Agnes:

Hi, Robin.

Robin:

Hi, Agnes. And hi, Arnold.

Arnold:

Hi, Robin. Hi, Agnes.

Agnes:

OK, Arnold, we are going to talk to you today about interpretation. So let me start with the following question. And we'll maybe work our way towards a definition of what interpretation is. When I like write stuff online and the same thing happens to Robin, people reliably misinterpret us. And they even reliably misinterpret us in certain predictable ways. So for instance, the thing I just wrote about travel, people interpreted it as me saying, don't travel. If I just know that people are systematically gonna interpret me that way, even if I say it, that's not what I mean. Is it right to say that that is what I said? Like, regardless of my intention, that is what I said, because that's what people took me to mean?

Arnold:

No, I think that, you know, we can have misinterpretations. So, I mean, my work is largely interpretive, right? So I write about Plato and Aristotle, and I teach Plato and Aristotle. And when I'm, doing research or preparing for a class, I'm thinking about what is the right interpretation of these texts, you know, so I go through the text and in many ways it's just an empirical exercise, right, so I'm marshalling evidence, developing a theory and, you know, trying to answer questions that that theory might confront when challenged by paradoxes and problems of interpretation and so on. And at least naively maybe, that is, I take it that there's a goal here when I'm doing this, and it's to get at the truth about what the text means. And the question, what does the text really mean? What's the truth behind the text? That can, I think, get very complicated. But we do want to make room for the idea of a misinterpretation. And I think not very substantially just because we want to preserve the sense that we have that we all misinterpret one another all the time. And that part of having a conversation and interacting with one another is trying to correct those misinterpretations. But the story of how and why we can have those kinds of errors is, I think, a very difficult one.

Agnes:

Let me just push you on that question of, is a systematic misinterpretation still a misinterpretation? So something you and I have talked about is, there's kind of the caricature version of most major philosophers. The caricature Kant, who says, don't lie even if there's a murderer at the door. There's the caricature Plato, who believes in forms. There's the caricature Aristotle, a certain kind of neo-Aristotelianism, right? And then there are the scholars who say, no, no, no, that's not at all what this philosopher said. It's much more nuanced. And I know you're at least sympathetic to the thought. The caricature, in some sense, must be what the person has succeeded in conveying to a broad audience. And that's to say that a certain kind of systematic misinterpretation might just be what the person effectively communicated.

Arnold:

Yeah, so sorry, go ahead.

Robin:

So it seems to me that we can define a number of different kinds of interpretation. And we don't have to decide which is the true one at first. Maybe the first task is just to define different kinds of priorities or things we're trying to do in an interpretation. So yeah, right. So one kind of an interpretation would be to summarize, as Agnes just said, sort of the simplest view that's accessible to the widest audience, that, you know, would plausibly be what a wide audience would come to believe if they were to engage it, and plausibly is perhaps what ideas that's one kind of interpretation. Another might be what you best guess the person meant, when they said it using all historical knowledge and everything you could possibly know about this person. And maybe a third kind of interpretation would be to take a more limited text and find the most consistent, coherent view that fits that particular text. And these three could just be three different criteria of interpretation that would lead you to three different sets of conclusions. And we could probably define more. In what sense is one of them the interpretation? Which of them is more important, why?

Arnold:

Yeah, so, I mean, along the lines of what you just said, so one way that we could square off the kind of interpretation on which we might say, look, Kant, you know, he's, as it were, on the record saying certain things and, you know, he can't try to appeal to an infinitely nuanced interpretation of his views, right? At some point, there just has to be something that Kant roughly meant. with his ethical theory or something like that, or Aristotle with his physical theory or something like that. And I think that that's the kind of interpretation that is at home in dialectical exchange, right? So the kind of interpretation that you and I have right now, like where I try to come up with a reading of what you just said, Robin, and then, and I think when I do that, if you were to respond with, an indefinitely complicated series of corrections and nuances where I just sit here and I have to keep modifying my interpretation until it's indefinitely complicated, that there would be something wrong with that conversation, that we're not really communicating well in that case. That is that you take yourself to be committed to something like the simplest, most readily available reading of your speech, and that if that doesn't represent your committed beliefs, you'll say something like, oh, I misspoke, or I put that the wrong way. Let me correct myself. Let me get a different one. And we can read philosophers that way. And in fact, I think that when we're dealing with living philosophers, we do tend to read them that way. That is, if John McDowell or something writes a a piece, then we, well, maybe not John McDowell, actually, at this point. But if many contemporary philosophers were to write a journal article, and we all have this experience with reviewers, where the reviewer is like, here's a surface-level reading of what you're saying. It seems implausible. You've got to come up with a better argument for it. The reviewer is not treating you like Aristotle. The reviewer is not like, well, how can we make this work? background stuff can I impose on the text in order to make this all consistent and coherent? They're saying you're responsible for the surface reading.

Robin:

To make that point stronger, it just occurred to me that we can't do it for Aristotle or these ancient people. We could, in the near future, record brain states of people as they were writing and saying things and then define the interpretation that was consistent with our recording of their brain state. And that would be the definition of the recording that was truest to what was in their head, perhaps. But as you say, that's not terribly useful. when we're reading things and talking about them together. So clearly we're going to want to compromise on a concept of interpretation that's between what the most naive observers might quickly attribute to something and what the person most meant in their complicated brain state. We need to pick some intermediate level of concept of interpretation that doesn't require too much of interpreters, but still requires them to pay some attention to the actual details of the text.

