What’s the difference between a fact and a value judgement? The answer, of course, is ‘Miaow’ – at least, if you ask my neighbor’s cat. Suppose the cat to be speaking for Hume or Kant or Moore or some other such non-tabby. Let M be the set of all instantiations of Miaow meanings re. fact value hiatus as cognized and received in a given decision context by Roberto Unger. The question arises, is there any fact, in that decision context, which, with some Bayesian probability, is also a value judgement? Suppose there is only one possible way the world can be such that a given fact is true iff a semantically identical deontic proposition is implemented. Here, the value judgement is the condition for the fact. Relaxing the assumption of only one possible world, we can get a Bayesian debate re. the probability that a value is a fact, based on the available M which is uniquely resolved for every Unger. In this sense, Unger’s M, for some given decision situation, includes the null element. Is it possible to classify all value judgments according to how close they come to the nearest possible fact? If so, M is well ordered provided values are. This suggests a relationship to stochastic dominance in inference based decision theory such that for some given ‘value-aversion’ or ‘fact-aversion’, we can devise a heuristic which has the effect of turning any value judgement into a factual statement with an ‘error term’ related to distance from the null element. In other words, if one fact is a value judgement and it is possible to rank value judgements according to how different they are from the ‘closest possible’ fact, then all value judgements are facts with a bigger or smaller error term and are, for any given degree of value aversion or adhesion, more or less stochastically dominated.
Another approach, which might converge on the above, is to think of Putnam fact/value entanglement as legitimating mixed strategy choice. In this case considerations of Evolutionary stability yield a ranking over M.
The good news is that we can now get rid of the cat’s Miaow and the philosopher’s message it encodes. Why? Well, how does it help us to keep pulling the tail of the cat and hearing it say Miaow? We can proceed in an ad hoc manner till, like the cat, we get bored and saunter off over the rooftops. One good reason to do so, is that the calculus of inference based stochastic dominance and/or the evolutionarily stability of mixed-strategies has the effect of cashing out Putnam fact/value entanglement as something more or less antinomian if not De Maistre’s theory of sacrifice.
Unger, however, is not Hume or Kant or even Putnam. He believes in
1) ‘infinite personality‘- not multiple personalities as arising from conflicting drives but infinite personality arising out of a sort of conatus of divine discontent- coz, obviously, we have infinite cognitive processing capacity and don’t need to eat to fuel our brains which, magically, are totally hysteresis free and like always shortest path ergodic and able to bitchslap math till P=NP and other cool stuff of that sort. Unger is constrained to believe impossible things about our brains because he rejects ontological dysphoria as a possible expression of human freedom which, for some reason, has to feel at home in this world or else it won’t get any pudding and be sent straight up to bed. By contrast, I can believe I have low cognitive power in this world but ‘infinite personality’ across possible and impossible worlds- but this cashes out as not feeling at home in this world- that’s ontological dysphoria- which Unger thinks is real, real bad and evil and will probably cause hair to grow on my palms and lead to blindness.
If it’s ‘wrong’ to be ontologically dysphoric, you can throw away information about preferences while still pretending to be doing Democratic Social Choice- but that erases the fact/value distinction at the get go. This aint Philosophy, it’s prejudice.
2) some sort of ‘real’ Time which evolves and so isn’t really many fingered and has no truck with that Possible Worlds bullshit- i.e. this is a brutalist ‘anything goes’ Presentism, wholly at odds with the fin de siecle, fin du globe, Proustian pathos of Bergsonian duration and which, as such, only attracts Tim Maudlin or Lee Smolin type Soft Left senile delinquents. Essentially, in Unger’s conception of Time, nothing inter-personal is conserved, Noether’s theorem gains no purchase, so we know the system is dissipative- it throws away information. But, that’s the same thing as erasing the fact/value distinction. But in that case Smolin, Woits et al needn’t actually do any Physics to say String theory is not even wrong because human beings have no right way to agree something is wrong. Thus the only game in town is declaring a theory to be ontologically dysphoric because it isn’t dedicated to ‘making itself at home in the World’- itself constrained to be Unger’s moral gymnasium.
Still, on the basis of the above two premises, if Unger thinks the cat’s miaow stands for his own theory, then does something real cool happen such that we get a genuinely prescriptive ‘super-theory’ out of just plain old pi-jaw?
One reason to think so is that, on Unger’s assumptions, human passions are Divinized, while Time (that is Evolution that is hysteresis that is Ontological dysphoria) is put firmly into a box marked ‘don’t open till Xmas- or else’.
Thus the cat’s Miaow is now the voice of that God who creates us and sustains us and to whom we return in death. But only for Unger who, having successfully erased the fact/ value distinction, felt able to become the Minister for Strategic Corruption under Lula in Brazil and to hand out Govt. money to various random shitheads- not because it was fun or the optimal mixed strategy but because it was like EMPOWERING DEMOCRACY and finding a THIRD WAY and other such shite.
Still he came out against Obama in 2012, so at least we know he isn’t Mormon. The moral of this story is- don’t waste your money on books by Harvard Professors who erase the fact value distinction. Cut out the middle-man! Just listen to your neighbor’s cat. If only in this sense, it really is talking to you.
