Should one eat something that has emotions? If nonhuman animals are sentient creatures, able to feel and perceive, they may be entitled to rights typically reserved for humans, and perhaps more so if they are sapient, with some degree of intelligence. I’ll be teaching a course on animal rights–ethics, ontology–this spring. I think we can arrive at a better understanding of labor and economic class by rethinking the relation between humans and nonhuman animals. I make this point only to underscore the fact that caring about nonhuman animals–e.g., factory farming and slaughterhouse conditions–is not some bourgeois claptrap, e.g., “The one thing you have to remember about W.A.S.P.s: they love animals and hate people,” etc. Shouldn’t one address all forms of suffering and alienation?

The following is a response to “A New and Improved Cogito Argument” by Stephen Mumford.

Mumford’s

cogito ergo causalitas is the ostensible final answer to the idea that causation is a social construction. “Social construction” is postmodernism’s favorite trope and a popular target for self-proclaimed realists such as Mumford. According to Mumford, his cogito began as a response to a linguist friend’s assertion that causation is “just a social construct,” that there is only “the flux of experience” and we “impose a causal structure on [that experience] in our social practices.”

Mumford concludes: 

The new cogito argument –cogito ergo causalitas– has the advantage of taking us outside our minds. It proves the existence of something that exists independently of us and even of our social practices.

I’d like to address that conclusion and some of Mumford’s claims that bring him to that conclusion, which, at this early juncture (i.e., mine), should be seen as me thinking through those claims rather than anything as definitive as

cogito ergo causalitas

is for Mumford. 

Mumford begins:

My opponent’s view was that causation was merely a social construction. But what is this claim? First, it is a claim that causation is socially constructed. But construction is a causal term. So the claim is that causation is brought into being, made, created by, our social practices. I cannot understand this as anything other than a causal claim. Indeed, if there is no causation, I do not see how anything can be socially constructed. Social construction requires causation. 

Isn’t this reasoning tautological (i.e., valid but unsound)? That is to say, one cannot use the apparent tautology in social constructionist logic to defend the position that there is cause: Causation is a construction is a causation is a construction and so on. Per Wittgenstein, “‘A knows that p is the case’ is senseless if p is a tautology”). If social construction requires causation, it is only because causation is social. Hence, when Mumford writes, 

A society, as I understand it, is more than just a plurality. What turns this into a society is that it’s an interacting plurality. And the notion of interaction is, again, an obviously causal notion. The individual members of a society affect, and are affected by, each other. How can they do so unless causation is real?

we reply that plurality and its ostensible causal effect, normativity, neither make causation objectively real beyond its participants (“something that exists independently of us and even of our social practices”) nor circumvent the social construction critique, but rather instead reveal causation as a condition of the social as such (not the other way around). Hume and Wittgenstein argued likewise, with Hume’s “habits” and Wittgenstein’s “nonsense” and “language-games”:

Hume: “Hume’s attitude to causation was that it had to be explained in terms of experience [ … ] and this led to a psychologised account of causation. Causation was reduced to an Idea based on experience of constant conjunction, temporal priority and contiguity. This gave us a habit of expectation” (Mumford).

Wittgenstein: “5.136 There is no causal nexus which justifies such an inference.
5.1361 The events of the future cannot be inferred from those of the present. Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus” (Tractatus).
“631. I am going to take two powders now, and in half-an-hour I shall be sick.”–It explains nothing to say that in the first case I am the agent, in the second merely the observer. Or that in the first case I see the causal connexion from the inside, in the second from outside. And much else to the same effect. Nor is it to the point to say that a prediction of the first kind is no more infallible than one of the second kind. [ … ] And it can only mislead you to say: ‘The only essential presupposition of your utterance was just our decision’” (PI).

This note to self is self insofar as information isn’t only carried-transmitted by a self but is biologically, electrochemically part of the self who thinks, speaks [etc.] it. Hasn’t the tendency been to see the individual as separate from the idea, as a carrier and transmitter of information but not as the information he carries? (Floridi calls this the “information processing view.”) I suppose this note to self also casts aside Wittgensteinian doubt.

Perhaps then a better way to state the idea is as follows:

If one plays the psychology language-game (e.g., one can know one’s inner workings; there is materiality to a text’s meaning even if a text’s meaning is made between people, socially, pragmatically, and is therefore out there) one should see the idea as body, too; the utterance is the medium. A thought has as much material reality as a body (since it is body) and is therefore part of the universe in a very real, material sense.

Doesn’t such physicalism collapse information and medium? If so, does the collapsing support or problematize the epistemology suggested by a “multi-agent system” (Floridi), where information holds different values for each agent, i.e., the distinction between the maker of information (e.g., the mover of a chess piece) and the one who receives the information (e.g., the opponent), since the thing that is true (the specific chess move) is not informative for its maker (i.e., since s/he already knows) but informative for the receiver? These questions may be better aimed at neuro- and cognitive science than at logic, but they do emphasize another dimension to a priori/a posteriori and analytic/synthetic knowledge: informativeness, information. This note’s title could be a bit misleading since one is what one perceives and thinks with or without understanding. Data and information, then, in addition to information and medium, collapse in the material, bodily sense.

1. What is information?
2. What are the dynamics of information?
3. Is a grand unified theory of information possible?
4. How can data acquire their meaning?
5. How can meaningful data acquire their truth value?
6. Can information explain truth?
7. Can information explain meaning?
8. Can (forms of) cognition be fully and satisfactorily analyzed in terms of (forms of) information processing at some level of abstraction?
9. Can (forms of) natural intelligence be fully and satisfactorily analysed in terms of (forms of) information processing at some level of abstraction?
10. Can (forms of) natural intelligence be fully and satisfactorily implemented non-biologically?
11. Can an informational approach solve the mind-body problem?
12. How can information be assessed? If information cannot be transcended but can only be checked against further information … what does this tell us about our knowledge of the world?
13. Could epistemology be based on a theory of information?
14. Is science reducible to information modelling?
15. What is the ontological status of information?
16. Can information be naturalized?
17. Can nature be informationalized?
18. Does computer ethics have a philosophical foundation?

Beavers, Anthony F. “A Brief Introduction to the Philosophy of Information“