Robin:

Hello, Agnes.

Agnes:

Hi, Robin.

Robin:

You suggested that we try some episodes on readings. And so, this is our first attempt on a reading and a reading you picked and the reading is…

Agnes:

William James' The Sentiment of Rationality. Maybe let me say what I think it says, like really quickly.

Robin:

OK.

Agnes:

And then we can talk about it. It says a bunch of things but I think the main point is that philosophers in coming up with their conception, their big theory are solving a kind of constrained optimization problem, where they're trying to optimize, like, both for clarity and for unity, at the same time. And that's a difficult problem, because those things pull against each other.
So, unity is getting one overarching account that fits everything. And he connects up unity, in fact, with identity that you really only like connected to things, if you see them as in some sense of the same thing. The moon is the same as an apple and that they're both round. But then on the other side is clarity. And clarity is the kind of concreteness that goes with being able to grasp something with your mind in such a way that you've captured exactly it. And so, he says, he uses the word representability. He says, it's that of clarity, but I think what he means by representability is imaginability.
So, getting an account of each thing that does justice to the way in which that thing is distinctive, that's clarity. And if identity is associated with– if identification is associated with unity, then association is associated with clarity, that is, when we grasp each thing clearly, we might see that there's another thing nearby, but those two things are going to be different that can be merely associated. Right?
So insofar as you're really into clarity, and like he cites Hume as a philosopher who's really into clarity, you're going to tend towards thinking that things are associated but ne resistant to identifying them. Insofar as you're really into unity, you're going to be with a rationalist, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, right? Then you're going to you're going to think things are so to speak identified on the inside. So, this is James's basic framework for like what philosophers are doing. There's more in the paper but I think that's the basic point.

Robin:

So, of course, I read the paper too. And I agree with roughly what you said. He said there's unifying and clarifying. And these are two big things that we want to do. He poses them as sort of a psychological impulse, that we just sort of really want to do them. And he contrasts the philosopher's having a stronger impulse than other practical people so he seems to suggest this isn't an entirely practical and enterprise, it's some sort of philosophical impulse to do both of these things.
He is interested in whether there are limits and so in the unification and he postulates plausibly that eventually you reach some brute facts, which are just facts and different than– and that can't be unified and that you'll have to accept that. But he says, “We won't accept it and we'll just keep psychologically pushing on anyway.” It doesn't seem to say whether there are limits to clarification though, although, you know, in some sense, if there were this key trade-off, there might be but I'm less convinced there is such a fundamental trade-off between the two, I think you can try to achieve both.
He doesn't seem to give enough appreciation to sort of the practical useful benefits of being able to find meaning and understand the universe. Because I guess he seems to think that philosophers go beyond that. At some point, he says that, simplifying is great to the extent things are actually simple. But beyond that, that was just philosophers indulging themselves in simplifying when reality isn't actually simple. And then of course, you might disapprove that extra, you know, so I– there's an old famous quote from Einstein, I think our theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. And sounds like he's thinking we might go beyond to be too simple.
And he's got a lot of pop shots along the way against various philosophers of his age and people that he thinks is too sloppy or too grandiose and everything else. Like he criticizes Hegel for like unifying too much and not having enough discipline to notice that there are really differences or something.
But anyway, the points that I would disagree with him would be again, for explorer, are there limits to clarification, in addition to limits to unification? And is this stuff actually more useful than he gives credit for? And can we like, just – is it all to be attributed to psychological urges to just want to– I mean, he talks about somebody wanting to organize a deck of cards, make it like pretty. That's what philosophy is, it's just this obsession to sort of make things, it’s like obsessive compulsive people wanting to put all the things in a row and making sure they're spaced evenly apart and facing the same way, and they get really upset if one of them is faced the wrong way. I mean, he's kind of presenting philosophy as it was just this sort of unique, rare obsession with a certain kind of compulsive organizing.

Agnes:

Yeah. So, I think that's roughly right. I think that one thing is he is restricting his topic here to reason in its theoretical aspect, right? And he's very clear that like, he would say very different things, if he were talking about ethics, if you're talking about the use of any of this, he thinks that's a different topic. Right? So, he thinks that sometimes people engage in reasoning with no practical end in view. He doesn't think that's the best or most important or whatever kind of reasoning, and he talks a lot about the other kind of elsewhere. He's just restricted his topic. So, he talks about that in the beginning of the end of the paper, right? So, you know, and...
So, I think we should relieve him from the need to explain what the practical benefits are. Because he's just wants to grant that just sometimes, we think, we engage in thinking, right, but not because of like, the action that's going to issue from that thinking. And he's wants to study that activity. And he thinks that it's very hard to get any kind of grip on what would count as like success in that sort of activity, except for like, some kind of– there'd have to be some kind of psychological registering of the success, right? You have to know that you achieved it. And so that's why he frames it in terms of what is the sentiment of rationality? What does it feel like when you've accomplished rationality? The action– because we're not aiming at that, right?

Robin:

Right to engage with that is, it seems to me that the prospect of making sense of the world, which he's roughly talking about, finding ways in which apparently different things really are underlying the same is a very useful common practice that we do in our personal lives, and in academia in general, and if philosophers do it, all the better. So, I would mostly look for the rationale for it, and the structures of it in that useful purpose of it.
I don't– I think if you try to divorce this practice from its useful purpose, and then you ask why, you know why we do it one way or another, you'll be missing the sort of the main structure which would be, well, presumably, we have habits of doing these things in many contexts, because those habits are useful. And if we apply those same habits outside of – in a context where it's harder to judge, presumably we’ll still be applying the same habits, because they're the habits that work elsewhere.

Agnes:

So, and James wants to say like, this is why not many people are interested in philosophy, because it involves ignoring all the things. He says, "This is why so few human beings truly care for Philosophy. The particular determinations which she ignores are the real matter exciting other aesthetic and practical needs, quite as potent and authoritative as hers. What does the moral enthusiast care for philosophical ethics? What does the Aesthetik of every German philosopher appear to the artist? Why does it appear to the artist like the abomination of desolation? What these men need is a particular counsel, and no barren, universal truism."
OK, so James wants to sort of grant like, the thing he's talking about is a very niche activity, very niche mental activity that is not useful in all sorts of ways. And for that very reason, most people are going to have no interest in it. James thinks it's interesting anyway, and it's worth thinking.

Robin:

I don't want to grant that it's not useful. Why not? So, he gives many concrete examples of unifying things and great– many of them look like quite useful examples of unifications of things. He talks about sort of things that produce a distorted view. And thinking of them as all having a common effect of light waves changing speed in a medium. And that's very useful.
He even talks about say, the parts of a flower as modified leaves. And he tries to give that as example as of like completely useless sort of categorization, but it sounds actually pretty useful in biology. He tried to talk about sort of Darwinian, talking about two things that's similar if they had common ancestors as if that was almost useless but of course, that's terribly useful way to think about how [0:10:07] [Indiscernible] people think to…

Agnes:

Oh, I don't think he thinks that's useless. I think he thinks that that's the move that when you go from classification to explanation, he says, to find the common ancestor, because that allows you to identify the two things. I think he's suspicious of the sort of Darwinian Monism, right? The [0:10:25] [Indiscernible] view.

