The New York Times Memorializes Daniel Dennett Without Reading Him
The Gray Lady's obituary of Dennett wasn't just wildly unfair. It got his basic philosophical commitments wrong.
Assume for the sake of argument that we live in a completely deterministic universe. Everything that ever happens—including, crucially, everything that happens inside human brains—is the only thing that could have happened given the total physical state of the universe at earlier times and the operation of cause-and-effect physical laws.
Compatibilism is the surprising claim that, even if all of this is true, humans still have free will. Probably the world’s most famous compatibilist, Daniel Dennett, died eight days ago. In several of his books, he argued that the kinds of freedom “worth wanting,” and certainly the kinds that are relevant to moral responsibility, have nothing to do with freedom from determinism.
And, as of the time I’m writing this, the DEK at the top of the New York Times obituary of Dennett still says:
The approximate equivalent would be if Bernie Sanders died and the Times obituary highlighted the senator’s deep, life-long commitment to defending the private health insurance industry.
One way of thinking our way into the free will debate is to notice that all four of the following seem at least somewhat plausible:
(1) We might very well live in the kind of universe described above.
(2) If so, there’s no such thing as free will.
(3) If there’s no such thing as free will, there’s no such thing as objective moral responsibility—however useful it might be to sometimes act as if people were responsible.
(4) But objective moral responsibility pretty clearly does exist—i.e. it seems to be the case that sometimes, when people do things, what they did was really and truly their fault (or to their credit), and thus must have been up to them in whatever way this requires.
Clearly, something has to go.
One choice is to jettison (1). This gets you the position in the free will debate that unfortunately shares a name with the let-poor-people-starve position in political philosophy—"libertarianism”. One of several problems with this option is that it often looks suspiciously like the libertarian is engaged in a dubious chain of reasoning from an a priori intuition about free will to a conclusion about physical reality to which they just aren’t entitled. The deterministic “worst case scenario” sketched out above might or might not be true, but it sure looks like a live scientific possibility.
Another option is to bite the bullet and reject (4). This classically takes the form of hard determinism, which is the position that (i) determinism is true and therefore (ii) there’s no free will. An even more sweeping form of free will skepticism is hard incompatibilism, which holds that determinism and indeterminism are both incompatible with free will. (What, after all, could an undetermined process be but one including an element of randomness? And what does randomness have to do with freedom?) These positions have the virtue of being coherent and giving their adherents a giddy sense of embracing forbidden truths. But it’s awfully hard to maintain with a straight face that nothing anyone does is ever really their fault.
Theoretically, you could hold onto free will by rejecting (3), but this doesn’t look promising. It’s one thing to argue that we don’t need to be free in some particular sense or other in order to be responsible. Anyone who endorses one particular theory of free will and rejects the others will say that much. But it really seems like there has to be some important sense in which what we do is “up to us” for responsibility to make sense. If what I did wasn’t up to me at all, that really does seem to entail that it also wasn’t my fault.
Daniel Dennett’s rejected (2). He thought the kind of “freedom” that really matters, especially when we think a bit harder about (3), is, as he says here, a matter of various distinctively human “competences” about which we can tell an “entirely naturalistic story.” The “key” to this story is that we “act for reasons” which we can then “represent to ourselves consciously.” This in turn presumably unlocks crucial competences like our ability to reflect on competing reasons and deliberate between different courses of action. And the crucial point is that almost no one denies that we have these capacities, regardless of whatever might or might not be true about cause-and-effect determinism.
I say “almost” no one because one straightforward way to disagree with Dennett would be to be an eliminative materialist about mental states—or at least about the particular sort of mental states evoked in his talk of “acting for reasons” and “representing those reasons to ourselves consciously.”
Other kinds of materialists might explain what these states are by reference to things like brain states or behavioral dispositions, but they aren’t denying that the states exist any more than, in saying that water is made out of hydrogen and oxygen atoms, we’re denying the existence of water. Eliminative materialists think various kinds of mental states we all normally take themselves to have should be thought of less like water than like witchcraft—it’s not that modern science gives us a better understanding of how witchcraft works but that it shows us that there simply isn’t any such thing. The most famous advocates of this view are University of California-San Diego emeritus philosophy professors Paul and Patricia Churchland, who think that “folk psychology” concepts like e.g. “belief” or “pain” will be rightly discarded as we move toward a more correct and scientific understanding of what’s going on between our ears.
Imagine, to make this vivid, that you’ve just been hammering a nail into a wall. You accidentally hit your thumb with the hammer. You might naively think that you’re “in pain.” At least as I understand the Churchlands’ position, they think that strictly speaking your claim to be “in pain” is false. A complete and scientifically correct account of what’s going on here would of course include the neurological processes associated with “pain”. But the Churchlands would say that the more correct way to talk isn’t that these process “underlie” or “cause” or even “constitute” pain but rather that “pain” is a bad and unscientific folk-theory of a phenomenon better understood by just talking about the neurological processes.
