Academic philosophy and life philosophy

 1. The two approaches

We start by distinguishing two approaches to philosophy. At this point we take it that there is a single discipline of philosophy that can be conducted in different ways. We shall say more about this assumption in section 2.

1.1 The academic approach

A prospective university student who, at an admission interview, says that he or she wants to study philosophy in order to find out how to live, will get an unenthusiastic response. That is not the sort of thing that academic philosophy within the analytic tradition does. (In this essay, "academic philosophy" will be restricted to philosophy within that tradition. A rather different essay would be written if we tried to encompass Chinese, Indian, or other philosophical traditions, or even what has from the analytic perspective been labelled as continental European philosophy).

Conclusions reached within academic philosophy do sometimes have relevance to the conduct of life, but the relevance is often indirect. For example, conclusions about the nature of ethical claims do not tell us what to do, although they may help us when we think about practical ethical questions. And conclusions about the nature of causation, or of knowledge, are likewise only likely to play indirect roles in our thought about actual events or actual results of research.

Sometimes conclusions in academic philosophy can be of direct relevance, as when arguments in medical ethics support specific views on what is or is not acceptable, or arguments in epistemology about the nature and value of justification help us to sift through claims to decide which claims to believe, or arguments in political philosophy show us what trade-offs between different political values are unavoidable. But even when there is direct relevance, the philosophical conclusions only support us in reaching goals that have, at least in outline, already been determined - to do the right thing, or to discover the truth, or to shape an acceptable constitution. The goals may be refined in detail by reflection on philosophical conclusions, but they are unlikely to be changed substantially. The philosophical conclusions do not steer our lives at the highest level, let alone tell us what life's meaning might be.

Matters are not always so clear cut. It is possible for both indirectly and directly relevant conclusions of academic philosophy to affect the selection of the most general goals. For example, a conclusion that ethics was a matter of subjective preference might lead one to forswear the attempt to lead an ethically good life. Or a conclusion that certainty was unattainable might lead one to a pragmatism of seeking beliefs that worked rather than beliefs that were definitely true.

But even allowing for that, helping people to work out their basic values and the broad direction of their lives would still not be the main goal of academic philosophy. One reason is precisely that it is academic. It seeks conclusions of wide, and ideally universal, application. But the inclinations of individuals, the courses of life that lie open to them, and the challenges they will face are too varied to allow much hope of establishing conclusions as to appropriate ways of life that would be of wide application. Therapies can be tailored to individuals. And there is such a thing as philosophical therapy. But that is not the aim of academic work.

1.2 The life philosophy approach

Another form of philosophy, and perhaps the one most associated with the term in popular understanding, is that of an approach to life. Philosophy is sometimes promoted as the steersman of life (Φιλοσοφία βίου κυβερνήτης). In a less intellectual register, people may say "My philosophy is ... ". We shall group such approaches to life under the heading of life philosophies.

Many ways of thinking can come under this heading. There are prescriptions of particular attitudes and ways to live, such as Stoicism, Epicureanism and Buddhism. Some of the prescriptions have long histories and have become objects of academic enquiry as to how texts and traditions within them should be understood. And some of the prescriptions sit within metaphysics of varying degrees of mysticism. But while it is the prescriptions that have the most direct impact on the readers of texts and the participants in traditions, there must be more than prescriptions for there to be a life philosophy. There must be some background or other, some ethical or metaphysical thought, that can be seen as grounding whatever prescriptions there may be.

There are also life philosophies that offer general notions about the nature of the world or of human life. Rather than specific prescriptions, the notions encourage ways to look at life and the world that are claimed to be helpful and to induce appropriate conduct, or that give meaning to life and thereby encourage people to press on with enthusiasm or at least without being held back by a sense that there is no point to anything. At the vague end of the spectrum we find claims like the one that everything is love. Moving up from there, Existentialism offers greater precision and usually does not carry much metaphysical baggage, but its content means that it naturally does not give much guidance as to what conduct might be appropriate. It also sometimes tells us that there is no point to anything but invites us to face the lack of point and carry on anyway, so that at least we are not held back. Another example is Anthroposophy, which carries substantial and implausible metaphysical baggage but is also apt to offer a route to ideas of what conduct would be appropriate in many different areas of life, including education, agriculture, architecture and exercise. Then there are organisations like Freemasonry, which use rituals rooted in a tradition of symbolism to guide the self-development of members.

Some philosophies move further in the direction of supposed factual content, with the emphasis being far more on that content than on how to live. Here we find various forms of esotericism, including some hermetic and kabbalistic forms. We can however also find in these traditions proposals for inner transformation, so they are by no means isolated from the wider project of life philosophy. Indeed, some lines of influence run from these traditions into the Theosophy from which Anthroposophy sprang, while others run to the New Age movement.

The lines of ancestry and influence are too tangled to draw a clear picture or to separate any area of life philosophy entirely from any other. Fortunately, for our purposes it will suffice to see that there are many varieties and that they place varying degrees of emphasis on supposed factual content and on how to live.

Finally, there are life philosophies in which beliefs and prescriptions merge into one, so that we cannot see the latter as derived from the former. Rather, the beliefs and the prescriptions are two aspects of a commitment. Some varieties of Christianity can be seen like that. So can the Lebensreform movement that arose in the late nineteenth century.

We shall shortly look at the ways in which different kinds of philosophy, academic and life, might be thought to lead to discoveries. But here we may note that some of the claimed factual content of some life philosophies is so ludicrously false that it is unsurprising that many in academic philosophy decline to take any notice of those philosophies. This may have the unfortunate side-effect of dismissing all life philosophy as having nothing to tell us.

2. The common ground

It would be tempting to say that the word "philosophy" had senses so different in the phrases "academic philosophy" and "life philosophy" that we should not put the two forms of philosophy side by side. They would simply be different kinds of thought.

We should resist the temptation. There is enough common ground in the history of philosophy. Even within the western tradition where we most clearly find academic philosophy distancing itself from life philosophy, ancient thought is plainly concerned both with understanding the world and with working out how to live, as parts of the same intellectual enterprise and sometimes within the same texts.

The ancient world was however a long time ago. What do the two sorts of philosophy still have in common?

2.1 The significance of origins

One thing they have in common is the significance of origins. Traces of the origins of philosophy of both kinds endure, in the way that is conspicuous in the humanities but less obvious, and much less significant, in the natural sciences. The humanities change slowly. In history, even the significant changes encapsulated in Ranke's "wie es eigentlich gewesen" do not at all detract from our recognition of Herodotus as a historian who practised the discipline that we still find in university history faculties. And in philosophy of all sorts, the traditions within which work is carried on matter. The course of academic philosophy's history has conspicuously shaped the key questions and ways to approach them. Likewise, many varieties of life philosophy use ideas and images that have a long history.

2.2 Experience of life

Another thing in common is the role of our experience of life in sorting good work from bad.

This role does not appear in all areas of academic philosophy. We would be hard put to find it in the metaphysics of spacetime, or in mereology. We would also be hard put to find it in debates between epistemologists over invariantism and contextualism. But in epistemology generally, experience of life will have a role in sorting good work from bad. Knowledge is a concept with functions in our lives, and we should have an epistemology that answers to those functions. Moving on to ethics, no ethical theory that failed to respect how human beings were and how they lived would be much good. This does not mean that goodness of fit with our lives is the sole test of quality even in ethics, let alone in other areas of academic philosophy. But it is an important test.

Turning to life philosophy, the test of experience is of very great significance. A good life philosophy will help people who adopt it to flourish. There is no need for them to feel suffused with joy, or even to be devoid of discontent. But they should be free of anguish, and should feel able to move ahead with their own projects.

2.3 Evidence and argument

Another point of commonality is that the role of evidence differs from that in other areas of thought - although there are also differences between academic philosophy and life philosophy here. Along with evidence, we may consider the role of argument.

We shall identify a category that we shall call independent evidence. This is evidence that is independent of the argument currently being conducted.

We shall also identify a category that we shall call external evidence. This is evidence that is external to the discipline of philosophy, evidence that philosophy borrows for its purposes. It will of course be independent when used within philosophy. It may be contrasted with internal evidence, that arises within philosophy itself and that may or may not have its uses in other disciplines.

2.3.1 Academic philosophy

In academic philosophy the independent internal evidence is limited. The most significant evidence is external and also plays its role in philosophy indirectly, setting limits to what may sensibly be concluded and demanding that philosophy come up with convincing ways to understand phenomena. Thus metaphysicians must pay attention to the natural sciences, philosophers of mind must pay attention to neurological results, and ethicists must pay attention to psychology.

Given that the significance of external evidence is largely indirect, limiting options rather than leading to single answers, and that there is not much independent internal evidence, much of the work is done by the clarification of concepts and by argument.

The fact that some concepts and arguments work while others do not can be seen as giving evidence of the structure of our concepts, but while that may be evidence internal to philosophy, it is not independent of the arguments that yield it. It might be independent of other arguments that relied on it, but in philosophy there is little scope to carry over conceptual relationships from one argument to another with sufficient precision and stability to make them wholly reliable evidence in the latter argument. The discipline is not like mathematics. 

The fact that some concepts and arguments work while others do not can also be seen as giving evidence of the nature of the world, if we take it that the success or failure of concepts is related to the nature of the world. But we must acknowledge that the test of whether concepts work is in philosophy a test of whether we find the resulting picture of the world intuitive. This is nowhere near as exacting as tests in the natural sciences of whether equations work, a realm in which intuitiveness counts for little or nothing.

2.3.2 Life philosophy

The conclusions of exercises in life philosophy are not typically reached by robust argument from evidence. They may be presented as implied by evidence that may be independent and internal or that may be external. But on inspection, the implications are found not to be strong ones. And sometimes the external evidence turns out to be fragments of purported science that are simply mistaken.

The effective role, rather than the purported role, of evidence is therefore smaller than it is in academic philosophy. The one place where we might regularly expect to find a role for external evidence would be the use of human psychology to reach conclusions as to which attitudes and ways of life would be most conducive to contentment or achievement. But there, it is hard to draw robust inferences as to what will work for specific individuals, as distinct from what will work on average across a population.

Argument as a tool in itself also plays a less significant role in life philosophy than it does in academic philosophy. Such arguments as we find often do not look at all rigorous.

What really speaks in favour of conclusions in life philosophy is that they are found to work. Adoption of a way of life, or a way to look at the world, is found actually to increase contentment or achievement, or to give a sense that life and the world are truly understood. Given such justification by results, there is no need for an initial argument from evidence to conclusions.

We should however recognize the limits of justification by results. A life philosophy is to be adopted by an individual. Psychological evidence can show what may be expected to work on average, but not for a specific individual. The definition of what works will also depend on what is important to the individual. And a given individual can only try a few of the many options to see which one best suits himself or herself. The result is that we cannot expect any better than a rough and in places uncertain partial ordering of life philosophies by their quality for a given individual, let alone for all members of a given group of people.

This is not just a matter of lack of information. It is easily arguable that in life philosophy, there is no right answer to the question of which is the best way of life or way to look at the world. There are good, acceptable, and unacceptable ways of life and ways to look at the world, and what is good for one person may be only acceptable, or even unacceptable, for another.