Robin:

Yes. And he's suspicious of physics monism, and in the intervening decades, intervening century, those have won out pretty spectacularly. So, the kind of unification that he is being skeptical about here has been very useful and profitable intellectually. So, this isn't at all useless.

Agnes:

As it went out philosophy, so I think, and I think he's actually already granting that it is one out in his own time outside of philosophy. Maybe it will be helpful to get to this question of what– is there a limit to concreteness?

Robin:

OK.

Agnes:

Because I think there is. So, like, I think that the kind of mystery of this paper is that on the one hand, James is saying, "Look, philosophy, there exists a weird niche activity of going in for a certain kind of absolute unity, but not buying it too cheaply. The boor– the boorest person gets unity cheaply, right? The philosopher gets it more expensive, and that– basically, that's what James says, is the difference between them.
But the– you might think, well, what if we just didn't go in for this unity thing? Like, what if we just went for clarity, right, and didn't worry too much about unity? And what he says in like, section, I think that's what section seven of this paper is about. It's about how actually you need to do philosophy, like everyone does at least some philosophy.

Robin:

Which page are we on?

Agnes:

So, like, go to page like 339.

Robin:

OK, sorry.

Agnes:

So, this is in Section seven, right?

Robin:

Just easily look at the page numbers as I scan through.

Agnes:

Yeah, yeah.

Robin:

Yeah.

Agnes:

Yeah, OK. 339. So, he says... So right, like two-thirds of the way through the page, enough simplicity remains however, do you see that?

Robin:

Right. Yeah.

Agnes:

OK, I'm going to read that bit. “Enough simplicity remains, however, and enough urgency in our craving to reach it, to make the theoretic function – and here he just means the philosophical function, one of the most invincible and authoritative of human impulses. All ages have their intellectual populace. That of our own day prides itself particularly on its love of Science and Facts and its contempt for all metaphysics. Just weaned from the Sunday-school nurture of its early years and with the taste of the Catechism still in its mouth, it is perhaps not surprising that its palate should lack discrimination and fail to recognize how much of Ontology is contained in the nature, force and necessary law, how much mysticism in the awe, progress and loyalty to truth or whatever the other phrases may be with which it's sweetened its rather meager fair of fragmentary physiology and physics.”
OK. What's he saying there? He's saying, we all do philosophy, we just don't necessarily notice when we're doing it. Right. And so that's why he goes on to say it just on the next page, there's no such thing as doing no metaphysics. There's just such a thing as doing good metaphysics and trashy metaphysics. And what most people do, what most scientists do is what James wants to call trashy metaphysics, which is to say, using concepts like in nature and force and using them in a kind of mystical way, but not noticing that you're doing that, and thus thinking that you've somehow, you've somehow been able to sort of set aside this philosophical itch or urge for unity.

Robin:

So, he's criticizing, in essence, sloppy or unthoughtful use of many terms and concepts. And therefore, in his mind, correctly, there would be work to do to try to clarify those concepts, then he would be thinking himself and his colleagues is doing that work. And I'm happy to grant that that sounds completely correct, that his people in his time and even today, using words like that are being sloppy, in ways that we might hope we could be more precise and clear about, if we thought about it.
But that doesn't suggest a limit to that. That how far we could go with that. In the way– so when he talks about unification, I think he makes a more plausible argument that in fact, what you just can't, in the end, unify everything, they will end up being those intrinsic contingencies. I mean he talks about in physics, even if you make everything part of the same physical nature, there'll be sort of the initial conditions of the universe and you won't have unified those.
And you know, that's quite plausible. But for clarification, he doesn't offer an argument that you couldn't keep going in that direction. And this passage certainly doesn't suggest, I mean, this passage to me suggests that, you know, more work has to be done, and he's calling for more continue to work on those things.

Agnes:

Well, I don't think he wants to deny that there are limits– that he wants to assert that there's limits to clarification in the sense that we get more and more clear. The point is, what he wants to say here is that you couldn't just do clarification and forget about the urge towards ultimate unity. That is, the philosopher has this impulse to unify everything, right? And that impulse creates, like, kind of metaphysical monsters, like the idea of substance, right, the idea of being itself, whatever. And you might think you could just do without those metaphysical monsters. You could just be a hard-headed scientific type.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

And what he's trying to point out in this passage is those people have their metaphysical monsters too, they just don't notice it. A Philosopher is the person you go weird that they're doing philosophy.

Robin:

Sure. OK. But that's just saying that in the process of trying to do unification, you will need to do clarification. And many people have chosen a scope for their thought where they think it's all clear and they don't realize there's a whole bunch of other concepts that they aren't being very clear on that. Eventually, they will have to integrate, and in that eventual integration, a unification will require that they clarify those other concepts, and so…
But that would be saying that the effort to unify will eventually force people to clarify more. It doesn't say that you couldn't have a motivation just to clarify and not to unify. If you were that sort of person, you might claim that those people don't exist. But still, they are, in principle, two separate efforts one can do and maybe one is limited, but the other isn't.

Agnes:

Yeah. I mean, one thing that's a sort of theme that runs through this piece is like, there are no essences. The essence of everything is relative to some interest and purpose, right? It shows up in a lot of places, in footnotes too like...

Robin:

I don't think it's right. He keeps repeating that, but in fact, like he makes fun of, say, physicists who will try to sort of, you know, if you have a bunch of concepts, they want to find a concept, such that it would be a thing you could see in a microscope, right? And he distinguishes that, you know, something could be white, and it could be noisy, and it could be fluffy, etc. And most of the properties of objects we have around us aren't properties that you might expect to see in a microscope. But he says physicists are obsessed with this idea of finding properties you could see in a microscope and then using those properties to explain all the other properties. And he thinks that– he seems to suggest that it's a bit arrogant and presumptuous.
But that's exactly right, it's exactly the process, people have successfully used quite well, to find the more fundamental descriptions. And I think that it's correct that those properties you can see in a microscope have been the most successful way to figure out, how to think about materials and objects. And it isn't just, you know, it depends on your purposes for that is good for pretty much all purpose.

Agnes:

So, I think he's making fun of something quite a bit more specific. And it is a trend in his own time to talk about, like, mental molecules, so like molecules of thought. And the reason he's making fun of this, he thinks it's a certain kind of, like hypertrophy of the desire for clarity that you have to be you're so into grasping that you can only grasp even the abstract as being concrete. And I have to read his most hilarious example here. Right? So, he talks about...

Robin:

Where are we?

Agnes:

This work... this is on page 323. But I'm about to turn the page, right. Psychologie réaliste, by P. Sièrebois, OK, it says, “It is maintained that our ideas exist in us in a molecular condition, and are subject to continual movements… Their mobility is as great as that of the molecules of air or any gas. When we fail to recall a word, it is because our ideas are hid in some distant corner of the brain whence they cannot come to the muscles of articulation, or else they have lost their ordinary fluidity. These ideal molecules – he's now quoting – are material portions of the brain, which differs from all other matter precisely in this property whence it possesses of subdividing itself into very attenuated portions which easily take on the likeness in form and quality of all external objects.”
Now, James comments, “In other words, when I utter the word “rhinoceros” an actual little microscopic rhinoceros gallops towards my mouth.” So actually, he's making fun of the idea that the mental has to be understood as the physical in order for the mind– we can grasp the idea of a rhinoceros and so the idea of a rhinoceros also has to look like a rhinoceros.

