An Epistemological Crisis

With regard to what ‘truthfulness’ is, perhaps nobody has ever been sufficiently truthful.

Nietzsche

The question “how do I know what is true?” has never seemed so difficult to answer: we are in the midst of an epistemological crisis. It is neither the first nor will it be the last. However, in contrast with previous crises that were mostly of interest to philosophers and scientists, the present situation is considerably more relevant to the general population.

At its core, the crisis is one of evaluating the veracity of testimony. “Testimony” is used here as a philosophical term to mean purported knowledge that is communicated by another person rather than perceived or conceived directly by a subject. The problem of testimony is not new, though it could easily be argued that it has not received enough attention.

It can be illustrated simply by considering an everyday situation: a news article on the health benefits or shortcomings of some particular food or diet. How do we know whether, or to what extent, such an article is true, both in its factual claims and its interpretation?

The Superficial and the Deep Problem

I divide this problem into two components: superficial and deep. The superficial component is about pure testimony - the conveyance of knowledge or information. The issues here arise from whether the testifier is correctly transmitting the information that he or she received, regardless of where it came from. Analyses of this problem can be found in sources ranging from the Islamic hadith, to courtroom rules of evidence, to treatises like Schum’s The Evidential Foundations of Probabilistic Reasoning, to my own analysis presented in this talk.

The solution to the superficial problem is effortful but tractable. We try to reduce the number of testimonial “hops” to the original source of information. We evaluate the reliability of sources through various means, and try to rely on sources who have exhibited truthful testimony consistently in the past. We try to find multiple independent sources that offer the same account. We make an effort to evaluate whether the independence of sources is impaired by collaboration or implicit biases.

An aggressive pursuit of the truth of pure testimony leads us to original sources. These might be in the form of numerical data, or written communications, or eyewitness accounts, or video or audio recordings. The deep component of the problem is in evaluating the veracity of these original sources. It is partially a problem of testimony, but also incorporates issues of perception, memory, and cognitive bias. It is a deep problem because an evaluation of the original source is sometimes impossible and almost always requires a great deal of effort and knowledge. As subjects evaluating truthfulness, we do not have access to the original facts of reality and all the details of the means by which they were characterized.

In some cases the deep problem does not go that deep. Original sources can be falsified, retouched, or even just carelessly recorded or re-typed. If an individual or institution is generally a reliable original source, then we have some reason to believe that these factors do not come into play. There are occasionally stories of researchers who completely fabricate data, or of photos that are fake, but they are actually fairly rare. These concerns look more like issues of pure testimony.

More difficult is when data is legitimately produced but it is wrapped in interpretive cover. Statistical analyses have this characteristic. A scientist or or data collection agency might collect a large amount of raw data and then perform a variety of adjustments and statistical operations on it. Those adjustments and operations might be well-established as appropriate in the field, or they might be novel to the particular researcher. One might assume that such procedures would be evaluated during peer review, but for a variety of reasons peer review has declined in its thoroughness and efficacy. Government-sourced data does not have peer review, though economists and medical experts and others often opine on its validity. It is easy to find conflicting opinions on such matters, and these differences are difficult to resolve, even for experts, but especially for lay subjects.

Adjustments and statistics are only one example. More generally, a scientific paper or government report incorporates conclusions, based on the data along with the application of experience in the field of interest, and it can be extremely challenging to evaluate the logic of these conclusions without a similar level of expertise. Yet, once again, even experts weighing in on the conclusions will often have differing opinions.

The deepest level of the problem is when the data collection process itself is tainted with cognitive bias. This is extremely difficult to discern, because such work is always and necessarily affected by cognitive biases of some kind, and the real question is the extent to which those biases affect the results and conclusions. Further, it can be very difficult from the outside to tell the difference between explicit manipulation and implicit cognitive bias.

In the most innocuous yet endemic version of cognitive bias, as numerous philosophers of science concluded in the second half of the twentieth century, all terms are theory-laden. This means that even the statement of the hypothesis and the data collection effort depend on a particular paradigm, or model of the world. There is no “view from nowhere.” Thus, all data collection has a tendency to confirm the extant paradigm in a general sense. This occurs beyond just scientific fields. An individual who takes a photograph of a newsworthy event will point the camera at the most dramatic elements and will not capture the entire context of the scene. What is captured depends on what that person considers important or photo-worthy.

Of greater concern is the desire on the part of a researcher to gain support for a theory or hypothesis. Though we hope that scientists are mostly honest, they often truly believe their viewpoint. All science requires that some data be ignored due to spurious measurement error, that experiments be designed to control for external influences, and that other elements be selected from a wide range of seemingly reasonable options. Attention-related cognitive biases will naturally drive them toward approaches that support their theory and to fail to notice facts and concerns that counter it. Further, individual researchers face many pressures, including publishing regularly to gain tenure, gaining notoriety for their theories to obtain funding, and just generally seeking prestige in their field. Scientific journals strongly prefer to publish experiments that show an effect rather than those which show no effect or disconfirm previous effects. These difficulties due to implicit cognitive bias have been documented at length recently.

More egregiously, sometimes funding sources (e.g., corporate or government sources) are essentially looking for a “right answer” that will sell more products or support a particular policy. Scientists can always arrange things to be more favorable to the desired hypothesis even while providing perfectly rationalized support for that approach. A recently discovered example of this also shows that the phenomenon is not new. But money is not the only such influence. When public policy is integrated with science, the political beliefs of scientists, data collection agencies, and scientific journal editorial staff can influence the results in important but opaque ways.

Skepticism and Faith

The end result of these manifestations of the problem of testimony is a broad and profound skepticism, hence an epistemological crisis. We see opposing journalistic sources providing conflicting information, and when we dig down to the original research and data sources, we often find contradictory results or disagreeing expert opinions about those results. As information consumers we have the sense that, for all apparently factual material there is interpretive and methodological bias that affects both the data itself and any conclusions one might draw from it. Conspiracy theories about scientific results are rampant. We often see results from “established” science accused of either industry influence or a bias toward technocratic values, and the establishment treating all results that disagree with the dominant paradigm as “pseudoscience” or again as tainted by financial incentives.