What is happening here? Did Putnam really want the Derrida acolyte to pass him the butter or was his real purpose to signal an intention to bugger with his brains Brando style? Now it is true that Putnam actually ate the butter that the Derridista passed him but was it not to recruit himself for the purpose of buggering with the young fellow’s brains? Yet, given that Putnam’s life-project can’t decompose facts from values might not the reverse be the case- i.e. that Putnam’s quest for butter drives his buggering with brains rather than the other way round? Putnam thinks that a theory which returns the same answer to anything it analyses is not a theory. Yet nothing else is. The point about paying money to get a Credential as a theorist is that your output is predictable and thus marketable or rent yielding as Bourdieusian capital. Assuming the fitness landscape changes unpredictably, as must be the case if Life evolved, it does not matter if a particular theory is incoherent and silly so long as it as it always returns the same answer under any perturbation of the Social Information Set. Some Theory will be objectively- i.e. instrumentally- better than every other, irrespective of its incoherence and silliness, so it makes sense for Society to devote a very small amount of its total resources to feeding and clothing Theorists because of a Newcomb or Kavka’s toxin type problem facing Society such that strategically simulated belief in an Theorist- i.e. a guy who always says the same thing yet also believes he is a smart oracle- yields better or more stable correlated equlibria.
Perhaps a truly Private Language is impossible because, as Wittgenstein argued, we would have no way to check we were using a word properly. I suppose one way round the problem is to engage an auditor to maintain a Dictionary and a Grammar and so on for your Private Language and perhaps Relationships and Communities have evolved to provide that ‘external audit’ function. What about Public discourse, or what is called ‘Public Reason theory’? Is there a way to be sure it will always be meaningful? If so, then it is sensible to speak of a Rawlsian ‘Public Justification Principle’ – whereby everybody has ‘sufficient reason’ to back every Law- because absent a ‘well-ordering’ of Social States ‘sufficient reason’ faces a halting problem- i.e. Public Reason theory wouldn’t be meaningful in any Public sense. Applying Binmore’s ‘folk theorem’ -whereby there is always some game theoretic mechanism to replace the need for external coercion- we can get away from some of the problems in that literature and focus on the basic question of whether, under the most benign possible circumstances, Public signals and Private signifying exhibit a symmetry relationship such that something we can all agree to call ‘Meaning’ is minimally conserved. One way to prove that this can be the case is to attempt a General Equilibrium Analysis of ‘externally audited’ Private language and its aggregation as Public signals. A naive way of expressing Noether’s theorem, for non dissipative systems, is to say that the existence of a conserved property or Law is evidence of a Symmetry or vice versa. Thus, for Classical or Marxist Economics, ‘Labor’ and ‘Capital’ are meaningful terms and ‘Laws’- like the Iron Law of Wages- can be derived or, at a higher level of complexity, the project of a Sraffian Economics, or a Hilary Putnam/Amartya Sen type normative Economics can be sustained. This is of general interest, because, for Neo-Classical Economics, a scandal, in the shape of the Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu theorem, has arisen such that its notion of General Equilibrium becomes empty or ‘anything goes’- i.e. we have a non-dissipative system, under standard assumptions of individual rationality, or even homothetic preferences, such that no testable hypotheses arise nor is there any way of telling if the Economy is behaving pathologically. Of course, one way out is simply to say that one wants whatever outcome one is lumbered with. All states of the Universe are gross substitutes for each other. Perhaps, in some mystic or teleological sense this is actually the case for states of the World, but, surely, Discourse isn’t exclusively or even mainly about states of the World? Sir Alfred Sherman once said ‘A Bishop who stops believing in God can go in for Socialism or Sodomy but an Economist who renounces faith in his profession is unemployable’ Well, we know he was wrong about Economists, they can always toss coins for Big Finance or shill for Micro Finance or grow fins for an ornamental Think Tank or bottom feed as part of a Credentialist Academic Ponzi scheme, but surely a champion of Public Discourse can’t afford a similar agnosticism with respect to whether Language itself breaks public signalling/private signifying symmetries and simply throws away information?
Is there any way forward- perhaps work being done in some discipline I haven’t heard of- such that Public Discourse doesn’t cash out as pathological memetics which acts as enabler for all the mischievous Preference Falsification Avalability Cascades that have plagued us over the last 20 years? I don’t know- but I’d sure to love to find out. I wish I could be optimistic about the answer, but given the invidious nature, for Economics, of problems of aggregation- e.g. the Capital controversy between the 2 Cambridges’, or the well known problems of Social Choice- the greater likelihood seems to me to be that Public Discourse is doomed to either a Procrustean bed of ideology, such that polysemy is constrained, and symmetries are artificially enforced or else to an ‘anything goes’ emptiness unable to gauge its own morbidity or seek for its own cure.