Arnold:

Right, like what we're interested in a dialectical context is what we can hold each other to right and so. Knowing my brain states it's like that's not that useful what's useful is what i'm willing to say yes that's my view and then you can say well here's why it's wrong right and then then i'll be forced to. change my views or something like that. And then the thing we're doing with Aristotle or with an ancient philosopher or John McDowell or anybody that we hold in sufficiently high esteem is a little more like the interpretation of scripture, where that's a very different set of practices, right? There we are willing to move in the direction of indefinite levels of nuance and complication. And I think our grip on the interpretive practice involved in conversation, we can see that as sort of grounded by the aim of being able to commit our interlocutor to something, right? That's the goal of an interpretation is to be able to say, I know what you're saying and I can commit you to this interpretation of that, such that I can then respond. And then the question is, what are we doing with Aristotle? such that we have this different mode of interpretation? What's the goal here, such that we proceed so differently when we're interpreting? Where we take off the table the idea that, for example, something here might be wrong, or that there might just be a fairly silly logical error involved, or something like that. In the world of Aristotle interpretation, those are not regarded as valid moves in the conversation.

Agnes:

Before we get to Aristotle, I just want to go back for a minute to this conversational thing, which it's something in what you guys were saying that interested me is that it never occurred to me before that interpretation is a negotiation, where if I'm speaking, in some sense, I want you to interpret me in a way that is as close as possible to my intentions. um and you want to be able to give as simple as possible a reading and we have to meet somewhere in the middle where at some point i'm willing to say okay that's close enough i don't i'm not going to add another refinement i'm not going to add a correction i'm not going to require you to use my exact words right which would be the way to for sure make sure that you know the way that i can at least imagine that you have it the way that i thought it but i have to let go a little bit of my own attachment, my own fuzzy attachment to my thought and hear some slightly different version of it come out of your mouth and be okay with that. And that's a compromise. And this might shed some light on why people who dislike each other so reliably misinterpret each other, because it's hard to compromise with people that you dislike.

Arnold:

Yeah, right. And I mean, maybe we can add to our collection of interpretive practices. A lot of the time when we're talking to each other, we just kind of want to make ourselves look good or justified or something like that. So like in a relationship fight, you'll be saying things and very commonly saying to your partner, you're misinterpreting. There, it's like you're not exactly being held to or you don't want them to hold you to the simplest and most available reading of your words. You want them to hold you to the reading of your words that gives you the noblest possible position or something like that, right? That's what you want. You're making a kind of bid for a kind of like justification and standing and dignity. And then the other person is negotiating on that bid, right? negotiating you down or something like that. And so I think especially in those kinds of cases, we find it very hard to compromise, maybe, especially because in relationship fights, the dignity or justification of one of the two people is literally at stake. I mean, that's what conversation is about.

Robin:

So I'm struck by the contrast between the most forgiving context. So if you and I were talking and I'm struggling to communicate something to you and I say something and you interpret it a certain way and then I get to say, no, that's not what I mean. Let me try again. If you're willing to throw away all my trials and we can just end up with the thing where I finally say, okay, yeah, that's close enough. You can accept that. That's a pretty different context where Along the way, when I do these trial things, you might grab one of those and quote it and then throw it out of the world and complain to me about this claim to them about this thing I said. So I think that's one of the key context often is we're often at risk of our trial attempts to communicate being declared our official communication and we lose control of it.

Arnold:

Yeah, right. Right. I mean, right. And I guess, especially where people are being malicious misinterpreters. I mean, you know, we've all we've all been on Twitter. And so we know what malicious misinterpretation is like. And I guess one of the real puzzles about it is that it doesn't exactly seem malicious. That is, the people involved in it. at least seem to themselves to be well-intentioned. Like when somebody catches you with a bad opinion, they sort of feel like, oh, I've hit on the true view here, which you've let slip or something.

Robin:

Right. But then if I try to say, you misunderstood me, let me explain again, they reject that. They say, no, I got you the first time, right?

Arnold:

Well, of course you want to explain yourself now that I've trapped you.

Agnes:

But I wonder whether that isn't just quite similar to the relationship fight. I mean, maybe a lot, maybe interactions on Twitter, like in the relationship fight, you might say something, and the person you're in the relationship with might think, ah, now you've exposed your real view, what you really think. And you're like, no, no, I didn't mean it. It's not, you know, came out wrong or whatever. And they might snatch on those words and say, in a moment of weakness, you allowed the truth to escape you. And that's what people think on Twitter as well, is that you're hiding a lot of what you really think. And so they have to go sleuthing among your statements to discover the truth.

Robin:

Yeah, so certainly in the context of that sort of behavior, you will be more cautious with what you say. That is part when you when you have a thought in your head and you pick some words for it, you'll have a filter that go through and say, oh, how could this be misinterpreted? How can I weaken it or protect myself against that by saying less and more vaguely, et cetera, exactly because you're afraid of that sort of reaction?

Arnold:

Right, right. So it's sort of like suppose we're in a relationship fight or we're fighting on Twitter and I say 10 things. it might make sense for an interpreter under those circumstances to take the worst thing that I said and regard that as my true, as the true expression, right? As the one I can be held responsible for. Maybe because there's this background thought that I'm trying to make myself look as good as possible. And so the worst thing that I said is going to be the truest, right? It's going to be the one least adulterated by my efforts to aggrandize myself. Whereas the kind of interpretation we get in a dialectical practice would be, it's something like, you need my consent at the end of the day on what counts as the right interpretation of what I'm saying. And so.

