The Death of Philosophy

by Thomas-Fogiel, Isabelle; Lynch, Richard;

  The Transcendental Argument’s Positivity and the “Utility” of the Law of Reflexivity

  First of all, I should note that if, in fact, transcendental argument is particularly illustrated by refutations like “you cannot say what you are saying,” these refutations cannot be considered to be only negative, since the work that delimits the set of statements that we cannot accept and the systems to which we cannot adhere is, in the end, constructive. For example, with this argument, we are now in a position to reject the two key stances of contemporary philosophy—skepticism and scientism. Given that contemporary philosophy is torn between a certain form of strict positivism (the cognitive sciences, naturalism, all the way to various materialisms)18 and an increasingly radical relativism (Feyerabend, Rorty), we can now propose a third, positive solution. Thus even if my argumentative practice—which consists in showing that a discourse x self-destructs—can appear to be only negative, its yields are no less considerable because, as we have seen, the currently most common and widely shared theories must be abandoned. The argumentation that takes the form “You cannot say that x” is heavy with positive propositions in that it clears the barriers that obstruct the horizon of thought today.

  In addition, I can also show that transcendental argument can move from the proposition “You cannot say x” to another that, despite the double negative, is heavy with positive propositions, namely, “You cannot not say that x.” I have illustrated this passage from the negative to the positive in my works on Fichte, through (among other examples) the theory of affection (called the theory of stimulus), the theory of the relation between the finite and the infinite, and even through certain practical statements, even (and including) his most concrete views, such as his condemnation of the death penalty, which rests entirely on the employment of this kind of reasoning. The very production of a given proposition within a given system (in this case, Fichte’s or Hegel’s) attests to the fact that transcendental argument produces positive statements that take the form of “You cannot not say that x.” I should probably insist on this style of praxis or of the regulated production of statements, a general style of argumentation that is born in the distinctions of its starting point. I have noted that in Fichte, the starting point—namely, identity as congruence between what is said and what one does—is a task to be accomplished, an end to pursue, and not a psychological or factual given. I have also noted that the most immediate characteristic of the science of knowledge is that it is not defined as the description of an x but as the construction of itself. A construction because to reflect does not mean to reflect like a mirror or to give an image of something anterior but rather means to produce concepts and propositions as a task that one freely sets for oneself (the noncontradiction between the Tun and the Sagen). We thus can see how to argue is, stricto sensu, to produce something.

  But to be sure, if the whole of Fichte’s system demonstrates that we can move from a negative statement of the sort “You cannot say x” to a positive statement of the form “You cannot not say that x,” then I must—beyond the production of this or that concrete proposition of Fichte’s—demonstrate this capacity with more contemporary examples.

  Confronted with this challenge, I could be tempted first of all to retort to those who complain about the argumentation’s negative character that I have nevertheless demonstrated the necessity of positing the concept of truth. Indeed, the skeptic cannot say that truth does not exist without destroying the contents of this proposition. On the other hand, to say “truth exists” undergoes the test of self-application of a proposition to itself without difficulties (“truth exists” and “I claim that this proposition is true” do not mutually exclude each other, unlike in the previous case). It will probably be replied that the term “exists” does not mean anything here. To avoid this verb, full of misunderstandings, it suffices to say that the notion of truth cannot ever be consistently eliminated from our scientific or philosophical discourses. To put it positively, scientific and philosophical discourse cannot not posit the concept of truth—even if it cannot immediately determine its contents. (Is it an intuition and a concept, empirical verification, some sort of a priori, etc.?) We can clearly see that despite an apparently negative formula “to not be able not to posit that x,” the analytical gain is considerable. That said, one could retort that this proposition is too general to be useful. My law of reflexivity would, of course, be acceptable, and the idea of truth absolutely inescapable but unusable in concrete and specific contexts. In a word, the reflexive law could be accepted but would give rise to the question, What is it good for in concrete terms? To answer this question, I propose to address, as a case in point, a problem in the “philosophy of mind,” a problem that is taken for concrete since the problem is to know how our mind functions—the brain, or reason? I approached this quantitatively important aspect of current philosophy in part 1, and I recalled—in order to overcome them—Herbert Feigl’s physicalist thesis and (at greater length) Geoffrey Hodgson’s evolutionary view. In so doing, I thus brought up two of the foundational paradigms of contemporary philosophy of mind—physics and biology—but neglected the third paradigm, the sciences of the artificial. It is on this third paradigm that I would like to test the utility of transcendental argumentation that comes from the reflexive a priori. I shall do so by comparing this argument to what the founder of the paradigm of the sciences of the artificial, Herbert Simon, has to say about reason.19

