Wisdom Hack: Why There Is No Answer to Your Philosophical Question
In Most Cases, It's Your Fault
Let me start by making this bold assertion: if you aren’t exquisitely sensitive to the phenomenon described below, then you have zero chance at being wise in life. Zero. I know people won’t believe me on that issue. That’s fine; I’m not certain either. So, you can take it merely as “Jeez, he thinks this is super important” instead of “It’s probably true”.
This phenomenon—a kind of ambiguity that causes immense confusion and hardship in life—is talked about in detail in my coaching practice and in some of the paid posts. I merely introduce it here.
Do we have free will?
That’s the type of question one might ask an AI chatbot these days—or perhaps a neuroscientist. People think it’s a deep, profound question. I agree, sort of. Someone might think that since philosophers have failed to answer it, we might as well ask artificial intelligence or neuroscience. Well, no.
Although a chatbot or a neuroscientist may offer an answer to the question, no competent philosopher will. But that’s not because the philosophers don’t know about free will. No, the problem lies in the question itself—a problem that the chatbot and neuroscientist will miss entirely. Any decent philosopher will respond in roughly the following way.
Well, that depends. The term “free will” isn’t like the terms “electron” or “cilantro”. Different people quite reasonably--and very often--attach considerably different yet pretty standard meanings to “free will”, and although humans have some of those kinds or notions of free will, it’s clear that they don’t have all of them. Before I can respond to your question in a helpful manner I need to have a pretty good idea of what you mean by “free will”. If you mean A, then we clearly have free will. If you mean B, then it’s unlikely we have it, on scientific grounds. If you mean C, well, no one is sure yet. If you mean D, then … well … I still don’t know what you mean, as D isn’t any more clear than “free will” was, I’m sorry to say. You will have to revise it.
I could insert the A-D meanings, but this isn’t a book on free will. (I have a separate post that talks about free will.) Consider a much simpler question.
Are there any bats in the attic?
You typically can’t answer a question until you know what it means—but the use of “typically” is needed here. Maybe the questioner is asking about baseball bats. That’s fine; now we can offer an answer. Or maybe she was inquiring about flying mammal bats. That’s fine too. After disambiguation we know how to proceed. If you know the attic contains neither baseball bats nor flying mammal bats, then you’re probably lucky: you can accurately answer “No” even without disambiguation (hence, the use of “typically”). But usually, you need to know what meaning they had in mind in order to offer an intelligent response.
Did he bury the stolen money in the bank?
Again, it’s a bad question until it’s disambiguated. Maybe he stored the money in a strongbox and, in order to hide it, buried it carefully in the riverbank. Then again, maybe he put it in an ordinary savings account that cannot be traced back to him, although he knows how to access it anyway. Either way, it’s true that he “buried the stolen money in the bank”, with different meanings for “bank” (and “buried” for that matter).
The “bat” and “bank” examples are convenient for understanding ambiguity, since they are simple. However, they don’t make a difference to our lives. Others do.
Does God exist?
*Sigh*. Do you mean the vaguely anthropomorphic god of Islam, Christianity, and so on? Or do you mean god-as-all-of-nature? Or god conceived of as a certain state of consciousness, one that cannot usually be obtained without years of disciplined meditation? Or by “God” do you mean something else?
What do you mean? After you give me a clue, then as a philosopher I may have something helpful to say as an answer. Before then, all I can do is help you figure out what you might have in mind. If you refuse to clarify, then you aren’t going to get an answer at all!
In order to have a belief that is true or reasonable or amounts to knowledge, one has to have a belief in the first place. But in order to have a belief, it has to have a specific meaning. However, in many circumstances it can be hard to interpret what people are saying. Worse yet, and perhaps more surprisingly, it’s often the case that you don’t even know what your own beliefs and thoughts are.
Dwayne Johnson’s Acting. Former professional wrestler Dwayne Johnson, “The Rock”, has appeared in many movies over the last twenty years or so. Some of those movies made a fortune. Millions of people saw those films. He is beloved around the world. But is he a great actor?
Well, the term “great actor” has several meanings--and we can’t answer the question until we know what meaning is at issue. When some people think of great actors, they mean to pick out the ones that are great at entertaining. He certainly satisfies that one; just look at how many people see his movies. So, if that’s what you mean by “great actor”, then he’s a great actor. But other people have a different meaning in mind: great actor = winning well-respected awards for acting roles. He obviously does not satisfy that meaning. Yet other people have a third, more limited, meaning in mind: to be a great actor is to give convincing, nuanced portrayals of psychologically sophisticated and complicated characters in dramas. If that’s what you mean, then no: he is not a great actor. Even he would probably admit that.
The above examples illustrate one of the absolutely fundamental insights of philosophy: the importance of relevant ambiguity. Unlike a lot of philosophy, this insight has plenty of practical application.
A word, phrase, or sentence is relevantly ambiguous when three conditions are met:
It has multiple common ways of understanding it.
These common ways are significantly different from one another.
People routinely confuse them with each other in such a way that it causes trouble in communication and understanding.