Little of this skepticism is aimed at finding “truth,” of course. It is often a political or values fight, with extremely high standards expected of those who disagree and a pass given to those who agree. And for those who are genuinely looking to find truth, their skepticism is dismissed as partisan as well. Even attempts to apply appropriate standards of knowledge seem subject to bias; the snake is eating its own tail.

One might hold out hope that reality is the final arbiter of such matters. If only it were that simple. For questions where we, as subjects, will never encounter the phenomena directly, it is entirely possible that the debate will rage indefinitely. Unless the effect sizes are strong and transcend methodological choices, the same biases exhibited initially will continue to live on. For those questions where we will encounter phenomena directly, we only have the anecdotal observations we can make individually, which means that we probably cannot assign causality in a reliable fashion. For example, if I eliminate some food from my diet and subsequently feel better, the likelihood that there is some other cause for the change or that it is a placebo effect is fairly high.

Now, none of the underlying knowledge issues discussed here are fundamentally new. There have always been frauds, egos, cognitive biases, and paradigmatic influences. Some things that are new include: (a) science and government data collection is used to drive public policy, some of which extends beyond pure rational analysis and into values; (b) inexorable increases in the number of scientists drives a need to publish; (c) business model problems with journals have reduced the effectiveness and application of peer review; (d) due to the Internet, laypeople have greater access to both reporting and to original sources, making conflicts that were always there more broadly apparent, and values other than seeking truth more influential. There are probably other reasons why we have reached this crisis now.

The existence of the crisis does not reduce our desire to believe and to have knowledge. In the words of Charles Sanders Peirce, a scientist and philosopher of science who wrote in the second half of the 19th century:

Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else.

The unfortunate result for many laypeople is that they come to rely on faith, not only in matters of unverifiable metaphysics, but in areas where there is actually a fact of the matter that could be discerned. Their values drive an agenda, the agenda drives a cognitive bias toward supporting evidence, and an unencumbered faith in both the agenda and in this supporting evidence is the result. Since experts disagree, they pick those who share their values or agenda. As discussed above, modes of skepticism can be applied to any contrary evidence, suggesting not only that the particular evidence is suspect, but also that claimed knowledge from faith has an equal status to that from evidence and reasoning. This is an ugly situation indeed: among other things, it means that values can float unfettered by reality.

The syndrome is not limited to people who subscribe to a particular religious faith. It is not confined to the Dunning-Kruger idiocracy. It results any time someone holds their existing values and beliefs above valuing and learning how the world works. It happens left, right, and center. It happens among scientists and other experts, even within their own field. We are all at risk, and the only cure is to take truth seriously and to seek it with unqualified regard.

Looking Toward Solutions

In the early twentieth century, an epistemological crisis arose from a series of discoveries showing that our knowledge is fundamentally limited. Heisenberg showed that we cannot accurately know both the position and momentum of a particle. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems demonstrated that every formal system - e.g., a system of logic or mathematics - is either inconsistent or has true theorems that cannot be proved within that system. Many similar and related discoveries followed. Uneasiness with these limits continues to this day, but practitioners have gradually come to accept that these limits are simply facts about the world, and that knowledge of our epistemic limits is just another kind of knowledge. They found that there was plenty of knowledge still accessible and that we could cope with inherent uncertainty through indirect or partial means. Ultimately, the crisis did not inhibit progress.

Perhaps we can work toward solutions with this historical example in mind, and guided by Nietzsche’s point about the nature of truthfulness. The difficulties we are seeing are probably not some sort of contingent, temporary issue related to modern society, nor even due to flaws that are particular to human nature. Any autonomous agent collecting data has some set of values and purposes, or it wouldn’t bother to collect the data (or do anything else, for that matter). Those values and purposes, and the paradigmatic assumptions guiding the data collection and analysis, create biases which lead to biased results.

Three approaches come to mind. Original sources can try to ameliorate the bias resulting from their purposes; they can disclose their purposes and consequent biases; or they can align their purposes with others who have somewhat different purposes. Note that these approaches may or may not have practical implementations in any given case. Let us look briefly at examples of each in turn.

Suppose that a researcher is seeking tenure. A crucial bias of such a purpose is to find results and effects of interest to the field. The tendency will be to find effects where there are none and to overstate the significance of small effects. To ameliorate such biases, a researcher in this position should go to great lengths to demonstrate that the effect is real - not just finding a single statistic that supports the conclusion, but showing that a variety of analyses lead to the same conclusion. If the effect is small, do not overstate its potential importance.

Suppose that a researcher has pursued a career in a scientific field because she thinks the field studies a phenomenon that is an important risk to humanity. This needs to be disclosed, just as clearly as a financial conflict of interest needs to be disclosed. It is only natural that this sort of motivation exists in a scientific field, but it creates strong biases that readers of research need to be aware of.

Suppose that researchers in a field have opposed political viewpoints regarding a particular scientific question. They can work together to evaluate the data collection processes and analysis and develop a methodology that removes at least the most troublesome biases. This will only work with researchers who have a genuine desire to find underlying phenomena despite their political views. Those who are primarily concerned with their agenda will find ways to object to anything. I suspect that the vast majority of scientists would benefit from this, just as pair programming makes software developers focus on the flaws they would prefer to avoid.

These are only single examples of situations and how these approaches might be applied. Nevertheless, if among our purposes is improving our lives, and increasing knowledge of how the world works, it is crucial to find ways to mitigate this epistemological crisis. The alternative is ignorance and power politics, which is unlikely to result in our being happier, healthier, and safer.

Purpose is a Hot Mess

Those who contemplate the means by which we determine our purpose often arrive at a description based on some sort of hierarchical structure. In this structure there is typically some final or ultimate purpose, from which we subsequently and consequently derive cardinal and subsidiary goals. Thus all we need to do is discover or decide on this ultimate purpose and everything else flows from it as strategy and tactics. My own small contribution along these lines is in the blog post A Taxonomy of Purpose.