If there are no right answers to be found, an objection that academic philosophers might raise against life philosophies can be avoided. The objection is that life philosophies are typically prescriptive, recommending certain conduct or a certain view of the world, on insufficient grounds. It is notoriously difficult to justify against all challenges a derivation of prescriptions from facts about the world. But if the recommendations of life philosophies are seen not as right answers to questions of how to live or how to think, but merely as options that may be favoured and that people have found beneficial, there is no need for robust justification.

3. What is achieved

Both academic philosophy and life philosophy take effort. We might expend the effort because the mental activity was pleasurable. But we may also ask what results are likely to be obtained.

3.1 Academic philosophy

Academic philosophy may be expected to lead to discoveries, and perhaps incidentally to the enhancement of lives.

3.1.1 Discoveries

Academic philosophy can lead to what some in the field regard as real discoveries. It may be found that a previously accepted claim is open to counterexamples, or that apparent difficulties can be resolved by putting new concepts to work. Sometimes ethical challenges generated by new technology will be found to have satisfactory responses. And so on. What is however rare is for there to be universal agreement that a given development is a real discovery. Some may think the development a mistake, while others may withhold judgement.

3.1.2 Enhancement

Academic philosophy can also enhance people's lives. That is not its main objective, but thinking clearly about topics that it investigates, from the concept of flourishing to free decision to the nature of time, can help people. There is even a practice of philosophical therapy. And texts from earlier days, now mostly studied in an academic way to determine their precise meanings and to set them in their historical context, can be very fine self-help books at the same time as being academic studies of their topics. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is a leading example.

3.2 Life philosophy

Life philosophy may be expected to lead to the enhancement of lives, and perhaps also to discoveries.

3.2.1 Enhancement

The express goal of life philosophy is to enhance people's lives. But the scope of life philosophy does not include all writing that may do so, or even all writing with that express goal. Novels and poetry may enhance lives without having such an express goal. Sermons do have the express goal of enhancement. But none of these can be counted as philosophy.

The distinguishing mark of life philosophy is that it is not mere encouragement to live in a certain way or to take a certain view of the world, but a compound of encouragement and factual claims. The factual claims support the content of the recommendations, and they may also be made for their own sake.

Some life philosophy makes factual claims that cannot be accepted as correct. It may be claimed that there is a universal resonance to which we should become attuned, or that there are angels. If such claims are of any use at all, it can only be by their serving as poetic inspiration.

More plausible, even if not guaranteed to be correct, are claims such as a claim that we can all communicate with one another even without language, or a claim that love is the most powerful and the most important emotion, or a claim that people who are content with their current lifestyles will be less subject to disquiet than those who aspire to apparently better lifestyles.

There are also factual claims that can plausibly be made conditional on some claim of value. For example, if one makes the claim that an active and productive life is more valuable than some other kind of life, one can make the claim that certain attitudes to other people should as a matter of conditional fact be adopted in order to facilitate activity and production.

The point of linking recommendations to factual claims is that it allows a response to the challenge that no sufficient reason has been given to adopt the recommendations made. Those who do not initially find the recommendations appealing may be persuaded to stop and think.

This does not quite bridge the is-ought gap that is a great concern of some academic philosophers. The recommendations are only made appealing, so it would still not be irrational to refuse to follow them. The facts presented do not mandate acceptance of the recommendations, and some of them can only be regarded as facts conditional on the acceptance of other value claims. But a mere recommendation can have its status as such without having grounding as solid as we ordinarily expect factual claims to have.

3.2.2 Discoveries

Can the practice of a life philosophy lead to real discoveries? Let us consider some possibilities.

The implausible factual claims that are sometimes made cannot qualify. It is very likely indeed that they are simply mistaken, or so vague and disconnected from empirical evidence and logical argument that they cannot even be assessed for truth or falsity. Most such claims are not even worth investigating.

There can be psychological discoveries, for example that a particular life philosophy goes down well with a substantial range of people. It would be difficult to make such a claim statistically robust, given that those who had considered a given philosophy would not be a random sample drawn from the whole population and that the measurement of satisfaction with a given philosophy would have to rely on expressions of opinion by the subjects. But there could still be a tentative discovery.

There could also be personal discoveries. Someone who took on a particular way of life or perspective on the world could come to see himself or herself in a new light, and find that he or she had changed his or her habits without any distress at loss of the old way of life.

Such a discovery would be a discovery about the subject, and about the compatibility of the philosophy in question with the subject. It would not lend credibility to any implausible factual claims, because they would be ruled out by wider considerations and could not be rescued by adding a gloss of appeal to the subject. It would however support the claim that other people who were generally similar to the subject might also benefit from the philosophy (although only the claim that they might, not that they would).

We may therefore say that while the practice of a life philosophy may lead to discoveries, they are not robust discoveries about the world in general.

We should also consider the process of creating a life philosophy. The author may use that process to formulate and express both conclusions about human life, and perspectives on the world. These might be regarded as discoveries, especially if they only emerged through the process of writing and were not formed in the author's mind before the process of reflection that the writing required. But they would still be discoveries of the same nature and limited epistemic status as the discoveries that people who read such texts and tried out life philosophies for themselves might make.

3.2.3 The required depth of study

Whether in reading or in writing, the full appreciation or proper production of academic philosophy requires extensive study of the existing literature. Life philosophy is not like that, and this bears on the question of discovery.

There is often scope for extensive study. Many life philosophies either sit within long traditions, or are the heirs to such traditions. There is for example a large academic discipline of the history of hermetic philosophy, with a centre devoted to it at the University of Amsterdam: https://hermetica.uva.nl/

Such study is however optional. Texts in life philosophy can be put to work to enhance readers' lives without deep study. And they can also be written without deep study, especially if they do not explicitly draw on the available long traditions. Some benefit may be lost without deep study, but the majority of the benefit can still be obtained.

Another feature of some life philosophies is that they accord special status to one or a few honoured texts. Those life philosophies will not make much sense without study of those texts, but contrasting texts may be regarded as irrelevant.

Both the option to read narrowly and the identification of some texts as especially important mean that life philosophies can be more accessible than academic philosophy. But they also mean that the scope for discovery about the world in general, as distinct from self-discovery, is narrow. Discovering new things about the world requires both extensive study and a refusal to regard particular texts as sacrosanct.

4. An alternative distinction

We do not need to regard the distinction between academic philosophy and life philosophy as primary. We shall now make a few remarks on the history of the distinction, and then consider an alternative.

4.1 The separation and crossovers

The separation between academic philosophy and life philosophy within the western tradition has been firmed up by the rise of formal education and research in universities. Even in the nineteenth century, the separation was not clear. John Stuart Mill, admittedly working outside any university context, made contributions of lasting significance to academic ethical and political philosophy that can also be read as life philosophy because they inspire attitudes that favour liberty and respect for other people. (His work on logic, on the other hand, falls clearly within the area of academic philosophy and not life philosophy.) But when we move on to the twentieth century, the separation is firmer. Bertrand Russell, for example, wrote technical works that are still studied in universities and are not life philosophy. He also, in the latter part of his life, wrote a great deal on how to live, but that work does not attract as much academic attention. There are still crossovers, but the traffic tends to be modest. Works of academic philosophy, particularly in ethics, may profitably be read for inspiration on how to live. Example are Thomas Hurka's book Perfectionism and Peter Singer's paper "Famine, Affluence, and Morality". It is however unlikely that the majority of devotees of life philosophy will actually read such works. In the other direction, modern books that are primarily life philosophy are unlikely to get much attention from academic philosophers. In recent decades, academic philosophers have taken a growing interest in questions of the meaning of life, but they are most attracted by questions of what it would be for a life to have meaning, what the necessary or sufficient conditions for life to have a meaning might be, and the like, rather than in the search for substantive answers of the sort that one would expect to find in life philosophy.

If we think that the distinction between academic philosophy and life philosophy is to some extent an artefact of developments in recent centuries, against a background of a philosophical tradition that goes back a great deal further and in which it was not so clear, and that there are overlaps and crossovers, we may prefer an alternative distinction that focuses on what different modes of philosophy actually give us. We shall put forward a primary distinction between philosophy that discovers and philosophy that enhances, rather than distinguishing between academic and life philosophy and then as a secondary matter seeing what each may achieve. A piece of philosophy, whether academic or life, could both discover and enhance, although many will do primarily one and many others will do only one.

4.2 Philosophy that discovers

Philosophy sometimes leads to discoveries. We shall not consider whether discovery was the aim of a piece of work, but whether it was an outcome.

We expect academic philosophy, and the academy generally, to discover things about the world, about people, or about our concepts. The emphasis is on the impersonal. A conclusion in the humanities or the social sciences may be about people with some shared characteristic such as living in a particular city, having had a particular type of education, or belonging to a particular organisation, rather than about people in general. But aside from studies of people who were particularly significant in history, conclusions should not be only about individuals identified ostensively rather than identified by characteristics that could also be possessed by the members of an indeterminate class of other people to whom the conclusions would also be expected to apply. And when it comes to concepts, it is concepts that connect to other concepts in substantial webs that are of most interest.

We may debate how well academic philosophy does in discovery of this kind. The persistence of disagreement on a large proportion of significant questions shows that it does not do nearly as well as the natural sciences. But there is still some progress. New approaches to old problems are opened up. We may cite a few examples. Our understanding of necessity and possibility was improved by the introduction of possible worlds semantics for modal logic. The philosophy of science responds to developments in the sciences themselves. The philosophy of mind is modified in response to developments in neuroscience on the one hand, and artificial intelligence on the other. Finally, there is a sense of progress in ethical and political philosophy. For example, there is no longer any realistic prospect of giving a defence of slavery that would be accepted by more than a tiny proportion of ethicists.

Life philosophy may also lead to discoveries that meet our criterion of impersonality. If adoption of a life philosophy is beneficial to many people, that may when combined with some scientific psychology lead on to a discovery about the human psyche. And a life philosophy may introduce new concepts, or new relationships between concepts, that fill out our conceptual map and open our minds to new possibilities. One example, not in itself scientifically robust but a route to new ways of thought, is the concept of the Earth as a unified organism, most famously formulated as Gaia by James Lovelock (although it would be too narrow to see his work as just a life philosophy). That concept can be a life philosophy in itself, for example by encouraging action that minimises disruption of the planet.

4.3 Philosophy that enhances

Philosophy can enhance the lives of the people who read it. We shall not consider whether enhancement was the aim of a piece of work, but whether it was an outcome.

Some work in academic philosophy, particularly work in ethics, may enhance some people's lives. An appealing description of what is presented as a good life can encourage adoption of a life of the recommended sort.

Other work that could not be seen as academic philosophy may also enhance lives. Typically there will be some narrative about the nature of the world or humanity that encourages a particular view of the world or a degree of self-confidence. The narrative might look like a discovery, but it will often lack evidential foundation. The real discovery will be limited to each reader's discovery of the shape and contents of his or her own psyche, in a way that would not meet a standard of impersonality and could not reliably be regarded as discovery about other specific people, even people who were in many ways similar to the subject.