So understood, “free will” and “God” are relevantly ambiguous. But “bat” isn’t: although it’s ambiguous, it’s not relevantly ambiguous. Virtually no one is going to confuse the two primary meanings of “bat”, so it fails to satisfy condition (3) in the definition. In addition, we restrict ourselves to common ways of understanding the word, like the ones you find in a dictionary or at least prevalent amongst a great many people.
Returning to Dwayne Johnson, it’s easy to see how in a real conversation, two people could appear to be disagreeing over whether Johnson is a great actor even though in reality they aren’t disagreeing at all. Instead, they are merely using different conceptions of what it is to be a “great actor”. When one person says “He is definitely a great actor” and the other person responds with “No way. His movies are fun but there’s no way he’s a great actor”, they could easily be talking past one another: they think they are disagreeing with each other but they really aren’t at all. If they managed to make their meanings clear, then they may well realize that they agree completely in their assessments of Johnson’s acting ability.
So, if you want to write an essay regarding the greatest actors of all time, then oddly enough your essay has to start by ignoring acting performances entirely. You need to go through a linguistic-psychological investigation first, in order to figure out what the people you’re engaging with have in mind with their uses of “great actor”. After that, you can turn to considering Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, Jim Carrey, and Lucille Ball.
Part of being a critical thinker means being aware of when ambiguity is having negative effects on one’s conversations and thoughts.
In another post I talked about how there are quite different conceptions associated with “wisdom”. Trying to find a singular theory of wisdom is like trying to find a theory of bankhood, one that applies to financial institutions, river banks, basketball bank shots, snow banks, banks of electrical equipment, etc. Sure, no one would try for an all-encompassing theory of bankhood, since the ambiguity is so obvious. But we shouldn’t aim for one for wisdom either, for the same linguistic reason.
We will look at more cases of this, including ones that cause trouble in our lives.
Abortion is Wrong? Is it? Well, first you need to clarify what you mean. By “wrong” do you mean
against legal rules
against God’s rules
against communal standards of behavior
against moral rules
against prudential rules
Or something else? Or maybe several of those? Each of them is a common way of understanding “wrong”. Furthermore, by “abortion” do you mean:
all abortions whatsoever throughout all history
all recent abortions only
all recent abortions in the second or third trimester
all recent abortions on viable fetuses
all recent abortions on conscious fetuses
all recent abortions except for pregnancies that came from rape or incest
all recent abortions except when the woman’s life is in danger
all recent abortions around the world or in only certain countries
all recent abortions in the second or third trimester where the woman’s life isn’t in danger, the pregnancy didn’t come from rape or incest, and the fetus is both viable and conscious
Or something else? Since people often have quite different ideas in mind when using “abortion”, it’s definitely a question that needs to be addressed. Finally, where does the alleged wrongness lie:
In the person performing the abortion
In the person having the abortion
In the action of abortion, considered apart from the individuals just mentioned
In this case, matters of ambiguity are quite serious. People debate the alleged wrongness of abortion but often talk past one another since they haven’t disambiguated what they mean by “wrong” and “abortion”. This is not to say that they never communicate well. It’s only to say that in many real-life cases, we fail to communicate well because we are using terms with different meanings, and we are blind to that fact.
Life Begins at Conception? I remember running a research seminar for PhD students on the epistemology of disagreement. We started talking about disagreement over abortion, and one student said that at least one thing we can all agree on is the fact that the main moral issue regarding abortion is whether “life begins at conception”.
But he was confused because he had not clarified what he meant by “life”. I started out by saying to him that everyone agrees that a fertilized egg is alive in the biological sense. It’s not at all like a rock or piece of dirt. It’s a completely standard living thing, and it’s also a human thing (e.g., it’s not canine or feline). Just as clearly, even if something is a naturally-occurring clump of living human cells hardly means there is anything wrong with killing it (e.g., think of a pimple on your butt, which certainly is a naturally-occurring clump of living human cells. No one thinks there is anything immoral about killing it). He was using “life” but giving it some other meaning. Eventually, we figured out that he meant by “life” a conscious living organism.
But even that wasn’t very helpful: what do you mean by “conscious”? Philosophers of mind have figured out that that term has literally around a dozen different meanings, some much different from others, and it’s clear that a fertilized egg inside a womb is “conscious” in only the most primitive of those meanings. Because he hadn’t thought any of this through, he was unable to even start to think productively about the topic.
Later in our discussion he realized that the main issue, at least by his lights, was not the current level of consciousness but its natural future level. In reality, he had never even begun to think intelligently about the morality of abortion even though he was training to be a priest and had thought about abortion very seriously for years. If he had talked for just a few minutes to just about any competent philosopher, he would have avoided years of fruitless debate and confusion.
This shows that when debating the alleged wrongness of abortion, one has got to get straight on how one is using “wrong”, “abortion”, “life”, and “conscious”, for a start. In order to be a wise thinker, one has to be quite sensitive to relevant ambiguity.
Miracles & Babies. Every birth of a baby is a miracle. By definition, miracles are violations of the laws of nature. Therefore, every birth of a baby is a violation of the laws of nature.