When we examine more carefully the relationships among our purposive influences, we find nothing so straightforward. For example, our desire to survive is certainly strong, but rarely is it so dominant that we are willing to forego all but the safest activities. Those who claim to have a manifest purpose are sometimes observed not to be focused at all on that purpose. Most people have a set of important values in their lives that continuously ebb and flow in their importance. They have career, family, friends, and avocations, all of which vie for attention and time. Indeed, the people who genuinely hold a single purpose - such as world-class athletes, musicians, or inventors - stand out precisely because they are so unusual. Interestingly, It is common for such individuals to experience burnout and depression in the midst of their obsessive pursuit.

Even establishing a general criterion such as “leading a happy and satisfying life” provides only limited guidance. We must discover what actual activities provide such effects, and they are likely to change over time. Further, though, it is often necessary to invest in activities that are not intrinsically satisfying, so as to derive greater benefit later. How do we decide the extent to which we ought to make such investments at the expense of immediate gratification?

The point here is not that there is a lack of substantive purposes or values available to us to make decisions about our activities and directions. Quite the opposite - there are many of them and the relationships among them are uncertain, variable, and often unstructured. One could argue that this is merely how we typically behave, but that we ought to operate in a more structured way. Such a claim of course assumes some prior or higher purpose on which to judge a purposive structure. More importantly, though, we can look at examples of those who approximate such behavior and see what we would typically consider unhealthy or even sociopathic outcomes.

In the field of artificial general intelligence, efforts are underway to model motivation and purpose. To the extent this aims at capturing something like human purpose, it is likely not comparable to a rules engine or even a static pattern matching process. It may not even be possible to model it with a Markov process, because it is dependent on the path by which we arrived at our present state. Perhaps we could come close with some sort of time varying, constrained optimization model. Instead, though, it is often assumed that an artificial agent will be imbued with an explicit and singular final purpose, and the logical consequence is usually that the AI endeavors to kill all humans to achieve that purpose. In some accounts, this is even the case if the purpose is to make humans happy. Conclusions like these could be used as further suggesting that the inscrutable organization of human purpose has a certain stability and desirability that is lacking when it is oversimplified.

Purpose is and probably ought to be a hot mess of desires, values, goals, and visions that constrain and contradict one another so as not only to keep life interesting and fresh, but also to keep us from going off the rails on a crazy train.

Decision Processes

When we are faced with a choice, how do we decide?

We make many decisions passively or without apparent conscious effort. From a psychological viewpoint, we might assume that such decisions are made through some combination of: an expectation of pleasure or pain, entrenched habits, emotional states and reactions, implicit “pattern matching,” implicit and practiced decision principles, social cues, and possibly other ingredients.

Other times we choose consciously, but make a meta-decision to “go with our gut.” Interestingly, it does not seem as though the decision criteria in these cases are significantly different; rather we are simply more likely to bring various facts and values into consciousness and change the weight they are given in the choice.

Take for example a decision whether to drive on a freeway or a surface road to one’s destination. If we drive this route frequently and normally take the freeway, we might just take the freeway without ever consciously being aware of making a decision. Or, we may pick the route based on apparent traffic, and in this case we are conscious of the decision; but if there are no obvious traffic problems we take the freeway anyway based on instinct.

Non-conscious decision processes develop naturally from our biological reward systems. We come to predict those actions that will satisfy drives such as hunger, thirst, and warmth. We also have strong, though less immediate, drives such as curiosity, sexual desire, and a need for social interaction and status. Early in our lives, the more basic drives dominate and the providers who satisfy them create a strong influence on our habits of action and decision. Later, a broader social environment conditions us to certain behaviors through the dynamics of individual relationships, peer pressure, and authority figures. The habits that we develop early in life may persist even though they may no longer correspond to our actual desires as we mature.

At other times, we actually deliberate consciously. Consider the following general procedure, which is not intended as definitive, but seems a reasonable approximation:

1. identify the relevant options;
2. for each option, attempt to predict its consequences;
3. for each option, compare the expected consequences to our desires;
4. compare the assessments over all the options.

The first two of these are primarily epistemic processes. Rarely is it this simple, of course: we usually rule out or never consider options that are prima facie in conflict with our values; or the contents of a prediction might relate directly to values. Nevertheless, we will not treat of (i) or (ii) here except to point out that improved skill in them will help one to make better decisions.

Comparing the expected consequences of an option to our desires is not as easy as comparing a grocery list to a filled shopping cart. Those consequences may take the form of a statistical distribution of outcomes, or a tree of possibilities that turn on unknown extrinsic factors. The desiderata may be multifarious and their weightings or priorities may be time- or path-dependent or combination-sensitive. Further, it is not only those criteria relating directly to the context of the choice (a goal) that must be considered: there are often background considerations that render an otherwise acceptable outcome untenable (side effects).

Comparing these assessments over the various options is a higher dimensional version of the same process. We must compare the statistical distributions or outcome pathways across options and assess how well goals are met and side effects are minimized along with the relevant probabilities. Here there are also stylistic meta-desires involved, for example, whether one seeks values as an optimizer or a constraint-satisfier, or whether we prefer to cast the die once or to leave downstream options open.

Crucially, underlying this epistemic labyrinth is a requirement to have knowledge of our desires and how their interrelationships. While we do not have control over the extrinsic factors that affect the outcomes of choices, we do control the extent to which we understand what we seek. Here arise further interesting questions (which we will not address here): do we to some extent need to discover what it is that we desire? How does that process unfold?

It is no wonder that we typically rely on habits, gut instinct, and norms whenever we can. The cost of following a conscious and rational decision process (whether that described above or some variation) is extremely high, and in any case it is often so filled with uncertainty that the incremental value of spending time and energy on detailed comparisons is low.

Given that, we should ask the question whether we even need to consciously deliberate. What is wrong with just relying on our existing habits and intuitions? The answer is that, though these sub-conscious mechanisms undoubtedly contain elements of our genuine criteria, it is likely that they would contain some influences that we have rejected, are missing some that we have embraced, and weight them incorrectly. In short, our sub-conscious mechanisms rarely match up with our conscious desires, particularly when the decision involved will have long-term effects. Even though the conscious process is complex and imprecise, it is likely to produce results that are closer to our actual desires.