Vampires like human blood. Humans are willing to sell blood, preferably that of somebody else, for a price. So long as Vampires are willing to sell their services to humans- say as night-watchmen-the conditions for a co-operative equilibrium exists. However Vampires may be very impulsive by nature and so their ‘time-preference’ may be too extreme to permit them making binding contracts. However, since Vampires by their nature are immortal, it follows that so long as they have non zero phenotypal polymorphism- i.e. so long as small differences in ‘time preference’ exist in that species- then there must be an evolutionarily stable equilibrium in which some older vampires kill young vampires for humans in return for a steady supply of blood. The problem here is that this is a ‘repugnancy market’- Vampires may feel it infra dig to do deals with humans and humans may find it disgusting to live peacefully with their historic predators- and so irrational barriers or restrictions may arise which make the co-operative equilibrium infeasible. The TV show, ‘True Blood’ deals with a synthetic food for Vampires which allows them to ‘come out of their coffins’ and enter Civil Society by getting rid of the overt repugnancy cost associated with blood sucking. However this is an unstable equilibrium on both sides for purely thymotic reasons and, in the current episode, militant Vampires are planning to dynamite the ‘True Blood’ factories so as to restore overt repugnancy costs and set the stage for a final conflict between the dead and the living. From the human point of view, what lies at the root of this repugnance? Is it that something which is dead is having commerce with the living? The same ‘repugnancy cost’ was associated with usury- the notion that ‘dead’ money can multiply in the same way as cattle or sheep. At a later stage, Marx introduced the idea that Capital- i.e. some fungible asset vital to the production process- was ‘dead labor’ and that it was morally repugnant that Capitalist Vampires get to dictate how and when and where ‘living’ Labor is to be employed.
More broadly, we can say that anything created before today which nevertheless has a bearing on our present decisions, is an example of the ‘dead hand’ of something or other constraining us in a morally repugnant way. Let us take an example. Suppose a new Bank wants to set up its H.Q. in the City of London. The Govt. could say ‘look, the City of London already has plenty of Banks. Why don’t you set up in Liverpool?’ The Bank may reply- ‘It is precisely because there are plenty of other Banks in London that we need to set up there. London has ‘external economies of scope and scale’, for the Banking industry.’
The Govt. may reply (and in the Seventies quite often did reply) ‘but these ‘external economies’ are merely a historical accident. Why should we let the ‘dead hand’ of Capitalism’s vampirical past dictate the future shape of Britain?’ Moving away from Govts., in the de-regulated Eighties, we find a lot of factually inaccurate memes cropping up which protested against ‘lock-in’ inefficiency by reason of historical accident. Thus, people asked- Why should we be stuck with the qwerty key-board? It was only introduced to slow down professional typists who might otherwise type too fast and break the primitive machines which were available a Century ago. Why should the ‘dead hand’ of past typewriter technology constrain us to a sub-optimal keyboard which, going forward, imposes an ever rising Social Cost? (Actually, qwerty reduced jams and thus enabled people to type faster.) Similar, generally mistaken, points were often made about VHS vs. Betamax or the Windows Operating System and so on- i.e. there was a notion that ‘historical accident’ had got us stuck with an inferior product because producers were too stupid or unimaginative or downright sucky to understand that they needed to be competitive just as much against potential rivals as actual rivals.
Why did these ‘memes’ gain such widespread and unquestioning currency? Is it because of an irrational repugnancy cost attaching to the notion that ‘the dead past’ still constrains us modern, living, human beings?
In Economics, ‘lock-in’ effects are studied under the rubric of ‘hysteresis’ or ‘path dependence’. One reason why Moral Philosophers were attracted to ‘Neo-Classical’ Welfare Economics was because it used hysteresis-free models. This meant that the opportunity cost of breaking with the past- what we might term hysteresis costs- was set to zero. Thus, a playground was created where all manners of pseudo repugnancy costs could be conjured out of thin air. Any form of intersubjective Just Proceeding, that is widely acknowledged as such, is going to have hysteresis effects as it is a sort of moving target for successive co-ordination problems. But, by simply ignoring hysteresis- the way most Economists do in their models (because hysteresis is less mathematically tractable)- Moral Philosophers got to re-label every form of Just Proceeding as an example of a grievous injustice. The comedy here is that Philosophy’s own in-built path dependence is the reason it has been shunned by all sensible people and not just starting from Aristophanes either. But this itself is an example of a hysteresis cost becoming the basis of an irrational repugnancy effect! Equally, had philosophers been alert to the hysteresis ridden nature of their own profession, they wouldn’t have made fools of themselves by so sedulously manufacturing bogus repugnancy costs! This stricture applies not just to Moral Philosophy but also to every Philosophically informed Methodenstriet (dispute over what constitutes proper methodology and thus what results can be thought of as valid) such that there was a repugnancy cost attached to truths only derivable by one method of proceeding or which violated some preferred ontology. Empirical results, e.g. experimental confirmation of Bell’s inequality, ought to have killed this sort of Philosophy off, but the evidence is it didn’t.
