The Campaign for Better Citation and Credit-Giving Practices in Philosophy

Al-Ghazâlî and the Dream Argument

By Preston J. Werner¹

We’re all familiar with Descartes’ famous “Dream Argument”, from the Meditations I:

It may be that although the senses sometimes deceive us concerning things which are hardly perceptible, or very far away, there are yet many others to be met with as to which we cannot reasonably have any doubt, although we recognize them by their means. For example, there is the fact that I am here, seated by the fire, attired in a dressing gown, having this paper in my hands and other similar matters. And how could I deny that these hands and this body are mine, were it not perhaps that I compare myself to certain persons, devoid of sense, whose cerebella are so troubled and clouded by the violent vapours of black bile, that they constantly assure us that they think they are kings when they are really quite poor, or that they are clothed in purple when they are really without covering, or who imagine that they have an earthenware head or are nothing but pumpkins or are made of glass. But they are mad, and I should not be any the less insane were I to follow examples so extravagant. At the same time I must remember that I am a man, and that consequently I am in the habit of sleeping, and in my dreams representing to myself the same things or sometimes even less probable things, than do those who are insane in their waking moments. How often has it happened to me that in the night I dreamt that I found myself in this particular place, that I was dressed and seated near the fire, whilst in reality I was lying undressed in bed! At this moment it does indeed seem to me that it is with eyes awake that I am looking at this paper; that this head which I move is not asleep, that it is deliberately and of set purpose that I extend my hand and perceive it; what happens in sleep does not appear so clear nor so distinct as does all this. But in thinking over this I remind myself that on many occasions I have in sleep been deceived by similar illusions, and in dwelling carefully on this reflection I see so manifestly that there are no certain indications by which we may clearly distinguish wakefulness from sleep that I am lost in astonishment. And my astonishment is such that it is almost capable of persuading me that I now dream.²

Discussion of this argument (as well, of course, of Descartes’ evil demon argument) is a staple of introductory philosophy courses. And though the skeptical tradition is widely acknowledge to go much further back than Descartes, credit for the dream argument itself is typically given to him. This credit is misplaced—or at least the situation is more complex than typically acknowledged.

500 years before Descartes, Islamic philosopher and theologian Abû Hâmid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazâlî was writing his al-Munqidh min al-Dalal, commonly translated to Deliverance from Error. Of importance at present is the second chapter of Deliverance, “The Avenues to Sophistry and Skepticism.” After some initial discussion about the more common ways that sense perception can err³, Al-Ghazâlî gives his own dream argument:

For a brief space my soul hesitated about the answer to that objection, and sense-data reinforced their difficulty by an appeal to dreaming, saying: “Don’t you see that when you are asleep you believe certain things and imagine certain circumstances and believe they are fixed and lasting and entertain no doubts about that being their status? Then you wake up and know that all your imaginings and beliefs were groundless and unsubstantial. So while everything you believe through sensation or intellection in your waking state may be true in relation to that state, what assurance have you that you may not suddenly experience a state which would have the same relation to your waking state as the latter has to your dreaming, and your waking state would be dreaming in relation to that new and further state? If you found yourself in such a state, you would be sure that all your rational beliefs were unsubstantial fancies.⁴

While Al-Ghazâlî’s argument differs in important ways from Descartes’, they strike me as similar enough in their general spirit that Al-Ghazâlî deserves credit for providing the first sustained argument from the existence of dreaming to skepticism. (It’s also worth noting that Descartes’ argument isn’t obviously superior to Al-Ghazâlî’s.)

It’s unclear (as far as I can tell) whether Descartes’ had access to Deliverance from Error, so it’s difficult to say whether Al-Ghazâlî influenced Descartes or whether the two philosophers developed their dream arguments independently.⁵ And I should also stress that I’m certainly not the first person to notice the parallels here.⁶ However, given that many philosophers I’ve come across are not familiar with Al-Ghazâlî’s dream argument, and given the importance of the dream argument in introductory courses, it felt worth trying to more widely publicize: Descartes was beaten by 500 years!