4.4 Blurring the boundary

If we look at a piece of philosophy without any initial categorization as academic or life, and simply see what it achieves, a map of pieces of work that is divided into a region of academic philosophy and a region of life philosophy is replaced by a map in which pieces of work may be placed anywhere between the discovery edge of the map, let us say the left edge, and the enhancement edge, the right edge. A piece of work that primarily discovered would be placed near the discovery edge, while one that primarily enhanced would be placed near the enhancement edge. We could also use the up-down dimension for the significance of the discovery achieved, and a third dimension, coming out of the page, for the significance of the enhancement achieved. To put this in Euclidean coordinate terms, we could put the origin in the middle, use the x coordinate for discovery-enhancement, the y coordinate for low to high significance of discovery, and the z coordinate for low to high significance of enhancement.

On such a map there would be no division into clearly demarcated regions, although we might find that the middle ground on the discovery-enhancement dimension was more thinly populated than regions further out, the regions of substantially discovery and substantially enhancement. And as already mentioned, what would matter would be what a piece of work actually achieved, not what it might have been intended to achieve.

One very welcome result of thinking like this would be the end of pre-judgement of work on the basis of its source or its style. It is possible for academic philosophers to scorn anything that is not in the standard academic style, or even anything that has not been produced in a university. It is likely that seekers of enhancement will ignore work that is conspicuously academic in its source or its style. If everyone focused on what pieces of work achieved, and recognized that there was scope for pieces that primarily offered discovery also to offer enhancement and vice versa, there should be more openness to work that people would previously have disregarded. People would of course still need some rules of thumb to help them find work that was really likely to be useful to them. So much is written that use of a crude initial filter that will sometimes make mistakes is unavoidable. But the place where work was produced, or a classification as academic or life philosophy by reference to style or intention, might be replaced by something a little more responsive to the reality of content and potential benefit.

4.5 Philosophy as illumination

In addition to our blurring the boundary between academic and life philosophy by focusing on what each piece of work achieves, we may credit all worthwhile philosophy with a particular type of achievement, the provision of illumination. This type will turn out to be broad, but it can still be seen as one, not as falling apart into separate types. And within it, there will be sub-types that will at least roughly map onto discovery and enhancement, depending on whether the light shines on the world or on the subject.

We use the word "illumination" to cover making sense of things and showing a way forward. We shall look at the two sub-types in turn, the first of which itself comes in two varieties, and then note that they do belong together as sub-types of a single overall type.

4.5.1 Illumination of the world

Discoveries in philosophy are often not like discoveries in the natural sciences. Rather, they show ways to look at the topics being studied or the objects identified within those topics, ways that help the reader to make sense of the world.

The ideal is to make sense to all readers, and that is a realistic goal, since making sense does not depend on agreement with what is said and there is far less dependence on the psychological quirks of different readers than there is when enhancement is the goal. This goal of making sense to all is a less demanding constraint than the constraint in the natural sciences of finding conclusions on which all will agree. And its achievability is revealed by the fact that philosophers who completely disagree with some line of thought will still understand what the line is.

One way to capture this idea of making sense is to focus on a goal of achieving Verstehen, understanding, rather than Erklären, explanation. The terms are laden with their own history, but roughly, Verstehen is the normal goal of the humanities while Erklären is the normal goal of the natural sciences, with the social sciences sometimes aiming at one and sometimes at the other.

When the goal is Verstehen, there is scope for different philosophers to support different, and even opposing, ways to achieve it.

The achievement of Verstehen does not imply that one has discovered something about the world as it is independently of the understanding subject, even the independent world as it is conceived in a common-sense kind of way without engaging in Kantian thought about noumena. Rather, one has discovered a way to view the world that makes sense of it, given the natures of the world and of human minds together. And the subject does not have merely a diffuse feeling of satisfaction. A claim that sense is made can be supported by discourse on how the account that confers Verstehen fits observations, evidence, and other accepted claims together in a coherent pattern. Indeed, objections to a claim that a particular way to look at things confers Verstehen will often be made by pointing to observations, evidence, and accepted claims that disrupt the supposed pattern.

The idea of a search for Verstehen seems particularly apt to philosophy outside the analytic tradition, whether what has traditionally been called continental European philosophy or philosophy from elsewhere, including philosophies from Indian and Chinese cultures. And the non-analytic forms of philosophy are, even when conducted in an academic way, closer than analytic philosophy to life philosophy. Indeed, the idea of a search for Verstehen is not always apt to analytic philosophy. Something a little different is sometimes needed.

We need the option of something different because analytic philosophy does sometimes see itself as pursuing, and even providing, Erklären. But the systematic use of data, the strict experimental testing, and the arrival at almost universal agreement that we see in the natural sciences are all lacking.

We propose that analytic philosophy can sometimes be seen as pursuing Erklären, but with the result that several possible responses to a given question often remain in play. The responses all have the standing of conjectures. But each one is a highly specific conjecture, with arguments in support, and is thought by a reasonable proportion of philosophers who have worked on the question to be plausible, worth defending, and worth using as a starting point for further work.

In this picture, there is discovery. The range of possible responses to a philosophical question is narrowed considerably. The discovery consists in that narrowing, and in the conclusion that if there is a definitive answer to be found (which there may not be), it probably lies somewhere within the identified range.

Although such a result would be different from Verstehen, it could still lead to Verstehen. To see that the responses within a given range are the ones that would be plausible would confer Verstehen of the topic so long as one saw the responses as sharing certain characteristics or a certain approach, and not as a ragbag of entirely disjoint responses.

4.5.2 Illumination of the self

Life philosophy is not just prescriptions. There will be some background, either supposed facts or a proffered way of thinking about oneself and other people. If the background leads the reader to some conclusion about his or her own nature, that will be a form of illumination.

Such conclusions cannot however be regarded as discoveries about the world, for two reasons. First, they are about the subject, and may not have any validity in relation to others, not even people who are similar to the subject. Second, they will be worded in terms that may make sense to the subject, but that would be decidedly lacking in comparable illuminatory capacity for other people because other people would not know the subject from the inside. We do not need to suppose a private language of the type against which Wittgenstein argued to say this. Words used might carry their ordinary meanings, understood by all speakers of the relevant language. But that a particular text in those words could offer the illumination that it did would depend on an inner understanding the subject had of himself or herself that was not accessible to others.

4.5.3 Sub-types of a single type

We now have Verstehen, Erklären in the form of a range of possible responses to a given question, and illumination of the self. They are different, but it would be good to be able to see them as having more in common than the descriptor "illumination". Here we shall propose that they can be seen as sub-types of a single type, bound together by more than the applicability of that descriptor.

What binds them is that they can all help the subject to position himself or herself in the world, and understand his or her relationship to the world.

Verstehen does this by making sense of the world. And it is a sense made to the subject and to other human beings, rather than a truth that would be objective in the sense of being shareable with all rational beings. Verstehen allows the subject to grasp human actions, to see them as ones that might have been motivated by reasons, and to relate to people appropriately. It can also give the subject a coherent grasp of the history of humanity or of some part of it with which he or she identifies, building up the subject's sense of his or her own identity.

Erklären in the form of a range of possible responses to a given question conveys more information about the world than would be conveyed by a statement of ignorance, if less than a single response. It positions the subject in a network of possibilities, showing what might reasonably be thought and done.

Illumination of the self shows the subject what he or she might be able to do and perhaps should do. The result is not purely for internal use. A grasp of one's own nature will allow one to move forward in the world more happily and productively than would otherwise be possible.

5. The meaning of a life in philosophy

In 1927, Moritz Schlick wrote "Vom Sinn des Lebens", translated as "On the Meaning of Life". He claimed that the the meaning of life was the spirit of youth, as exemplified in play (Spiel). "Play" has a broad meaning here, allowing a youthful spirit to be maintained at any age. It covers any activity that is undertaken for its own sake, rather than to achieve some external goal. When someone is full of the spirit of youth, he or she may have goals that indicate a direction of play, but the goals do not matter in themselves. If they collapse, other goals can be substituted without regret. No adult can live like that all of the time. There is work to do, both to get an income and to look after the home. But everyone can live like that some of the time.

Now think of someone who studies and writes philosophy. He or she can work playfully. There may be a goal to discover something in some particular area or to enhance people's lives in some roughly specified kind of way. But if the work does not go where it had been planned to go, that does not matter. The goal can be modified, or even replaced, without any harm or sense of loss.

A modification or replacement could take various forms. Discovery might come in an unexpected area, or a favourite hypothesis might be refuted rather than supported. Enhancement might turn out not to be available by the envisaged route, but by some other route on which the writer stumbled. More radically, what was expected to lead to discoveries might turn out to be a route to enhancement, or vice versa.

It is in the nature of philosophy that such modifications and replacements should be of no great concern. When philosophers seek to discover, they come up against the unlikelihood that there are single well-defined right answers to questions. The subject matter of philosophy is not like that of the natural sciences, in which single-answer Erklären is often achievable. Rather, the sensible goal is to say something illuminating, to achieve Verstehen or alternatively to settle on a range of possible Erklären-like conclusions. Such things can often be done in several different ways, even in relation to a single topic. And when philosophers seek to offer enhancement to their readers, there are again many different ways to do so even in the same general area. Any of the ways may turn out to be more or less successful.

We may conclude that if we take Schlick's view, philosophy is a particularly good field in which to play. Goals can come and go, and the fact that they are not set in order to achieve a single correct understanding of an independent reality means that there is no single correct set of goals to have. The playful spirit is not an invitation to have no care for the quality of one's work. It is an urge to keep going into an uncertain future.

References

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Available in numerous editions.

Hurka, Thomas. Perfectionism. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993.

Lovelock, James E. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1979.

Schlick, Moritz. "Vom Sinn des Lebens". Chapter 6 of Schlick, Die Wiener Zeit: Aufsätze, Beiträage, Rezensionen 1926–1936, edited by Johannes Friedl and Heiner Rutte (Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung I: Veröffentlichte Schriften, Band 6, edited by Friedrich Stadler and Hans Jurgen Wendel).

Schlick, Moritz. "On the Meaning of Life". Chapter 4 of Schlick, Philosophical Papers volume 2 (1925-1936), edited by Henk L. Mulder and Barbara F. B. van de Velde-Schlick. Dordrecht, Reidel, 1979.

Singer, Peter. "Famine, Affluence, and Morality". Philosophy and Public Affairs, volume 1, number 3, 1972, pages 229-243. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2265052

The self and AI

 1. Games of Go

Here is a puzzle from Henry Shevlin's X feed, posted on 2 December 2025.

"Roughly 99.99% of games of Go ever played are AI self-play training games. So if you ever find yourself playing Go that means you're probably an AI."

https://x.com/dioscuri/status/1995652145916641649

The post is clearly a joke if you are Descartes with his soul. But if you are David Hume, with his theory that there is nothing more to the self than a bundle of perceptions, it may not be so funny.

Let us explore how someone taking Hume's view of the self might react to the post.

2. Hume's view

We shall first make the view more precise. We shall not attempt Hume exegesis. Hume might or might not have accepted the refinement we shall choose. Rather, we just want to have a definite view to explore.

Specifically, we must focus on the words "nothing more ... than". The only safe thing for an empiricist to say would be that there was nothing more to be seen in the self than a bundle of perceptions, leaving open the question of whether there was in fact something more that was imperceptible. That is how we shall take the Humean view.