As a case in point, Putnam argues that the Many Worlds interpretation is wrong because any time there’s a Schrodinger’s cat type situation then, no matter what the probability of the cat being killed, half of the observers across multiple worlds will see a dead cat. This because there are only two possible worlds- dead cat and live cat world. What about a sequence of Schrodinger experiments- so we have sequences of dead or live cats? Surely, the Universe splits every time the Schrodinger box is opened such that you have a bunch of these Universes out there. Putnam asks ‘What is the probability in the naive sense—not the ‘‘probability’’ in the quantum mechanical sense, this real number which I calculate by finding the square of the absolute value of a certain vector, but the probability in the sense of the number of my future histories in which I will observe that, say,( the cat was dead) half of the time plus or minus 5% of the time divided by the total number of my future histories?’ Putnam thinks it very strange that this naive probability is 50 percent and not whatever the chance of getting a dead cat was according to the Q.M probability theory. Yet, what else could it be? These multiple worlds (generated by the experimental sequence) differ only according to the criteria dead cat/ live cat. In every other respect they are indistinguishable. Putnam is ascribing a repugnancy cost to the Many Worlds interpretation based on discerning a bogus hysteresis. To see why, consider the following- is there anything in Many Worlds which constrains the arrow of Time to a particular direction? If your answer is yes, then Putnam is right- there is some sensible use of the word ‘probability’ such that he can say ‘On the Many Worlds interpretation, quantum mechanics is the first physical theory to predict that the observations of most observers will disconfirm the theory.’ In other words, if path dependence is a feature of Many Worlds, then its use has a repugnancy cost. But, if Many Worlds is hysteresis free- i.e. if it says there’s a block Multiverse containing all the possible worlds- then Putnam’s use of the word ‘probability’ is not logically coherent. As a matter of fact, Many Worlds doesn’t have to make any ontological commitments at all and can plume itself as a paradigm of, hysteresis free, ‘logically coherent thought’
Bearing this in mind and returning to take a closer look at repugnancy markets- prostitution, abortion, drug dealing etc.- the problem with each of these is that once hysteresis effects are taken into account, the picture changes. In each case, the relevant information- viz. was this particular act of prostitution/abortion/drug dealing, welfare and capability enhancing or was it deleterious?- is difficult to extract because it is so highly correlated with everything else that was happening or had happened or was likely to happen. Contemplating this mess we find there are no easy answers. It may be that licensing a repugnancy market reduces the social evil and enables Society to move more quickly to a better path in which that evil diminishes to a purely medical problem affecting very small numbers of people. On the other hand, it could happen that a small increase in the Social evil has a run-away effect. How are we to know in advance what sort of attractors are lurking in our vicinity on the fitness landscape? Might not hysteresis effects save us from disaster? But is it not somehow repugnant that we can even ask ourselves this question? Whatever are we to do?
The answer, of course, is watch more TV, because the Series Finale of ‘True Blood’, will reveal that beverage not to have been synthetic at all. It was ordinary human blood purchased from willing humans out of wages paid by humans to Vampire night-guard guild. This guild contains the oldest Vampires with lowest time preference. They secretly manipulated the militant Vampires to blow up the True Blood factories not so as to re-establish overt repugnancy costs and thus drive a wedge between the dead and the living, but to show that repugnancy costs are irrational and ought to be abandoned when a stable co-operative equilibrium exists. Thus it turns out the ‘True Blood’ fraud had two objectives 1) to get the dead and living used to living together 2) to shake out the low time preference or high repugnancy cost militants and hate-mongers on both sides.
My question is, once this co-operative Utopia is established, would sex with Vampires still be hot? No. Not at all. Think about it, what would women need tampons for if Vampires were on tap?
Shapley’s well deserved Nobel win has been a long time coming. I know geniuses like him don’t need Nobels but it is worth pausing a moment on an occasion like this to think about how India might have been different if people of my generation- or that of Gurcharan Das, for that matter- had not gone Gadarening after Amartya Sen and John Rawls and now Martha Nussbaum and Hilary Putnam and so forth, rather than Coase and Tiebout and Shapley and Buchanan who, I think, are right about Wicksteed & Choice and thus immune to pointless palaver over what the word ‘Cost’ means- i.e. dining philosophers starving to death for caught in a concurrency deadlock. Still maybe these hunger artists on Ivy League catwalks were doing Gandhian dharna so my Hindu instinct was to worship them. My own antipathy to Shapley is summarized by this extract from my novel Samlee’s daughter-
In other words, since Shapley’s work is very useful and highly relevant to India, it must be ‘Right Wing’ and thus it is to be feared and denounced or, at any rate, studied in the abstract but never applied to Policy making. At the same time, I guess people like me were uneasily aware that every semi-literate dehati politician was a master of calculating the Shapley index of power for various interest groups, not to mention the most computationally efficient collocation method for solving for correlated equilibria (we call it corruption)- indeed that sort of thing is virtually hard-wired in their brains- and that even if us City boys mastered the maths or wrote a Computer program to do the same thing, we’d simply be outclassed by them.
It was only later on, thinking about Game theory in the Gita, that I realized that the paleo-discrete maths tradition in ancient Tribal Republics would have been strongly focused on the sorts of things Shapley taught us guys to at least be aware of, if not actually do. Since the Mahabharata’s own compositional heuristic- at least in my belief- is part and parcel of that wider paleo-mathematical politics Welt Bild- it follows that the Bhagvad Gita, as its Pyrrhonist epoche- tells us that it is our ‘svadharma’ (i.e. there is a ‘public signal’ telling us our strategy so that, in a manner more general than Nash, we come to Aumann correlated equilibrium) to do Shapley not for the sake of the fruits of Shapley (good stuff, like getting democracy to work properly) but in an Amartya Sen-tentious spirit of utterly abnegating constructive Politics in favor of cunt-queefing pi-jaw so Man remain a futile passion and God again slay himself in vain. Shapley & Roth’s approach to matching problems is, of course, something the Mahabharata does very well so as to show that all ‘svadharmas’ have a stable way of meshing within just a few iterations. But the central epochee of the Gita shows that one such match- that of Nar & Narayan- is thereby rendered both a Philosophical Situation Comedy as well as Occasionalism’s Nightmare on Om Street. So I’m sticking with slagging off Sen- virodha bhakti donchaknow- but, sure, you guys just go ahead and read the Gita with Shapley as its Smriti. Not everybody can be a pointless fuckwit you know. Me, I’m just lucky that way.