Agnes:

Sorry. Yeah. Go ahead. I was just going to say that I think that what was interesting was coming out with the thing Robin said was that, in fact, if the quote unquote malicious interpreters are actually just correctly interpreting you at that point. That is, if because you're scared about how people will interpret you, you hold back and don't reveal a bunch of your views because you think they might be misinterpreted, then it does make sense for people to take the stuff you say and go digging and be like, what are the real things that she's not telling us? And it could be that you are rational in hiding because you think they're going to do that, but then also they're then rational. You're each actually supporting. It's a kind of stable equilibrium where you are making it rational for them to interpret you in the most hostile possible way.

Robin:

So if we think about this issue of the context of an interpretation, the Twitter examples are an extreme example where maybe just one tweet is retweeted out into the world and the context of the conversation is lost. And then you might feel confident if someone could read the rest of the context of the conversation, they would have a much more accurate view of what you said, but that context is thrown away. And so now you're trying to ask, you know, how would this look stripped of context? And that's related to the question of, you know, do we interpret one of Aristotle's essays just as that one essay? Do we take into context of everything else Aristotle said or everything else all the Greeks back then said? Like the larger context we ask people to consider for interpreting any way of thinking, the more work we're demanding of them and the harder it's going to be. And so this larger world could think, I don't have all the time to read the whole conversation around this thing you said, you said this one thing, and I feel like I'm going to draw a conclusion from that.

Agnes:

Right, it seems like the context issue is actually really, it's once again a negotiation. The person who speaks is always going to be asking for more context to be taken in. And the listener is going to want to be taking as little context in as possible. And they have to agree. But the answer can't always be more context.

Arnold:

So I'm not sure that's true. I think that, at least in relationship fights that I've had, sometimes you want to be interpreted narrowly. rather than in the context of all the other things you said, especially when somebody points out a contradiction. You want to be like, well, look, this is a new experiment. So a wrinkle that maybe is worth introducing at this point is that we can't treat interpretation just as a purely spectatorial relationship on some object. as if it were inert, right? So anybody who's trying to communicate is communicating with an interpreter in view, right? So they, what's going on is that we're trying to model the communicator. And at the same time, the communicator is trying to model us, the interpreter, right? And so the act of communication is this sort of joint creation, this joint relation that is held by the speaker and the listener, each trying to model the other so as to come up with something like an agreement or something like that. That is, the interpreter has a certain goal alongside, sorry, the communicator has a certain goal alongside the interpreter of communicating something. So for example, Aristotle, when you pick up a passage of Aristotle, you might be tempted to think, well, the right way to approach this problem, where I don't understand what this paragraph means, is to go look up every instance of Aristotle's use of a certain term in this corpus, or every similar discussion of this topic in the corpus, or a dialogue of Plato.

Agnes:

He uses this analogy.

Arnold:

Yeah. Right, right. Every time he uses the analogy of a bronze statue, or some point at which Plato uses some of these terms, or this analogy, or talks about this kind of a topic, or something like that. But the problem is that Aristotle is probably not modeling an interpreter. That is, Aristotle doesn't have in view an interpreter that has in front of them a concordance of Aristotle's own terminology in all of his works. In fact, he would have regarded that as an impossibility, right? Like, it would be absurd for him to think that his interpreters would attempt to achieve that level of context when he's writing. And so we're misinterpreting Aristotle when we reach for that kind of context, but precisely because we're not being the interpreter that he wants us to be.

Robin:

So Arnold you asked, what's different when we do this Aristotle kind of interpretation. And the first thing that occurs to me is I think of a spectrum of how indulgent or forgiving your audiences. then that's sort of the extreme of this audience that just really wants you to win as Aristotle. And they're just going to try really hard to help Aristotle be consistent and coherent because they really want him to. And I was thinking about other, so if you think about the opposite end of the spectrum, so I've noticed, you know, so people who are very afraid of being misinterpreted, maliciously misinterpreted perhaps, we can see a bunch of predictable ways that their conversation will be different. So first of all, they'll want to stick closer to well-defined terms. Precisely defined terms they'll be wary of ambiguity and metaphor and humor, maybe inspirational talk. And so there's a sense of which people who are allowed humor and metaphor and vagueness and inspirational talk or have are privileged. And often those people, when they talk, they look at the other people's talk and they call them inhuman and, you know, soulless. And, you know, those scientists or whatever are, you know, inhuman and soulless because they never joke and they never, whatever, but it's, you know, or even like people in a context where, you know, you're allowed to be progressive. And if you're progressive, you're allowed to joke and speak metaphorically and things like that. But if you're conservative, you're gonna have to be really careful and precise. And then those conservative people look humorless. and, you know, without metaphor, without color, you know, and you can insult the people who are being very protective in their speech by pointing out how they're not doing all the colorful, fun things that you get to do if you have a forgiving audience.