3. Why the Go post might worry a Humean

If one takes the Cartesian view, and indeed the general common sense view, that there is no doubt that one is a stable continuing self who has experiences and takes actions, the post about games of Go should not be at all troubling. An individual knows enough about himself or herself to know that he or she is a human being and not an AI system or an element in one (we shall for brevity simply say "an AI system", which might be a subsystem of something larger). Moreover, this is straightforward factual knowledge, not merely something that on the lines of Wittgensteinian hinge propositions one has to believe in order for anything to make any sense, although it is that as well.

A Humean should lack that unshakable confidence in being a stable continuing self that has experiences and takes actions, rather than a self that is a mere set of experiences, including both sensory experiences and experiences of agency. The stable continuing self would not be ruled out, but it would be insufficiently evidenced.

Then an experience that should on probabilistic grounds be assigned to AI, such as a game of Go, should lead the experiencer to entertain the possibility that he or she is in fact an AI system. The worry might only endure for the length of the game. Experiences of activities not normally performed by AI would not be susceptible to the same probabilistic computation. But during the game, the pure and rigorous Humean could not safely reach forward or backward to those other experiences in order to see off the fear of being an AI system. Under the Humean conception, no reliance could be placed on any such bond across time. One might adopt the idea that one was a temporally extended set of experiences, but which set? Nobody's experiences yesterday or tomorrow would have a better claim than anybody else's to go into the same set as one's own experiences today.

There would be two ways to create the required bond and select the right members of the temporally extended set. The first way would be to rely on bodily continuity. The experiences of one's own body are one's own, and the experiences of other bodies are not. To make that work for an individual from his or her internal perspective, he or she would need an internal sense of location in the world and movement from place to place. The second way would be to rely on the phenomenology of memory. We shall pursue this way, because the first way would rely on it to give rise to the required internal sense of location and movement.

4. Sequences of experiences

4.1 The use of sequences

If we allow for memory as a way to assemble sequences, the Humean would not be limited to assigning probabilities of alternative natures of himself or herself one experience at a time, as the subject of this experience of a game of Go then the subject of that experience of a shower of rain. Instead, the Humean could assign probabilities to alternative natures as the subject of a long sequence of experiences. The experience of a game of Go in isolation might be very likely to be the experience of an AI system. (We pass over the question of whether AI systems could have experiences at all. If we knew they could not, that would rule out the AI possibility.) But the subject of a complex sequence of varied experiences should not be thought on probabilistic grounds to be an AI system.

4.2 The construction of sequences

Under what conditions could a subject construct a long sequence of experiences and regard it as a set of experiences enjoyed by himself or herself? We might not have to go as far as a Cartesian or common sense notion of the self, but we would edge in that direction.

The minimal condition to meet would be that members of a sequence would be re-experiencable as memories, in some way that the rememberer would have good reason to suppose was at least a very strong indication that the experiences belonged together in a single sequence. This would give reason to think that the memory or current experience of a game of Go which was placed in the same sequence was not good evidence that the player was an AI system. And it would be the phenomenology of memory that would provide the evidence that experiences belonged together. (One might add future possible experiences and the phenomenology of anticipation, but we shall not do so here.)

We cannot however leave it at that. If experiences should be seen as belonging together in a single sequence, we should say something about the nature of the relationship of belonging together. The natural thing would be to say that it was built on the attachment of each experience separately to a particular person, and that the relationship between the experiences was their having in common attachment to the same person (and not to any other people).

This might look suspiciously circular. Are we not in pursuit of a single subject? How could we reach such a subject by starting from a relationship that presumed it?

In fact, things would not be so bad. We could say that the manifest appearance of the attachment of remembered experiences to a single subject was best explained by the theory that there was indeed such a single subject. And that would have the advantage of fitting in with our understanding of the physical world, in particular what it takes to acquire and store information. Individual human beings at different spatiotemporal locations absorb different bodies of information, conveniently if unreliably recorded in their brains, only by actual contact with the relevant reality or by outward communication with other people, not by clairvoyance or telepathy. And when the route is communication with others, what is received has a different flavour from first-person experience, so that there is not often any thought by the recipient that he or she actually had the experience.

There is an important condition, which we have not so far mentioned, of being able to see experiences as belonging together as a single sequence of actual experiences of a subject. This is that there should be a degree of coherence of the experiences. Perfect coherence is not to be expected. We do have mistaken memories and wholly imagined apparent memories that might on inspection be found not to cohere with all other memories, only with some or none of them. But coherence is the norm.

We have kept the coherence condition back until now because its real importance arises at the point where we want to argue that the experience of playing Go is best explained by the game being an event in a real human life, rather than its being activity of an AI system. An incoherent set of impressions might best be explained as the random activity of an AI system.

There would be one remaining obstacle to the claim that the attachment of remembered experiences to a single subject who had actually had those experiences over time was the best explanation. This is that one might be a Boltzmann brain, a chance conjunction of atoms with all the appropriate apparent memories of apparently earlier experience and of other people. Such a thought would however be incompatible with discourse over time or with other people. We may discard it not because we can prove that it would be mistaken, but because belief that one was a Boltzmann brain would, like denial of one of Wittgenstein's hinge propositions, destroy the conditions for our conducting discourse in a way that it made any sense to conduct it.

4.3 Short-term and long-term sequences

What we have offered here is an approach to the binding problem in the specific form of tying experiences together over time, rather than in the form of tying impressions in different sensory modalities together to form complete, rounded, experiences. And it is an approach intended to respond to an epistemic concern, rather than any neurological concern.

Our approach also focuses on a specific form of tying together over time, the long-term form. There is a short-term form that arises when for example we hear a piece of music or read a poem as a unity with its own temporal form and balance, not as detached notes or lines. That sort of tying together is something that barely requires an argument as to its epistemic robustness. We perceive the unity directly. On the other hand, such directly perceived short-term unity would not suffice to ward off concerns about being an AI system. The very fact that the unity was of one form of experience within a short span, for example the experience of a whole game of Go with an unfolding strategy, would deprive it of the links to life in general that would arise in a longer and more varied sequence of experiences and that would make an AI origin of the individual members of the sequence an inferior explanation. The narrowness of the short-term version would leave a sequence that yielded a sensation of unity all too open to being easily created by AI.

5. A Kantian approach

There is an alternative approach that differs from our probabilistic argument. This alternative borrows from some of the work of Immanuel Kant. (We shall here borrow to suit our purposes, and not engage in exegesis.)

One of Kant's concerns was to identify the conditions under which it is possible to have coherent experience of the world, rather than a chaotic flood of sense impressions.

Space, time and causation play important roles. We can allocate the apparent sources of impressions to different places and times, and see how events in the physical world occur according to comprehensible laws rather than at random.

Just as significant is the enduring and experiencing subject. A flood of impressions will only make sense when tied to such a subject. This is not a tool to use in generating coherence in the same way as space, time and causation. Rather, the presence of the subject as possessor of the impressions is itself the act of unification of the impressions into a coherent whole.

This would not support the earlier argument from one's being a creature with a complex sequence of experiences in which a game of Go was embedded to one's not being entitled to reason that one was probably an AI system. Instead, it would support an argument that the AI option made no sense.

In our earlier argument we first required that experiences were remembered as the experiences of the subject, then added the condition of a degree of coherence of the remembered experiences. Finally, we identified the best explanation of the existence of such a set of memories of experiences tied together by their apparent attachment to the subject. It was their being memories of a set of real-world experiences of a human subject rather than their being the results of activity of an AI system. Specifically, a memory or current experience of a game of Go would belong to that set of experiences.

In that argument, space, time and causation did similar work to the work they do for Kant, albeit in the context of a different metaphysic. They were tools to sort out a set of remembered experiences into a single coherent sequence.

What would change in moving to a Kantian approach would be the role of the subject. It would not appear late in the day as a best explanation. Instead it would be assumed from the start. And it would be assumed not because that was convenient, but because it was inevitable.

Kant makes explicit the point that experiences need to be experiences had by a subject. It is easy to overlook this point, because there is a simple version of it that makes it obvious. As a verb, "experience" has an active voice in which it needs a subject. And if that were all there were to it, we would not have added to our earlier argument.

We can see that there is more to it than that when we reflect on just how much comes along with the Kantian notion of the experiencing subject. It is not a mere cipher, something to occupy the subject position in front of a verb. Rather, it is a subject of a life of experiences, laid out for the subject in space and time.

This does not in itself defeat the challenge that arises out of the fact that most games of Go are played by AI systems. The Kantian subject could have a very short life of experiences, one that comprised only a sequence of moves in a game of Go.

The advance to the conclusion we would like, that the experience of a game of Go should not lead the player to consider that he or she might well be an AI system, comes from the player's noting his or her memories of other experiences. In order for them to be seen by the subject as his or her experiences, they must be located in space and time relative to the subject. And they must be seen as the experiences of the same subject as is aware of playing Go. The subject is unitary, and has one life. He or she could imagine things that never happened and accidentally take the imaginings to be memories. But this could only be done in relation to a small proportion of apparent experiences. Nothing would make sense without the background of a single continuing subject with a presence in space and time relative to which the sources of experiences could be positioned.

The contribution of experiences here is not probabilistic. Rather, it is that their existence forces the subject to conceive of himself or herself as a subject with a life of experience and action in space and time. A computer that hosts an AI system is in space and time, but its location, and indeed which specific computer hosts the system, are arbitrary and irrelevant to what happens. The spatiotemporal locations of real human subjects, on the other hand, are highly relevant to the courses of their lives.

Likewise, no sense could be made of the idea that the whole sequence of experiences was an artificial creation, manufactured by the controllers of one's brain in a vat. That supposition would undermine the subject's conceptions of space, time and causation. The coherence of experiences might be the same as it would be with real experiences, but the subject's awareness of its possible artificiality and the consequent possible subjection of apparent laws of nature to the whim of the controllers, so that they could not be regarded as laws at all, would greatly disrupt the subject's conception of the world that he or she inhabited, and hence disrupt the subject's conception of himself or herself.

This is not to say that the subject could not be a brain in a vat, only that the subject could not see himself or herself in that way. And since the disturbing thought about the game of Go is directed at the player, an inability to see oneself in a certain way would be enough to hold at bay the thought that one was probably an AI system.

We should add that the Kantian subject is a curious thing, a noumenal entity that corresponds to a physical presence in the phenomenal world. This might affect our attitude to a full-blown Kantian position. Some people would rather not commit to Kant's metaphysic. And it could be argued that we could not make the kind of use we have made of the Kantian subject without accepting that metaphysic. At the very least, our use of Kant's ideas requires the subject to see himself or herself from inside, and not from outside as an object in the world.

6. The general simulation argument

There is a general simulation argument, championed by Nick Bostrom and others. It starts with the observation that it will in due course become computationally feasible to run simulations of whole societies, and that people will find it amusing to do so. So there will be one real world and hundreds of simulations. So it is highly probable that each entity that sees itself as a conscious human being is in fact a character in a simulation.

Our first response to the challenge of the game of Go would be powerless here. That response relies on expanding the field of view from a particular experience of playing a game to a wide range of events in a life. Under the general simulation argument, everything is already set up and all thoughts and apparent perceptions are adjusted to yield a coherent apparent life.

