past and the present, and the powers of discernment we have (another aspect of nature, although this includes nature as it determines the capacities of our scientific instruments). The continued accessibility of that which is written is given by human conventions. And it is very much in our interests to keep those conventions stable, so that information can be kept accessible.

And yet, there is a cost. Data last longer than the timespan over which they should dictate value judgements. We have seen in recent times how people can be attacked, be denied new employment, and even lose their current jobs, for things they wrote years earlier. The mob may attack even if what was written was entirely unobjectionable at time of writing. It is the modern equivalent of a charge of heresy, with punishments that are lighter than in the past but are still severe.

The solution to this problem is for people not to take other people to task for views they expressed in the past. One might take people to task for their past actions. And sometimes expressions of views may count as acts of aggression against specific people, for which it may be reasonable to take people to task. But apart from such cases, a simple renunciation of views should suffice to put a stop to attacks on those who have expressed them, even if there is no tearful apology. And if the views are not renounced, one should stop to ask whether there may actually be something in the views.

If such a solution is adopted, there should be no difficulty in honouring the permanence of writing by acknowledging that the views in question were once expressed, perhaps without that giving rise to any difficulty at the time, and no need to distort our appreciation of intellectual history by seeing aspects of the past through the lens of current objections.

Nor should there by any urge to distort current debate on the relevant issues by identifying views, past or current, which are to be denied dissemination by refusal to publish them or by making them hard to find in online fora. Such denials of dissemination attack the integrity of the corpus of written words, and thereby strike at one of the sources of writing's magical power. Its power rests not just in the permanence of individual pieces of writing, but in the permanence of the corpus. This permanence will never be perfect because there will be continual losses of individual pieces, but it is nonetheless important. One piece of writing can lead the reader on to other pieces, greatly enhancing the benefit of access to the first piece. And when the function of writing is to preserve and pass on knowledge, a stable corpus is clearly vital. One academic paper will mean little in isolation, but the value of a corpus can be immense.