Dennett’s own approach to the philosophy of mind is laid out in his classic book Consciousness Explained. There, he doesn’t embrace anything like Churchlandian skepticism about e.g. beliefs but he still says some strikingly radical things about the nature of our minds. He rejects what he calls the “Cartesian theater” model of consciousness in favor a “multiple drafts” model. According to the latter, the information coming in through my senses—this is all a bit easier in the first person!—isn’t all synthesized in one “stream of consciousness” for an audience of one. (And what, Dennett wants to ask, is that one audience member supposed to be, anyway? A soul? Or…?) Rather, there are multiple sensory “tracks” going on at the same time and information is being continually processed and revised—often in highly misleading ways, hence his talk of consciousness being “a bag of tricks” in the video above.
When I started graduate school in 2004, Dennett was already a philosophical rock star. He’d already published two books on free will, but my impression is that he was best known for (a) his work on consciousness and (b) his interventions in debates about Darwinian evolutionary theory.
As the decade progressed, he became far better-known, especially in the wide world outside of philosophy departments, as one of the “Four Horsemen” of New Atheism along with Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. While the essay you’re reading is, oddly enough, the first thing I’ve ever written about Dennett, I’ve written pretty extensively about the other three—very critically in the cases of Dawkins and Harris, and with more ambivalence regarding the Hitch. I’ve long held that Dennett was, for many reasons, by far the least objectionable of the four. I never saw him take his anti-theism in the unsavory political directions the other Horsemen did—generally speaking, when tallying up the virtues of two writers, I’m going to prefer the one who didn’t defend the war in Iraq or argue for a nuclear first strike on Iran—and he was certainly too philosophically sophisticated to say hideously stupid things like “you can’t prove a negative.” But I’ve always had a bundle of reservations about his work. I’ll try to unpack those here, if only to dispel any misimpression that I’m only offended by the Times obituary because I’m a Daniel Dennett super-fan.
To start with, while I agree with him that the kinds of freedom worth wanting are compatible with determinism, I have various objections and quibbles about his kind of compatibilism, which I sometimes suspected of trying to have some important subjects both ways. I promise to do an essay fleshing out that critique at some point in the future. Suffice to say for now that I prefer the version of compatibilism offered by John Martin Fischer.
Second, like many critics of Dennett’s work on consciousness, I always suspected him of failing to adequately grapple with the question of subjective inner experience. He didn’t share the Churchlands’ sweeping eliminativism about “folk psychology” concepts like “beliefs” but a key component of his approach was his rejection of “qualia”—basically, the idea that the “what it’s like” of first-person experience can’t be adequately captured by third-person observations about brain states, behavioral dispositions, or anything of the kind. There, he was an eliminativist. He had many clever and interesting things to say in defense of this position, but reading him I always had a nagging feeling that he hadn’t quite disposed of the issue.
Finally, there’s the New Atheism of it all. As I’ve said, he was most certainly the best Horseman. But he was decidedly uninterested in using his philosophical training to model a better way of being an atheist debater than his horsebrothers or to press them into making better and more sophisticated argumetns against the existence of God. (He wasn’t, in other words, Quentin Smith.) He preferred to write about religion in the mode of speculative popular science, telling a Darwinian story about the origins of religious “delusions.” That story might be right and it might be wrong but I always worried that his focus on it amounted to passing on a golden opportunity to make rigorous philosophical arguments for a wider audience.
One place where he did push back against the philosophical sloppiness of his horsebrothers, though, was on the subject of free will. Sam Harris wrote a spectacularly bad book on the subject, in which Dennett is one of two compatibilists to get even passing mentions—the other being Eddy Nahmias, whose article popularizing his views about the subject Harris happens to have seen in the New York Times.
Dennett wrote a long review, generously hosted by Harris himself on samharris.org, that’s more charitable than mine in all sorts of ways, but which also read like he’s straining really hard to find nice things to say about his friend’s book:
The book is, thus, valuable as a compact and compelling expression of an opinion widely shared by eminent scientists these days. It is also valuable, as I will show, as a veritable museum of mistakes, none of them new and all of them seductive—alluring enough to lull the critical faculties of this host of brilliant thinkers who do not make a profession of thinking about free will. And, to be sure, these mistakes have also been made, sometimes for centuries, by philosophers themselves. But I think we have made some progress in philosophy of late, and Harris and others need to do their homework if they want to engage with the best thought on the topic.
I am not being disingenuous when I say this museum of mistakes is valuable; I am grateful to Harris for saying, so boldly and clearly, what less outgoing scientists are thinking but keeping to themselves. I have always suspected that many who hold this hard determinist view are making these mistakes, but we mustn’t put words in people’s mouths, and now Harris has done us a great service by articulating the points explicitly… Wolfgang Pauli’s famous dismissal of another physicist’s work as “not even wrong” reminds us of the value of crystallizing an ambient cloud of hunches into something that can be shown to be wrong. Correcting widespread misunderstanding is usually the work of many hands, and Harris has made a significant contribution.
In his response, Harris makes it clear that he resents the condescension of this effort at positivity. He also does the thing a great many free will skeptics do—especially the skeptics who’ve never had the patience to dig into the underlying philosophical debate—and accuses Dennett of simply changing the subject, talking about something else, and trying to sneakily rebrand that something else as “free will.” Harris makes the same move in the horsebrothers’ in-person debate on free will.