Robin:

So, in economics, that's, you know, made fun of through the phrase physics envy, that is, physics has been so successful and other sciences try to mimic physics in their style and concepts and approaches. And so, that's what that looks like. Here, he's saying, OK fine, that may work fine in physics, but it's just not going to work very well in psychology, stop trying so hard to, you know, structure everything as if your mind was more like the physical systems you're trying to analyze, which is correct. I mean, that is, even today, our best ways to think about the mind don't look much like the way we analyze materials in terms of molecules. That's quite correct.
But it still doesn't mean that when we eventually analyze the mind well, there won't be some sort of key concepts that a way you want to think about it that help you explain all the other concepts. It wouldn't necessarily be true that, you know, there's just, it's just arbitrary, which concepts of the mind you focused on, depending on what your purposes are. If there's actually a real structure there, then knowing that real structure is key to lots of different purposes.

Agnes:

It's not at all clear to me, if you were to try to pick which scientist is most concerned with clarity, as over against unity. I don't think I'd pick the physicist. That is like what are stuff made out of for physicists? I mean, it's not atoms anymore. It's not even like electron, it get– you keep, you break it up to a point where my mind can't grasp but it doesn't feel very concrete. It feels extremely abstract. And the tendency is toward like, a unified system, right? Like if I wanted the really concrete science, I'd pick biology. And in this example, the mental molecule notice is like, a rhinoceros, like, it looks like the rhinoceros. And that we can…

Robin:

So, I mean, this is exactly where the difference between unification and clarification split apart. I would say, you know, you're not going to put them on a single axis here. I would say, yes, physics has managed to unify to an enormous degree. But that isn't at the cost of clarification. But it might be at the cost of contingency, right? So, if you say biology, or you know, is full of contingency, that would be the key way we would tend to talk about it. That is, we have a few relatively general theories of biology and they give you some understanding of overall patterns. But then you've just got an enormous contingency, you've got this particular species in this particular place with this mountain and this river. And this particular way, it does have snails that you know, and there's just all this detailed contingency which isn't unified by any grander theory. It's just contingency you have to remember and memorize.
I remember when I took college classes, the molecular biology classes were this horror of massive amounts of detail to memorize without many general principles to understand them and I hated that. I liked physics where there was a small number of principles interacted in different ways, and I can just understand them and clear them. But they're both clear. That is, they have both admirable clarity.
Now, I would think, where you have the less clarity in biology is in places where you're just trying to make sense of say, ecologies for behaviors, in intuitive ways to grasp the complexity where you haven't, you know, you might talk about aggressive or something, but not be very clear what aggressive means. But you have an intuitive sense, and you'll use the word as long as you can get away with it. And so, there is lack of clarity in areas where we've got so much contingency that we don't find clear words to be as useful as vague words. And that's an interesting fact about when we find clarity useful.
And in physics, we have enormous clarity, and we rarely give it up, we can almost always be very precise about what we mean. Nevertheless, you know, it's unified. So those things are different, the concepts split apart.

Agnes:

I think that… I think that what James means by clarity, like, it’s something more like what you're calling contingency. That is, it is a recognition of the distinctness of things. Where… that's why I said, I think the idea of imagination is very important. Basically, something can only be very clear if you can imagine it. So almost none of the concepts of physics are clear, according to this step, which doesn't mean they're unclear, it doesn't mean they're like, but it means that when the mind tries to focus, it's sort of like I don't quite have a like visceral sense of what I'm grabbing on to.
And maybe, I mean, I don't know if this is right, but I would think that in accordance with this mathematics would be completely unclear. That is, it would be a science that is– that has zero clarity to it. Right? Why? Because in this sense of clarity, OK, in the sense that he's interested, in the sense in which Hume is the philosopher of clarity, because there aren't distinct existences that you can encounter.
So, I think what's really– what James is really interested in here is to give a – one thing he's interested anyway is to explain what empiricism is. So, he sees himself as a radical empiricist. Right? And what he means by that is that like when you encounter the world, you just like, face this thing that is in some way other in that it's something over and above your theory is no matter what, right? And that he says you have this experience of like wonder of…

Robin:

Well, let me read from the key introduction to the concept of simplification.

Agnes:

OK, what page is it?

Robin:

Beginning on Section III, page 322.

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

“But alongside the passion for simplification, there exists a sister passion which in some minds –though they are perhaps the minority – is its rival. This is the passion for distinguishing the impulse to be acquainted with the parts rather than comprehend the whole. Loyalty to clearness and integrity of profession, dislike of blurred outlines, of vague identifications, are its characteristics. It loves to recognize particulars in their full completeness, and the more of these it can carry the happier it is. It prefers any amount of incoherence, abruptness, and fragmentariness, as long as the literal details of separate facts are saved to a fallacious unity, which swamps things rather than explains them.”
So, I have to say, this paragraph is ambiguous between the two concepts that you are talking about. And at this point is where I will invoke the– my priority to say, I don't really care what he meant. I'm more interested in like, what distinctions can we think about and what can we say about them? So, let us name these two distinctions, right?
One is just wanting to make sure you've made distinctions, i.e., that you don't confuse two things that are different for the same. That would be one key passion. And another might be the passion two, when you refer to something or name it or have a concept for it, you know exactly what you're saying. That is the vagueness or ambiguity in language or descriptions, is a separate issue from the making sure you have a full set of distinctions. So…

Agnes:

I actually don't think either of those is quite what James is getting at. So, there's– in what you read, there was a word that stands out to me. “particulars”. OK? There's such a thing is sort of like the mind encountering an individual thing set off from the rest of the world. Like if I hold up a pencil, and you look at this particular, part of what you're doing is you're separating it from everything else. And you're like, there's a– there it is, right? It's particular.
And I think that that's a distinctive kind of encounter. And in some places, he calls it aesthetic, like, almost sensory, right. And when, when you try to create– when you try to make that sort of encounter with something like a thought or an idea, you want to make the thought of an idea to be like a thing. And so, you talk about the thought of a rhinoceros, and you imagine a rhinoceros galloping into your mouth from your brain, right? Because what you're trying to do is concretify or particularize, the thought so that it has boundaries, so that it's separate from the things around it, so that you can encounter it as a whole. That's what clarity is, how he's using the word clarity.

Robin:

But even what you said isn't very clear to me. So… But, again, it's less important what he meant, than different concepts we might distinguish. And then we might ask how important they are. So…

Agnes:

Yeah, the problem is we might not be that much better than him, right? This might be a hard thing to get.

Robin:

But we can at least endeavor to be clear what we mean, in a way that we can't clari – because we can't ask him questions and clarify what he meant. But we can certainly ask many. So, for example, you held up a pencil, and to me it looked red. Now, if you hold up another pencil, and I want to know, is it the same pencil?