Hilary Putnam thinks logic exists independently of metaphysics- i.e. talk of possible or impossible worlds- as the form of coherent thought. He also thinks Ethics can do without ontology- though Lebenswelts can be partially ordered only according to purely ontological criteria. This permits him, in his book ‘the collapse of the fact/value dichotomy’, to abolish the distinction between Values as ends-in themselves and purely instrumental Epistemic values- e.g. a Physicist thinking he’s on the right track because his equation is elegant, or a Chemist who feels he’s onto something because his theory is more parsimonious, or a Mathematician whose confidence in a conjecture arises out of its ‘beauty’- even though no Physicist will stick with an equation, no matter how elegant, which doesn’t fit the facts; nor will any Chemist stick with a parsimonious theory which leads to his lab blowing up; or any Mathematician stick with a beautiful conjecture which has been proved wrong. Elegance can be an end in itself- the dandy may persist in wearing a garment unsuitable for the weather though he perish of influenza- Parsimony can be an end in itself- the Miser might starve to death so as to increase his pile of gold coins- Beauty can be an end in itself- I wear a paper bag over my head while crossing the road because…urm… well, my g.f. makes me wear one in bed and I mean a chap likes to look his best… I suppose one could argue that all values are instrumental. There is some other Value lurking behind them or else some blind Schopenhauerian Will. But, some values are ontologically dysphoric- their instrumentality lies in granting their holder a vantage point from which to devalue and denigrate this world and everything that goes on in it. But this is not Putnam’s own belief. For him Values aren’t ontologically dysphoric at least not those he holds to be truly valuable. Perhaps his book is a defense against the unconscious realization that the reverse is the case.
Is this why Putnam now abolishes the distinction between instrumental or heuristic ‘values’ and absolute values? Or has his long life really led him to the conclusion that everybody just synchronically rapping in a coherent way in is a good thing and like mebbe results in Ethics developing super-powers, coz it gets bit by a radio active spider, and then it like takes over Economics and things just becomes so much nicer and I needn’t get up three times a night to pee and though we can’t rule out that we’d all know what to think about abortion and capital punishment and so on, that still would be swell because we could have a gentleman’s agreement not to talk about it in plain terms- at least, y’know, not pas devant les domestiques.
Thus, Putnam’s role in Philosophy is now to say only incoherent things like ‘Economics is a ‘policy’ Science’- i.e. Economists are Scientists of a particular sort whom Govts. and NGO’s ought to consult before deciding what to do or even what to want to do. Are there any circumstances when this could be called a cogent or coherent point of view? No, unless we adopt a linguistic conventionalism whereby ‘Economist’ is defined as the guy whom at any moment is most helpful in getting a Govt. or NGO to do something everybody later agrees was the best thing. Thus, in Kipling’s story ‘Todd’s Amendment’, Economist means the 5 year old boy whose providential remarks enable the Govt. to make the right decision. The senior Civil Servants holding appointments as Economic Advisers, however, can’t be called Economists because what they are saying is not helpful and is in fact counter-productive.
I suppose, in a one period Economy- a momentary kshanikavada Universe- one can coarse grain one’s definitions as much as one likes so as to retain the appearance of logical coherence. This is what Putnam does to collapse the ‘is’ /’ought’ dichotomy and praise up to the Skies, Amartya Sen’s brand of Economics.
This raises the question- is Amartya Sen, Putnam’s paradigm of a ‘good’ Economist, a guy Govts. or NGO’s should consult before deciding what to do? The answer, for India, is- Fuck, No! He has never given a good Policy prescription, advanced a viable hypothesis, or made a sustainable forecast. Instead, he’s muddied the waters and stalemated the reform process in a manner which most harms precisely those he would have us believe are closest to his heart.
Putnam may argue that Sen is still a good Economist because he tells Govts about what sorts of things they should want to do- stuff like making life better for everybody including the poor, the disabled, women and so on. But can’t anyone do that? In fact, what would be a hundred times more effective than Sen gassing on would be a You Tube video of a poor disabled woman actually saying ‘hey guys, my life is real crappy right now, but guess what, if you do x and stop doing y then I can do z and the Social benefit of z outweighs the cost of x minus y and what’s more it will have a demonstration effect and so the dynamic benefits are even greater. So, guys, get off your arses and do x and stop doing y already. ‘ Clearly the experience of the last decade and a half is that listening to Sen-tentious shite hasn’t been good for the clients of Govts or NGOs as opposed to ‘Moral Entrepreneurs’ & Academic or Bureaucratic Careerists. Paying attention to Sen is a waste of resources. It crowds out genuine research. Sent-tentious nonsense about Famines being about democracy rather than crop failure increased African vulnerability and reduced funding for Norman Borlaug type Green Revolution programs there. He’s now telling Indians to ban private tuition- the one thing preventing India lapsing back into mass illiteracy. Even if Sen didn’t always say the stupidest possible thing under the circumstances, even if all he did was say ‘hey guys, be nice to the poor’ he’d still not be a good Economist in Putnam’s sense. This is because Economics itself tells us that employing an Economist to tell you stuff like – care about the disadvantaged why don’t you. Stop being such an almighty dick!- is throwing money out of the window. Plenty of people will do it for free if you will also permit them to slap you silly while doing so.