Personally, I always find this accusation underwhelming. Here’s one way of thinking about it:
There are a number of different things from which we can be “free.” We can be free from coercion and manipulation, for example, whether or not we’re also free from cause-and-effect determinism. Or to switch from “freedom from” to “freedom to,” there are a number of kinds of capacities we can have (or lack) that add up to senses in which our decisions can (or can fail to be) “under our control” or “up to us.” Some of these capacities are compatible with determinism. Some aren’t.
We can, of course, do a linguistic investigation of which of these kinds of control or up-to-us-ness people most often have in mind when they use the phrase “free will,” but I don’t think the results of that investigation are going to be terribly informative. In my experience, most undergraduates will nod along with any number of wildly different definitions of “free will” that sound like they might capture some part of what they have in mind when they use the phrase. Again, that just doesn’t seem interesting to me.
A far more promising question is:
Which of these kinds of “free will” matter for the purposes of thinking through objective moral responsibility or other philosophically weighty concepts that incorporate “free will”?
If he framed things that way, Harris might well still disagree with me and Dennett (and, as Dennett notes here, the majority philosophers who’ve thought hard about these issues). But at least he would be asking better questions.
Earlier the same day that I saw the New York Times obituary of Dennett, I happened to see a friend posting this clip of Dennett making fundamental methodological objections to the ways that philosophers typically analyze concepts.
I don’t know that I necessarily agree, but one thing you can’t deny is that it’s interesting. And, though I’ve never met Dennett and haven’t thought much about his work in years, it honestly gave me a little pang about the intellectual loss.
And then I read the obit in the Times. And good lord, man.
Let’s start with the cheap accusation that Dennett could dish it out but not take it:
While Mr. Dennett never held back in contradicting the views of other scholars, he bristled at harsh comments about his own work.
The obituarist, Jonathan Kandell, cites Dennett’s letter to the editor responding to Leon Wieseltier’s New York Times review of Breaking the Spell:
In a lengthy, angry rebuttal, Mr. Dennett denounced Mr. Wieseltier for “flagrant falsehoods” that demonstrated a “visceral repugnance that fairly haunts Wieseltier’s railing (without arguments) against my arguments.”
…all of which amounts to a neat little reading comprehension test. Does the quote used as evidence actually support the claim? Is Dennett bristling at the harshness or is he frustrated, as a philosopher seeing a harsh critique and looking for an argument to rebut, that Wieseltier didn’t bother to engage much at the level of arguments?
Then there’s this sentence, where Kandell manages to simultaneously attribute to Dennett both Sam Harris’s position on free will and something like the Churchlands’ position on the philosophy of mind:
Mr. Dennett responded that free will — like consciousness — was based on the outdated notion that the mind should be considered separate from the physical brain.
And the next one:
Still, he asserted, free will was a necessary illusion to maintain a stable, functioning society.
…that makes me wonder why Dennett spent all those thousands of words responding to Harris, and why he wrote several books on the subject, if his only response to free will skeptics was, “I know you guys are right but let’s keep quiet about it so society doesn’t fall apart!”
I get that Kandell glanced at a couple of places where Dennett was telling a quasi-Darwinian story about the utility of free will and got his wires crossed. But did he not bother to check with anyone who’d bothered to read one of Dennett’s books all the way to the end?
Similarly, did it occur to Kandell to wonder why Dennett’s classic book is called Consciousness Explained not Consciousness Refuted? Of course, many philosophers would argue that, given his position on qualia, Dennett was in effect denying the existence of consciousness itself. But that’s certainly not how he understood his own project. You can argue in this case—as Sam Harris does in the case of free will—that Dennett’s attempted to provide a naturalistic explanation and only succeeded in changing the subject. But just presenting him as a skeptic about consciousness and free will without qualification is jaw-droppingly inaccurate.
Honestly, I can’t believe I’m saying this but I actually wish the Times had offered the obituary to Sam Harris. He would have, surely, treated his friend and collaborator with a modicum of respect. At the very least, having engaged in long and frustrating debates with Dennett, he would have known what his positions were.
It is unfair to claim Dennett thought *evolution* was necessarily explained by natural selection. He believed that *functional explanations* for anything not designed by a higher intelligence had to ultimately be rooted in some form of selection -- in the context of most biological phenomena this would be natural selection. But he didn't reject genetic drift, founder's effects or any of the other maintstays of the modern synthesis of biology. It is just that these things can't explain surprising design features of animals or plants.
Gould's concept of "spandrels" is ambiguous. If it just means that there are often engineering reasons that features and bugs not selected for go together with the design feature selected for, then Dennett would have agreed. He also would have agreed that sometimes these bugs/features themselves become the subject of *subsequent* selection. But he would not have agreed that you can explain complex design features without some kind of selective story.
On this point, G.A. Cohen ultimately agreed with Dennett, not Gould, although he also insisted that sometimes you know something has a functional design without yet being able to give the selection story. But under Elster's pressure, he granted the point that this situation had to just be a placeholder for a better materialist explanation later.