Agnes:

I have a lot of red pencils.

Robin:

Exactly, right? So, we can think of…

Agnes:

But they’re all slightly, slightly different shade of red.

Robin:

Or you could think we might want to have a way to talk such that it could be clear that we were talking about the same pencil, so that we could make more discussion of it, we're comparing it to a different pencil, for example. And in that case, we might want to clarify, well, you know, is it the same pencil at the same time? Is it the same orientation? Like maybe you're showing me the opposite side of the red pencil, or maybe we want to make sure we had you make sure it was facing the same direction when we looked at it again, to see if it was– if we had a dispute about whether it was reflecting or not, or whether it looked the same as the red on your blouse or whatever, right?
You know, we could try to just be– try to have enough detail of how we talked about it so that we made sure we were distinguishing each particular thing and could refer reliably to the same thing that we had meant to refer to, right?

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

And make the distinction of one side of the pencil or the other, the upside from the pencil to the bottom side, how it looks in a fog or how it looks in clear air and like, how it looks when the temperature is hot or cold, right? So, we could have this instinct to just try to make sure we have a language and a procedure for talking about it, such that we could reliably go back to the same thing, if we wanted to talk about the same thing.
And it does seem that like that habit is, you know, somewhat different than the habit of trying to unify things, if I'm, if I'm just saying all red– I'm making a theory about red pencils in general, I don't much care which side of the pencil it is or which red pencil, it is, right? I will slide over those things. And I'll allow you to substitute one for another without caring very much. But if I worry about these abstractions, and I'm not so sure about them, I want to make sure that we check if it's the same red pencil on the same side, etc.
But for that purpose, it seems like clarity, and language is an important input and tool, right? I won't be able to be clear with you about which exact thing I'm talking about unless the words I'm using and the descriptors I'm using are clear enough to serve that purpose.

Agnes:

Sure. And like James, I think– so I think you fastened onto something here, which it's right to be skeptical of, namely, a certain kind of idea of impossibility of making progress on a certain problem. OK, that is– he doesn't explicitly say it but that's an undercurrent here. There's an undercurrent here of philosophy bases itself with a problem that it can't really make progress on. And I think it's good to ask whether he's right about that.
But he doesn't want to deny that one can make all sorts of progress on all sorts of extra philosophical problems that have real upshots. Right? And that one can make that progress by making better distinctions and unifying in better ways etc. So, we do want to separate the question of what's true about this bizarre intellectual activity that doesn't aim at some further, like viewed purely as a theoretical activity, right? And some people might do physics or math that way, right, purely as a theoretical activity with no interest in what any kind of upshot.

Robin:

I'm just not seeing that line. I mean, it sounds like you’re trying to draw this…

Agnes:

You don’t think there’s anyone who does that in the whole world?

Robin:

No, no, I don’t see what their motive has to do with what they're exactly doing, right. I mean, look, you can saw a log for all sorts of purposes, you could do it out of artistic desire just to see what it feels like the saw the log, or to hear the sound of the log being sawed, or just to have a pile of log pieces. Or you could do it to make a house or make a piece of furniture. There's a lot of reasons you could have for sawing a log.
But we could still look at the process of selling log and talk about what– that it will break into two pieces and all sorts of things about it, regardless of knowing your purposes here. So, the general topic here is unification. And I would say there's lots of very valuable common uses of the concept of unification. He could declare that he doesn't care about any of those purposes but I don't care…

Agnes:

But he does, he's just interested in this paper and talking about a specific thing. He talks about those things in other places lots and lots. That’s actually what he’s more interested.

Robin:

Right. Right. But it's not clear that this thing is a different thing, because he has a different purpose.

Agnes:

Well, I mean, you might think– so I think you're right, that unification and clarity, and he would agree that those function in all thought, including practical thought. And he would probably agree that in all those other domains, one can make, you know, often make lots of progress by adding some clarification or adding some unity and thus achieving better whatever the goal was that you were trying to achieve. Right? He doesn’t want to deny that.
But you know, if you were talking about people sawing logs, right, and you noticed, OK, everyone who saws logs has to whatever, make this kind of motion. But then depending like, if people are sawing logs for a particular purpose, right, let's say they were sawing logs like to demonstrate how people used to do it in the olden days, or something. Mostly or somebody who saws logs in that way, there might be some distinctive features of their log sawing that show up because that's their purpose.
And James thinks that that is true about philosophy, that is the way that unity and clarity function in the philosopher’s thought is distinctive because of the kind of goal the philosopher has, which isn't a practical goal, but it's the goal of battling a certain kind of demon, the demon of the impossibility of complete unity.

Robin:

Well, he's failed to convince me that there are interesting differences so far. So, all I see him is describing issues of unification and clarification and mentioning many particular people who do it different ways and complaining about some and praising others, but I don't see him having identified interestingly unique different issues that philosophers have when they try to unify or clarify than anybody else does.

Agnes:

So, one… like one thing that James– one thing that I think is distinctive of James as a philosopher is that he's very sensitive to the phenomenon of like, human psychological heterogeneity, in a way that I don't know any other philosopher who is like, James, when you read James to get his idea of there are different kinds of people and they're really deeply different, right? And that's one thing this paper is about. You have the philosopher whose mind works like Hume, and you have the philosopher whose mind works like Kant or something. And you're more like the Kant one, right? You've already actually classified yourself. You said that when you had to learn all this biology or whatever, you know…

Robin:

Yeah, right.

Agnes:

…stuff, you didn't want to learn a big list of things, you like unity, right? So, one thing that this paper can do for you is show you that the way your mind works is that when it wants to solve these optimization problems, it privileges unity, which I think is true about you, you actually do privilege unity.

Robin:

No, I completely agree that different people have different personality with respect to these unification and clarification, but that's also true in all the other areas where we unify and clarify, that's not unique to philosophy.

Agnes:

I think that's right. So, I think… maybe a way to think about it is the philosopher is somehow solving this problem, absolutely. Like without, without, not towards some other end, right? That is, like the philosopher is in some way grappling head-on with unity versus clarity, in a way that other people, like they're solving it for some purpose and that purpose could dictate how much clarity you need here and how much unity you need. The philosopher doesn't have those like guardrails or whatever, and they just have to…

Robin:

Well, let me rephrase that and maybe see if you'll accept the rephrasing. I might say that we have different areas of inquiry. And in some areas, we can produce rapid and volumous feedback in a way that helps us hone our efforts in those areas. And then in other areas, where we're going to use roughly similar tools to do roughly similar things, we just don't have the same rapidity or volume of feedback. And then we're often at a loss to know how far we're succeeding. But, you know, a reasonable strategy is to take the strategies that work in the areas where you do have rapid volumous feedback, and then just apply them hoping they will continue to work in the areas where you don't.
So, for example, in forecasting, you know, I'm into prediction markets, and, you know, basically giving people feedback of winning and losing in a betting market to get them to make accurate forecasts. And then there are forecasts, say, about a million years in the future, or at least 100 years are just far off, or forecasts where there aren't very many, and you say, how are we going to get forecasts there? And what some people want to do is just take the people who are good at one kind of thing, or the methods that are good at one kind of thing, and just apply them to the other and hope that works out because they don't have another way to make that work.
So, we could say, philosophers are people who have chosen a task where it's just harder to get feedback on a timescale and volume and because it's a very high-level abstraction. They're working on a similar sort of problem unifying and clarifying, but they're struggling with less feedback. So, again, I think the reasonable approach is to say, well, whatever seems to work elsewhere, you know, look at that, and then try to use it here. I would be wary of trying to invent whole new approaches to work in an area where you just don't have much feedback to tell you if it's going to work.