Now it may be Putnam believes that non Sen-tentious Economists are all very evil and bad and they trip or push the good Economists down in the playground and steal their lunch money and then when the good Economists try to complain they just accuse them of not having properly understood David Hume or Kant or some other dead Racist which makes the good Economists burst into tears and go running home to their Mommies. If this is what Putnam believes, then his book makes perfect sense. Since good Economists- with the notable exception of Sen and some other guy who was Putnam’s best pal at School- are really stupid and don’t know from John Dewey they get cowed by the attacks of the bad Economists, which is why the bad Economists are running things and telling Govts. to be really corrupt and to implement really stupid policies. Thus Putnam has written a little book- or had it distilled out of some of his lectures- which will help good Economists to fight back and turn the tables on the bad Economists by getting off snappy comebacks like- ‘1950 called. It wants back its ‘analytic-synthetic dichotomy’ which Quine totally ass-raped in 1951.’ at which point the bad Economists all get like real red in the face and start to sweat through their Brooks Bros. suits and then next thing you know they are blurting out in these like real tight little voices- ‘Quine molested me! He touched me on my no no place behind the book stacks when I went to borrow a copy of Ayn Rand or Rice or whatever and he smelt just like my Grandmother and and and why are you being so mean to me? My other car is a Prius.’
Of course this is not what Putnam actually thinks but he’s just going to go ahead and say it anyway because he believes by doing so he will be able to breathe new life into Classical Economics- i.e. strident feuilletonism or dyspeptic armchair polemics providing a mask for hypocritical rent-seeking within a game of elite musical chairs. Putnam isn’t an Economist so we mustn’t blame him too much. The question is- what theory or theories within Economics itself are relevant to it as a ‘Policy Science’? If Putnam addresses these theories in his book then it is worth reading. If he doesn’t but just goes after dead-in-the-water Research Programs then his book isn’t worth reading. Obviously different people will have different notions of which theories are alive and which are dead. But, off the top of my head, my guess is everybody would agree that for real Economics, useful stuff, people can agree about ‘facts’ and have grounds to be suspicious of ‘value-judgments’ for reasons roughly similar to what I outline below. 1) Economics is a Science which only has a subject matter when preference diversity isn’t too great or too small. It may be that Socio-Biology of some sort can tell us when Economics will have a subject matter but, assuming the fitness landscape is unpredictable then it can’t tell us why and when genotypal canalisation type choke-points on phenotypal plasticisty will arise. Still, once preference diversity is within the ‘Economic’ range , everybody studying it is going to good-faith agree that there are some canonical, or Schelling type, ‘fact’ demarcators which are the solution to the co-ordination problem. In other words, if a situation is one where Economics has a subject matter, then Economists can good faith agree on what are facts. If they can’t, then the field probably isn’t Economic at all and other disciplines (except Philosophy because it isn’t a discipline) can explain why. 2) Values aren’t necessarily subjective- they could be strategic or they could arise by ‘preference falsification’ or as being in joint supply with ‘availability cascades’. In any case, if Values or meta-preferences themselves have Utility then there is going to be a) a drive to 100% preference diversity since everybody has an interest in valuing what he himself has or will have b) some sort of Girardian mimetic desire type dynamic which constrains the bargaining problem re. Values to the neighborhood of a strange attractor such that ‘the more things change, the more they remain the same’ In other words, Values are unknown and unknowable. We can show that Evolution might endow us with Rationality re. Choice of Technique, Bargaining, Optimization etc, because Engineering beats intuition in certain fields, but we can’t show that Evolution would have given us a faculty for telling us what is really valuable or how to rank states of the World given an unknown future. If the future is going to be really hairy, maybe Thrift is the supreme Value Economists need to inculcate. On the other hand, if the Future is going to be fabulously wonderful, Thrift is the enemy. So long as there is no God constraining Evolution, not only would the Evolutionary Stable Strategy be for Value diversity but agents are going to be doing 180 degree Value reversals pretty often. If unpredictable changes in Values are what generate the ‘mixed’ (i.e. stochastic) aspect of the E.S.S, then another way of doing the same thing as Value pi-jaw is to say ‘Let’s randomly reward a certain percentage of crimes and punish a certain percentage of good deeds because that’s a mixed strategy which can’t be simply dominated so, actually, lets not even bother to do that but just let the current system of hack journalists and publicity hound D.As and corrupt Judges and bat-shit crazy celebrities and senile Professors talking shite, continue to muck things up such that a certain percentage of crimes are rewarded and good deeds punished the way it’s always been.’