To reduce the ongoing cost of conscious decisions, and to improve the consistency of our efforts to obtain what we desire, we can actively establish norms and values and attempt to entrench them as habits of behavior. In both the “subconscious” and “conscious-implicit” cases discussed earlier, the psychological basis for the decision is a combination of unanalyzed habits and responses along with habits and responses that were developed or practiced consciously.

It seems that there are two approaches – or perhaps the poles of a continuum – by which we can consciously habituate decision criteria. First, we might consciously make a decision anew in each individual case, perhaps based on more fundamental criteria. Over time an abstraction will form that enables recognition of a circumstantial pattern, whether or not we explicitly identify it, and that pattern-response mechanism is the source of the habit.

In contrast, we might instead recognize in advance that a species of circumstances does or will occur regularly, and we contemplate and calculate a decision rule in general form. Initially, when applicable circumstances come to pass, we must consciously recognize the situation and form the decision. We may even engage in some deliberation during the first few such occurrences; in this case, such deliberation is in the context of whether our initial, abstract deliberation was correct. In any case, after sufficient practice, decisions in such circumstances can occur without either conscious deliberation or even recognition.

From this analysis we observe three categories of decision processes: conscious, habitual based on consciously developed norms, and habitual based on conditioning.

The Constitutive Role of Risk in Entrepreneurship

In an earlier, somewhat inaccessible essay, we began to explore some of the rough outlines of what constitutes entrepreneurship. In particular we suggested that a novel, instrumental idea, along with the desire and action to see it realized, might be minimum or necessary conditions, though they may not be sufficient. Here we will explore the potential constitutive role of another factor that is often associated with entrepreneurship: risk.

In this piece, our examples will all involve commercial business situations, but that is for the sake of simplicity and clarity, not to limit the discussion or conclusions to entrepreneurship of a commercial nature. Further, for those concerned with rigor, I will point out that in any definitional enterprise there are two value-laden considerations. The first is due to the fact that we have purposes driving the need for a distinct term, and the second that if we are to trouble ourselves with a distinct term, then its meaning should be unique in some way so as to perform some cognitive work. While the latter point is generic, I should clarify for the sake of the former that my purpose is in studying the nature of entrepreneurship, as I believe it has been and will be a major contributor to human civilization.

The popular archetype of an entrepreneur includes “risk-taker” as an attribute, and risk is normally present in entrepreneurship. However, this could be a consequence of another factor, or even just a coincidence resulting from the way entrepreneurship is historically conducted. We would like to determine whether it is among the necessary or sufficient conditions constituting entrepreneurship. We would also like to understand more about the role it plays, given its apparent ubiquity.

To do that, we will need to look more closely at what the term “risk” means in this context. It has several definitions, such as “variability of economic returns” (finance) and “uncertainty of outcome in making a decision” (psychology). In relation to entrepreneurship, we might instead emphasize the possibility of loss of something one currently possesses. What sorts of things might an entrepreneur lose?

Most obvious is the potential for financial loss. Entrepreneurs are usually their own first investors, not only supporting direct outlays but also expending effort and time that could have been directed toward earning money. Bootstrap entrepreneurs sometimes use credit cards, second mortgages, and savings to get the business off the ground. And entrepreneurs - even those with outside financing - rarely draw a full market salary.

Also apparent is the possibility of harming one’s reputation. If the venture fails, one might be viewed as less competent or capable by colleagues, as an embarrassment to one’s family, as an object of pity to one’s friends. Recently, there has been some emphasis on the positive aspects of business failure (for example, learning and experience), and in Silicon Valley some entrepreneurs even tout such failures as a selling point. Nevertheless, loss of reputation remains a real risk.

Less widely understood is the potential for a toll on one’s health, both physical and mental. Entrepreneurship typically involves long working hours, grueling travel, and rushed or indulgent meals. It involves substantial emotional stress, difficult and awkward interactions with a wide variety of people, and extraordinary volatility in the prospects for success. Depression is common and the daily instability may exacerbate any propensity to bipolar disorders.

A few other potential losses, possibly not as consistently present, come to mind. Often an enterprise is founded with trusted and respected colleagues: those relationships could be damaged. The entrepreneur’s adventurous spirit or enthusiasm could be lost. Sometimes the very vision that guides the effort is a longtime dream and an integral part of the entrepreneur’s persona, and failure would do violence to it.

Thus when we speak of risk in entrepreneurship we are typically talking about important values such as these, values that the individual currently possesses and that the venture might directly or indirectly cause to be lost. Further, if the notion of risk is to help us demarcate entrepreneurship from other endeavors, it seems necessary that such risk exceeds that of commonplace activities - whether due to putting larger quantities of the aforementioned values at stake, or from a higher probability of loss.

With that framing of risk in place, let us now consider whether it is a necessary or sufficient condition for entrepreneurship.

We do not normally consider gamblers and thrill-seekers to be entrepreneurs despite their bearing considerable risk. The reason seems to have something to do with the absence of creation: even if the gambler wins, or the thrill-seeker survives and garners an adrenaline boost, nothing new has been produced. This becomes even more clear if we add a creative element to each activity. A “gambler” who develops a team method of counting cards, or a thrill-seeker who devises a new way to plunge toward the earth and decelerate before impact, these activities seem to come closer to our sense of what an entrepreneur does.

Based on these examples it seems that risk alone is not a sufficient condition to constitute entrepreneurship. More difficult to ascertain is whether it is necessary. Put another way, is it possible for an activity to be entrepreneurship if there is no incremental risk?

Let us assume for a moment that our previously suggested conditions are necessary but perhaps not sufficient. A putative entrepreneur has a novel, instrumental idea along with a desire to see it realized, and takes action on that account. Do we need to add risk to the broth?

