Dear Colleagues,
I have not yet made up my mind about Invariances.
I do think it is worth reading.
Recent changes in my life transformed much of my
reading and writing activity of the spring, so I have not
yet finished reading Invariances. It is worth noting that
you can see Invariances for yourself without buying it.
Harvard University Press provides a complete copy
online for online reading at
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/NOZINV.html
I am not sure that Nozick is preaching what we
normally understand by the word "relativism." Nozick
is generally known for his subtle thinking, and a quick
read stopping at page 110 of a 400-page book may fail
to render up the depths of Nozick's argument. Before
entering a debate on this, I'd prefer to complete my
own reading of Invariances.
Here is how Harvard University Press describes the
book:
--snip--
Recent scientific advances have placed many traditional philosophical
concepts under great stress. In this pathbreaking book, the eminent
philosopher Robert Nozick rethinks and transforms the concepts of
truth, objectivity, necessity, contingency, consciousness, and
ethics. Using an original method, he presents bold new philosophical
theories that take account of scientific advances in physics,
evolutionary biology, economics, and cognitive neuroscience, and
casts current cultural controversies (such as whether all truth is
relative and whether ethics is objective) in a wholly new light.
Throughout, the book is open to, and engages in, the bold exploration
of new philosophical possibilities.
Philosophy will never look the same. Truth is embedded in space-time
and is relative to it. However, truth is not socially relative among
human beings (extraterrestrials are another matter). Objective facts
are invariant under specified transformations; objective beliefs are
arrived at by a process in which biasing factors do not play a
significant role. Necessity's domain is contracted (there are no
important metaphysical necessities; water is not necessarily H2O)
while the important and useful notion of degrees of contingency is
elaborated. Gradations of consciousness (based upon "common
registering") yield increasing capacity to fit actions to the world.
The originating function of ethics is cooperation to mutual benefit,
and evolution has instilled within humans a "normative module": the
capacities to learn, internalize, follow norms, and make evaluations.
Ethics has normative force because of the connection between ethics
and conscious self-awareness. Nozick brings together the book's novel
theories to show the extent to which there are objective ethical
truths.
Robert Nozick is Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard
University. His book Anarchy, State, and Utopia received a National
Book Award.
--snip--
I purchased my copy because of this review in The Economist:
--snip--
Robert Nozick
Not all words need be last words
Jan 31st 2002
From The Economist print edition
We look at the life-and the new book-of one of America's leading
philosophers, who died on January 23rd, aged 63
WHEN he was a graduate student at Princeton in the early 1960s,
Robert Nozick was known as the visiting professor's ordeal. However
deeply the eminent guest had thought through the counter-arguments
and rejoinders, young Mr Nozick could be relied on to spot a hole in
the defences and work away at it until the structure of argument lay
in ruins. This love of the chase stayed with him after he had become
an academic celebrity in his own right. He relished pointing out
flaws in his own arguments. In lectures, no question was too weird or
off the point for him not to run with it to see where it led.
Brilliance, restlessness and a distrust of authority marked all he
touched in a distinguished professorial career, mainly at Harvard
University, where he seldom taught the same course twice.
The book with which Mr Nozick burst on the public scene in 1974 was
"Anarchy, State and Utopia", a work of political thought that is
acknowledged as a modern classic. It opens with the words,
"Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may
do to them (without violating their rights)." Given that, Mr Nozick
immediately asked, what might states and their officials legitimately
do? His answer was very little.
Against the pure anarchist, he allowed for a minimal state with a
monopoly on legitimate punishment, provided it gave citizens adequate
protection in return. But against anyone looking to the state to
lessen material inequalities in the name of fairness he mounted a
formidable challenge. No imposed pattern of property holding, he
argued, is stable without continual interference in people's lives.
The only just patterns of property distribution are those that derive
by voluntary gift or trade from earlier just patterns. How can we be
sure that the original pattern was just? Not because it was fair or
unfair, but because it was justly acquired. In a neglected third
part, Mr Nozick sketched a Utopian vision of like-minded groups
freely forming communities in a minimal state that was "inspiring as
well as right".
No part of this impressive structure was (or is) without critics,
particularly on the vexing issue of what makes original acquisitions
just. Yet in the vigour of its arguments, the punch of its
formulations (taxation is "on a par with forced labour"; "to each as
they choose, from each as they are chosen") and the breadth of its
attack, the book had an impact far beyond the academic world. It is
doubtful if many who bought it read it through. But its overall
thrust-that a just distribution of property need not be fair-found
welcoming ears.
It is hard to overestimate the part that "Anarchy, State and Utopia"
played in restoring intellectual confidence among American
conservatives and establishing a consensus in favour of free-market
liberalism. Mr Nozick's book was the philosophical flank of a
successful three-sided offensive against prevailing left-liberal
ideas, the other two being Milton Friedman's economic work and the
writings on politics and foreign affairs of the neo-conservative New
York intellectuals grouped around the magazine Commentary.