Arnold:

Yeah, so, I mean, I'm sure you've heard there's a sort of famous, sort of slightly apocryphal divide in philosophy between the continental and the analytic tradition, and it's basically a divide between the a French-German tradition on the one hand and the Anglo-American tradition on the other. And sort of my pet theory about why these two traditions look very different is that the French-German tradition, everybody is either in the same city or they're a quick train ride away. And so, They can do this, they can fill their talk with vagueness and ambiguity and metaphor, and they can communicate with each other in ways that where, or where they can be confident that they won't be misinterpreted, because if the person is reading your work they can come to your seminar they can come back to the person. Your colleagues are right there. Whereas if you're an Anglo-American philosopher, there's this Atlantic Ocean between you and your colleagues, right? If you're- In Australia. Yeah, right. Right. So there's this big ocean. And so you send these journals across the ocean, right? So especially in the early part of the 20th century, you're sending journals back and forth. You've never met these people that you're writing to. And so you develop a kind of style for very precise speech, very well-defined terms, And that's analytic philosophy. It places this absolute premium on clarity because it has this history of awareness of interpretation. And anybody who's been and met Oxford philosophers knows that they're malicious interpreters, right? They won't find the best possible interpretation of your view. They're the people who will say, you know, who will give, as it were, the worst and challenge you to defend them, which isn't to denigrate them as interlocutors. It's just, that's the practice. It's very intensely critical.

Robin:

I've suggested that that's sort of, that was the key to science in some sense.

Arnold:

Yeah.

Robin:

Right. You know, the story of the key to science was to have a community of people who are especially skeptical of each other hostile to each other, so that they had to sort of go to ground and just okay let's measure some numbers. Let's have a mathematical model let's just let's talk in ways that we can be really sure we're we meet we know what each other saying and we can get each other to agree, even if we're all hostile. and don't, you know, willing to misinterpret each other. And the idea is like, that was really productive. And that didn't happen up until a certain point in history. And once it happened, it just unleashed this vast amounts of insight that we couldn't have in a world where people were vague and forgiving, and understanding of each other, but not really being very clear what they meant.

Agnes:

So really, you got it backwards in terms of who is privileged. It's the conservative who's privileged. Right, because they are put into this environment where all their wisdom can be unleashed. Whereas the other person is going to talk metaphor, joke, whatever. But like, what are we going to learn from them?

Robin:

Well, you could say by being harshly treated, they end up unleashing a power. But, you know, harshly treated isn't privileged, usually.

Agnes:

Well, I mean, it might be. Like, look, if I'm like- Tough love, okay, they got tough love. They got tough love, right? And like, if the one road leads to like most of human knowledge and the other road leads to not much of anything, then I would say the privileged road to be on is the first one, seems to me. Oh, I want to hear from Arnold. I want to ask you about interpretive charity. So you alluded, and I could sort of see on Robin's face almost an incredulity of this thing of Aristotle's not allowed to be wrong, because Aristotle certainly, in fact, did commit logical errors, factual errors, error of any kind, you name it, Aristotle did, in fact, commit it, including changing his mind and not telling us. And yet, as interpreters, we do largely pretend none of that is true. And so I want to hear your thoughts as an Aristotle interpreter who is bound by these norms. Are they good norms? And what justifies them?

Arnold:

Yeah, so I think that interpretive charity has something going for it, which is that to be an uncharitable interpreter is a very high entropy position. the number of interpretations that I can describe to Aristotle on the assumption that he's committing logical and factual errors everywhere is vast, right? Whereas if I'm a charitable interpreter and I have to make sure everything that Aristotle says is, if not right, at least very reasonable for somebody who doesn't own a microscope, then the number of interpretations I can produce are relatively narrow. And so in the game of setting interpretations against one another, right, and trying to come up with a better theory of what Aristotle is saying, we're going to prefer a sort of low entropy method to a high entropy one. And so I think that the principle of charity has that going for it. But I also think that the principle of charity, especially construed in the sort of unbounded way that it is in practice, right, so when we talk about charity, you know, like, For example, when we're thinking about Davidson's use of that concept, we're not thinking of this unbounded charity that we generally, that we Aristotle scholars often have for Aristotle, what its scriptural interpreters often have for our favorite forms of scripture. But when the problem with that unbounded form of charity is that Aristotle could almost certainly not have anticipated This is almost certainly not how Aristotle expects to have been read, right, with unbounded charity. And so I think it's just, in a deep way, a misinterpretation of Aristotle to read him like this. Because when you do, there's a mismatch between his expectation of his interpreter and you, and your, as it were, expectation of him as an author. And so it's just a mistake. It's just a straightforward error. What you should be trying to achieve when you're reading Aristotle is to become the interpreter that he was trying to anticipate. And that is an interpreter who is liable to mistakes. And so he thinks that there are certain kinds of mistakes you're going to be making. You're going to expect parts of the text that are going to try to anticipate those mistakes and steer you away from them. He's going to expect you to have the kind of knowledge base that a student at his school might have had. Um, he's going to expect you to be, uh, uh, have certain prejudice and prejudices and proclivities. He's not going to expect you to have a thorough going understanding of logical validity because nobody on the planet had a thorough going understanding of logical validity at that time. Um, he's, he's going to expect you to understand roughly what was in his text. If you can come up with a good theory about how he. Um, presented it to students in what order, if there was an order, but that's it. Right. that's the kind of thing that pushes you towards good interpretation versus bad one. The principle of charity is like, it's like an opening move in lowering the number of possible interpretations, but it's not a method. It has to stop somewhere and it has to stop where Aristotle would have expected it to stop.