Suppose we stipulate further that our subject is financially very sound, physically and emotionally healthy, and has had several large successes as well as some failures, putting her reputation beyond reproach and rendering her ego stable. The amount of time and money she intends to put at risk are proportionately small. The envisioned widget is clearly needed in the market and for whatever reason there are no competitors. Is this activity entrepreneurship?

If we were to claim that it is not, we would be in a somewhat uncomfortable position. An activity that, earlier in our subject’s career, might have been clearly entrepreneurship, is not so designated because the person has managed to be successful and healthy and the project is relatively small. By requiring risk per se, we make the question of whether an activity is entrepreneurship dependent on the financial, health, or reputational status of the subject pursuing the activity. This would be a startling result. We do not ask about a scientist’s prior success to determine whether his latest experiment is science, nor an artist’s mental condition to decide whether her attempts at sculpture constitute art.

Perhaps, though, the necessary conditions we assumed are too strong, and occlude an underlying need for risk in constituting entrepreneurship. Two elements that seem promising in this regard are the novelty of the idea and the need for action. We can consider each in turn.

Imagine an individual investing his entire net worth to purchase a local chain of dry cleaning outlets from the retiring owner. The chain is successful, and no significant changes are planned, so there is no novelty in this endeavor aside from the fact that our subject will be managing the business. Nevertheless, there is considerable risk due to the scale of the investment and the ever-present, uncontrollable macroeconomic factors that affect all businesses. Is this entrepreneurship?

It is a case where opinions might vary. Peter Drucker, in Innovation and Entrepreneurship, excludes situations such as this despite the risk, because there is no innovation involved. Others might hold that in this case the risk substitutes for novelty in constituting entrepreneurship. Still others might claim that the existence of the risk implies at least some hidden novelty - for example, every moment in time has different characteristics - though this sort of claim tends to blur any distinction between entrepreneurship and other activities.

We can more likely agree if we perturb the scenario, so that the subject does not actually operate the business but merely makes the investment. In that case we see the individual as an investor, or perhaps a gambler, but not an entrepreneur. It seems that at a minimum, for risk to act as a substitute for novelty, we also need to see ongoing involvement beyond an initial transaction.

We can take this further, and address the requirement for action, through the following, admittedly recherché, scenario. Here imagine an individual who is a non-operational major shareholder in a company, who has a novel idea and a desire to see it realized. She describes this idea to an operating executive but takes no further action. There is novelty, and there is also risk, but there is no direct action on the part of the shareholder.

Though agreement may not be universal here, most would not call this entrepreneurship. The reason is subtle: the risk does not appreciably arise from the idea or even the fact that it was shared. The risk antedates the sharing of the idea, and exists whether or not the idea is ultimately implemented. WIthout her stake in the company, our subject is merely someone who has an idea and shares it, which is quite outside the realm of entrepreneurship.

From these scenarios we conclude that in constituting entrepreneurship, risk cannot substitute for action, and to the extent that we think that risk can substitute for novelty, it needs to be combined with ongoing action. Consequently, risk is neither a sufficient nor necessary component of entrepreneurship, unless it is substituting for novelty.

We now return to a more realistic scenario to fill out the picture. Suppose an individual seeks a role within a large organization, having distinct novel ideas about how the role could contribute to the firm’s success, and subsequently joins the firm and executes on those ideas. This seems to be entrepreneurial without being entrepreneurship. That is to say, it is similar to entrepreneurship, or has some but not all of the qualities of entrepreneurship. A comprehensive elaboration of this distinction is outside the scope of the present discussion.

But what if we now substitute risk for novelty, as we did before? For example, the subject leaves a stable job and moves her family to a new city to join a company in a particular role, but has no particular novel ideas about that role. Here the similarity seems to fail. The subject is merely making a risky job move; not only is it not entrepreneurship per se, it does not even seem particularly entrepreneurial. This outcome suggests that, even if we do consider risk to be a potential substitute for novelty, its constitutive role is considerably weaker.

If risk is only a necessary condition for entrepreneurship in limited circumstances, and even there its constitutive role is weak, why does it seem to be present virtually all of the time? There are two straightforward reasons.

First, action in the face of novelty always carries incremental risk, above and beyond that of prosaic activities, even if such risk seems immaterial to a particular subject. Not only is there some probability of failure; that probability can be quite difficult to estimate, because there are no genuine comparables to rely on.

Second, the relatively strong requirement of action means that there is an opportunity cost risk for the entrepreneur. Typically, an entrepreneur makes a deep commitment to a single venture rather than engaging in a portfolio as an investor would; thus there is significant unique risk (as the term is used in portfolio theory) relating to the time, money, and effort expended. Even in cases where the entrepreneur is involved in multiple activities simultaneously, each one limits the time available for the others. This commitment implies a concomitant risk, again even if it is not material for the individual.

Given these straightforward causal relationships, it is no wonder that we often conflate risk with entrepreneurship. More accurately, we might consider certain forms of risk to be entrepreneurial, even if the activity as a whole is not genuinely entrepreneurship. As a similarity relation, the term entrepreneurial admits of degrees. For example, in a scenario where an individual takes a job with a startup at half-pay in exchange for a significant equity stake: that is surely entrepreneurial in some degree, simply because bearing risk of this particular kind is common among entrepreneurs.

Finally, risk is often present in entrepreneurship because investors and other parties see it as a motivational tool. The upside is a carrot; the risk is a stick. An entrepreneur who takes little risk is seen as lacking commitment. When difficult situations arise, so this view goes, the entrepreneur with “skin in the game” will be more likely to persevere in the effort and do whatever is needed to succeed. Whatever the merits of this view, risk incurred for this reason is clearly not constitutive of the activity of entrepreneurship, but simply represents a common business practice.

As the practice of entrepreneurship continues to become more professionalized and systematized, it is important to recognize that the presence of risk is a common but not inevitable artifact of other, essential characteristics, or of particular business methods.

Deconstructing Atheism

Though probably too much has been written on atheism and its various strains, I will nevertheless contribute to the fray, as a result of some recent concerns and insights I have had on the topic. Though I have long been a committed atheist, I have never been completely satisfied with the standard depictions of what that means. I am also concerned not to overreach in my own beliefs, as I described in detail in Doxastic Promiscuity Considered Harmful.

