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Elucidations - Episode 128: Melissa Fusco discusses free choice permission

Episode 128: Melissa Fusco discusses free choice permission

08/16/20 • 41 min

1 Listener

Elucidations

One of the foundational ideas behind philosophical logic is that when you say something, that has further implications beyond the single thing you said. Like, if I think ‘every single frog is green’ and ‘Fran is a frog’, then I am committed to thinking that Fran is green. I don't have to have actually thought to myself or said out loud that Fran is green—I'm just required to believe that Fran is green, given that I thought the first two things, and if I fail to believe that, I've made some kind of mistake. Like I haven't thought through all the consequences of my beliefs.


Modal logic studies how we reason about obligation and permission. For example, f I think that Bob is obligated to visit his parents for the holidays, it follows from that that he isn't permitted not to visit his parents for the holidays. (The term for this in philosophical logic is that obligation and permission are duals.) There are lots of inference patterns that pop up, some of them familiar and some of them surprising, the moment you start thinking about how the notions of ‘obligated to’ or ‘permitted to’ interact with notions like ‘if/then’ or ‘and’.


Free choice permission is a funny case where it feels like out in the wild, you would have to draw a certain conclusion from something you said, but our best formal, mathematical theory of obligation and permission tells us that you aren't allowed to draw that conclusion. So although the theory gets most other things impressively right, it seems to get this one thing wrong.


Here's the example. Imagine you're a customer at a cafe and a waiter says to you, ‘Since you ordered our prix fixe lunch menu option, you may have coffee or tea’. Translated into the terminology of obligation and permission, we could think of what the waiter said as ‘it is permissible for you to have either coffee or tea’. And there seems to be no way the waiter could think that and not thereby also be committed to thinking it is permissible for you to have coffee. If you're allowed to have either coffee or tea, then surely you're thereby allowed to have coffee. Right?


The problem is that the best available formal mathematization of how reasoning about obligation and permission works (believe it or not, this is given the humorous-sounding name normal modal logic) predicts that you are not allowed to draw that conclusion. So since it seems obvious that any rational person would draw that conclusion, but our theory predicts that you aren't allowed to draw it, that means the theory has a problem. The trouble is that revising the theory so as to correctly make that prediction is quite technically difficult, because most of the obvious things you might do to have it make that prediction have the side effect of breaking other aspects of it that work well.


In this episode, Melissa Fusco sketches out a highly original and ambitious approach to the puzzle, using a more sophisticated framework called two-dimensional modal logic. Two-dimensional modal logic is based on a subtle but interesting distinction between a statement that's automatically true the moment you start thinking about it, and a statement that is necessarily true, no matter what. It may sound a bit counterintuitive, but just wait till you hear the examples that Fusco gives! Trust me—her idea about how you can use that distinction to explain what's happening in the waiter example is super cool.



Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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One of the foundational ideas behind philosophical logic is that when you say something, that has further implications beyond the single thing you said. Like, if I think ‘every single frog is green’ and ‘Fran is a frog’, then I am committed to thinking that Fran is green. I don't have to have actually thought to myself or said out loud that Fran is green—I'm just required to believe that Fran is green, given that I thought the first two things, and if I fail to believe that, I've made some kind of mistake. Like I haven't thought through all the consequences of my beliefs.


Modal logic studies how we reason about obligation and permission. For example, f I think that Bob is obligated to visit his parents for the holidays, it follows from that that he isn't permitted not to visit his parents for the holidays. (The term for this in philosophical logic is that obligation and permission are duals.) There are lots of inference patterns that pop up, some of them familiar and some of them surprising, the moment you start thinking about how the notions of ‘obligated to’ or ‘permitted to’ interact with notions like ‘if/then’ or ‘and’.


Free choice permission is a funny case where it feels like out in the wild, you would have to draw a certain conclusion from something you said, but our best formal, mathematical theory of obligation and permission tells us that you aren't allowed to draw that conclusion. So although the theory gets most other things impressively right, it seems to get this one thing wrong.


Here's the example. Imagine you're a customer at a cafe and a waiter says to you, ‘Since you ordered our prix fixe lunch menu option, you may have coffee or tea’. Translated into the terminology of obligation and permission, we could think of what the waiter said as ‘it is permissible for you to have either coffee or tea’. And there seems to be no way the waiter could think that and not thereby also be committed to thinking it is permissible for you to have coffee. If you're allowed to have either coffee or tea, then surely you're thereby allowed to have coffee. Right?