Robin:

Let me raise what I think is a difficult question, which is, you think of somebody long ago who wrote stuff and you ask, why are they famous? Why do we know about them? There's two paths we could distinguish. One path is via readers of them who understood very carefully what they meant and who had a subtle understanding of them and then saying they were great because of that. And the other would be because of many people who had a very crude rough understanding of what they meant and then liking that and passing that on. So it seems much, that second one seems much more plausible to me for most people. That is the reason that they're famous and we know about them is because many people knew of a rough reading of them and liked that and thought there was value in that. So now if we ask the very basic question, why should we be reading old people at all anyway? The first argument would be, look, there has to be something in reading them that isn't captured in other people having summarized what they said and incorporating in their new thoughts, right? So the first idea would be, there's no point in reading old people, because if there's anything they had to say that was worth saying, surely people have incorporated that in all their later thoughts, and we can forget the original source. So the counter argument has to be there's something about reading them that will get you an insight that the later people haven't summarized or incorporated in their thinking. Still, it seems most likely that's going to be the caricature, rough reading of them. So that's where the value is, if there's value. So sure, you could do this more careful reading what exactly they meant, but that's not plausibly the reason why they're worth reading, because that's not plausibly the causal reason why people talk about this person now.

Arnold:

Yeah, so I had a professor when I was an undergraduate who had many little aphorisms that I remember. And one of them was that stupidity is efficient intelligence. And that crude readings are just efficient packagings of sophisticated readings. And that whenever we encounter stupidity and crudity in the world, we should see, ah, look how efficient and powerful and why exportable this little piece of intelligence has become. And this is, I think, a well-known thing with cognitive biases, right? That they're not bad judgments. They're just judgments that aren't. They're heuristics. Yeah. And so I think you're right. So for example, I'm a reader of Aristotle. And the reason I'm reading Aristotle can't be because I'm hoping to better promulgate the crude view That is the crude Aristotelianism that actually made Aristotle famous and made him a reliable feature of the history of philosophy and the history of science. I guess I would say the reason why I think it's worth reading Aristotle is because it's a part of a larger project. And I guess I think there's a larger project of self-understanding where how we're doing things like reading Aristotle is important. If the only thing we were doing in philosophy was reading ancient philosophers, that would be bad. That's not a worthwhile endeavor. But reading ancient philosophers can be useful because one of the things that we want to understand is why we think the way that we do. Why do we have the concepts that we have? How much of that is contingent? How much of that is stuff we're reading off the world nice clean way where we've all more or less come to the understanding that the answer to that question is very little. The world doesn't feed us very many concepts. We get them historically and culturally. And so a lot of what we want to understand is where our thinking comes from. Why do we think that there's such a thing as matter in the world? If you look at the introduction to physics books in high school, you'll see that there Physics is the study of matter is a very common definition of the field. Now, nowhere in physics does the word matter. There's no physical equation that discusses matter. It's not a term within the science at all. And yet, many physicists and many ordinary people would say that that's, you know, Um, they would talk about materialism as a, the view that physics is the or science, but there, there's, as it were, no knowledge deeper than that. Um, and they would understand physics to be discussing matter and so on, but where do we get this idea of that?

Robin:

Like, where does it come from? If you have a current concept of matter, and then you have these crude summaries of Aristotle that say contained a concept of matter, and then there was the original Aristotle's concept of matter. Uh, it's going to be that interim, I mean, that final thing caused it via the intermediary, right? That is, it wasn't Aristotle's subtle concept of matter that caused directly our current concepts of matter, it was the crude summaries of Aristotle's concept that caused our current concepts. So then, you know, then it becomes just more of a historical interest. Well, where did that crude concept come from? Well, you can look at the source, but I might think, well, all I wanted really to know was the crude thing that we are using. I'm not sure I care where exactly that came from.

Arnold:

Right. It's not exactly that we're looking for the sophisticated concept of matter so much as we're trying to understand where the crude concept came from, where the theory is. And I think this is a theory that could be wrong. The theory is that what it would mean for that crude concept to be transparent to us is for us to understand what problem is the concept of matter and answer to it, right?

Robin:

I mean, it doesn't have to be that to us. We could see it as an answer to a different problem, but that was its historical origin.

Arnold:

Right. And I think if we discover that for us, you know, so the word energy is another, it's another Aristotelian coinage, though, unlike matter, where our concept of matter and Aristotle's, at least the crude concept of matter from Aristotle, more or less line up, right? The word energy and Aristotle's Energeia do not line up. They're not really related concepts. And so there, I think, it would be a mistake to go looking to Aristotle to understand what energy means. It's just not an Aristotelian concept. It's a linguistic artifact that there's some relationship between Energeia and energy. At least, you know, as far as I know. But with matter, I think that it is useful to go back and look at what Aristotle thought. Because we can ask ourselves, is the question that we're trying to solve with the concept of matter, or is the problem that we're trying to address with that, the same as Aristotle's problem? And if not, are they related problems? And how are they related? And how did the one problem become a different kind of problem? And in fact, I think that there's a really rich and continuous and interesting story to be told about how it is that we arrived at the modern conception of matter from an Aristotelian, right?

Agnes:

Can you give us that story in like three sentences?

Arnold:

I can give it to you as quickly as I possibly can, right? So that is that there was a discussion starting in the Greek commentary tradition about the question of prime matter, which Aristotle is quite indecisive about he doesn't seem to settle one way or the other about. Is there any level on which you have something like fundamental right.

Agnes:

Arnold, can we pause? Arnold, I think you need to explain that because I think most people just think when they think matter, they think that.