¹ I should stress that I am far from a historian. Those with more knowledge should feel free to correct the record on anything I’ve gotten wrong here. I stumbled across Al-Ghazali’s dream argument by luck many years ago, but was inspired to write this post after slowly coming to realize that this parallel is not as widely known as it should be.

² Meditation I (trans. Haldane). (Available at http://selfpace.uconn.edu/class/percep/DescartesMeditations.pdf).

3 Note here too the similarity with Descartes, who also discusses more common ways that sense perception can err just prior to presenting his dream argument.

⁴  al-Ghazâlî (trans. McCarthy (1980)), paragraph 13.

5 http://christopherhurtado.com/al-ghazali-and-descartes-correlation-or-causation/ 

⁶ https://www.academia.edu/989063/The_Influence_of_al-Ghazali_on_Descartes 

Elisa Freschi (Austrian Academy of Sciences) on what one should have read in Indian Philosophy

"Absence and error in Indian Philosophy: What you should have read"

by 

Elisa Freschi

Why are we all too busy that we do not have the time to read even what interests us, e.g., to read relevant literature on the topic we are writing about? The outputs of this attitude are that too many interesting works end up being neglected (with possible consequences on their authors' career) while the "usual suspects' are the only authors who get cited again and again, also for extra-scientific reasons (such as, trying to please them or showing that one knows the big names).

A small case study:

The topic of absence, with the related fields of negation and error (since one might claim that in the case of error one grasps something non-existing) has been the object of important reflections by Classical Indian philosophers, most notably Kumārila Bhaṭṭa (6th c. ca.), Maṇḍana Miśra (7th c. ca.) and Dharmakīrti (6th c. ca.). Several important works have been dedicated to these authors, but again and again new studies just ignore them and start from scratch--an attitude which leads to blatant errors or, at best, a huge waste of time. For instance, a recent article speaks of the Sanskrit categories as an "inventory of the world", although they include also items such as samavāya 'inherence' and abhāva 'absence' which could hardly figure in such an inventory, although they are needed to make sense of the world in an economical way.

Starting from a work which might be of more general interest:

• Arindam Chakrabarti's Denying existence: the logic, epistemology, and pragmatics of negative existentials and fictional discourse (1997) is a great book, which discusses absence in analytic philosophy and has also a chapter on Indian philosophy.

• Lambert Schmithausen's Maṇḍanamiśra's Vibhramavivekaḥ: mit einer Studie zur Entwicklung der indischen Irrtumslehre (1965) is a comprehensive study of error in Indian philosophy.

• Birgit Kellner's book (1997) Nichts bleibt Nichts: die buddhistische Zurückweisung von Kumarilas Abhavapramana: Übersetzung und Interpretation von Stantaraksitas Tattvasangraha vv. 1647-1690, mit Kamalasilas Tattvasangrahapañjika, sowie Ansätze und Arbeitshypothesen zur Geschichte negativer Erkenntnis in der indischen Philosophie and 1996 article, "There are no pots in the Ślokavārttika. Kumārila's definition of the abhāvapramāṇa and patterns of negative cognition", in Indian Philosophy (officially published in 1996—but in fact written after the book) offer important insights on the topic from the point of view of Buddhist Epistemology and of Mīmāṃsā (as for the latter topic, the article partly revises some of the theses of the book).

• John Taber's Much Ado about Nothing: Kumārila, Śāntarakṣita, and Dharmakīrti on the Cognition of Non-Being review of Kellner 1997 is an intriguing defense of why we need, after all, absence as an instrument of knowledge.

• A more recent study, by Nirmalya Guha (No Black Scorpion is Falling: An Onto-Epistemic Analysis of Absence, 2013), is also philosophically intriguing and nicely bridges Indian and Western perspectives on the topic. You can find some notes about it here: http://elisafreschi.blogspot.co.at/2013/05/absence-in-ontology-and-epistemology.html

(Full Disclosure: I myself wrote three articles on absence in Mīmāṃsā (they can be found on Academia.edu).)

