From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Wed Oct 15 2003 - 14:07:02 MDT
[Erik]
The issue with Kant is a utilitarian one. Not "was he right", which is clearly subjective, but it it useful to view the world through Kant colored glasses? What can you derive from it? And vice-versa regarding Russel."
[Kharin]
Surely the issue in question is concerned with truth rather than utility. The idea of subjectivity you appear to be using here is not one I would expect Kant to recognise. That said, I'm not sure utility is particularly helpful here, since the form of truths that Kant is speaking of is not one that can be easily shared or verified.
[Erik 2]
Utility, by definition, is helpful. The question is: of what use is Kant in our knowledge of the Universe? Can you propose one conclusion, drawn from Kant, that may be useful?
[rhinoceros 2]
Interesting questions. I'll start from the "easy" ones and I'll leave utility for the end, except one question which I am tempted to ask here: How is the scientific work of astronomers and astrophysicists for figuring out the age, the size, the "shape", and the bounds of the universe useful?
One of the things philosophy deals with is what it means to have knowledge of anything at all, the Universe included . Today, we have cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists working on the field, but their attempts are definitely guided by the rationalizing attempts of those thinkers (such as Kant and others). They posed the questions long before proper sciences for these things were around.
Kant's argument, in particular, as distilled by Goedel, proposes an answer to this question: Does our own brain's make-up define our perception of the world? Note that "perception of the world" here does not mean whether we see blue-tainted or yellow-tainted images, but the very way we encode the world, discern parts of it as separate objects with identities, experience time, and -- here is the point -- build our logic exactly upon this particular way of perceiving the world.
Back to the question of "utility". While the phrase "Utility, by definition, is helpful" sounds so tautological that it seems to say it all, it is not as simple as that when you think of what it means in practice. We can say that something is helpful to *someone* for *something*. That same thing may be a hindrance to someone else, or for doing something else.
Utility, as a means to attach a value to the desirability of any item or action, has been very important in economics, game theory, decision theory, even artificial intelligence. It has been "useful" to these fields for achieveing their goals by trying to quantify and compare the values of items and actions. Mathematical techniques are used for assigning significance to the results of actions and possibly to the significance of the subjects influenced by these action under particular circumstances. But this approach is not simple at all. It faces some of the same problems as using money to quantify value. (Value is not intrinsic in an item or action. How much is a glass of water in Sahara Desert when someone is there? How much when someone else is there, or when nobody is?). These problems limit the scope of utilitarianism to something less than a final universal method.
The concept of utility owes a lot to Bentham and Mill (both travelling in the boat of philosophy, as Kant did). Utilitarianism, unlike Kant's argument we have been discussing here, is a normative and a meta-ethical doctrine, and it also tries to make wider arguments -- what is useful for "society". It is not at all easy to define "social utility" in practice, so it is not easy at all to be fairly sure that your actions are socially useful. I think the most important thing about utalitarianism is that it opened the discussion of these issues, allowing a better insight and understanding of the specifics.
There have been several objections to accepting utility as a universal measure. These objections, which show that the utility of "utility" has limits, are usually paradoxes caused by an awkward choice between dissimilar options (for example, there is this famous quote by Mill while trying to refine the concept: "It is better to be Socrates unsatisfied, than a pig satisfied." A well known objection to the practicality of utility is the "Three Mile Island" incident, which has been used by Daniel Dennett.
http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island
Back to my point. First, "utility" as a normative concept telling us what is the right thing to do, and as a meta-ethical concept trying to figure out what is the best for society is very useful but it has limits, which means that we often have to resort to non-quantitative reasoning. Second, not all the things we are concerned with have to do with normative reasoning. Except assessing the utility of an item, a model, or a theory, we also have to create it. Creativity works in many different ways, and bringing in a normative concept such as utility may sometimes stifle it (as in cutting the funding for research on a field with no quick profit).
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