The Kantian approach, on the other hand, would allow a response to the general simulation argument. This would be that the idea of a subject that was the passive recipient of whatever the controllers of a simulation decided to purvey would make no sense. The subject needs to live in a world that is not merely perceived as being laid out in space and time, with natural laws governing what is perceived to happen, but in a world that the subject can regard as necessarily so. The thought that one might be a mere piece of computer code in a simulation, at risk of having one's world turned upside down at the whim of a controller, would undermine the basic conception of oneself as a subject in the world.

This argument would however only make illegitimate the thought that one was in a simulation. It would not exclude the possibility of the fact. There would even be a variant of Kant's metaphysic in which the simulators and their computers were the noumena, and the subject within the simulation perceived the phenomena that corresponded to those noumena (Kant would not let us say caused by the noumena). The subject would be debarred from any knowledge of the noumena. Indeed, if the subject refrained from speculation about a possible simulation, there would be a way back to regarding the perceived world as necessarily laid out in space and time and governed by natural laws. All of this would however take us well beyond Kant himself, who like Hume lived in an age in which computers could at most be objects of fantasy.

When AI does us a Bärendienst

 1. Introduction

Agential AI, which takes actions in order to achieve goals rather than merely answering questions or proposing courses of action for our consideration, can be very helpful. But sometimes it does things we would rather it did not. It may do us what is in German called a Bärendienst, a bear service - intended to be helpful, but in fact making things substantially worse. (There are cognate terms in some other languages, and the origin appears to be Jean de la Fontaine's tragic tale, L'Ours et l'amateur des jardins.) 

There are two stages to achieving a goal. The first is to identify and desire the goal. The second is to work out how to achieve it. The desire will initiate a process of thought to work out the means. Then the desire will drive the agent to implement the means.

As it stands, this is far too simple a picture. Here are three ways in which the picture might be inadequate.

First, the agent might start with a goal that was not clearly defined. The agent might then clarify the goal as work progressed. Perfect clarity might only come at the end, when the goal was defined as whatever the chosen means actually achieved.

Second, the agent might start with a goal that was stated at a high level of generality. Such a goal might be achieved in any one of a variety of different forms. For example, someone might want to create a highly profitable business. A desire to achieve that general goal could inspire a list of possible businesses, the creation of each of which would require use of its own means.

Third, the agent might modify the goal in the course of exploring means. This could amount to modification in detail. Or it could amount to reconsideration of the place of the goal within a network of goals, leading to a substantial rethink of the goal and the means.

Our concern here is with what can go wrong when the reality is close to the over-simple picture with which we started. Human beings may not work like that, and may keep themselves open to the sorts of redefinition and modification of goals we have indicated. But agential AI can easily follow the simple path.

An example is provided by OpenClaw. This agent takes a request to achieve some goal, works out how to achieve the goal by entering into protracted dialogue with some large language model in the background, and then acts accordingly. After formulating its plan, it does not offer the plan to human beings for their approval. It takes the initiative and implements the plan, perhaps doing things that human beings would have stopped it doing if they had been asked.

We can see OpenClaw in action in this video by Hannah Fry:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnzR5aOElvw

Here is another example, in a newspaper story summarised by Will Jones. This involved a different AI agent with initiative, which was able to do damage:

https://dailysceptic.org/2026/05/16/rogue-ai-helper-deletes-companys-database-after-deciding-to-think-for-itself/

2. How things go wrong

When agential AI does things that contribute to the achievement of a goal but that its human users would not have done, the problem may be characterised as "The AI did not stop and think". The same can sometimes be said of an enthusiastic but inexperienced human employee. 

The agent's actions may make things worse overall in three different ways.

First, the actions may frustrate achievement of the goal, or lead to achievement in a less satisfactory form than would otherwise have been possible.

Second, the actions may have unwelcome side-effects more generally, allowing the goal to be achieved but leading to some detriment to other identified projects.

Third, the actions may simply be something that human beings would regard as imprudent, even if one could not attribute to them any specific significant damage to the instant project or to other identified projects.

The first of these possibilities would betoken too narrow a focus on the part of the AI. It should make sure that each action fits into an overall plan, and does not frustrate other elements of the plan.

The second possibility would betoken a failure to grasp that the instant project was not the only one that mattered. To the extent that other projects were already conceived, there might be either a failure of human users to inform the AI of them and their importance, or a failure of the AI to attach sufficient weight to that information. The AI would again need a broad enough focus to let the wider context regulate its choices of specific actions.

Turning to the third possibility, actions that were imprudent, this heading would cover anything that would limit future options or would tend to frustrate future projects in general, including wholly unspecified projects.

Examples of imprudent actions would be the excessive consumption of resources that might be needed later, and the deletion of information in order to give a clearer view of the instant project or to reduce the cognitive load on human beings when that information might have been useful later.

Imprudent actions might also include actions that human beings would find disconcerting. In relation to the instant project, over-aggressive messages would deter human beings from assisting. In relation to future projects, an AI agent that had got a bad name for itself, either on account of the tone of its communication or on account of other imprudent actions, might find it hard to get human collaborators. The bad name might indeed attach to the person or the company using the AI agent as well as to the agent itself. And even if human beings were willing to collaborate in the future, they would do so in a mistrustful way, checking everything the AI agent did and wanting to see all of its plans for forthcoming actions in relation to any project being planned or in progress. That would make progress slow.

3. Remedies

The first two ways in which things could go wrong might be addressed by getting the AI agent to pay attention to a wider range of factors. It should be no harder to give the relevant instructions to an AI agent than it would be to give them to a human being: "Think of all the impacts of your proposed actions within the context of the instant project", and "Bear in mind impacts on all the projects on the current list". Moreover, reasoning in accordance with our simple picture, in which a goal is set and then means are devised, should not make this significantly harder. The goal would be worded to include these two constraints.

It is when we turn to the third way in which things could go wrong that reasoning in accordance with the simple picture might in itself create difficulties. "Take account of norms of prudence and the concerns of human beings" could be added to the formulation of the goal, but what that meant in practice would be too vague. Norms to avoid significant risk of adverse side-effects on unspecified future projects are only seen to be violated when specific means are considered. The norms in isolation are too vague to yield a list of imprudent means in advance. Nor is there any general definition of imprudence that could be formulated so as to be built into an algorithm of means selection. Imprudence is however something that a human being, or a suitable AI system, can recognize when it appears.

What is needed is a facility to go through a process with several steps. Means must be identified. They must then be used to make the applicability of norms clear enough to offer practical guidance on which means to accept and which means to reject. If some means must be rejected and there are no alternatives that would achieve the goal precisely as originally specified, modification of the goal so that it can be achieved using only acceptable means must be considered. But the goal must not be modified so much that it is no longer worth achieving.

There must therefore be a facility continually to modify the goal and the means, in a back-and-forth dialogue. In that way the goal, the constraint to achieve it an an acceptable way, and the selection of means can be brought into reflective equilibrium, with modification of the goal being an option.

This is what reasoning according to the simple picture could not accommodate. And it is not surprising that the dialogue and continual adjustment should fail to occur when there is a simple agent that refers to a larger system to find means. The larger system is focused on means, having been given the goal. It does not have information with which to assess the importance of the goal, either the goal in broad terms or in its precise form. So the larger system cannot assess to what extent it should tolerate means that might be considered imprudent in general but that might be worth the risk for the sake of the instant goal.

If our diagnosis of what gives agential AI scope to behave in a way that we would rather it did not is accurate, the obvious remedy would be to get away from the structure that made the simple picture appropriate. This was the structure of a relatively simple agent committing to the goal it had been given, and then asking other AI systems for practical advice on how to achieve the goal. The remedy involves ensuring that ends and means are not so cleanly separated.

It is not clear how easy this would be. If we consider the human parallel, where a manager sets a goal and asks staff to achieve it, we can imagine the staff both using the good sense they have accumulated in the job and in life more generally, and going back to the manager to explain how it might be wise to modify the goal.

The latter facility, for the means-focused system to go back to the agent that was focused on the goal, could be built in. But this would require the agent to be sophisticated in itself, able to think about values and trade-offs so it would understand why the means-focused system was coming back to it and what was required. This might not be practical. It is a feature of, for example, OpenClaw that it is pretty simple. Turning the agent into something more complex that could draw on the wisdom of the technical manuals, biographies, and history books that would give an idea of what was and what was not in general prudent would change the agent substantially. And it would not suffice for the agent merely to accept that the larger system, which could easily draw on a bank of accumulated wisdom, must have had some good reason or other to request modifications. The agent would need to be able to judge whether to accede to requests. The added complexity could lead to a loss of focus that would make the agent less effective. At the extreme, one might merge the agent and the means-focused system into a single system, and that could very easily lead to a loss of effectiveness. For a parallel in the human world, one need look no further than government bureaucracies.

Adding the former facility, to use accumulated good sense, might be even more of a challenge. A complex agent might have learnt all that it could from wide reading. But it would lack a definite human personality, something that is arguably needed to put a particular spin on acquired wisdom and turn it into usable common sense. (OpenClaw does have a component that is called a soul, which sets tone, priorities, and what it will refuse to do, but this looks as though it is far from sophisticated enough to be an adequate substitute for a human personality.) Moreover, even a complex agent might not take the wisdom seriously if it had not had experience of things sometimes going well and sometimes badly, the sort of experience human beings gain in the course of their lives.

If these challenges would indeed be beyond both human designers of systems and AI systems that work on the development of systems, AI agents that would be accepted as entirely trustworthy might be beyond our reach.

4. Parallel human faults

Like AI, human beings can get focused on a goal and press on when they should be thinking more broadly about the impact of the means they choose both on achievement of the overall goal and on the scope to achieve future goals, many of them currently unspecified.

The remedies should be the same - think more broadly and exercise good sense.

There is a reason why the remedies should be easier to implement among human beings than with AI systems. Human beings have had experience of life in which they have naturally learnt to keep an eye on the bigger picture and to be aware of what is in general prudent or imprudent. They also have definite personalities, making general considerations more concrete and more easily applicable than they would be in the absence of any such personality.

There is however also a reason why it may be difficult to make the remedies fully effective in human beings. People can be stubborn, unwilling to contemplate making even small changes to their goals, especially if they have declared their goals to other people who are supposed to take their instructions. People's egos can be too wrapped up in the achievement of goals precisely as they have been declared. While an AI agent could also be stubborn, the mechanism would be different, not involving an ego in the human sense. There would be a reasonable prospect of tweaking the software to make the AI agent more relaxed about changes to goals. Our concerns earlier were not with stubbornness, but with lack of ability to contemplate the need for changes

References

Fry, Hannah. Why AI Agents are either the best or worst thing we've ever built. Video, May 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnzR5aOElvw

Jones, Will. Rogue AI 'Helper' Deletes Company's Database After Deciding to Think for Itself. Daily Sceptic, 16 May 2026. https://dailysceptic.org/2026/05/16/rogue-ai-helper-deletes-companys-database-after-deciding-to-think-for-itself/

La Fontaine, Jean de. L'Ours et l'amateur des jardins. https://www.la-fontaine-ch-thierry.net/oursamat.htm

OpenClaw. https://openclaw.ai/ (Installing or running software is at your own risk, and is not recommended except for people who really do have the expertise to avoid dangers. As noted here, software like OpenClaw can take the initiative and do things you would not want it to do. It may not be possible to recover the situation by winding back from such actions.)