Agnes:

Let me ask you a phenomenological question, which is, I mean, James just makes an assertion about what the sentiment of rationality is like, I guess, based on his own experience, that is he tells you what does it feel like when you're being rational? Right? He wants to answer that question at the opening of this paper. And he just makes an assertion as to what it feels like. He's like, it feels like relief. It feels like a feeling of ease and peace and rest. And the kind of, you know, the movement of thought without impediment, something like that. I can't remember the exact phrase he uses, right?

Robin:

I mean, I think he is, you know, accurately describing one element of the mental state, but it's not a comprehensive description.

Agnes:

What I'm saying is –what I want to ask you is, what does it feel like to you to be rational? Is there a feeling, like does it feel some way? Can you notice it in yourself?

Robin:

Well, I mean, I think it's just a very large, complicated feelings so the challenge is to, you know, find a language for describing it and find the useful elements to point– pick out. He is…

Agnes:

Really a large complicated feeling?

Robin:

Of course. Sure. I mean, it's almost like you know, half of my life. So, I would say, you know, half my life is involved with trying to think through things and so there's just a lot of different feelings. I have a lot of different aspects.

Agnes:

I'm not talking about the trying part, I'm talking about the succeeding part. Is there a way that the succeeding part feels?

Robin:

It's connected to the trying. I think the way we feel about succeeding at anything is interconnected with the ways we try all those things. And so, yes.

Agnes:

Yeah, here’s a sort of meta point that I think is a virtue of this piece. If you read basically, any, like op ed or whatever public commentary, somewhere, you'll come across a sentence that says something like, people are oversimplifying, right? It's more complicated than you're inclined to think.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

This is actually quite complicated, right, as you were just inclined to do what it felt like…

Robin:

Sure. Right.

Agnes:

I mean it’s very complicated. It's not just one thing.

Robin:

Right. Yeah, yeah.

Agnes:

And that’s like… It almost, it seemed like a truism like, well, we always need to make things more complicated, we should always – we have this this bad impulse, like his original sin, that the mind wants to move towards simplicity. We're lazy and we go for simplicity. And we should realize that things are complicated. And one thing that I think James brings out, and that I think philosophers are pretty sensitive to is understanding is simplifying. Those are one in the same thing, so that when people tell you “Oh, it's complicated.” What they're saying is not give up on understanding it, you can't understand it anyway.

Robin:

I don't think that's entirely fair. That is, I think, when you understand something roughly, you can have a sense of how many detailed understandings it will take to cover it. You can have a sense of how big a thing you're trying to sense, right? So, for example, if you were trying to like get a map of a building, if it's a little tiny, you know, little tiny hovel, then you have a sense that you'll be able to get that map pretty quickly by walking in the front door, because there's only one room and you'll look around and you'll have the map. If it's this enormous building, you'll know that a few seconds after you walk in the front door, you'll still have a lot to learn. So, you know, but you still want to add.
So, I mean, I would say the way you understand a big thing at first is usually just collect a lot of small ways to understand it and try to add them together so I'm happy to throw in James's description as one of the small ways we're going to add to our description. You know, definitely, we do have some senses of like frustration, or, you know, resistance where something isn't making sense, or there's something that's puzzling that something is bothersomely not unified.
And then, upon finding a unification, finding a way to make, have it makes sense, there's a sense of relief and satisfaction and, you know, brought other view that you can see more things at once from a point of view that now makes more sense. And so that's certainly true. That's one of the things that happens in rationality is, but it's not, you know, by far a full, comprehensive description.

Agnes:

So, James's answer is right, the relief of identification, that is the feeling that A is B, and then that goes with a kind of relief. So that's his answer. And using that, like part of the story, or whatever,

Robin:

I mean, I would just say that we're looking to make sense of things. And there's a lot of ways to make sense. And saying A equals B is one of many, it's not the only kind of pattern you can find. And so, it's not the only way to make sense of things but it's certainly one of them.

Agnes:

So let me make James's case for why that is the only way to make sense of things, ultimately. So, he wants to say that when there is an inward connection between two things, that is when the mind can sort of pass from the one to the other by reasoning. He gives an example, I'm going to give his example that I like, which is, suppose you've noticed that in August, the asphalt becomes soft, right? And he wants to say like, “Well, at first, all you have is an association, the association of like, the month of August, the asphalt and softness. But then you learn, then you realize, oh, well, like heat is of the essence of August.” That's where root claim, by the way, right? I mean, I suppose you have to know something about the sun and whatever. But OK, heat is of the essence of August, right? And you think that, you know, softening is of the essence of pavement change or something, I guess.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

And then you think, but you're not done yet. You just have association, and you're like, wait a minute, the heat and the pavement change is both just the movement of molecules. And there's one thing there that underlies those two things. And actually, it's just one thing, there's just one thing at that moment, James thinks it clicks. And he thinks that's the feeling of rationality. And he wants to say anything else before that point, when you've just associated the two, you may feel fine or whatever, if you're not a very philosophical sort, and you don't have these high demands for unity. But you haven't really achieved that understanding to its maximum point.

Robin:

I mean, it is true that you find an integration and a simplification in that case, but I don't think just saying it's A equals B is an adequate summary of that case. That case has a bunch of structural parts and they all need to be there to make that work and that context is an important context in addition to the A equals B. So…

Agnes:

Right. Because he wants to distinguish between the boorish person who's just like, Yeah, whatever A equals B for any A and B, right, just some idiot. He wants to say that person just gets this feeling cheap. It's possible to get this feeling very cheaply, right? And he wants you to buy it with expense, he wants you to start with these heterogenous things, and then see that and then click into seeing their unity, right? And he thinks that that's kind of like this insight that you have.

Robin:

I would say it's about you have this sort of different models of different things. And then somehow, when you merge two models, in some sense, you can sort of pull out some extra parameter that's no longer needed, because it's redundant. That as you're sort of reducing the number of parameters in your model, for example, would be one way of thinking about it. And that's, you know, not necessarily identifying two things. It could be, you know, three turns to two, for example, or something.
But it's still, the key idea is that, you know, what we're often doing is trying to find a more integrated, simple picture that incorporates all the different things we're looking at. That's quite true. And it's it is a feature of rationality. But again, I think that instinct and feeling is mixed up with a lot of other feelings about our heuristics for doing things, including our practical purposes for these things. And unless, you know, want to sort of separate it out as just this human psychology independent of everything else.