The problem is that the best available formal mathematization of how reasoning about obligation and permission works (believe it or not, this is given the humorous-sounding name normal modal logic) predicts that you are not allowed to draw that conclusion. So since it seems obvious that any rational person would draw that conclusion, but our theory predicts that you aren't allowed to draw it, that means the theory has a problem. The trouble is that revising the theory so as to correctly make that prediction is quite technically difficult, because most of the obvious things you might do to have it make that prediction have the side effect of breaking other aspects of it that work well.


In this episode, Melissa Fusco sketches out a highly original and ambitious approach to the puzzle, using a more sophisticated framework called two-dimensional modal logic. Two-dimensional modal logic is based on a subtle but interesting distinction between a statement that's automatically true the moment you start thinking about it, and a statement that is necessarily true, no matter what. It may sound a bit counterintuitive, but just wait till you hear the examples that Fusco gives! Trust me—her idea about how you can use that distinction to explain what's happening in the waiter example is super cool.



Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Previous Episode

undefined - Episode 127 - Nic Koziolek discusses self-knowledge

Episode 127 - Nic Koziolek discusses self-knowledge

In this episode, Nic Koziolek (Washington University in St. Louis) returns to talk to me and Nora Bradford about self-consciousness.


Self-consciousness, as philosophers use the term, is a word for when you know something about one of your own mental states. Like when I really enjoy some pizza and note that I'm enjoying it. Someone else might ask me: ‘Hey Matt, do you like that pizza?’ And I'm typically the best person to ask about that, which is a sign that I typically know whether I like the pizza. Or when I have an itch, and I notice the itch before going to scratch it. If I noticed it, then I know that I have an itch. Self-consciousness, in the philosophical setting, is a name for me being able to tell what's happening in my own mind, when it happens.


Now, you might wonder how I know about my own mind, when something new happens with it. Our guest argues that there has to be an answer to that question, because whenever you know something, there's an answer to the question how you know it. And so, he argues that the way you know you're in a mental state is by being in that mental state. So to apply the idea to the two examples we started with, you know you having an itch by having an itch. And you know you like the pizza by liking the pizza. Being in the state is what allows you to know that you're in it.


If you think that idea sounds wacky, you're not alone. But our guest provides some pretty interesting arguments in favor of it. And he also makes the case that understanding what's going on when you fail to know something about your own mind can lead us to a clearer understanding of what's going on when you fail to know that you know something—which is an age-old puzzle in philosophy.


It's a fun discussion. I hope you enjoy it.


Matt Teichman



Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Next Episode

undefined - Episode 129: Nethanel Lipshitz discusses discrimination

Episode 129: Nethanel Lipshitz discusses discrimination

This month, Ben Andrew and I are joined by Nethanel Lipshitz (Tel Aviv University, Bar-Ilan University) to talk about discrimination.


If someone treats me unequally--that is, if they give other people a relative advantage but not me--am I the victim of discrimination? Our guest says yes. That is enough for me to count as having been discriminated against, and that is enough for it to be morally wrong.


All fine and dandy. But then what's the big deal? The big deal is that the standard view in political philosophy tells us that discrimination requires more. If a shopkeeper kicks me out of their store merely because they don't like my hat, then according to the definition, I haven't been discriminated against. Why? Because in order for this behavior to count as discrimination, I have to be treated unequally based on my membership in a salient social group. It's maybe a bit tricky to define exactly what a 'salient social group' is, but some familiar examples might include e.g. LGBTQ people, people with a disability, or black people. 'People with a funny looking hat' aren't a salient social group--that's just a random category that popped up in this moment. So although I may have been treated badly, I haven't been discriminated against.


Nethanel Lipshitz doesn't see a good reason for including 'you have to be a member of a salient social group' in the definition of discrimination. Note that this is compatible with saying that being discriminated against qua member of a particular social group is worse than being discriminated against as an individual, maybe as part of a one-off. The idea is just that it still counts as discrimination, and that it's still bad, even if it isn't as bad. Lipshitz' main reason for thinking this is that the 'I got discriminated against because of my hat' situation and the 'I got discriminated against because I'm gay' have a key factor in common: in both situations, the victim is being singled out as someone not worthy of the same moral respect/consideration as everyone else.


It's a fascinating discussion, and I hope you enjoy it. I think Nethanel Lipshitz provides lots of good reasons to rethink some of our contemporary assumptions about what discrimination is and why it's bad.


Matt Teichman



Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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