Breaking Bad and Doxastic Voluntarism

As I work my way through the acclaimed television series Breaking Bad, an episode from Season 3 struck me.

I have been a devotee to The Wire ever since I plowed through all five seasons back in 2008...and then again in 2010.  The Wire is a masterpiece.  I think it is best summarized as being about "the effect of institutions on individuals."

But what is Breaking Bad "about"?  I had enjoyed the first two seasons, but this was no Wire.  In this particular episode of season 3, it struck me: BB is about belief.  Of course, BB is about many things. But I think its overarching metaphor of "breaking bad" qua transformation or rebirth can be analyzed in terms of what we choose to believe, or rather whether we can choose to believe things in a non-self-deluding way.  To use fancy philosopher terms, BB is about doxastic voluntarism.

In this particular episode, Walt's wife Skylar finally abandons a crucial strand in her web of beliefs to acknowledge what she knew to be true all along.  Skylar has always known that Walt had two cell phones.  Walt's abduction and subsequent (epically) elaborate alibi–that he was in a "fugue state"–give Skylar two doxastic options: (a) Remain skeptical of Walt's alibi in favor of her hard perceptual evidence that Walt is indeed "up to something", or (b) Assent to (adopt the belief that?) Walt's alibi is honest testimony.  Skylar acts as if she believes Walt for several episodes, which is perhaps sufficient for (b). When Skylar finally confronts Walt, her words echo Tolstoy's when Karenin lets himself go on believing that there is nothing going on between Anna and Vronsky:

"What he knew was so dreadful that now he was ready to believe anything"

Here I simply rehearse Ermanno Bencivenga's argument in his (1999) "Knowledge Versus Belief."  Belief is a more sophisticated achievement than knowledge.  Knowledge is basic and belief is "a way of countering knowledge, of disturbing it and possibly deactivating it, not of subsuming it in a comprehensive embrace."  Belief is deontic to the core: it involves a choice, a taking responsibility for a certain manner of representing the world and one's place within it.  Skylar had too much at stake to not adopt the veracity of Walt's alibi.  The lie was too big, too major of a strand in a coherent web far preferable to that other coherent, but incomplete, web.

Just as Karenin tells himself an improbable story about the meaning of Anna's mannerisms and gestures, Skylar projects improbable scenarios regarding Walt's strange disappearances, his second cell phone, his "fugue state."  Perhaps most interesting is the social nature of Skylar's delusion.  Not only is she wrapped up in a commitment to representing reality a certain way, she is wrapped up in Walt's commitment to representing reality a certain way.  From a third-person standpoint this is not surprising; of course we are more likely to adopt commitments that mirror and support the commitments of those closest to us.  Our stability depends on it.

Thinking Together (con't)

[excerpts from an interview with Rolf-Dieter Heuer, head of CERN]
(my emphases)

The European: Should scientists be more vocal in the public sphere?
Heuer: If they have right things to say, yes. When we make important decisions, we should be able to rely on sound premises and statements. Just babbling isn’t so good. I also believe that science can really provide an example for cooperation that works. “Diversity” is such a nice word, such a nice mix of different ideas and characters. We can show that diversity enriches us.

The European: In the middle of the Eurozone crisis, you head a European institution that has worked rather seamlessly for almost 60 years. Is basic research possible on a strictly national level?
Heuer: Our research would be impossible without a collaborative element. The infrastructure necessary for basic research has gotten so big – at CERN but also e.g. in the case of electron lasers. You need many brains and hands to build it – that’s impossible on a national level. CERN was founded in 1954, when a bunch of scientists and politicians got together right after World War II and said: “we will only be successful together.” The decades since then have confirmed that approach. I think that we will even have to go further in the future and cooperate globally.

The European: The re-nationalization of Europe is the wrong way?
Heuer: I think it goes in the wrong direction. We need something that we can work on collaboratively. And we also need projects that we can pursue individually – often, those are smaller projects. Take food as an example: it’s good to introduce certain standards, but we should not give up regional cuisines. We need to strike a balance between international large-scale projects and smaller, national or bilateral projects. You won’t get very far if you only pursue lighthouse projects.

Commentary:
I emphasized 4 claims from this except:

1.  Science can really provide an example for cooperation that works.

•  This seems obviously true.  

2.   Our research would be impossible without a collaborative element.

• This also seems obviously true, so long as "our" is indexed to a group of scientists working on a large scale project, requiring large scale equipment/infrastructure/man-hours, etc.

3&4.   (i)We need something that we can work on collaboratively.  And (ii)we also need projects that we can pursue individually – often, those are smaller projects.