Some general comments:
Let us imagine that everyone in the field is in good faith, as it is probably the case. Still, before sending that article, please consider that:

• Reading is not just pedantic, it truly enhances the philosophical value of what you write.
• Finding relevant literature is nowadays much easier than it used to be, thanks to features like Google Scholar, Academia.edu or Philpapers (which, interestingly, work also outside the "core areas" of philosophy and yield interesting results also for South Asian thought).

Jessica Wilson (Toronto) on the pedigree of the 'subset view' of realization

On the pedigree of the ‘subset view’ of realization

Jessica Wilson

University of Toronto

The ‘proper subset view’ of physical realization, according to which it is key to non-reductive realization that the powers of higher-level and lower-level features stand in a proper subset relation, is often credited to Sydney Shoemaker, citing his 2000/2001 paper ‘Realization and Mental Causation’ (first published in 2000 in the Proceedings of the 20^th World Congress in Philosophy, which took place in August 1998, and reprinted in revised form in Physicalism and Its Discontents, Gillet and Loewer, eds., in 2001).  Correspondingly, the view is frequently described as ‘Shoemaker’s subset account of realization’, ‘Shoemaker’s proper subset view’, ‘Shoemaker’s strategy for non-reductive physicalists’, and so on.

However, I was the first person to present and defend the subset view, in 'How Superduper does a Physicalist Supervenience Need to Be?' (Philosophical Quarterly, 1999), based on a term paper of the same name that I wrote as a third-year graduate student at Cornell in April-May 1998.  I don’t take credit for the basic idea---like Shoemaker, I credit this to Michael Watkins, who suggested it in the course of a 1996 NEH Seminar in the Metaphysics of Mind run by John Heil, that I attended and that Shoemaker visited; Watkins’s suggestion was then concurrently developed by both Shoemaker and me.  But again, I was the first to present and develop it in print, and many of the arguments that are attributed solely to Shoemaker can be found in my original paper.  Moreover, since 1998/9 I've refined and developed my conception of the approach, in my 2001 dissertation (Physicalism, Emergentism, and Fundamental Forces) and in several papers, including 'Supervenience-based Formulations of Physicalism' (Nous 2005), ‘Determination, Realization, and Mental Causation’ (Philosophical Studies 2009), 'Non-reductive Physicalism and Degrees of Freedom' (BJPS 2010), 'Non-reductive Physicalism and the Powers-based Subset Strategy' (Monist 2011), and ‘Metaphysical Emergence: Weak and Strong’ (forthcoming).

So I have at least an equal claim to being a progenitor and defender of the subset view.  However, many authors do not cite me at all.  And  when I am cited, my work frequently fails to be discussed in the main text, even when arguments very similar to those being discussed first appeared in my work, and even when my work contains explicit responses to objections being discussed in the main text.

Besides the subset view, I have at least an equal claim to credit for two other theses associated with this view, which again are proposed and extensively defended in my work, starting with my 1998/9.  First is that the proper subset approach to realization provides a basis for a ‘compatibilist’ solution to the problem of mental (higher-level) causation; second is that Yablo’s determinable-based account of realization (‘Mental Causation’, Philosophical Review 1992) can be profitably interpreted as involving satisfaction of the subset condition on powers.  Here again, Shoemaker’s work is commonly cited, whereas mine almost never is.

There is one final, more general thesis for which I deserve, but haven’t so far gotten, credit.  In my 1999 paper, I proposed and defended attention to powers, as opposed to either supervenience relations or explanatory relations (such as Horgan’s superdupervenience’), as providing a properly metaphysical basis for characterizing the primary differences between emergentist, reductive physicalist, and non-reductive physicalist accounts of seemingly higher-level features. To the extent that there has been a ‘metaphysical turn’ in understanding dependence relations, my paper was certainly in on the ground floor, and deserves to be acknowledged as such. Certainly I was calling attention to the need for such relations to be understood in metaphysical rather than merely modal or epistemic terms long before, e.g., Fine, Schaffer, or Rosen.

Below I flag a couple of key passages and sections from my 1999 paper, relevant to these theses; again, the view has undergone some refinement in my later work (e.g., I now formulate the proper subset condition in terms of token powers, on a given occasion). 