That’s a terrible argument, obviously. (I include bad arguments to illustrate key points, not because I think you endorse the bad arguments.) In the first part of it, “miracle” has one meaning but in the second part it has another meaning. When we argue over whether there really, truly have been miracles, such as those described in certain religious texts, we have something like the second meaning in mind. But even then, we need to work hard to clarify what we mean: a “miracle” in the religious sense has to be extraordinary and in some sense beyond our understanding, but does that mean it has to violate scientific laws of nature? Before you get caught up in the debate over miracles, you had better figure out what the hell you are even attempting to debate.
Today’s Witches. Like many eccentric “goth” young women today, Sara is a witch; witches can do black magic; so, Sara can do black magic.
Again, this is a bad argument, because “witch” is being used with different meanings in the first and second sentences. Roughly put, a “witch” in the first sense is a woman who identifies with a certain lifestyle, while someone is a “witch” in the second sense when she can actually do magic that is somehow evil. It’s not hard to be a witch in the first sense, but it’s very controversial, to say the least, that anyone is a witch in the second sense.
Are You in a Relationship? For many years Anna has worked closely with Harvey in a law firm. Anna pretty much idolizes Harvey. When she is meeting with her psychotherapist, the therapist mentions that she and Harvey have a “relationship”. The therapist didn’t mean that Anna was in a romantic relationship with Harvey. All she meant by the term “relationship” was that Anna and Harvey had had many important and psychologically significant interactions over the years, ones that made an enormous impact on Anna. But Anna took “relationship” to indicate romance, and got flustered that her therapist was implicitly suggesting that she had romantic feelings towards her coworker.
Definition of “God”. Hakeem worships football. It’s his god. Eliza’s god is poetry. Jo worships the god of Abrahamic monotheism. Sara believes in God--conceived of as a completely impersonal force that creates the universe, without any mind at all. Neha worships her God: all of living nature. Aleem believes in God too, thought of as the entire universe. It’s not hard to see that the terms “God” and “god” have multiple meanings, and it can be tricky to keep track of them.
For instance, a few years ago in the USA some people who are hostile to Islam tried to argue that the Muslim God isn’t the Christian God. However, they were confused by their prejudice: if the God of Islam exists, then the God of Christianity exists too and vice versa, as it would have to be the same thing. Just because Muslims and Christians have different views about God doesn’t mean, at all, that they are talking about different things: their conceptions of God may differ, but that doesn’t mean the object of the conceptions is different. My conception of democracy, or baseball pitching, or Taylor Swift, or even electrons, might be significantly different from yours, but that doesn’t mean we are literally talking about different things. There aren’t two Taylor Swifts.
Three examples of ambiguous words that do not typically cause communication troubles (and thus don’t satisfy condition (3) for relevant ambiguity) are “wood”, “fraction”, and (again) “bank”.
The term “wood” can indicate the substance that makes up most parts of trees or it can indicate a whole forest of trees. In the Winnie the Pooh children’s stories the forest in which some of the characters live is called “The Hundred Acre Wood”. These two meanings for “wood” are closely related. That fact separates “wood” from “bat”, given above, since the baseball and flying mammal meanings have nothing to do with each other.
The term “fraction” can have a straightforward meaning in mathematics: a number N is a fraction = there are numbers A and B such that A/B = N. Thus put, fractions need not be less than 1 (e.g., 8/7 and 8787/3 are fractions greater than 1), they can be negative (e.g., -46/56 and 4/-5 are fractions), they can be equal to an integer (e.g., 4/2 is a fraction equal to 2, and 0/4 is a fraction equal to 0), they can be irrational (e.g., Ö2/5 is an irrational fraction), and they need not even be real (e.g., Ö-1/5 is an imaginary fraction). But in much discourse outside of mathematics (e.g., “He paid only a fraction of what he owed them”), a number N is a “fraction” = there are positive real numbers A and B such that A/B = N and N is much closer to 0 than to 1. I suppose that these closely related meanings don’t cause too much confusion in most areas of life.
The term “bank” has many quite different meanings, as noted above. It’s ambiguous in two ways: it has utterly different meanings, since it can stand for a river bank as well as a financial institution; and it has two closely related meanings, since it can stand for a corporation or the building it uses. And that’s just for “bank” as a noun; it has verb meanings too, like when you bank a shot off the backboard in basketball.
Roughly put, relevant ambiguity can be more on the side of being linguistic or more on the side of being conceptual. It is more linguistic when the differing ways of understanding are just different dictionary meanings. It’s more conceptual when the differing ways of understanding won’t be found in a dictionary.
A final comment, which is important for understanding the material in this substack:
Philosophers are accustomed to dealing with the ambiguity of key philosophy terms such as “know”, “evidence”, “believe”, “rational”, “reasonable”, “certain”, “possible”, “opinion”, “fact”, “expert”, and so on—each of which is an important term in this book. The wise person realizes that miscommunication and misunderstanding due to subtle ambiguity are not rare events. In most cases I will try to flag the pertinent ambiguities as they arise.