Arnold:

So you have to explain what else matters. So if you were to ask Aristotle, what's the matter of a human being? He would say the human body. And then what's the matter of the body? He would say, well, it's the organs. And you could say, what's the matter of the organs? He would say something like, well, flesh and blood and various homeomerous substances and stuff like that. And Aristotle thought that for the most part, you're interested in that first level, right? What's the matter of, what he called the proximate matter of something. He wasn't very interested in this question, what's the ultimate matter of things? That's what's the matter of matter of matter of matter of matter, all the way down to the bottom. And he was pretty ambivalent about whether or not there was something that we could call a prime matter down there. But that's the thing that physics is supposed to study, right? Physicists will be happy once they've reached a level of material analysis beyond which they cannot pass. They've reached the fundamental thing. That's the point at which physicists will say we're done. And so that's the question of prime matter. And Aristotle was pretty ambivalent about it. Various Greek commentators tried to sort this out. The problem is that prime matter can't have any positive attributes. Because any positive attribute would be a sort of formal attribute. It would already be determinate. Prime matter would have to be totally potential, right? Nothing actual or real or realized about it. Including, the trouble is, extension, right? So prime matter couldn't have spatial extension. But that seems now paradoxical and absurd, that you could have matter without spatial extension. That is somehow merely a potentiality for it or something. And so Aquinas took the position that prime matter is absolutely just totally a potential, a potentiality. And then on the other side, Occam said, no, prime matter is just spatially extended stuff with no further determination belonging to it. Everything is just made of something that takes up space. And eventually, Occam's position won out through a pretty contentious dialectic among Aristotle commentators and philosophers. And Occam's position became more or less Descartes' position, right? And so Cartesian physics, where we first start to see theories where we are developing equations for the interactions of corpuscular objects, the interactions of billiard balls bouncing off of one another, and so on. That's something where we really start to see that with Galileo and Descartes. It really gets only theorized with Descartes. And that is where we get Newton. So Newton is, in some sense, a refinement of the French attempt at physics, because it's Aside from Newton's atomism, it's very much of a piece with Descartes' approach. And the modern theory of matter is the inheritor of one branch of Aristotle interpretation, namely the prime matter must at least have spatial extension. And so physics became the study of the interactions of bodies just insofar as they're spatially extended. And that sort of ceases to be the case once we get to the early 20th century, right? Physics goes off in a different direction at that point. But our understanding of physics as the study of matter is kind of an early 20th century study or understanding of physics anyway, so.

Robin:

Arnold, you've given an articulate reason why you want to interpret Aristotle. Yeah, it seems to me that that may not be the most common reason for interpretation. So like, I've seen myself be interpreted. That is, you know, have many specific essays with many specific conclusions. And then I see some people coming along and saying, what's the Hansonian view on the following question, which isn't something I wrote on, but they seem to want to have my view on that question. And I'm but they, they will, if they haven't done already, they will be doing it for Agnes as well. There is this desire. Aristotle all the time they constantly say, what did Aristotle think about this thing that he never talked about, and then produce the right but I'm pointing that like this Aristotle may be worth figuring out for this historical origin point of view but I'm thinking I'm less valuable and maybe even you less valuable for understanding the detail historical origins of points of view. or at least it's not clear that that would be valuable. I'm just pointing to a psychological habit. People want to take thinkers that are represented as a thinker in their mind and they want to fill out their views on many things, even if that doesn't actually help them maybe understand those person's arguments better. or the origins of them. So it feels like, to me, most of the time, people try that. To me, I go, this isn't very helpful. I didn't take a position on this. I'm not sure why you would want me to take a position on this. Here's my arguments. If you misunderstood them, let's talk about the thing that I said. But why try so hard to attribute all these other views to me?

Arnold:

Yeah, so let's go back to this idea of the communicator or the writer modeling an interpreter. and the interpreter modeling the writer, right? So there's this funny kind of interaction going on where each side is trying to model the other. And what I think is going on when that's successful, right? So the hallmark of a good Aristotle is I think that they can predict the text, right? When they give you a theory, the theory will And then you think, OK, well, suppose I've never read the Aristotle, right? What kind of a text would I expect Aristotle to write about, say, the role of matter in the generation of substances if he's going to write a chapter about that? What kind of a text would I expect? What would I expect him to be worried about? What would I expect him to try to differentiate himself from theoretically? What kind of puzzles do I think Aristotle would be interested in trying to address in that theory? read the text, and that's exactly what you find, right? So that's what a good interpretation is. Good interpreters are the people who can predict the text.

Robin:

But does that explain why people are interested in playing this exercise in this question?

Arnold:

Yeah. So, and I think when people want to know the Hansonian view on something, it's because they're reaching for the ability to do that. They're reaching for, that is, insofar as they're becoming, they're trying to become good interpreters of Robin Hanson. What they're trying to do is be able to predict your response to novel questions, to texts that don't yet exist. And now they ask you, they say, I've tried to predict your response. Sometimes Agnes and I talk about your views, Robin, and I often am in the position of being a Robin Hanson predictor, where I channel you.

Robin:

I think when you and somebody else were arguing about an interpretation, your ability to predict them would count for you as being a better interpreter. But I'm not so sure that's actually the reason why people interpret. So, for example, I was at an event with a bunch of specialists in Adam Smith, and I asked them, what's the most controversial question about Adam Smith? And they said, well, was he a lefty or righty? They want to know where to put them on the political spectrum. That's the most interesting question to him about that. And I see it for a lot of people. They really are trying to like put them on sides of various current debates. They want to know, is he one of us or one of them? That's one of their primary motivations. And for me, they also want to like score me on being accurate about things. They want to say, well, what did Robin really say about the psych project back then? Because should we score it as a good or a bad thing? Was Robin right or wrong about that? So I think there's a lot of sort of alliances, like whose side are they on, and then scoring them good or bad, basically, according to our shared morals. People are very interested in what old thinkers were how racist or how sexist, not because those seem to matter much for their point of view, because we're just trying to score these people and decide how high they deserve to rank, and whether they're one of us or one of them.