In the following I make numerous claims about rationality and what qualifies as rational. Arguing those claims is well outside the scope of this article, but in any case I do not think any of the claims is outrageous, even if debatable.

The usual organization of atheism divides the field with two oppositions: implicit vs. explicit, and weak vs. strong. An implicit atheist merely has not thought, or thought much, about the subject, while an explicit atheist has made a conscious decision. A weak atheist does not hold a belief in a deity, whereas a strong atheist denies the existence of deities. This results in three actual categories (implicit weak, explicit weak, explicit strong) since it makes no sense to hold strong atheism implicitly. Somewhere in all this are agnostics, which I will not address here because agnosticism is really about knowledge claims rather than belief.

These descriptions of atheism have numerous difficulties on their face, and consequently it is common for theists to debate the logical consistency of these positions using this casual presentation as a straw man. So, let us attempt to improve on it. Here is an informal statement of the two forms of explicit atheism:

Weak: I do not believe that God exists.
Strong: I deny that God exists; or, I believe that God does not exist.

In the event you are unclear on the distinction here, the weak atheist has some set of beliefs, but the belief in God is not among them. He is mostly epistemically passive with respect to the beliefs of others. The strong atheist, in contrast says that a belief in God is incorrect, and not only does he not include it among his beliefs, but would also say that you are wrong if you do so.

There are three obvious difficulties here:

• What do we mean by “exists”?
• As to the Strong claim, is a statement of non-existence logically coherent?
• What do we mean by “God”?

As to what we mean by existence, we need to assume agreement on some sort of ontic postulate, i.e., that there is a world of real things that exists independently of our consciousness and of which our own existence is a part. The primary alternative to this is radical phenomenology, a vaguely Berkelian universe of phenomena presented by God, roughly akin to The Matrix but without even the bodies. It can be argued that an ontic postulate is a metaphysical article of faith, but since virtually all theists and atheists alike accept some version of this, we will proceed in that context. With an ontic postulate, the notion of existence is largely our common sense view of it - something that is part of that external world.

Even with this clarification, the logical coherence of existential statements about particulars is suspect. We do not need to get involved in that debate, as these statements are straightforward to repair using the notion of reference. Reference just means that there is an actual thing in the world to which a concept or name refers beyond its representation in someone’s mind. Not surprisingly there is also debate about reference of proper names, but here we can rely on the weakest form of reference, that there is something in the world that at least epistemically justifies the use of the term. Using the language of reference, we can restate the two explicit forms of atheism as follows:

Weak: I do not believe that “God” refers.
Strong: I deny that “God” refers; or I believe that “God” does not refer.

As to what we mean by “God,” we can agree with theists that a variety of concepts of God or gods are held or have been described by different believers now and through history. Further, these concepts often contain certain attributes that are shared among many or most of these concepts (e.g., immortality). Capitalized it is a proper name, implying monotheism, but it is nevertheless defined by a set of conceptual attributes, some of which a believer may claim to have experienced but others not. We could also consider a broader class of concepts that have never yet been expressed but that are somehow of a kind. We will need to look at all this more closely.

We now introduce further terminology, a distinction between de dicto and de re statements. Suppose we take the statement:

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

This can be interpreted in two different ways. It might mean that one believes there is a particular, known thing in Denmark that is rotten (de re); or it might mean that one believes that there is some unidentified but apparently rotten thing in Denmark (de dicto).

Using this distinction, we can further adjust our statements to clarify which meaning we intend:

Weak de re: I do not believe that that particular concept of God refers.
Weak de dicto: I do not believe that any concept of God refers.
Strong de re: I deny that that particular concept of God refers.
Strong de dicto: I deny that any concept of God refers.

Note that nearly everyone is at least a weak de re atheist about some concepts of God; for example, a Christian does not (usually) believe that Zeus exists. And weak de re atheism is clearly within the bounds of rationality, as we can simply claim that we do not find convincing the level of evidence in favor of a particular concept of God. But what about strong de re atheism?

Demonstrating that a concept or name does not refer is of a different order than demonstrating that it does. In the latter case, we simply show that the various attributes match actual evidence. This sort of demonstration is subject to all sorts of justificatory disputes, but at least we are dealing with substance. In the former case, it seems as though we must claim that there cannot be a thing to which it refers, or that we have looked everywhere. Nevertheless, rationality cannot require that our standard of belief is apodeictic knowledge - otherwise we can only believe logic, and perhaps not even that.

Further, we generally consider it within the bounds of rationality to deny the reference of fictional characters. Thus we can say that neither unicorns (which are a good example, because they present no logical difficulties) nor Mickey Mouse refer (except to those fictional characters in stories and screen), because we know (at some level) the provenance of their authorship.

There may be additional rational bases on which to deny reference, but I am not aware of them.

Given the ethereal nature of most concepts of God, there is probably not a rational notion of having looked everywhere pertinent in an attempt to find something to which the concept refers. Therefore the strong de re atheist must rely on one or both of the following claims in order to conform to some standard of rationality:

1. The applicable concept of God cannot refer, most likely because it contains an inherent contradiction. Recalling that our standard of belief is less than apodeictic knowledge, along with accepting an ontic postulate, it is rational to insist that a proposed entity not imply a contradiction.
2. The applicable concept of God is fictional, i.e., it was authored by individuals who either fabricated the concept in its entirety (e.g., the “flying spaghetti monster”) or who one believes grossly misinterpreted the evidence available to them.

A special case applies when the attributes of a particular concept of God is entirely metaphysical, i.e., it has no nexus with the known world, and nothing at all about it is verifiable or refers in any way to any known element of reality. In this case, one might be able to make a fiction argument, but the impossibility of referral is not available because the concept does not make reference to anything that could be contradicted.