Agnes:

I mean, I think you agree with James more than I do. In that, like, if I had to just name what is the feeling of rationality? Someone asked me that before I read this paper, so I'm not polluted by giving them these answers and like, what does it feel like… if someone asked me, “What does it feel like to you, when you're being rational?” Where what I have to do is select out those moments where in some sense, I know I'm being rational, right? I wouldn't pick these moments where like I say, A equals B. Because in those moments, I'm also like, yeah, it seems like but what if I'm wrong or something? You know, like, I don't know, if I got it right.
And so, for me, like the feeling of rationality is, I would say one word is humiliation. That is, it is when I'm, like, I'm giving an argument, right? And like, here's my argument, I think it's pretty good. And I think it's like pretty rational stuff. Right? And then someone says, “Wait, but what about this? Or, what… and they point out a problem. And I can see that it is a problem with what I've just said. I see it. I'm like, I see, but I'm wrong. And it's like, the last thing I want to be doing is to see that that's wrong, because I'd like to think that I was right, but I can't. And that feeling of like, I don't want to be thinking that this is right but it just is right for me. That's the feeling about, then I know and being rational. Because there are all these costs I'm paying, right? It's not– I'm not making myself feel good.

Robin:

OK.

Agnes:

That for me is the feeling of rationality. And for me, it's a feeling of pain and not a pleasure. That's totally different things.

Robin:

But I mean, you know, let’s say if you talk about people who go to school, right? So, a lot of people go to school and they go through school, if you ask them, what was the essential moment of school? They might point to different moments of school when they thought it was the most schoolish?

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

That could be a graduation ceremony or being on about to take a test or just finishing a test, or getting their letter grade after the course, right? There could be all sorts of ways people frame in their minds the essence of something. But the key point is, there's just it's a lot of parts. And, you know, there's a lot of freedom we have about where we flagged the essence, because they're correlated pretty strongly and doesn't, you know, they all work roughly, to sort of anchor us and connect us to it. So…

Agnes:

No, I don't think that's right. I think that's too, that's too quick to be like, well, there's many different parts of the elephant and people can focus on different parts, I think the place I'm focusing suggests a radically different conception of rationality than the place that you and James are probably saying.
So, you and James, when you're thinking about being rational, you're imagining yourself sitting in a room by yourself thinking about a problem. And you might say, well, there are all different parts of this problem and there's the early stage, the later stage, in fact, that's most of my life so it has all this flavor and this texture and whatever. Fine, but basically you have the same scenario as James. And James just highlights this final moment as A is B moment, right? And he might say, “Sure, reducing the number of parameters.” That's fine. The way you reduce them is by identifying some of them, so you're basically agreeing with me, right?
Whereas for me, the scenario of rationality is a communicative scenario. And there is no feeling of rationality for me that is like not part of communication. And that suggests two really different…

Robin:

But both of them are parts of this larger process, all of which needs to happen for any of the scenarios to play out, right? The scenario we're talking about and the scenario you're talking about both need a lot of other things to happen. And, you know, if we want to pick one part of it as the essence, that's somewhat arbitrary, because in truth, you need all of them.
So yes, you will have to have some sort of insight, and then you will have to try to explain it to people, and then you will have to get pushed back. And then you'll have to see if you can succeed and you know, you have to see the moment where you're willing to push at it, and to sort of identify yourself with it. And then the moment where you find out whether or not other people accept it. I mean, those are all parts of the total process. And…

Agnes:

Those are all, like, associated with the activities of rational people. But there's a question, do you think those are essential? Like, could a person be rational without them? And I think James anyway, would say, “Sure, that's like, that may be how this feeling shows up. And it may be that in a given case, I was talking to somebody else. But that's not important. The important thing is that if I look inside my own mind, there's like a psychological process. And that can be happening, whether there's someone there or whether someone else is not there.” And my picture says, “No, there has to be someone there. You have to be interacting with someone in order to feel rational, the feeling of rationality is a social feeling.” So, I think that's a real disagreement.

Robin:

But it's about this word rational. So, what is the other reference of rational such that we could take away this word and say, “What is this thing that's really there when you have this feeling?” If it's just about the word rational, I don't care, right? You could…

Agnes:

Good. I mean, look, anytime you have a big disagreement, there's going to be like, a moment, right? The moment where it's like, do we stay married or do we get divorced? That is, like, do we hold on? Did we have a concept? Do we keep the concept as one and say, “We're really disagreeing about this concept? Or do we say, “No, look, there are just two things, and you're talking about one, I'm talking about the other.”
And my own feeling is that the word rationality is a placeholder, right? For something that we want to have a better grip on. And it's a placeholder for something like whatever it is, that in virtue of which a process of theoretical reasoning in this case, I'm direct question like, is going well, right?

Robin:

I mean it's more than that, right? Basically, you know, as an economist or social scientist, I would say, the world is divided up into places that are seen as more or less rational. And that rational places are higher status and referred to in a great many ways. And in society, we often– when there's a dispute elsewhere, we point to the rational part, and we say, “Well, those people agree with me, and that carries a lot of weight.” And so, there's this description of parts of the world that are more rational, that should be believed more. And then there are people there who fight over controlling that, and fight over sort of the different parts of that, and which ones will dominate it, which ones will be stronger. And therefore, and within that they fight over who should win and lose for his jobs in publication contests. And part of how they fight is with method like saying my method is better than yours, and your methods shouldn't be used so much.
And so, we've got all these rich, you know, conflicts of people doing things different way talking about different things all trying to sort of, you know, gain the upper hand in terms of percent of authority, and who will be deferred to when there's disagreements, and rationality is kind of one of our main words to talk about, in essence, who does win, or who should win that contest? And that's what makes it awkward to define, because, you know, that's a big complicated process, right?

Agnes:

I mean, so one thing is I would distinguish rationality from knowledge ability, right? So, you can be quite rational, but no, I think relatively few things. You would have to manage that relatively small amount of information well, in order to count as rational. I think, in a way, it's easier to be rational, but less you know…

Robin:

For sure. But as a practical matter, when we're having a dispute, we say, “Well, that person is rational.” So, they don't know much about dispute now, but if we invite them in and we show them our disputes, then it would be capable of assimilating the key elements of our dispute, and then they would make a judgment and we would defer to that judgment because they were more rational.

Agnes:

Right. So, they would be– they're good at processing the information. They don't need to have it already. Right. But I do think that we speak of the virtue of being knowledgeable already as being an intellectual virtue.

Robin:

Sure.

Agnes:

That some people have and sometimes we're willing to defer to people because they're knowledgeable, not because they're rational. We wouldn't want them to be irrational, but they don't need to be the most rational.

Robin:

Right. But fundamentally, we say we defer to you, and then they would say, “Oh, well, if you’re thinking we want the people to know more about that, and that's these people in the way I say, OK, fine, we'll go to those people. But sort of the rationality would be the people we trust to decide who we should go to the list– to know about the thing. And that's going to sort of be more primary than the knowledge because we don't know who knows, and we're not sure if people who knows know how to use what they know. And so, we need a rational person to sort of make those judgments.