  First of all, I should recall that Simon’s field of investigation goes far beyond the single domain in which he has been honored.20 Compared, because of his multiple scientific competencies, to Leonardo da Vinci,21 Simon undeniably embodies the anachronistic figure of the complete humanist who, having mastered his epoch’s fundamental fields of knowledge and having innovated within some of them, does not for all that disdain wondering about the definition of reason and of science. In this sense, Simon would probably have been described, in a different time, as a philosopher, in light of the guiding question that defined his domain of investigation. Indeed, he wrote in the preface to Reason in Human Affairs that the question of how we can understand individuals’ rationality is the very heart of all his reflections: “The nature of human reason—its mechanisms, its effects, and its consequences for the human condition—has been my central preoccupation for nearly fifty years.”22 Starting from the behavior of “economic agents” (firms, and then the individuals that compose them), Simon has in the course of his work expanded the scope of his investigations to encompass human reason in its entirety. His project is thus not only to determine agents’ possible behaviors in an economic context—that is, to grasp only one aspect among others of human behavior—but in fact, as is attested by the sentence I just quoted, also to discover the “mechanisms” of human rationality in general. This detail is significant in that it alone entitles me to examine Simon but not any economist or any sociologist or any other specialist in some aspect of humanity. Indeed, if the economist confines himself to only the domain of economic rationality while asserting that this rationality is not at work in other (moral, political, scientific) domains, then transcendental argument cannot be used, even indirectly, to analyze these propositions. To say something about the rationality of economic laws is not necessarily to understand all rationality, for example, the rationality of moral agents or scientific researchers. Different demands (investigation into self-interest, happiness, or the better argument) could preside over the behavior of an acting human. It follows that only the economist’s assertion that he indeed is speaking of “the nature of human reason” makes the comparison possible. Such is surely the case for Simon, who in a first approach defines human rationality as a “limited rationality.” How should we understand this first characterization?

  Rationality, from a general point of view, means that human beings can, most of the time, give reasons for their decisions. Unlike animals, humans can enter into a process of justification for their behavior. As Simon writes, “By
a weak definition of rationality, virtually all human behavior is rational. People usually have reasons for what they do, and if asked, can opine what these reasons are.”23

  Nevertheless, this rationality is limited, in that humans find themselves in a particular environment in which they do not control all the elements, thus they cannot calculate every possibility; moreover, they can delude themselves about what they can do or what they are:

  Of course, as Freud (and laboratory experiments) have taught us, people may deceive themselves; the real reasons may be different from what people suppose they are . . .

  To say that people have reasons for their actions means that there is a connection between the actions and the goals (values, utility functions) the actors possess. The actions increase the likelihood that some of these goals will be achieved. However, even in behavior that we would call rational, there may be serious gaps between action and goal achievement.24

  Individuals thus make decisions as a function of limited “goals or values,” on the basis of a series of finite inferences and observations, which could be false. Even if the inferences are false, the behavior would be called rational.

  This definition of rationality could appear banal, in that it simply tells us that a human, unlike the Leibnizian God, cannot calculate, foresee, or know everything, and therefore that his choice of the “best possible” is not perfect but is necessarily limited by his finite capacities. This generic definition nevertheless has considerable importance at the narrow level of economic debate and particularly as a critique of market theories stemming from Léon Walras, all of which presuppose the “utopian hypothesis”25 of “perfect rationality.” This very general definition is made more precise by what Simon terms “procedural rationality.” Here again, this definition must be understood in opposition to the neoclassical economic theories in which Homo economicus must ideally effect all the possible calculations to make the best choice. If this type of rationality, which Simon calls “substantively rational” (and which, again, amounts to the rationality of Leibniz’s God), is presupposed, then it is sufficient to know the environment (the possible worlds) to anticipate an agent’s choice. Conversely, for Simon, we should consider the procedures by which individuals make this or that decision. It only makes sense to revise the rationality at work in the decision-making procedure in situations when agents’ choices are difficult:

  The process of rational calculation is only interesting when it is non-trivial—that is, when the substantively rational response to a situation is not instantly obvious. If you put a quarter and a dime before a subject and tell him that he may have either one, but not both, it is easy to predict which he will choose, but not easy to learn anything about his cognitive processes.26

  And yet, as a general rule, the world in which we have evolved is complex, not simple: “We are concerned with how men behave rationally in a world where they are often unable to predict the relevant future with accuracy.”27

  Briefly, given a particular end, humans employ a procedure to choose a situation that is most likely, in one’s eyes, to lead to that end. And yet for Simon, these decision procedures can be scientifically analyzed; they are predictable, even if our rationality is limited, our environment is complex, and we are likely to deceive ourselves.