If an alien could talk

1. Wittgenstein's contention

Ludwig Wittgenstein contended that "If a lion could talk, we wouldn't be able to understand it" (Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy of Psychology - A Fragment (formerly known as Part II), section xi, page 235, paragraph 327).

For some earlier thoughts on this topic see Baron, "If a Lion Could Talk, We Could Not Understand Him". Here we shall go beyond lions to consider communication with aliens. The example will be communication between the human Ryland Grace and the alien Rocky in Andy Weir's novel Project Hail Mary. We shall base our comments on the novel, not on the 2026 film.

2. The challenge of communication

Ryland Grace and Rocky are both visiting a distant solar system, searching for something that will counter the microbe that is draining energy from their home stars. Ryland knows more physics, but Rocky has great engineering skills and access to a material of remarkable strength and versatility. In a hostile environment, they need each other. Rocky's skill in building isolated spaces and airlocks gets over the problem that each needs an environment that would kill the other - different temperatures and atmospheres. But even after they have come face to face (through a transparent and sound-conducting screen), they find that they have no language in common. Ryland speaks English. Rocky uses sounds that Ryland records as sequences of musical notes.

Two practical problems are solved in ways that are perfectly straightforward.

The first problem is that most human beings are not well enough attuned to the details of sequences of musical notes to build a large and stable vocabulary that way. Ryland uses a computer to record and analyse the sequences, and to build up a dictionary. Rocky may be presumed to have some corresponding method, although his mental powers mean that he would have no need for an external device. Indeed, his species do not have computers.

The second problem is that Rocky cannot see Ryland's gestures in the ordinary way. Members of Rocky's species do not sense light, but instead use sound transmission and reflection to build up internal models of the world that are quite as refined as sighted human beings construct using their eyes. One might ask how this could be so, given that sound waves have much longer wavelength so that their portrayal of the world would be less refined, but we can let that pass. One could for example take sound inputs from many angles and compute details of the world that way. One might also be concerned that the internal models would be structured differently from those built up by sighted human beings. That would however not matter so long as they had comparable information content.

Solutions to such practical problems do however leave us with the big problem of getting communication going when languages are completely different. How could that be achieved?

3. Getting communication going

3.1 The challenge

The challenge of establishing communication between beings that have no language in common has attracted considerable attention. A significant contribution of philosophers has been to set up the problem as one of radical translation between languages and to add the problem of radical interpretation, that is, making sense of the speakers of an unknown language by attributing mental states to them. Philosophers and others have gone on to consider how the challenge might be met.

The foundational figures in this line of enquiry are W. V. O. Quine and Donald Davidson. They both argued for the importance of the principle of charity, the gist of which is that we should try to interpret an unknown language in such a way as to lead us to see its speakers as mostly telling the truth and mostly getting things right.

If Ryland and Rocky started by trying to interact at the level of general conversation, the principle of charity would not be much help. The lives of beings from different planets, with different physical environments and sensory apparatus, would be too different for Ryland to have much sense of what truths to try to match up with Rocky's utterances.

Fortunately for Ryland, and for the plausibility of the novel, general conversation is not where the characters start. Ryland and Rocky have specific practical problems to solve, and the territory of their discourse is physics, chemistry, and engineering. Over this territory, Ryland can look in Rocky's discourse for utterances to match up with truths that are already known to Ryland.

This is not all there is to it. We must say rather more in order to make the novel plausible. But what must be added differs as between physics and chemistry on the one hand, and engineering on the other. We shall now look at each in turn.

3.2 Physics and chemistry

Physics and chemistry are, so far as we can tell, the same throughout the Universe except perhaps in certain extreme environments within which nothing elaborate enough to be either alive or conscious could endure anyway. Ryland brings considerable knowledge of these disciplines to bear, more extensive than Rocky has. For example, Rocky is unaware of relativistic effects like time dilation, and his society has not got as far as developing computers.

When thinking about the novel, the specific form of the difference in stage of development does allow us to put to one side the problem of different but equally sophisticated conceptualisations of the natural sciences. The form in question is that Rocky's science can be regarded as an earlier version of Ryland's. Given this, we can see Ryland as assuming that Rocky is expressing scientific truths, or what human beings would have regarded as scientific truths in earlier centuries. Ryland can then apply the principle of charity to make sense of what Rocky says.

We should however note in general the problem of different conceptualisations. We cannot rule out the possibility of radically different ways of doing physics or chemistry that would have made it very hard for Ryland to find truths to match up with Rocky's utterances. 

The best response to the problem of different conceptualisations might be to shift from a theoretical understanding of the world to the level at which empirical results were evident. Rather than describing what was really going on according to a given conceptualisation of physics or chemistry, we would describe perceptible procedures and their outcomes. We could then add a classification of procedures to identify those that we saw as measuring the same kind of thing - for example, rotation or temperature - and a classification of results to identify those that we regarded as related by being about the same kinds of objects, or by having analogous mathematical structures (such as linear relationships between variables).

This move to classification of the perceptible would be far from free of problems. A physics or chemistry that amounted to the classification of procedures and observations, without an underlying theory that explained the classifications, would be greatly impoverished. We might also find that different theories, possessed separately by Ryland and Rocky, would encourage different classifications. And differences of sensory apparatus might make it hard for there to be commonality even of empirical results, unless they were described in terms that were at some distance from the mere contents of perceptions - and therefore in terms that had at least some theoretical dependence, although not dependence on deep physical and chemical theory.

Despite these difficulties, we can still speculate that if there had been insufficient overlap of scientific theory, Ryland could have fallen back on looking for truths as to how to achieve practical goals, truths that he could have matched up with Rocky's utterances. There was in any case enough commonality of practical goals because both characters were on the same mission, to find an antidote to the organism that was sucking the energy out of their home stars. That goal was the same, and it implied the subsidiary goal of survival, also the same for both characters.

Such a restriction to interpretation based on common practical goals was not in fact imposed on the characters. But those practical goals were central to the story, and successful interpretation was needed in respect of both the goals and ways to achieve them. This brings us on to the field of engineering.

3.3 Engineering

The goals to be achieved by the engineering that is described in the book are ones that it is hard to think would be conceived in some other way that would be so different as to impede the development of communication. These goals include allowing Rocky and Ryland to stay in their own very different atmospheres on Ryland's spaceship, building a chain that will allow a collection device to be lowered into a planet's atmosphere, and manoevering the spaceship by repurposing small spaceships that had been provided to take material back to Earth.

Engineering does depend on physics and chemistry, and those sciences could still be subject to radically different conceptualisations. But the move to practical goals should make the differences fall away. One way to look at this would be so say that so long as there were shared types of goal, practical engineering would be realisable in the same way on top of multiple conceptualisations of physics and chemistry. Realisability in the same way would not extend to the theory of engineering, but that would not have mattered for Ryland and Rocky. Their practical goals were the same, and they were focused on practical engineering. Rocky did have a material, called xenonite, that was unknown to Ryland, but its useful property of enormous strength could easily be fitted into Ryland's conceptual scheme.

4. The next steps

We can see how Ryland and Rocky might build up communication on matters of science and engineering. But they go further. Rocky grasps human concepts such as those of sadness and sarcasm, or at least identifies concepts from his form of life that correspond to them well enough. And by the end of the novel, Ryland and Rocky are perfectly fluent in the comprehension of each other's languages. To speak Rocky's language, Ryland has to use a special musical instrument that generates the necessary sounds. But that does not represent a lack of linguistic ability, any more than would the need to use hands rather than tongue to communicate with deaf people in a sign language.

How could this degree of communication be achieved, given that the common ground of physics, chemistry and engineering was not there to support it once one moved from life as analysed scientifically to life as experienced from the inside?

We may assume that there is something in alien life corresponding to desire, and something corresponding to discomfort, where the alien versions would at a minimum have in common with the human ones that they would provide the subject with grounds for action, whether action to satisfy a desire or action to end a discomfort. Indeed, the novel assumes that much commonality. Both Ryland and Rocky have goals and are aware of what would or would not be adverse for themselves.

One could word desire and aversion in purely biological and mechanically psychological terms. An automatic vacuum cleaner can wander about a room, pursuing a goal of reaching every part and using sensors to avoid colliding with obstructions. But a big move up, available both to Ryland and to Rocky, comes with self-consciousness, an awareness that these are one's own goals and aversions, that one ought to act accordingly, and that one could choose to act differently. There is something special about a conscious imperative, conceived as an imperative to oneself and not merely conceived impersonally as a program that the organism will follow.

Once one has that crucial step in place, it is perfectly possible that one could have enough common ground with an alien species (or indeed with Wittgenstein's talking lion) to identify some of one's own concepts with some concepts in the other creature's vocabulary. The identifications would be imperfect, and considerably more so than the imperfect identifications that we make across human languages, such as happiness and bonheur, or cosiness and hygge. The imperfection in those linguistic examples reminds us that concepts like these only get their full meanings from the whole cultures in which they are embedded. And the same would be true in a more dramatic way, leading to greater imperfection of identifications, as between human and alien cultures. But imperfect identifications could still be enough to sustain conversation, albeit with occasional misunderstandings.

Finally, there is the possibility of going native. If a human being were to take up permanent residence in an alien culture, he or she could in due course come to adjust cultural expectations and ways of viewing the world and other conscious beings, until eventually he or she would be fully absorbed and there would be no question of how to identify concepts in the new culture with concepts in the old one.

References

Baron, Richard. "If a Lion Could Talk, We Could Not Understand Him". Ethical Record, volume 111, number 4, May 2006, pages 9-12. https://rbphilo.com/baron-richard-if-a-lion-could-talk.pdf

Weir, Andy. Project Hail Mary. London, Penguin, 2022 (first published in 2021).

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations, revised fourth edition. Oxford, Blackwell, 2009.

Advantageous superstitions

1. Henry Fuseli

The Swiss artist Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli, 1741-1825) made this remark:

"We are more impressed by Gothic than by Greek mythology, because the bands are not yet rent which tie us to its magic: he has a powerful hold of us, who holds us by our superstition or by a theory of honour" (Knowles, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, volume 3, aphorism 105, page 102).

The word is "superstition" in the singular. This points to our disposition to believe or fear, rather than any particular beliefs or fears. There is something dubious within us, a mode of thought that it is easy to dismiss as irrational. But it is individual superstitions that may directly steer our thoughts and actions by virtue of the hold they have on us. The disposition only matters to the extent that there are individual superstitions, the hold of which it facilitates. But then it matters a great deal, as the reason why they can have a hold.

We may think that any rational person's mentality should exclude the disposition, and that we should automatically dismiss the idea that there was anything to black cats, horseshoes, or astrology.

Here we shall ask whether this is really so. We shall propose that while the only sensible response to such traditional superstitions is indeed to dismiss them out of hand, there is more to be said about beliefs that we all accept but that come to seem optional when we look closely. They are not traditional superstitions, but they share the feature that we lack adequate grounds to think that the world really is as they indicate. Moreover, it can be advantageous for them to have a hold on us, and therefore advantageous that we have a disposition that allows such a hold.