Arnold:

So I have a theory here. And I think it'll take me a second to get to it. So suppose we do engage in this double modeling game with the communicator, insofar as we're interpreters. And then the question is, why are we so interested in pursuing that? And why are we so interested, in particular, in lionizing or bringing down certain figures, especially people like Aristotle, where there's this constant, you know, talk over, is Aristotle evil? Where the answer is, yeah, by any modern standard. But, you know, it's sort of complicated. It's a sort of complicated historical question, but we worry quite a lot about this, especially insofar as we're Aristotelians. I'm sort of an Aristotelian. I think in an Aristotelian-y way, And I like this, right? This is something that I like to do. And so if you come along and you show me that Aristotle was not only evil but stupid, or evil in an especially pernicious way where he really should have seen it coming or something like that, I'm going to start to get worried. I might become defensive. I might write counter articles about how great Aristotle is. Or I might give up on being an Aristotle interpreter. So the question is, what's going on here? Why am I stuck on Aristotle? Why are there people that are I'm stuck on various thinkers, right? Why do people become not just interpreters, but sort of followers of a thinker? And I think that the answer is, and I'm sort of borrowing something from Agnes here, that we, this game of interpretation, of modeling a communicator and the communicator modeling us as interpreters is just, that is, it's a really, really deep part of what it means to think at all. That is, if I had to give you the, as it were, dark answer as to why people are Aristotle interpreters, it's because I don't know how to think. And by playing this game with Aristotle, where he tries to project me, tries to model me, and I try to model him, that's the best I can do when it comes to being a thinker. right? That is, for many of us, it's just really hard to think. It's really hard to even get started on thinking. And that this interpretation game is how we do it.

Robin:

That is, if somebody has an essay on a particular topic, you read that essay more carefully, you can understand their argument. Trying to guess their political positions that are very related to the thing doesn't seem terribly useful in understanding the thing they said. It seems to be more about affiliating with them. Like, they're being a hero or a villain. People are just much more interested in this who to affiliate with based on who's high status and who's aligned with who. And I don't think they care that as much about what exactly they said and what it meant.

Arnold:

Yeah, so I mean, maybe that part of what the especially degenerate forms of this interpretation game look like is that people aren't really the focus of it, but sort of something like a party or a team, right? that there's a kind of generalized expression for lefties or righties. And you're supposed to just kind of get on that wavelength and anticipate what they would say about any given topic, right? The sort of archetypal wise leftist or archetypal wise righty person. What they would say on it is what you're supposed to say, right? But I think when people are asking for the Robin Hanson perspective on something, probably because a fair number of people use you as someone with whom to think. That is, they're trying to get a grip on the idea of thinking, and you're somebody that they can attach to, where they can think about a problem precisely because they can try to anticipate your thinking about it.

Agnes:

Right. I wanted to get in there because I could see Robin does too. But I think that you're being unappreciative, Robin, which is there are just very few people in the world that are in the lucky position where other people are constantly saying to themselves, what's the Hansonian view of whatever? Now there are negatives, okay, I'm not saying there are no negatives, but I think that you get into that position because your mind seems to other people to be something they can inhabit. So You seem to have a coherent outlook on the world that fits together, that they can model, and then they can make predictions as to how someone with that outlook would see something. Most people are not like that. Most people's minds are just a jumbled mush, and you cannot model them, and you cannot know what they would think about something. Either that, or you can model them, but it's just what everybody else would think. So, and I think in a way, one way to understand what it is to be a philosopher, not in the sense of to be engaged in philosophy, but to be someone who is a philosophical icon or someone who's a figure in the history of philosophy, is that you have an outlook that is both distinctive enough and coherent enough that other people can inhabit it, that there is something that it is like to have your mind and other people can have it too. People who are not Robin Hanson can be Robin Hanson, can think like you. And people want to do that. Now, part and parcel of that is, do I want to do it or not, right? Do I want to become Robin Hanson? This is a little dangerous. Maybe I'll have some, like, bad views that people will hate me for. And so people are sensitive to the question, if I become Robin Hanson, is everyone going to hate me? And then they're attuned to the places where that might happen. But still, the basic phenomenon is that your mind is a mind that other people want to inhabit.

Robin:

So it seems like the key question here is, if I write an essay on a particular topic and I give particular arguments, how much, in order to understand those arguments and their conclusions, does someone need to inhabit me as opposed to just read my arguments? That is, how modular or decontextualized can the arguments be?

Agnes:

Can I answer? A lot. A lot. They need to inhabit you a lot, Robin. This is something you don't have to do by yourself.

Arnold:

Or I think the answer is they do, in fact, need to inhabit your mind, because they need to be able to see what you anticipate in an interpreter.

Robin:

Right, but our usual style of argument doesn't reflect or credit that. So the way we usually argue usually gives the impression, on the surface at least, that you could just follow the argument and see whether it works. So if that doesn't work, then we're misleading people by our style of argument. That is, we're presenting arguments as if you could just look at the assumptions that we're making and the evidence we're pointing to and the conclusion we say draws from that. And that's all misleading. It doesn't work. We can't actually get those conclusions, those assumptions, unless you inhabit this person's whole worldview, which of course is a vastly larger thing. So we talked before about the size of a context that it takes to interpret. And here this is an argument about a very large context that's required to interpret.