So far my contention is that Putnam is wrong about Economics. Still, some Economists may be trying to emigrate to Philosophy-land coz they have laxer drug laws there or else to escape alimony payments or something similar. So the question arises, is Putnam right about Philosophy? The short answer is no. He is making the assumption that Pyrrhonism isn’t already everybody’s default position from which they are momentarily seduced by ephemeral Faustian pacts. Worse, he refuses to see that ‘Values’ are what we are all most inclined to be skeptical about. If I tell you I suffer from hemorrhoids you are likely to believe me. If I tell you that my experience of hemorrhoids has led me to have a change of heart, I’ve now quit the Tea Party and support Gay Marriage coz why should the homos have it easy? You may still believe me. What you won’t believe is that I’ve suddenly seen the light and stopped being a nasty little homophobe because ‘Suffering is Redemptive’ or any such pi-jaw. Putnam stretches the word ‘Values’ to breaking point and then some.Maybe this would be okay if he weren’t sticking with notions like ‘logic is coherence’ and ‘partial ordering is possible’ because new vistas upon the nature and implications of universal ontological dysphoria would be opened up. One reason to think that logic isn’t the ‘form of coherent thought’ is that imperative statements, though having logical form, gain visceral force by being incoherent- ‘be sure to post the check to the Insurance company before Friday’ is weaker than ‘burn down the house. That will save you the trouble and inconvenience of posting the check by Friday. Go on, what are you waiting for?’ This seems incoherent and violates transitivity because it says burning your own house down is better than living with an uninsured house, but it is effective which is why Moms use this strategy all the time. Indeed, it may be- a subject for a future post- genuine Value Judgments, at least of a sort that give rise to a lexical ordering of preferences, always have this logical form. Rawls stipulates for a ‘threshold of prosperity’ and Nozick for a catastrophic event loophole for their lexical orderings such that they are lexical only in name. The question raised by the Prophet Amos- do two people walk together except they are agreed?- i.e. does some pre-established harmony obtain such that strategy and tactics are always univocal- can be answered in the affirmative only alongside ‘Shall there be Evil in the City and the Lord has not done it?’
The other problem with Putnam’s analysis is the notion that people currently believe ‘facts’ actually exist in such a manner that a Fact/ Value dichotomy can be usefully erased. But, the truth is, we don’t believe there are any genuinely factual statements, just stuff that’s as factual as we can get given our instruments and understanding and so on. So ‘ the facts’ are just a pragmatics which evolves in one type of game. Do ‘Values’ arise in exactly the same type of game? Suppose I have a theory of Ethics which says real Value-judgments don’t change when the facts change. Suppose, further, that I feel a sense of quiet virtue because I am deliberately failing my exams so as not to become complicit in the frauds of the Power Elite. Consider what happens when I suddenly learn that the Power Elite only recruit candidates who deliberately fail the Exams by the widest margin- indeed, all the smart kids knew this and adjusted their answers accordingly but the Power Elite were smarter yet- in other words the reason that I’m a failure is not because I was too good for the system but that I was too stupid. Still, I feel my Virtue stands. The important thing is I wasn’t tempted by power. I might even say that it is to my credit that, though stupider than other people, prompted by Virtue alone, I nevertheless succeeded where they failed. In other words, if one says ‘Value-judgments are what don’t change when the facts change’ then one can also say, fine, in this case, we have a different sort of game than the one about facts. But, is it a game without ontology? I’d say- no. In the case mentioned above, I realize that all stupid people as a class have a sort of virtue similar to mine precisely because the Power Elite don’t want to co-opt them. Those stupid people who clamor to be co-opted and try to pass their exams might even be said to be more virtuous than myself because they have an unconscious Faith in their own worthlessness which is certainly better than my own neurotic doubts about my essential idiocy. I stand upon the threshold of becoming a Tolstoy or a Gandhi- if not a Christ. But, Putnam has nothing to say about this sort of ontologically inflationary Value-judgement. Putnam focuses on Sen’s 1967 paper on Prescriptivism which shows that, for most types of Utilitarianism, Facts are relevant to value judgments. However, instead of a supervenience relationship of some sort, Putnam thinks this means that facts and values are hopelessly entangled. We can’t decompose or ‘factorize’ them. But why should this be so? Is it because Putnam wants an Ethics without Ontology but doesn’t want to break with ‘Classical’ Utilitarian Consequentialism? Before addressing that question, let’s see whether decomposing facts from values is really so very difficult. Let’s say we’re playing poker. Two different games are going on simultaneously. One is about the cards that have been dealt. The other is about reading ‘tells’ or strategically simulating such signals. In this case, we could go through a video of the game and construct two totally different narratives- one about probability which has to do only with the cards, and another which has nothing to do with probability but has to do with reading facial expressions and deducing psychological motivations. Is there any reason not to believe ‘Facts’ and ‘Values’ aren’t similarly decomposable in any actual Economic policy debate? Couldn’t we run back the Video of it and perform just such a decomposition? True it would be difficult. We’d have to look at a whole classes of similar videos before we got a sense of what we were actually discussing. We’d also need models, simulations- videos shot on possible worlds, or aesthetically important impossible worlds- and so on before we had finally got an idea about what our different claims actually amount to. From then on there is no reason why the game should not be decomposable with ‘Values’ turning into Ontological propositions about possible worlds and ‘Facts’ referring to stuff that can be measured or which has a measurable proxy.