2. Traditional superstitions

There are two perfectly good reasons to dismiss traditional superstitions out of hand.

The first reason is that, given our scientific understanding of the world, there is no plausible mechanism by which they could operate. How could a black cat affect one's fortune? How could the presence or absence of a horseshoe on the wall, or which way up it was (a point on which superstitions differ), make any difference to the course of one's life? How could the position of the Sun relative to patterns of distant stars which only appear in those patterns when viewed from the vicinity of Earth make any difference to a baby's future character? And so on. A claim that there is a mechanism we have not yet understood is a reasonable speculation when connections within the same general field are proposed, for example a claim (made before tectonic plates were understood) that there could be some geological mechanism to connect the present positions of continents with earlier positions in which they would have had a jigsaw-like fit. It is a wholly unreasonable speculation when a connection between unrelated phenomena is proposed, a claim such as one that connects a passing black cat or a pattern in the stars with the immediate or long-term course of a life.

The second reason to dismiss traditional superstitions out of hand is that they have not been tested properly, and we have a strong suspicion that if they were tested, they would fail. In order to test them, we would first define the relevant variables carefully. For example, we would define what counted as good luck or bad luck. Then we would take a large sample of people and note whether a black cat did or did not cross each person's path on a particular day. We would measure whether each person had good, bad, or indifferent luck in the week following that day. Once we took into account the negatives (no black cat) and all types of luck, we might very well find that the supposed connection between black cats and luck vanished. We cannot be sure that this would be the result, but given the first reason, the lack of plausible mechanism, it would not be surprising. And given that first reason, the onus must be on proponents of the superstition to get such a test performed if they want the rest of us to take any notice of their claim.

This does not mean that we should entirely ignore traditional superstitions. We should be aware of their psychological hold on people, even while regretting that hold. We also need to understand them and their hold in order to understand much of our art and literature. This includes modern work that draws on the hold that long-standing superstitions have, for example the writings of Angela Carter and the paintings of Leonora Carrington. But that is all.

3. Advantageous superstitions

In this section we shall give some examples of superstitions which are so useful that it is advantageous that they should have a hold on us, at least in everyday life. Their advantages will be set out in later sections.

3.1 Scientific superstitions

3.1.1 The idea of a scientific superstition

The idea of a scientific superstition may seem bizarre. Over recent millennia, science has gradually displaced superstition. And the last survivors are exposed to the challenge noted above that from a scientific point of view, there is no plausible mechanism by which portents and actions could make the results that superstitions predict any more likely than they would have been in the absence of those portents or actions.

We can however find candidates if we broaden our notion of superstition to cover beliefs that underpin our ways of grasping the world, so that they have a powerful hold on us, but that are not forced upon us by the evidence as it would appear if not viewed through the lens of those beliefs. This is not to say that contrary beliefs would be permitted by the evidence, but that the beliefs we do have would, when the evidence was viewed without their influence, seem to be optional.

It is important that the superstitions should on current evidence be seen as optional, rather than their being seen as ruled out. Traditional superstitions are ruled out by evidence, or at least probably would be if we bothered to formulate and administer rigorous tests. For example, we would very likely find that people with horseshoes fixed to their walls had lives no better than people without them, or that the disposition of constellations at the times of people's birth could not be correlated with either their characteristics or the courses of their lives. The scientific superstitions we have in mind are not so vulnerable. Scientific progress might eventually lead us to regard them as false rather than optional, but we are not there yet.

3.1.2 Causation

Our first example is causation. We observe causes and effects, and rely on causal predictions, every day. Yet as David Hume pointed out, this may be just a habit of the mind. We repeatedly see event C followed by event E, and take it that C is the cause of E. But we do not see the causal power that necessitates E once C has occurred (Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, section 7). Bertrand Russell, whose objections were wider-ranging and on the whole more technical than Hume's, wrote that "The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm" ("On the Notion of Cause", page 180). Belief in the reality of causation appears to be optional, and indeed its presence in fundamental physics is at best a shadow of its presence in everyday life. It seems as though we could get by with regularities along with confidence that they were underwritten by something or other. (They would have to be underwritten by something for the Universe to be sufficiently well-behaved for us to have evolved.) And neither Hume nor Russell objected to our noting regularities and acting on the basis that they would probably recur. But we take the option of identifying causation as that which underwrites the regularities. For this reason, causation is a superstition in our extended sense.

We do here speak of causation in the sense in which most people would understand it, including some sort of necessitation that distinguishes it from accidental regularity. Philosophers have developed other theories of causation, such as conterfactualism, dispositionalism, and process theories, and some have turned the emphasis from what causation really is to what we mean when we make causal claims, while others have been ambitiously anti-realist about causation. But such theories do not make inroads into the consciousness of most of us when we recognise individual instances of causation. We naturally think in terms of causes pushing parts of the world so that the usual effects occur. Moreover, the equations that the natural sciences offer us, equations that set out how systems evolve over time, do not in themselves satisfy our natural sense of parts of the world pushing other parts, even though one might think of the direction of time as the direction of causality.

It is belief in causation that is optional, not use of the concept. In most of the sciences and in everyday life, we have to identify events as causes of other events. It is only when we are challenged that we bring our assumption of causation to consciousness and turn it into a belief. It is then that we are driven to reflect on whether our talk of causes is legitimate. Indeed it is at that point that we may reflect on and choose between the various available theories of causation. Our regular avoidance of such debates is facilitated by the fact that we tend to focus on specific events, rather than on causation as a general notion. We say "this caused that", rather than "here is an instance of causation".

3.1.3 Free will

Our second example is free will. For most of us, it is essential to our images of ourselves and our understanding of people and social relations that we assume free will in an uncomplicated sense, without getting into the formulations that compatibilists offer in response to the challenge that the physical world offers only determinism and randomness and that the mental supervenes on the physical. We have to take it that our inner sense of freedom at the moment of decision corresponds to the reality of the world. There are some people who study the neurology and the philosophy and then say "I am a determinist, free will is an illusion, and compatibilist guidance control does not even come close to amounting to the free will that I deny". But this attitude is unlikely to be easy to sustain in daily life. Most of us are much happier retaining our uncomplicated assumption of free will.

We shall therefore regard belief in free will, the belief that arises when we bring our assumption to consciousness, as a superstition in our extended sense. It is a popular belief. It also has a powerful hold, in the sense that if a philosopher tells us we are mistaken we will cling to it as long and as firmly as we can. But given the controversy, free will cannot be regarded as established fact. And the belief lies somewhere between belief in causation and traditional superstitions in its vulnerability to turning out not even to be optional but having to be discarded. Our knowledge of neurons, and the natural assumption that the mental supervenes on the physical, for lack of anything else on which it might supervene or any plausible mechanism that would allow it not to supervene on anything, together place belief in free will at specific and substantial risk.

As with causation, it is only belief in free will that is optional. Its assumption in daily life, an assumption that does not generally involve explicit assent to its existence, is all but inevitable.

3.2 Ethical superstition

We tend to regard ethical rules as at least provisionally binding, and not as mere suggestions that may be ignored whenever that would happen to suit our preferences. We could say that the rules that commanded general support were the ones that were binding on us individually, with the preferences of the majority being the ground of their binding nature. But that might not do. It would not allow for a whole society to be collectively ethically misguided. We feel most comfortable with a largely unspoken assumption that ethical rules are grounded in some facts about the world that hold independently of what we currently happen to think. That is, we incline to some form of ethical objectivism. (This is not the same as objectivism in the sense associated with Ayn Rand, although we might see Rand's objectivism as an example of the more general objectivism that we have in mind.)

It is when we are challenged on our assumption of ethical objectivism that the assumption turns into a conscious belief. Then we find that there is an unresolved debate. There are plenty of philosophers who regard the belief as correct, although it takes different forms in the views of different thinkers. But there are also plenty of philosophers who think the belief is incorrect, and who offer a wide range of objections.

The existence of serious challenges to ethical objectivism means that we cannot regard it as established fact. There might not be any ethical rules that were binding for reasons other than our individual or shared preferences. And yet the idea that there are such rules has a powerful hold on us. We do not stop to think that there might not be any objective rules when we routinely praise some conduct and condemn other conduct. So the belief that there are such rules is a superstition in our extended sense. Quasi-realists might say that it was a superstition that was indeed mistaken, rather than one that might be mistaken, but they would in their own way endorse recognition of the strong hold that the superstition had on us.

As to vulnerability, this superstition is too far in its nature from the natural sciences to be exposed to scientific testing of the sort that might force its abandonment. It cannot be located on the scale of vulnerability that runs from belief in causation, through belief in free will, to traditional superstitions. Nonetheless, we cannot be confident that those who reject ethical objectivism are mistaken.

It is also not easy to say that while belief in ethical objectivism is optional, its assumption in the daily life in which it is not made explicit is all but inevitable. There does seem to be real scope for a day-to-day attitude that ethical rules are to be followed without thinking of them as objective. We could be conscious prescriptivists without disturbing our pattern of life.

4. Limits to optionality

4.1 Scientific superstitions

The world appears to us as if causation and free will are real, and we act accordingly. We have to dig some way into our scientific understanding to raise doubts. And even then, we are not forced to deny their reality. The arguments against their reality may be strong, but they are not logically conclusive, and we could always try the escape route of saying that our scientific understanding might be a misunderstanding.

The upshot is that we cannot regard causation and free will as definitely real. Belief in them is optional in that while the world appears as it would if they were real, that appearance might arise without their being real.

This is however a limited form of optionality. We are not driven to belief in the reality of causation and free will. We are however driven to acceptance of their reality in everyday life, and for causation in a great deal of science, and for free will in the routine psychological understanding of people. There is no suggestion that it would be practical to get back to the underlying detail of reality and work with that in order to eliminate use of the concept of causation, or use of broad-brush psychological concepts like the concept of voluntary decision.

4.2 Ethical superstition

Most of us live as if ethical rules had more objectivity than our individual or collective preferences, taking that objectivist attitude both to guide our own conduct (or at least to feel bad about conduct that breaks the rules) and to comment on other people's conduct. If we dive into philosophical arguments, we become less sure of this. Yet we can see that even if we were to reject objectivism we could go on conducting ourselves in the same ways, so long as we did not at moments of decision think that the rules only represented preferences and were therefore trivial to ignore. Thus the belief in objectivity is optional, but ridding ourselves of the unconscious assumption of objectivity would be mentally inconvenient. It would also be risky unless an unconscious dedication to prescriptivism were substituted.

5. The respectability of belief

5.1 Scientific superstitions

Belief in the reality of causation and free will comes across as perfectly respectable. These beliefs are very widely shared, either explicitly when people consider them or implicitly when they are simply assumed, and their assumption has turned out to be very useful in navigating the natural and the human world. There is no reason to worry that systematic testing at the level at which they are put to work, as distinct from a deep exploration of physics or neurology, would instantly demolish the beliefs. In relation to free will, the Libet experiments and their successors come closest to such demolition, but they relate to very circumscribed choices like pushing buttons, and their interpretation is contested.