Having examined de re atheism in both strong and weak forms, we can proceed to de dicto. We see immediately that the nature of this question depends on the set of concepts of God over which the claim would apply, what we might call the range. In the easiest case, the range is merely a finite, defined collection of de re claims (e.g., “I do not believe that any of the concepts of God with which I am familiar refers.”) For this narrow range, weak de dicto atheism seems safely rational, since we are in essence listing a set of potential beliefs that we do not hold. Strong de dicto atheism is more challenging, for we need to have some level of justification for either (1) or (2) in each case, but there is no fundamental impediment to such justification. Such a range, whether it is circumscribed by familiarity or by historical access, represents a simple aggregate of claims which can in the worst case be addressed individually.

We might also consider a broader, non-finite range based on attributes. For example, suppose that we include in the range any concept of God that ascribes omnipotence. We would then say:

Weak: I do not believe that any concept of God that ascribes omnipotence refers.
Strong: I deny that any concept of God that ascribes omnipotence refers.

The weak de dicto atheist here simply does not believe in omnipotence. The strong de dicto atheist must make the claim that omnipotence itself is self-contradictory. When our range is based on attributes and therefore includes not-yet-created notions of God, we cannot claim that all those notions are specifically fictional; and to claim that they are necessarily fictional is to assume the self-contradiction. Consequently argument (2) is not available.

Caution is advisable if the attribute is entirely metaphysical. Above we noted that argument (1) is not available to us in these cases de re, but argument (2) is not available in ranges of concepts described by an attribute. Consequently, while weak atheism remains safely rational, a claim of strong de dicto atheism on a range based on a metaphysical attribute risks making unjustifiable assertions.

The range can be expanded further to include disjunctions and conjunctions of attributes, with the weak de dicto atheist not believing in entities with those combinations of attributes, and the strong de dicto atheist believing that those combinations of attributes are contradictory. We could perform a union of this range with all known historical concepts of God to establish a comprehensive notion of what we mean by God, with both weak and strong versions as potentially rational.

There may be other ways to expand the range. The broadest range at first seems to be all possible concepts of God. But without any attributes, this is not a meaningful notion, and God could be anything. What if by “God” one means “cats”? We would not want to claim that “cats” does not refer. Neither weak nor strong atheism will do here: there is no rational claim of this sort to make. As the foregoing discussion has illustrated, when taking an atheist position we must circumscribe the range, and if we are to take a strong de dicto position, we must make a set of arguments applicable to either attributes or particular concepts.

I’m sure the reader is wondering where the author comes out on all this. In general I hold weak atheism with respect to any of the concepts of God with which I am familiar, or that have the typical “omni-” attributes. In particular cases of note, I am willing to step up to a position of strong de re atheism. For example, I would deny that the various Christian concepts of God refer, based on both fiction and contradiction arguments. However, I am not willing to put forth the effort to pursue strong atheism against a broader range. Actively denying the reference of a concept assumes an argument with someone who holds or might hold it; belief in God is invariably based on faith, thus such a person’s beliefs will be impervious to my rational claims. I see it then as a waste of time, and rationality requires that we ration our time.

Phenomena of Freedom

What does it feel like to make a choice?

Our answer should be organized by tense: what does it feel like to be faced with a choice; what does it feel like to be making a choice; and what does it feel like to have made a choice. Our focus will be on those aspects relating to the question of freedom of will, thus the experience of conscious, deliberate choices. For if we do not have freedom in those cases we surely do not have it in unconscious decisions.

When we are faced with a choice, depending on the circumstances we may or may not notice that there is a prerequisite meta-choice involved: whether to make any decision at all in the present. Decisions require mental energy and usually involve commitment risk, so avoidance of unnecessary choices is an adaptive behavior. In evaluating this prior choice, we are motivated primarily by the possible consequences of failing to make a decision now. Sometimes it will make no difference; other times it will merely delay the achievement of some goal; and sometimes it is a matter of physical safety. On either extreme we will likely not even notice the meta-choice since our instincts take over; and the meta-meta-choice does not arise in practice, as it is merely a question of whether to be conscious of the decision.

Let us consider the experiential phenomena immediately after we have decided (whether consciously or instinctively) that we will or must make a conscious first-order choice. We consider our options in turn or in parallel, by visualizing their consequences. To some extent we attempt to simulate the experience of what it is like to be in the world that exists after a particular option is selected – both the substantive outcomes and how we feel about having made that choice. We may feel an urge to gather information and may actually do so. We may feel confident or uncertain about the outcomes we are visualizing. In all this, and whatever other thought processes or related activities we pursue, we experience the work of making the choice. It does not feel “ballistic” whereby our course is determined externally or in advance. It feels like the choice will not be made unless we make it ourselves.

Emotionally, this feels like a burden. It is up to us, and us alone, when are faced with that choice. We sense that it needs to be made, that making it requires effort, our effort, and further that we will be responsible for the consequences.

The actual experience of making the decision depends on our confidence or decisiveness. If we are decisive, it feels much like a switch flipping. Suddenly, we are on the other side, and we feel a sense of relief and possibly enthusiasm. If we are indecisive, it will feel more like the switch flipping back and forth, always in motion, never quite stopping on one side. When we do finally decide, though we feel the switch finally land in one position, we feel discomfort or dread, even continuing to revisit the other options, now either in a past tense or even evaluating whether it is too late to change the decision (which feels quite different from making another choice in the first place).

After having made the choice and learned the consequences, we are likely to experience either satisfaction or regret. We see how the choice played a role in the outcome, whether or not in the manner we originally envisioned prior to making the choice. We see how it would have been different had we made a different choice. We feel that the outcome was, at least in part, due to our choice, and we are therefore, at least partly, responsible for the outcome.

We can exploit this phenomenology to argue for freedom in at least two ways. The first is to apply a form of eidetic reduction. As an example of how this might proceed, Sartre famously makes an eidetic argument for the existence of other minds:

I have just made an awkward or vulgar gesture. This gesture clings to me; I neither judge it nor blame it. I simply live it. I realize it in the mode of for-itself. But now suddenly I raise my head. Somebody was there and has seen me. Suddenly I realize the vulgarity of my gesture, and I am ashamed. It is certain that my shame is not reflective, for the presence of another in my consciousness, even as a catalyst, is incompatible with the reflective attitude; in the field of my reflection I can never meet with anything but the consciousness which is mine. But the Other is the indispensable mediator between myself and me. I am ashamed of myself as I appear to the Other (Being and Nothingness, H. Barnes translation, p. 302).