Because Putnam thinks Ethics without Ontology is possible, and because he endorses Sen’s mania for partial ordering- he has no real answer to this objection. His invocation of ‘thick concepts’ only defines the antechamber to Economics’ arena. Thick concepts are like the pre-fight Press Conference where each contender makes a statement mixing descriptive elements with intentional elements- ‘I’m in the best shape of my life and I’m damned if I’ll go down to a little pussy like him’- stuff like this may determine the outcome of the actual fight- but Economics is not about the fight. Its what what happens when the post-fight analysis starts. There everything is separated out. There can still be strategic differences of opinion- but in the long run, after everybody has retired, there’s either a consensus about the facts or a factual question has been referred on to some other discipline- Biology, Psychology, Game theory or whatever. Okay, if we break completely with Consequentialism of any sort, Utilitarian or otherwise, then we might still have ‘entangled statements’- but they would be Ontological in nature- and refer to an ordering of possible or impossible Worlds- and thus not at all part of the sort of ‘ethical Econ’ Putnam wants which would enable us to get an ought from an is without recourse to Ontology. This is important because every fuckwit can do the other thing- vide my cri de coeur in the Eighties- ‘You must pay my air-fare to Calcutta coz my punching Mother Theresa in the face is that supremely Christ- like Act which will cause the Universe to turn into a Golden Syrup which appears exactly like whatever it takes the place of.’
Putnam’s chapter on Sen, the Economist, is the weakest thing in his book. He believes Sen said something important about Famine. Sen said something horribly foolish and mischievous about Famine and then defended himself by unfair and stupid means. As for the ‘missing millions’- when did Sen raise his voice against abortion? Infanticide was already illegal. Legalizing abortion, essentially as a population control method, with the postivie encouragement of sex selective feticide, went against all preexisting Values, Human or Religious. Yet abortion was supposed to be a very wonderful and good thing- ‘pro-Wimmin’ donchaknow- so Sen did nothing about this genocide which, unlike the Bengal famine, occurred on his watch.
Putnam misses the point that people pretend to have ‘Values’ they don’t actually have. Even if there was some window of Momus into the heart and Values were known exactly, still unless Evolution had given us a mechanism for acting rationally on the basis of one’s Values, then they remain a dead-letter. But anything which can be used to predict our actual behavior is covered by the notion of Revealed Preference already. What Putnam is objecting to is the convention of arbitrarily constraining this to tractable Mathematical shapes. But Sen, as a professional Academic has been pushing nothing else these last fifty years. How does this make him one of the good guys all of a sudden? Putnam thinks there was something sinister in Lionel Robbins getting rid of interpersonal comparisons of Utility. But what else was he supposed to do? Hitler had plenty of followers who gave very good reasons why Jews and Blacks and Chinese and Slavs get negative utility from breathing and why, if they weren’t too stupid to do ‘inter-personal Utility maximization’, they’d all have killed themselves or offered themselves as slaves to the Master Race. Similarly, Stalin worshipers were saying the Capitalist Class is yearning to be liquidated. It takes no genuine pleasure in its luxuries. The Capitalist actually wants to be re-educated in the Gulag. He’s just too neurotic to do it himself. He’s like a drug addict. He can’t help himself.
Putnam thinks Sen is one of the angels because Sen made a big deal about men in China and Kerala outliving African American Males . Yet, once prison sentencing got a lot harsher and racially discriminatory, African American Male health and longevity started to improve because those most at risk spent more time locked up- and there was a material incentive for a greedy privatized Justice/Penal System to gravitate to that outcome. In any case, once statistics were adjusted for risk-factors like diet, drug use, gang membership, as well as for reward factors like differential Societal rents to Seniority and Male status, African Americans were back ahead. Any given Chinese of Malyallee would have been better off migrating to America but no African American, ceteris paribus, would have been better off going the other way.
The crux of Putnam’s argument is his contention that all ‘capabilities approach criteria’- like ‘self respect’, ‘well nourished’ ‘able to take part in the life of the community’- are ‘entangled’ terms, i.e. values and facts are hopelessly intermingled. This can’t be true in the light of Putnam’s other contention- viz. that Sen on partially ordering isn’t foolish- because we can always run the video back on each evaluative occasion and turn every instance of a ‘value’ into something we can agree about how to better measure. Suppose this weren’t the case. Then, there is no partial ordering. No partial ordering means Sen has been talking worthless nonsense for the last forty years.
Putnam’s chapter ‘on the rationality of preferences’, gives the clue to his confusion. He doesn’t have a theory of why concurrency deadlock is good and necessary and something our decision making has evolved to mimic because of its inertial or buffering properties. In other words, as Computers got off the drawing board the actual engineering problem of concurrency fixed the lacunae in decision theory which Putnam has returned to so as to talk up his fellow Harvard Prof.
Economics has a good theory for why there is so much bad Economics- it’s supply and demand dude. Ethics does not have a good theory why every Ethical theory counsels only the most brutish and foolish thing to do under any circumstances. Putnam is a good guy. He’s done great work. Yet he has written a book which will promote Sen-tentious pi-jaw as a substitute for helping poor people. Has Ethics, as a branch of philosophy, gained anything from this book? No- unless you read it in conjunction with ‘Ethics without Ontology’ as a method of showing why the latter must be crap. But, doing that wouldn’t be playing fair.
Meta-metaphoricity 