                                                                        ****

In my 1999 paper, I started by motivating, by attention to the problem of mental (more generally, higher-level) causation, the need for all varieties of physicalism to impose the following condition on causal powers:

Condition on Causal Powers (CCP): Each individual causal power associated with a supervenient property is numerically identical to a causal power associated with its base property.

I said, after having discussed how robust (British) emergentists would likely respond to the problem:

The emergentist response to the possibility of mental causal overdetermination is to deny that the physical is causally closed [...] and to assert that mental properties have causal powers not possessed by any physicalistically acceptable base properties.  Physicalists committed to the causal efficacy of mental properties, as well as to the thesis that mental properties are “nothing over and above” mental properties (that is, most physicalists) cannot take the emergentist route.  They cannot allow that mental properties have any causal powers that are completely different from their physicalistically acceptable base properties (this violates physicalism), nor can they allow that mental properties have the same, but still numerically distinct, causal powers as their base properties (this leads to causal overdetermination).  The remaining option for such physicalists is to hold, in contrast to emergentists, that every individual causal power of a mental property is identical to a causal power of a physicalistically acceptable base property.  (As will be made clear later, this restriction does not entail that mental properties are identical to their base properties.) (41)

I then went on to note that imposition of CCP was compatible with a distinctively non-reductive physicalist account of the relation at issue, if the powers of the higher-level feature were a proper subset of those of the lower-level feature:

Conceiving of a physicalist supervenience in terms of causal powers would do more than allow physicalists to determinine whether a given property superdupervened on another.  It would also provide a blueprint for non-reductivists to establish that a given supervenient property was distinct from its base property, by showing that the base property had (one or more) different causal powers than the supervenient property.  In this case the set of causal powers associated with the supervenient property would be a proper subset of the set of causal powers associated with the base property, thus providing a clear-cut account (which has too often been lacking) of how a higher-level (say, mental) property could be distinct from, and yet “nothing over and above”, a lower-level physicalistically acceptable property.[Footnote: This observation is due to Michael Watkins, who used it (in John Heil’s 1996 NEH seminar in the Metaphysics of Mind) in service of a non-reductive physicalist solution to the problem of mental causation.] Attention to causal powers would also go some distance towards enabling physicalists to establish that a given property was multiply realizable, by showing that the causal powers associated with a given supervenient property were subsets, proper or improper, of the causal powers of properties in more than one supervenience base set.  If we are looking for markers that can do some metaphysical work, causal powers seem to be just the ticket. (45)

Finally, I considered three non-reductive physicalist accounts of the realization relation, and argued that the relation in each case arguably satisfies the condition on powers in question, including Yablo’s (1992) suggestion that higher-level features are determinables of physical determinates, Pettit’s (1995) account of physicalism and associated ‘dot-shape’ analogy, and Shoemaker’s (unpublished) account of realization as one that, in virtue of Shoemaker’s causal account of properties, can explicitly incorporate the proper subset condition.  

The Lewis-Stalnaker Analysis of Counterfactuals: What about Sprigge?

Note: the following information was provided to me by Jessica Wilson and David Balcarras, also referencing Benj Hellie. 

David Lewis and Robert Stalnaker are commonly credited with the "Lewis-Stalnaker analysis" of counterfactual conditional in terms of nearby possible worlds--an analysis that has become so dominant in analytic philosophy that it is typically just assumed in professional articles and discussion. But, should they be the only ones credited for the theory?

Stalnaker initially published his theory of counterfactuals in a (1968) article, and Lewis his theory in a (1970) article in the journal Inquiry critiquing and expanding upon Stalnaker's initial proposal. However, the very same year (1970), Timothy Sprigge published a book. Facts, Words, and Beliefs, defending an analysis of counterfactuals identical in almost every way to Lewis' now-famous analysis.