• I put three and four together because I wish to evaluate them in tandem.  (i) is a normative claim typical of the idea that the pursuit of scientific understanding of the world will naturally promote harmony and understanding.  (ii) also seems trivially true so long as "individual project" just means finding some purpose for your life through a collection of goal-oriented activities.  I currently have a watch-all-the-Breaking-Bad-episodes project, in addition to my get-a-phd-in-philosophy project.  The interesting thing to do here is see the four possible permutations of (i) and (ii).  Heuer claims both are true, and this sounds like a reasonable balanced position, Aristotilian virtuous and all that–the mean between extremes.  If one claimed (i) as true and (ii) as false, one would have a radically communal view of human life.  On this view, belief is collective all the way down.  One could claim that (i) is false and (ii) is true and have a sort of radical individualism–perhaps a sort of romantic-Nietzschean–existentialist view whereby we only find meaning in life through overcoming the herd and grasping one's ownmost finitude and making a Kierkegaardian leap of faith.  Rejecting both (i) and (ii) seems almost like Pyrrhonian skepticism–a cautious abstention from putting too much stock in any one surefire view of human value or teleology.  

I agree with Heuer's position, but with stronger leaning toward the importance of the communal aspect of life.  My position would be more like: We need things that we can work on collaboratively, and we probably aren't doing enough of these.  We also need projects that we can pursue individually, and we are probably too caught up in most of these.

Thinking Together

Why care about cognitive empathy?  It is not intrinsically truth directed.  The state I am talking about as "occurrent grasping," elicited when thinking together, is non-factive apparent knowing.  The end of thinking together is "cognitive alignment," evidenced by agents coming to share a language, to function within the same discourse.  Cognitive alignment is not intrinsically truth directed.  However, it is a desirable goal because it does entail the conservation of cognitive resources.  Conserving cognitive resources is obviously desirable.  Were we to question ourselves at every turn, show concern for the paradigm we are operating within, questioning our methods, our terms thrown in to doubt at every opportunity, always questioning the validity of the research program rather than simply pursuing the research program, in short, we wouldn't get anywhere.  However, we must be mindful that preservation of cognitive resources is not the ultimate value, truth is.  Thus, the virtue of cognitive alignment and preservation of cognitive resources is tempered by the virtue of critique.

The more ambitious claim: cognitive alignment gets us something more than just preservation of cognitive resources.  Thinking together is valuable for reasons besides efficiency.  Still working on this...

Don't Mind the Plurality

 [edited 6/7/11]

When it comes to talking about plural subjects, or collective intentionality, or the philosophy of social phenomena in general, the toughest issue pertains to whether we should posit some unique ontological entity that is the bearer of these supra-individual states.  Many philosophers, such as Michael Bratman, contend that in order to properly account for social phenomena we must work within the parameters established by an ontology of subjectivity that is limited to individual mental states, their contents, and properties.  Thus, on this line of thought, social phenomena are accounted for in the “singularist” paradigm that reduces phenomena such as shared intentions and collective beliefs to the individual mental states of the constituent group members.  However, other philosophers, such as Margaret Gilbert and John Searle, have persuasively argued against the singularist account—arguing that there are good grounds for committing to the existence of shared intentions and collective beliefs that are not reducible to the mental states or behaviors of individuals.  And yet, Gilbert, Searle, and those sympathetic to their holistic view adamantly resist the idea that they are positing some unique “hive mind” or “group thought.”  Thus, the question becomes: how can we account for social phenomena in a way that does justice to the (relative) autonomy of such phenomena (i.e. that they are non-reducible), but also without over-inflating our ontology of subjectivity? 

I contend that this debate over the ontology of social phenomena would greatly benefit from some phenomenological considerations, which are largely absent from most discussions of the topic.  The phenomenal character of experience (i.e., what it is like) extends beyond merely sensuous experience, and is an irreducible aspect of the content of “cognitive” experiences such as intention and belief.  Thus, we may speak of the properties and features of a plural subject with psychological predicates, but we must be mindful that these are analogies.  Theses analogies are possible insofar as we are all intimately acquainted with what it is like to intend or what it is like to believe in virtue of the unique phenomenal character of these mental states.  We must not mind the plural subject in that we must not en-mind whatever entity ‘plural subject’ designates.  On this line of argument, phenomenal character is the mark of the mental.

Accounting for plural subjects thus becomes twofold: we must understand the conceptual limitations of reduction and describe the social phenomena constituted by plural subjects as if they were an autonomous form of agency (i.e., we use psychological predicates: we talk of collective beliefs, joint commitments, and shared trauma); simultaneously, we must describe the phenomenology of being a member of a plural subject in individualist terms (for only these terms pick out the primordial phenomenon of subjectivity) that maintain the sui generis character of this unique form of experience.  This twofold task can be achieved by paying specific attention to the classic phenomenological notion of empathy, which is treated as a phenomenon sui generis and is meant to account for the lived reality of social interaction.