Agnes:

I don't know that the rational person is the best at knowing who knows. I mean, it may be that the best known who knows is like the connected person. That may be another virtue, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

Someone may not be that knowledgeable. They may not be the best but they are really well connected. And they're like going something…

Robin:

So even here, we see we have a set of different words that are all associated with this high per– high powerful, high deference world. And within that world, people will fight over these different words, right? You know, I might say, we want the rational people and you say, “No, you want the knowledgeable people or the connected people.” And, you know, we're not even going to be clear what these different words mean. But we're going to have different people associated with different ones, and we're going to… are fighting over what the words mean will be interlaced with our fighting over who gets the highest prestige, and who should be listed and why.

Agnes:

OK, but like, I think you're looking at this backwards. That is, you're looking at rationality by looking at a shadow that it casts in a set of contests that we have, right? So, like, there's a bunch of competitions and contests and we use rationality, in part, to adjudicate some of these contests, some of these power struggles or whatever. That's true, right?
But there's a reason we use rationality to do that. It's because rationality is super important and good. And it's a real thing that describes the operation of reasoning, right? And it’s because it does that, that we then use it to adjudicate the content. So, we first want to know is what is it to reason well? And it’s that– you know, then we're going to – we’d reference to that, decide like, who wins a contest, right? But that's the second point.

Robin:

So, I mean, I agree, but the fact that the people are fighting over this means I don't want to immediately say what does rationality mean? I want to set aside the word rationality and start to say, what are some concrete words we could use that would describe, you know, better or worse, or more useful, or more admirable reasoning, and not be committed to how many– there might be five of them and then I have to like, do a wait it out? I mean, I don't know how many there are but the key point is just to start to identify and make these distinctions between the different kinds of useful reasoning.

Agnes:

Right. But I think part of James's point is, it's really hard to do that, because there are two and they are in tension with one another, namely unity and clarity. Those are the two things that make thinking good. And just as theoretical thinking, I think he wants to say there's lots of other virtues that thinking can have is practical, namely, is it going to give rise or a give an upshot, right? But even…

Robin:

I'm not even convinced these things are in conflict, still. I actually not that is, I can see how you might focus on either one as a priority, but I don't actually see the conflict.

Agnes:

Can I give like, I think the best case scenario for seeing the conflict is at the most radical point, the Hegelian point? So, he says of Hegel, that, like Hegel is the philosopher who tried to ultimately solve philosophy. And he did it by like saying, even the principle, even the law of non-contradiction, like, you know, A is not…

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

We can sort of have a unity in which both of those things. And he's like the person who can somehow create a unity of those things and think they have thought anything at all, that has think there is any clearness at all on that thought, that person will not be troubled by any further difficulties in philosophy. He says– it’s tongue in cheek, but he also means it in the sense that that would be it, you would have– you would be done. Right?

Robin:

Right. So he also…

Agnes:

There’s no clarity that part.

Robin:

He also says, when he's talking about boors, and others, he says, “Well, look, you know, one of the– the simplest way to unify is to just make up data or ignore the data.”

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

Right? I mean, and so you can say there's a fundamental trade-off between looking at real data and unifying. But of course, since we all kind of agree, no, we're not going to make up the data, then it’s not a very interesting trade-off. We're all pretty much agreed that we want to unify the actual data that made up data and not ignored data, right? We want to unify the actual all of the actual data. And so given that we agree on that, that’s not interesting to talk about the trade-off between unification and making this stuff up.

Agnes:

Well, first of all, I think in real life, in fact, there are very real trade-offs there about ignoring data and in effect making up data. And that like, as far as I understand that that's an actual real problem, he’s put his finger on, but even he says, that's the– that's the vul– let's ignore those vulgarities. That's a vulgar version.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

The fact that scientists will ignore data or makeup data. Yes, it's true, they actually do it. And they do it because they want to achieve unity. But the deeper issue is that there is– from the philosophical point of view, there is a kind of brute reality that you come into contact with that where you can't ever quite get all the unity that you wanted into the story. And that shows up at the very least, like even if you have – even he says, OK, I really like this part.
He says, “Look, first of all, there's like the mind and the body and there's like mental things and physical things. And like, how are we going to have a common denominator between those two things? How are we going to have something where there appears to be an identity, where the mind can pass from the one to the other?” And he says, “Look, let me suppose you could do that. OK, let's suppose there's some kind of mental atom, right?” And I've got the physical atoms and mental atoms. He said, but after that, he goes it – the bilateral atom of being, right? So, there’s this bilateral atom that's going to have the mental and the physical properties fine, right? Even if you had that, and even if you explained all of reality has built up of this bilateral item of being right, you've got all reality. You still got like, what about all the things that could have happened? Right? You know what, like…

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

And at the very end you've got Why is there something rather than nothing? That is, you've got this, you've got this specter of the nothing, right? The nonbeing that could have been but isn't, the nonbeing that could be everywhere. And you're like, “Why? Why isn't that the case? The nonbeing? Why is the being the case instead of a nonbeing?”
And he thinks that, like, you know, at the end of the day, there's no answer to that there is just the confrontation with being, right? What he says is, like, at some point, you just look at what there is, and write it down. Like there's a reality, you're just like, that's the way it is. And that aesthetic reaction of like the brute force of the way things are, I think he thinks that's like a fundamental limit to how much unity you can get into your story.

Robin:

So, I mean, I agreed with that, at the very beginning, I said, you know, it's clear that there are limits on unification, that there are going to be brute facts that can't be unified. And you know, that is almost surely going to be the case. But I just was questioning the trade-off between that and clarification, just like I could say, there are many of these other trade-offs that aren't so interesting, because we already agree on which side we want to go. That is, if there's a trade-off between unification and having the real data as opposed to made up, or ignored data.
And sure, there's a trade-off between unification and sort of vague descriptions. Or because you can't really do real unification until you get accurate, you know, the accurate descriptions. But I still think– we all agree that will eventually want clear concepts and clear, you know, lack of ambiguity and lack of vagueness in our descriptions of things. And that will help but that will still won't let us fully unify.
And, you know, so I think we're running somewhat out of time here. So, I guess, you know, we might stand back and ask, like, what, what does James have to say that we might not have gotten from more recent authors? So, there's this sort of basic question I have about reading old authors, because that is a bit more work, their language is a bit harder to understand, you don't know their references to what they're talking about. The words are a little unfamiliar. Somebody could have rewritten this, perhaps whatever insights they thought they have for us, but why is it good to read James, the original James here, as opposed to sort of we could have just talked about abstraction and clarification issues today.

Agnes:

Well, what's your answer? You didn’t…

Robin:

I'm not yet persuaded. But, you know, I think, basically, most any essay could remind you of issues that other people don't remind you of, and then be a good jumping off point. The thing I'm most wary of is trying to get too much into the details of what exactly they meant. I have more skepticism about the usefulness of that. But I am quite happy to admit that, you know, academics just get stuck talking about the same set of issues and they forget about others. And so, the farther you dig into history, and a wider range of thinkers across a wider range of styles and schools of thoughts, et cetera, the more you will come across issues that are once mentioned are sort of obviously important, but that people just don't talk about lately. And so that's what I would most think of the value here.
So, I don't know who talks about this lately but I could believe that maybe people haven't talked much lately about the value of, you know, the limits of unification or the value of clarification or the psychology of trying to do these things. And so, you know, that would be what I might hope to get out of something like this is just to be reminded of something that matters that people don't talk about.