In universities, teachers set Mr Nozick's book for undergraduates
beside "A Theory of Justice" (1971) by John Rawls, a defence of
principles underlying redistributive schemes that were the primary
target of Mr Nozick's attack. Mr Rawls's classic account of justice
as fairness had almost at a stroke rescued political thought from the
doldrums, making it serious and interesting again. Mr Nozick made it
lively: there were now two intellectually respectable versions of
liberalism-left and right.
Mr Nozick, for all that, was not happy to be pigeon-holed. A
socialist when growing up in Brooklyn, he decided the case against
capitalism did not work. (Marxist exploitation, he later wrote, was
mainly exploitation of people's ignorance of economics.) Though he
chided fellow conservatives for not taking individual rights
seriously enough, he refused to be called a libertarian. He taught
political courses-on the Russian revolution, for example-but with
colleagues he preferred talking philosophy. A rare public stand came
in 1997 when he joined Mr Rawls and four fellow philosophers in a
brief before the Supreme Court arguing that the law should let sane,
terminally ill patients end their lives.
After his first book, he turned to pure philosophy, joking that he
did not want to write "Anarchy, State and Utopia II". In 1981 came
"Philosophical Explanations", which contains a famous chapter asking
a seemingly bootless question, "Why is there something rather than
nothing?", as well as chapters on personal identity and on free will.
It is best remembered for an ingenious argument against scepticism,
and for a dispositional account of knowledge as true belief that
would reliably stick with the truth (or self-correct) as relevant
circumstances changed. In "The Nature of Rationality" (1993), he
returned to Newcomb's paradox, an enduring puzzle about
decision-making, and he suggested that rational-choice theory could
be made less narrow and artificial if it included what he called
symbolic utility: things matter to us, he recognised, for the values
or emotional commitments they express, not simply for their practical
or material usefulness.
What does not change
Many such themes-and more-appear in "Invariances", which Mr Nozick
completed and published in October last year. Though written in his
usual clear style, it is in many ways a daunting book. It is rich in
detail and breathtaking in sweep. But it is not, as Mr Nozick himself
warns us, systematic. Based on his John Locke lectures at Oxford
University in 1997 and on other lectures elsewhere, its five parts
explore relativism and truth, objectivity, necessity, consciousness
and ethics.
No section is without close argument and fertile suggestion. A
standard reply to relativism-the claim that truths depend on a point
of view-is that this claim itself is either absolute (and so
self-refuting) or relative (and therefore of no general import). This
is too quick, Mr Nozick thinks, and he takes relativism more
seriously: it does not undercut itself if we identify its domain of
application clearly. Humans are enough alike for relativism about
politics and society to be implausible. (In passing, he throws out
the idea that social relativism gains favour among people who do not
like the political truths that confront them-his example is
resistance to accepting the success of capitalism.) In physics, by
contrast, he enlists quantum theory to support the idea that truth is
not (always) timeless. On a broader tack, he treats truth generally
in a pragmatist spirit as whatever underlies the serviceability of
our beliefs about the world-the X-factor in them that contributes to
our attaining our goals.
This curt, dense summary of a single chapter should alert readers to
what faces them. Mr Nozick goes on to unpack the idea of objectivity
in terms of invariance under transformations of different kinds, to
downgrade the notion of metaphysical necessity, and to suggest an
evolutionary function for consciousness and for morals. The
scientific, mathematical and philosophical learning needed to follow
the many themes in full-the 100 pages of footnotes should perhaps be
left for a second or third reading-is stupendous.
Philosophers will probably fasten on the hard arguments-on truth or
necessity, say-and pass over the future-science guesswork about, for
example, evolutionary cosmology. Non-philosophers (including many
scientists) will, alas, be at sea. This reviewer, with "Invariances",
felt like a social chess player accompanying a grandmaster down the
tables at a simultaneous display, struggling to follow each game
while listening to him explain how chess would work in six
dimensions. Mr Nozick was dying of cancer as "Invariances" went to
press. Might his executors consider a new edition, edited and
introduced by a sympathetic expositor?
That said, any reader of "Invariances" can gain from it a feel for
the scope and tenor of Mr Nozick's thought. He writes in a
recognisably American tradition of pragmatism and scientific
naturalism. One of philosophy's main jobs, he says at the start, is
to prepare topics for empirical science to go to work on. Yet the
science he is drawn to is the speculative, intuition-defeating sort.
He loved puzzles and free-ranging argument too much, you feel, ever
to surrender entirely to the constraining authority of slowly
accumulated fact.
Philosophy begins in wonder, he writes at the end, with a silent nod
to A.N. Whitehead. Indeed, Mr Nozick had a Romantic streak, both in
his Utopian vision of society and in his conduct of philosophy. But
this Byronic restlessness was the fault of his virtues: rare fluency
and audacity-a fearless readiness to follow an idea where it led.
Like any endeavour, philosophy needs explorers as well as mapmakers.
As Mr Nozick liked to say, there is room for words that are not last
words.
Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World.
By Robert Nozick.
Harvard University Press; 428 pages; USD35 and GBP23.95
--snip--
Best regards,
--
Ken Friedman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Leadership and Organization
Norwegian School of Management
Visiting Professor
Advanced Research Institute
School of Art and Design
Staffordshire University
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