Now, although there is (to my knowledge) no evidence of malfeasance on Stalnaker's or Lewis' parts, there is evidence that Lewis learned of Sprigge's contribution much later (in 1993 two decades later), as shown in the following letter to Sprigge (quoted verbatim from Sprigge, Timothy L. S. (2006) "My Philosophy and Some Defence of It" In Consciousness, Reality and Value: Essays in Honour of T. L. S. Sprigge. Ed. by Pierfrancesco Basile and Leemon B. McHenry. Ontos Verlag. pp. 299--321):

Dear Professor Sprigge,

Thank you very much for the note and photocopy you gave me when I was in Edinburgh last month. Since returning to Princeton, I've read Facts ... XIl.5 and Vindication ... 2.5. Sure enough-your 1970 analysis of counterfactuals is very like Stalnaker's and essentially identical to mine. (The only difference I spot concerns the case of an impossible antecedent: your counterfactual goes false, mine and Stalnaker's go true. Very much a side-issue.) I wish I'd known about your analysis and given you due credit years ago, but better late than never!

As for chronology, it's all very close. It was in May 1968 that I wrote to Stalnaker saying, "You and I have proposed very similar theories of counterfactuals". (I'd just heard of his work from Richmond Thomason.) At that point he had a final version of his soon-to-bepublished "A Theory of Conditionals"; I had seminar notes; and if my experience with production of books is any guide, you must already have had a manuscript of Facts . .. in pretty much final form. Stalnaker' s paper appeared later in 1968; my lheory as told by Howard Sobel (with my permission and with full acknowledgement) appeared in 1970 in Inquiry, as an appendix to Sobel's paper on utilitarianism; your book and Stalnaker and Thomason's joint paper appeared that same year; and my own first paper on counterfactuals appeared in Theoria in 1971. Paul Benacerraf beat us all by many years. But alas, he let Carnap persuade him that because of the vagueness of similarity, the idea wasn't worth pursuing!

If I believed in complex structural universals, one of which is the total nature of the actual world, and the rest of which could have been, then I might be willing lo join you and others in identifying these structural universals with (at least some ot) the possible worlds. I resist not the identification, but rather the structural universals themselves. I have trouble making sense of the relation between a structural universal and the simpler universals which are its constituents. I'm sending you an offprint about this from the Australasian JP, 1986.

Sincerely (Signed David Lewis)"

Unfortunately, although Lewis writes in this letter that crediting Sprigge with co-developing the theory is "better late than never", as of the present-day it doesn't seem better late than never. Sprigge is almost never mentioned in connection with the theory of counterfactuals, and indeed, is not even referenced in the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy entry crediting the theory primarily to Lewis (as well as, secondarily, to Stalnaker).

Is it time for philosophers to stop referring to the "Lewis-Stalnaker theory" of counterfactuals, and instead start calling it the Stalnaker-Lewis-Sprigge theory?

Mission statement (note: new posts are below mission)

*Updated on 3/5/2015 in response to feedback.

Recent research on citation-rates in academic philosophy and stories of people not receiving due credit for published work indicate a need to improve citation and credit-giving practices in the discipline, so that people can enjoy proper credit and recognition.

This blog aims to help do this by providing a forum for individuals in academic philosophy to bring to light general instances of work not receiving due credit or citations. Just to be clear, this site is not a forum for allegations of impropriety against specific individuals, articles, etc. (such things will not be published either in posts or in comments-sections of posts--though substantive critiques of claims made by authors in particular articles is welcome). Rather, this is a forum for people to (A) argue that particular works or authors have been unfairly neglected (i.e. not adequately cited or otherwise given due credit) in the philosophical literature in general, and (B) critically debate these arguments in comment-sections of corresponding posts.

Legitimate examples would be stories of the following sort:

1. "Philosopher X published argument Y in year 20ZZ, but argument Y is commonly attributed to other philosophers, not X."
2. "Philosopher X is commonly credited with first arguing Y, but Philosopher Z argued Y previously here, here, and here."
   
3. "Philosophers X, Y, and Z are commonly cited in the literature on Topic T, but Philosopher A has published noteworthy work on Topic T but is never/rarely cited."

This site, in other words, is intended to be a forum for people to bring to light, critically debate, and rectify systematic citation and credit-giving problems in academic philosophy. Anonymous and public posts alike are welcomed. Please submit posts to Marcus Arvan at [email protected].