Arnold:

So I think, I think the right way to see that is that this question how do we communicate with each other anonymously right where you don't know who your reader is, and they've never met you is just We've come up with a huge number of strategies for dealing with this question. And some of those strategies are, and I think this is something that's been very successful in science, is coming up with very formalized signals for how you, the communicator, are anticipating your interpreter will think. So you can signal to the interpreter how you're modeling in a very regular way through a series of conventions. But I think that that's really what's going on. When you present me an argument in premises and conclusion form, or you give me a table of evidence in a standard sort of nature article, what you're doing is you're giving me a constellation of references such that I can say, oh, OK, I know what kind of a reader he's looking for here. I can sort of figure that out. But manifestly, that doesn't make you clear Most people can't read a philosophical paper full of premises and conclusions or a nature article and get anything at all from it. You and I both do this every once in a while, is go and look at a science article that's recently published because, say, it made the news or something like that. And we go look at the actual article. And very often, interpretation is very difficult because we're not You know, you're probably better at this than I am, but at least I'm not well inducted into a lot of those signals and those formalisms. But that's what's going on. We come up with ways to tell each other how we should be interpreted.

Robin:

So, I mean, the standard way of describing that is a particular discipline. you know, what it takes to, say, get a PhD in a discipline and start publishing in there is you have to inhabit the standard discipline persona in how you read and how you write. That's what the discipline constructs. It creates this persona and then trains people in that persona. And you are not a member of that group until you can show that you can successfully project that persona in your writing and interpret that persona in your reading, interpretation. But then successfully, if in that discipline, people don't have to inhabit you, If you're reading a chemistry paper as a chemist, you don't have to inhabit that particular chemist and learn all the other things they said. You just have to inhabit the kind of chemist they are, biochemist or something, and then you can read their article.

Agnes:

That's why I said this is the mark of a philosopher. I didn't say this to everyone. I say philosopher. Philosophers are somebody where part of where we do this activity of trying to inhabit that particular person's mind. How does Leibniz see things? How does Hume see things? How does Aristotle see things? People take that approach to you, Robin, which is to say they're treating you not as a garden variety scientist, they're treating you as a philosopher.

Robin:

And so this is the great question then, like, when does that make sense? When is it more productive or insightful or whatever to be or see someone in that way? As opposed to, you know, so I do strive to like project myself as a person of a discipline and a reader of that when I write, you know, in a topic of a discipline, I, but obviously I probably fail.

Arnold:

Yeah, I mean, As to when it's valuable for an interpreter to treat somebody as a philosopher, we're now using that word to mean somebody whose mind you can strive to inhabit through a kind of unusual practice of interpretation, one that's not typical of, say, relationships or dialectical argument or something like that. That is, the value to the interpreter of doing that is just, as it were, the value of the philosopher. It's just how useful is that philosopher to think with. How far does it get you in the project of thinking about something?

Robin:

How useful is it to think in terms of philosophers? That is, when is it good for people to present themselves as philosophers as opposed to as a chemist or whatever else there is?

Arnold:

I don't understand exactly why, because I don't really understand, I think, what thinking is. One thing that does seem empirically manifest, though this could certainly use actual study, is that people find it incredibly valuable to latch themselves onto philosophers of one stripe or another, because they do it constantly. And the more educated people get, the more they're inclined to do it.

Agnes:

And they might, in fact, Robin, get more out of being able to do that with you than out of any of your particular views.

Robin:

So I would say this is true of most intellectual celebrities, not just philosophers. Think of Steven Pinker or Ross Dothat or something like that. They are not being interpreted primarily as a representative of some discipline. They are being interpreted primarily as a persona that has written a lot of things that you could have read. So the word philosopher may not. Right, but it suggests there's this much larger scope for this style of thought.

Arnold:

Yeah. But I mean, the ancient Greeks would have called all of those people philosophers. They're intellectual celebrities. That's kind of a lot of what the word philosopher means.

Robin:

So the- I think we're almost out of time. So Agnes, you have talked the least. Would you like to summarize where we are?

Agnes:

No, I want Arnold to have the last word.

Robin:

OK.

Arnold:

So I think one thing that you, and since you're apparently a philosopher, Robin, can think about, and that people ought to think about, and that I think some of the particularly Plato did think quite hard about is you model your interpreter as a member of a discipline, reading your work as if you were another anonymous member of that discipline. But another way that you could write is by anticipating an interpreter who treats you as a philosopher. And so that there is not just a distinctive way that we read philosophers. And in fact, we've more or less defined philosophy by a distinctive mode of reading. But there's a distinctive way of writing as a philosopher, right? To write in such a way that you anticipate a certain interpretive game with your reader, namely one that treats you as a philosopher, treats you as a mind to inhabit. And so you can, as it were, help people with this, right? Because to these, apparently, people find it valuable. And it can be something that they can be helped along with. And I think Plato, in particular, is the person who really tried to work out and perfect a style of writing that anticipated a philosophical reader. And Aristotle didn't at all, by the way. Aristotle has virtually no interest in this. Plato really really did work on this, and so it might be something for you to consider that you could you could start to write and think about what a philosophical interpreter of your work would look like.

Robin:

That sounds like a great basis for an analysis of style. Yeah, you know, but you'd want to ground it and more specific. you know, things that work for that kind of style. Like if you're going to write as a philosopher, then, you know, your, your essays should have more than one topic or one topic. They should be longer short. They, you know, they should mention things you said before or not, like go into the specifics of what particular strategies are compliments to that sort of persona. Yeah. That was the last word.

Agnes:

Okay. Bye.

Robin:

All right. Bye.