  Analysis of the environment is given as a response to stimuli:

  A stimulus, external or internal, directs attention to selected aspects of the situation to the exclusion of competing aspects that might turn choice in another direction. Within the central nervous system are built up channels that permit impulses to be translated into action while leaving large portions of the central system undisturbed.28

  For complex decisions, instead of automatic reactions (action-reaction, stimulus-response), a “deliberative procedure” must be employed. The rational agent investigates “alternative solutions” and adopts one of them, not because it is in itself the best but because it appears “satisficing,”29 solutions that Simon defines as “solutions that are good even though they are not optimal.” In a word, it is a matter of subjectively noticeable solutions, even if they are not objectively and in themselves (from the point of view of a calculating God) the best.

  But, it will be asked, how are we to analyze and predict—that is, to scientifically deal with—these decision procedures, which can initially seem to be numerous, or even infinite? Simon proposes to do so beginning with artificial intelligence, a domain on which his innovations have incontestably left a mark.

  The mind, like the computer, can be conceived as a stock of symbols that can be combined with one another. The symbols are “physical patterns (e.g., chalk marks on a blackboard) that can occur as components of symbol structures (sometimes called ‘expressions’).”30 Thus, a well-stocked symbol structure can be brought into relation with other symbol structures; it can also be transformed in order to create structures more appropriate for the environmental stimuli. These symbols are “physical symbols” in that they have a physical substrate, the brain—computers and brains are thus equivalents, because the physical substrates are “fabricated of glass and metal (computers) or flesh and blood (brains).”31 Despite their differing substrates, the computer and the brain thus have the same skills at their disposal:

  The physical symbol system hypothesis has two important corollaries:

  Corollary 1. A computer, appropriately programmed, can engage in general intelligent action.

  Corollary 2. The human brain is a physical symbol system.32

  Having established this equivalence, the computer can serve both as a norm—in the sense that certain programs can improve decisions (for example, expert systems that function as assistants)—but also as an image, a representation, a photograph of human intelligence. Artificial intelligence thus enables a description of the ways in which individuals make decisions:

  However primitive the existing understanding programs may be, they do provide a set of basic mechanisms, a theory, to explain how human beings are able to grasp problems, both in new domains about which they have no knowledge and in domains about which they have a greater or lesser amount of previous semantic knowledge.33

  How can this definition of human rationality and its comparison with computers be of interest to transcendental argumentation? Because it cannot be brought to completion without contradiction, and because the demonstration of this impossibility enables me to posit another definition of human rationality. Let’s look at these two points.

  First of all, I should generally say that three parameters are clearly to be considered in Simon’s discourse; these are the economist’s discourse on agents’ rationality, the contents assigned to agents’ rationality, and reality (even if this reality is understood as a set of rules or conventions). These three parameters multiply the economist’s tasks: On the one hand, he must state what reality is (for the scientist)—is it a set of arbitrary conventions or a set of immutable and necessary laws? This is the classic question of realism or of reference. On the other hand, he must define individuals’ rationality (limited, unlimited, determined or undetermined, a pure calculus of self-interest, etc.) Also, the economist must determine how the economic agent understands or represents reality (because this understanding is not necessarily the same as the economist’s). Finally he must try to understand the relation between the rationality that he employs qua scientist and the rationality that he attributes to the individual or the economic agent. If the question of “human reason” is Simon’s “central problem,” he must not define this reason as if his own scientific discourse were not also an expression of it. Here we confront the problem of self-reference.

  In view of these tasks (which I can specify without having to get into the details of analysis, nor having to test the proposed mathematical models’ falsifiability), what can we say a priori? That human rationality and the rationality employed by the economist must be congruent. The economist’s rationality, through its very employment, must not enter into a contradiction wit
h what he says about human rationality. In a word, the scientific (economic but also sociological or anthropological) discourse must make sure not to invalidate itself by attributing a rationality to humans that its own discourse contradicts. Here, indeed, we find my law of reflexivity, which can now be defined as a reflexive a priori because we can say before any experience of a theory to be analyzed that the status of its utterance and the contents of its statements must not enter into conflict.

  And yet if we apply this point to Simon, it seems that human rationality is entirely determined, that is to say, predictable, reducible to mechanisms that a computer could accomplish. Alain Boyer underscores this point, writing about Simon’s conception that “the ‘self satisfying’ agent seems unable to be anything but an automaton following rules or routines, almost incapable of any critical and reflexive look at the routines in question.”34 This determinist conception is also noted by John Searle:

  Herbert Simon of Carnegie-Mellon University says that we already have machines that can literally think. There is no question of waiting for some future machine, because existing digital computers already have thoughts in exactly the same sense that you and I do. Well, fancy that! Philosophers have been worried for centuries about whether or not a machine could think, and now we discover that they already have such machines at Carnegie-Mellon.35