Agnes:

So, I think as a matter of fact, that's true. That is the psychology of philosophizing is like certainly, it's not a topic in philosophy anymore. And he speaks at a level of– I don't want to say abstraction, but let's say generality, that's very, doesn't– people don't talk this way anymore. So, he can cover a lot of ground that, he covers around in the history of philosophy in a lot of different ways.
But I guess my own feeling is I, you know, I just have a very different view about like reading old stuff. I don't find it as painful as you do or as difficult. So, for me, a lot of new stuff is quite painful to read. Because people– a lot of contemporary stuff, people are not trying to make it at all interesting, or fun to read. James is kind of snappy and fun to read. So, in terms of the fun-ness, like, you know, this one you know are fun for me.
But the deeper thing is, have you ever had like a friend who dies, and you're really sad because your friend had like a mind, like a way of looking at the world that was distinctively theirs and you could tap into it sometimes when you talk to them. And you know that there's stuff in that mind, there's a framing, whatever that like will not be reproduced ever. Because that was just their way of seeing. They had a way. They had a point of view.
And I think James is like that, like, he's like this person who had a way of thinking about philosophy and psychology that nobody has ever had since. He had a grip on it. The only place you can get it is by reading him. And that grip that he has on it, for instance, I mean, I gave an example, which is like he's a philosopher who is sensitive to heterogeneity, to the idea that there really are different kinds of people. And there are different impulses in the soul that might push you towards empiricism or rationalism.
And I– so it's like, there's this mind, right, that I can interact with, when you say, “Oh, we can't ask him questions.” like so sort of if we can ask him questions like, this is how we ask him questions. And there isn't, there just isn't another version of him in the same way that when your friend dies, there isn't a– you just don't get to replace them. And so, I want to interact with this mind. And the only way I can do it is by reading James.

Robin:

So that to me is a surprising and apriori unlikely thing to do. That doesn't mean it's wrong, it just means it's not in my usual expectations. So, the thing I can most easily relate to is, you know, an old thinker might have made some claims or made some– ask some questions, and that they could be forgotten. And that we might want to sort of be reminded of them and pick them up and carry them on. And that would just be a different thing, we could get out of an old reader than trying to sort of create a simulation of their mind in our head, which would require you to read an awful lot of their stuff, which you couldn't do for very many people, right?
So, you could go back to a lot of old people and sort of find things they had forgotten to mention that we don't mention and just make a long encyclopedia, perhaps of like forgotten topics that people should get back to you someday. And how it would be great to have a huge encyclopedia of forgotten topics that people should get back to someday. But to browse that encyclopedia, I could go to one entry and read it and go, “Oh, that's interesting, I wouldn't have to spend much time on that one entry.” But the thing you're asking me to do is to pick out of all these ancient readers, a few of them to really read a lot of them and get this whole model of them in my mind. And that's, that's a pretty expensive thing to ask basically.

Agnes:

Yes, but it's more complicated. Now, I guess it’s more complicated than that, because what you do is, every time you read anyone, you create a simulation, like, but it's just a poor simulation, right? So, if– I'm just starting to get into reading– James, I've read for a long time, but I'm reading Dewey now for a class I'm teaching. And this is really my first time reading him. And I'm creating my little model of Dewey, right. And like at the beginning, it's kind of poor and weak. And there are many philosophers for whom I just have a kind of very simple weak model, right? And then there are others where I've read more. So, it's really that there's like a levels of model.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

And you, you want to make the detail of your model be sensitive to how much you think you can get from mentally…

Robin:

But let me… what this is going up against is, for example, I can sort of read some modern geologists, and then have a mental model of the typical geologists in my mind, or I could read a star physicist and have a model of star physicist. So, I've got all these options to take whole fields, and sort of read the basics of them and get a model in my mind of what this whole field thinks. And that seems pretty attractive, I could do a lot with knowing a lot of different fields and putting them together.
And now you want me to take one guy from 150 years ago, with his kind of weird ways of talking with other people back then. I'm going to go, but how is that going to compare in terms of the insight I could get out of him from going to whole new fields today. Because fields today really do try to sort of write and speak in a way that you can assimilate without knowing that author very– in much detail. They try to share styles of writing and method such that once you've learned the style of a particular subfield, you can just read each new thing and quickly assimilate their claim.
So, in some sense, that's what this one, this one guy, James is going up against, say, a whole field of people who all write things together, I'd have to sort of read enough papers in that field to assimilate like what, you know, geologists about, you know, Moon geologist say, but I mean, that's, that seems to me like a pretty attractive alternative.

Agnes:

So, let's take geo– how much geology do you know?

Robin:

I believe it’s one of the things I picked that I haven't learned very much, that I was just reading about.

Agnes:

OK. So, you've made a selection, right? Like you've decided to learn physics but not geology, right? And then presumably, even within physics, right, physics is big and you might, you know, you're going to specialize, right? And then even within the thing you're specializing, you're going to pick up on certain things as being like important. And so, you might think, like, even when you're reading a textbook, you're reading it as a particular person, you… right? Robin Hanson, who has a very particular sort of idiosyncratic mind, right?
It’s like William James, right, you have a particular penchant for unity, a bit of an aversion to what James calls clarity. And you're studying all this stuff, right? From the point of view of the person who has that mind. And the way I'm looking at it, who are you? You're just trapped. That's just the one mind you've gotten, you're sucking everything up into that one point of view that one mind, that one frame, right? And for me, it's like, I don't want to be trapped as me. I want to be able to think of the world in the way William James does, and he's going to select out different and maybe selects out geology, right?

Robin:

OK, but could you really like take a geology textbook and tell me how James would react to that textbook? Or could you really take a newspaper article in today's newspaper and say, “James would react to that newspaper this way…” I mean, that doesn't seem like something you could feasibly do just by reading a few things by James.

Agnes:

No, I'm not that able to animate him. So, in order to interact with James, I generally have to interact with it over his own writing. That's my only way of doing it.

Robin:

Right, which means you couldn't apply it to all these other topics. That’s why. So, if you say, if I go…

Agnes:

I’m not claiming I can apply it.

Robin:

No, no, but I'm saying if I go read geology and saying, for me, I'm only reading geology as me not as somebody else. But I said, “You're not going to let me read geology as anybody else. That's not going to be an option here.”

Agnes:

No, my thought was not that you could read geology as somebody else. My thought was, you're approaching the whole intellectual space as yourself. Right? In order to approach it as James, there are a cost to that, right, which is you have to just approach the bit that James did, read James's writing, that's the only way you can do it.
But they're still, I think, to me, anyway, something very appealing to the prospect of being able to think as someone else and to like to think, for me, the feeling of rationality is humiliation. I wonder what it would be like to have a mind where the feeling of rationality were relief, right? And that feeling of rationality being humiliation that permeates how I encounter all different situations, right? But when I read James, I'm like, “Wait, maybe it could be relief. That's a different way to think about the world.”

Robin:

I think we’ll have to let that be that for now.

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

A bit over our time, but nice talking again.

Agnes:

Yup.

Robin:

All right.