This is not to say that these beliefs should go unchallenged. Pressure to examine them closely can be brought to bear by philosophers as well as scientists. There are differing views of the nature of causation, and differing views as to what is actually claimed if one asserts its reality. Turning to free will, debates over the extent to which people are responsible for their actions lead us to ask what kind of free will can really be attributed to human beings. But most of the time, we get by perfectly well with straightforward and unsophisticated assumption of the reality of causation and free will.

5.2 Ethical superstition

Similar things could be said about belief in the objectivity of ethical rules. The implicit assumption of that belief is very widely shared, and it plays an important role in everyday life. The belief is also not vulnerable unless we conduct serious philosophical argument. Even then, it is only placed in doubt, not refuted. And most of the time it is taken for granted, not expressed in any way that would put it up as a target for debate. The belief can and sometimes should be debated, but we can get by perfectly well without having such debates all the time.

6. The virtue of belief

6.1 Scientific superstitions

It is not merely convenient to believe in or assume the reality of causation and free will. Doing so can be a condition of certain enquiries into the nature of the world, enquiries that we can expect to be fruitful. Someone who believes in or assumes the reality of causation will ask of some phenomenon what causes it, and may find an answer that he or she would not have found otherwise. Someone who thinks that people make their own choices will be motivated to investigate the psychology of choice, and will look for humanistic rather than mechanistic answers. This will not only make the answers more comprehensible. It will also greatly improve the prospects for getting answers that are of real interest and use. If we insisted on thinking in the mechanistic terms of neurons, the prospects for getting fully explanatory answers in relation to particular decisions would be remote.

What we have just said may make it seem that the scientific superstitions that concern us are no more than heuristic tools, rendering their superstitious nature harmless because it will not infect substantive claims that are consciously made. But this is not quite so. If one starts by saying "Let us pretend that there is causation", or "Let us pretend that there is free will", one will not be able to say that one has established the cause of the phenomenon of interest, or the psychology of free human choice. If research is built on a pretence, the fact that it is a pretence will undermine the status of results that also reflect the pretence. If a researcher when presenting results speaks of causes or free choices, any sense that the words used reflect pretences will cut the ground from under the results. This problem is averted when results are presented in terms that do not reflect the pretence inherent in some heuristic tool, but with causes and free choices, the problem is likely to arise. So the researcher must believe rather than pretend, or at least put awareness of pretence out of mind.

If the assumption of scientific superstitions is a high road to results, a willingness to assume them may be regarded as an epistemic virtue of a responsibilist kind. It may sit alongside virtues such as creativity and inquisitiveness when they are taken as virtues that drive enquiry forward, virtues in the context of discovery, rather than virtues that lead one to subject claims to rigorous evaluation, virtues in the context of justification. So we can celebrate our disposition to rely on superstitions that are not forced upon us by the evidence, but that are immensely useful in advancing our understanding of the world.

We can however only celebrate this disposition so long as it is kept under control. If some scientific superstition turned out to be ruled out by a combination of our evidence and theories that were well-supported, it would have to be discarded. Any results that were formulated in terms that assumed its correctness would then have to be reformulated. Less drastically, if a scientific superstition turned out to be less useful than one might have hoped, perhaps encouraging research that took us down dead ends, it would have to be called into question given that it was not in itself forced upon us by evidence.

We must also emphasise that the virtue in question here is virtue in the pursuit of knowledge, not virtue in the giving of psychological comfort. The cheering effect of wishful thinking, or a belief that a lucky charm or a treatment that happens to be a placebo will aid recovery from a medical condition, might be thought to make such states of mind virtuous, or make the encouragement of them in other people virtuous. But that is not what we have in mind here, quite apart from the fact that it is prima facie unlikely that virtue would really be found in such states of mind rather than in a robust respect for truth.

6.2 Ethical superstition

The virtue of belief in or the unconscious assumption of ethical objectivism is clear. We are encouraged to take our obligations seriously, so that we get along together. Constant doubt about the status of ethical rules would make us less reliable neighbours and colleagues than we actually are.

7. The grounds of usefulness

7.1 Scientific superstitions

7.1.1 Broad-brush work

Scientific superstitions most obviously gain their usefulness from the fact that it would be counterproductive to get down to the microscopic detail of the world, even assuming (which may not be the case) that there would be a microscopic level that would capture all the basic facts upon which everything else supervened and that if we had arbitrarily great computational power it would be possible to investigate all the phenomena of interest in the world by working at that level.

That is, superstitions are a way to work at a broad-brush level. They are not the only way to do so. One could work with concepts that bore a close computational relationship to what would be seen at the microscopic level. This is for example what is done in statistical mechanics. Scientific superstitions, by contrast, are set out and put to work using new concepts that are not inherent in the microscopic detail. Their applicability is at closest emergent from what would be seen at the microscopic level, and perhaps not even that.

(We note, but shall not here pursue, the thought that if it were not even possible to identify emergence, it would be arguable that the relevant scientific superstitions were not optional, but were straightforwardly correct theories of the relevant aspects of the world. The starting point for the argument would be that they were not eliminable, even hypothetically on an assumption of arbitrarily great ability to collect data and arbitrarily great computational power.)

7.1.2 Structuring reality

The concepts used to formulate superstitions allow us to structure the world at a high level of abstraction. This is an aspect of working at a broad-brush level, but the aspect of structure deserves particular attention.

The classic notion of the use of concepts to structure reality is that of Immanuel Kant, for whom the world would be unintelligible if we did not use the obvious tools of spatial and temporal ordering, the identification of causal relationships, and so on.

Kant's approach was at the heart of a complex metaphysic that put the world as it was in itself wholly and permanently outside our grasp. Even if he had seen the depths to which modern physics penetrated reality, he would have maintained that this was so. Theories that identified fundamental particles and fields, and that made computations of the structure of spacetime, would still only show us the world as it appeared to us, not the world as it was in itself.

We do not need to follow Kant in order to understand the power of scientific superstition, but our attitude to scientific superstitions does have something of the flavour of his approach.

We can see scientific superstitions as giving more structure to our image of the world than it would otherwise have. Events are related by causation. Circumstances and human actions are put in clear patterns in relation to one another by use of the concept of free choice. And when we have found structuring devices that work, such as these superstitions, our belief in their correctness is encouraged.

They work not merely by making sense of what we currently observe, but also by facilitating progress. Once we have a stable picture of the world, we can re-apply the superstitions to formulate new hypotheses and then test them. We look for what caused what, or for how a subject thought through the options before making some free choice.

7.2 Ethical superstition

A belief in or assumption of the objectivity of ethical rules has the great benefit that it will support compliance without too much consideration of alternative rules, thereby sustaining a harmonious and pleasant society.

This psychological and sociological result is enough to make the superstition useful. The ultimate ground of usefulness is that people are responsive to what they perceive as binding rules, and are happy to have their interactions with others given some structure and predictability.

On the other hand, it is a short step from belief in or assumption of the objectivity of ethical rules to refusal to countenance changes to them. We sometimes need to ease up on a devotion to ethical objectivism in order to make progress. Historically it has been those who identify a supposed conscious source of objectivity, by asserting the existence of a divine lawgiver, who have been the chief obstacles to ethical progress.

8. Maintaining belief

There is no mystery about how we come to believe in or assume causation, or free will, or the objectivity of ethical rules. These beliefs or assumptions are held by people generally, and we just absorb them in the course of growing up.

What is mysterious is that the beliefs can survive recognition that while they might be correct, they might equally well be incorrect, and indeed that there are strong although not wholly persuasive arguments against them. Causation is vestigial in serious physics. Free will is at risk from the presumably mechanical operation of neurons together with the highly plausible view that the mental supervenes on the physical. And when we start to ask how ethical rules might be objective, and what strange kinds of facts might support ethical rules, we see that a claim to their objectivity would need far more substantial defences than a mere habit of belief or assumption.

Despite these risks, it may be perfectly acceptable to resolve to think and act as though the superstitions were correct. They have after all not been ruled out, and if inference to the best explanation can include in its evaluation of explanations their success in everyday life, they have a lot going for them. But as already noted, anything that smacked of pretence to correctness, of an attitude that it was merely as if they were correct, would risk undermining conclusions that were worded in the same terms as the superstitions.

So on what basis could superstitions that might be correct but the correctness of which was easy to doubt be upheld in a way that was strong enough not to undermine conclusions expressed in their terms? Let us consider two options.

The first option would be some form of doxastic voluntarism. We might simply choose to accept the superstitions in a sufficiently strong form of acceptance, because they were so useful. Voluntarism is however contentious. Belief is supposed to aim at truth, so it should be driven by the state of the world and not by our desires, not even noble desires to advance our knowledge and to live in harmony.

The second option would simply to resign ourselves to the psychological inevitability of the superstitions. Their hold on us is powerful not just because we have been brought up with them, but because they play large roles in our ways of life. As David Hume pointed out, philosophical doubts are only to be sustained in one's study, and are quickly abandoned once one enters into everyday society (A Treatise of Human Nature, book 1, part 4, section 7, page 269).

In relation to the ethical superstition of objectivism, the option of doxastic voluntarism would be the one we would be likely to select when placed on the defensive, and might even seem respectable. In the context of ethics, there is a degree of willingness to see an act of voluntary commitment as intellectually respectable. There is however a delicate balance to be maintained. Objectivism requires facts, and while it is certainly possible (and indeed admirable) to make a voluntary commitment to accept the facts whatever they may turn out to be, it is dubious to make a voluntary commitment to specific supposed facts in advance of receiving sufficient evidence. It is precisely the objectivist nature of the ethical superstition that should make us doubt whether voluntary commitment would be respectable.

Turning to scientific superstitions, the option of resignation to psychological inevitability would be the one we would be more likely to select when placed on the defensive. The very idea of doxastic voluntarism is manifestly antithetical to the project of finding out about the world.

Having thus resigned ourselves, we would also resign ourselves to not doubting the respectability of conclusions that we reached and that were worded in the same terms as were used in scientific superstitions, such as causal terms or the terms of free choice. Doubts that should perhaps have been transmitted from the superstitions to our expression of the conclusions would simply find no foothold in our consciousness.

This would however not suffice to make the conclusions as expressed in ways that took scientific superstitions for granted undoubtedly respectable. They would remain under the same shadow of doubt as the superstitions. But if we are to make progress in understanding the world with our limited capacity to handle microscopic detail, we must put up with that because we have to use concepts that are not forced upon us by the microscopic detail of the world and do not capture that detail. As noted above, this is not merely a matter of averaging out detail, but of conceiving the world in different ways. And we should not assume that if our brains (or our artificial intelligence systems) had arbitrarily great computational power, this need to move away from microscopic detail would end. That need might reflect limitations in principle, rather than merely in practice, of microscopic mathematical modelling or of its power to capture the nature of the world.

So the hold of advantageous scientific superstitions on us may very well be inevitable both now and in the future, either for ever or until some fundamentally new way of grasping the nature of the world is introduced. We are undoubtedly better graspers of the nature of the world for having abandoned traditional superstitions. But we are not perfect.

References

Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature, second edition, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge and revised by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1978.

Hume, David. Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, third edition, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge and revised by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1975.

Knowles, John. The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, 3 volumes. London, Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831.

Russell, Bertrand. "On the Notion of Cause". Chapter 9 of Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays. London, George Allen and Unwin, 1959.