Similarly, in the case of conscious choice, we cannot shed the prior experience of burden nor the subsequent experience of satisfaction or regret that accompanies the outcome. For example, we might imagine having to choose whether an injured and unconscious parent should undergo surgery. We know that there are great risks and we feel the burden of the choice in part because we anticipate the feeling of regret that will accompany an incorrect decision. If the parent dies, the felt regret is powerful and long-lasting, and it connects to our memory of the experience of the burden of the choice. Applying Sartre’s terminology, freedom is an indispensable mediator connecting the felt burden with the subsequent feeling of regret. We cannot make sense of these feelings without freedom.

A second approach is epistemic in nature. We explored certain epistemic considerations in a previous post, Causation and Self; here we will consider the concept of choice in particular. Like all terms, “choice” aggregates, synthesizes, and abstracts a history of applicable experiences. However, concepts of pure phenomena are different than those of external objects in that we do not act as epistemic intermediaries. Saul Kripke considers this with respect to pain and other mental states:

To be in the same epistemic situation that would obtain if one had a pain is to have a pain; to be in the same epistemic situation that would obtain in the absence of a pain is not to have a pain… Pain … is not picked out by one of its accidental properties; rather it is picked out by the property of being pain itself, by its immediate phenomenological quality (Naming and Necessity, p. 152).

It is plausible that choice is, like pain, a concept of mental states, of pure phenomena. When we say we have a choice, we are not normally talking about ourselves as a biological machine that is computing a utility function. Even when we think of another human, or even some animals, making a choice, we normally imagine their experience of choice rather than seeing them as an inanimate object that might fall one way and might fall another.

If we accept this phenomenological version of the concept, then when we say we are faced with a choice or made a choice, it is the experiences described earlier to which we refer. The experience of choice, and in particular the feeling that the choice will not be made unless we make it, and that after we made it we were responsible for it, is what choice means. Thus when we ask the question whether a choice is free, we must turn to the nature of those experiences, not to an external, mechanical notion that is not constitutive of the meaning of the word. Viewed in this way, each referent of the term was experienced unambiguously as our choice and that we were free to make it.

Horgan and Timmons argued recently that we cannot rely on phenomena to establish freedom, because the representational purport of the phenomena is theory-laden (“Introspection and the Phenomenology of Free Will”, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2011). In other words, we cannot assume that we would experience freedom only if it that freedom were genuine in some underlying physical sense. Indeed, a reductionist neuroscientist might well say that our phenomena of choice are just how we experience the brain making a decision, mere epiphenomena. But this approach assumes that the concepts of choice and freedom refer primarily to a physical process, and we have suggested above that this is neither necessary nor consistent with typical use.

Consequently, answering the question of whether we have freedom of will depends on our concept of choice. If we insist that it incorporate physical mechanisms, then as we saw in The Metaphysics of Freedom, the question is likely unanswerable. If we treat choice as a concept of mental states or pure phenomenal experience, the answer is manifestly libertarian.

The Facticity of Values

Some theories of ethics hold that there are moral facts, either existing independently or implied by other facts. While this may or may not be so, we can invert the analysis and note that there is a connection between our values and future facts. This is mediated by two assumptions: first, that we act to pursue those values; and second, that the world is at least partially responsive to our actions. We might call this idea that our choice of values has consequences the facticity of values.

Just as we can use knowledge to attempt to predict the future state of the world, we can make predictions about the consequences of pursuing a particular value, or a set or hierarchy of them. However, our choices are only one factor in any particular circumstance, and such predictions are at best stochastic in nature. We gain more reliable insight from the analysis by assuming that values are to be pursued consistently over a period of time. As with any prediction, these are also subject to knowledge error, implying that they should be accompanied by a measure of the degree of confidence we have in them.

Suppose that by some means we have arrived at a set of values that we tentatively intend to pursue. We have a variety of means of examining their implications. For example, we could observe the lives of others (whether personally acquainted, documented historical figures, or through testimony) who have pursued similar values and note whether there is a pattern in the consequences. We could apply psychological or sociological theories, or philosophical beliefs about human nature. Or we can test the waters by actually pursuing these values ourselves and attending to the results.

In the course of such an examination we may find that our selected values are mutually consistent and supportive. However, we may instead find that there is some conflict – whether of great or lesser import – among them. Or, in seeing the consequences we may discover that we have neglected to account for a value that we in fact hold dear.

Let us consider an example. Suppose that among our highest values is to have and show compassion for other people. Then imagine that a close friend suffers from severe substance addiction. He is out on the street, and has no money, and asks for financial assistance – allegedly for food or shelter, but as likely to be used to procure the offending substance. The psychological notion of enabling, wherein someone who helps another to reduce the immediate consequences of their behavior thereby makes it possible for that behavior to persist, suggests an evident conflict in values. It seems that our compassion is self-defeating in this instance.

To aid in determining consequences, we can begin with a taxonomy of areas where conflict is likely to manifest. Physical implications are those that result from natural laws, including not only laws of physics but also of biology. For example, if I value athletic achievement, the effect on my body must be considered. Psychological implications can relate to self or other. For example, my actions may embed in me a habitual behavior, or hurt the feelings of my friends. Sociological implications relate to the response of society to our actions, or to influences we might have on society. The former includes such effects as ostracism or incarceration. Regarding the latter, historically such influences were mostly taken into account if one were in a position of power and influence (e.g., in determining the values by which the President of the United States should abide), but increasingly individuals consider the behavior of companies in which they invest or from whom they buy products.

Now, supposing that we have discovered an apparent conflict in our proposed values by means of assessing their consequences, how shall we respond? We are of course free to either ignore or postpone resolution of the issue. But this leaves us in a position of acting against our own values. If we seek to consciously and deliberately pursue our values, we must seek resolution.

A first step is to review our confidence in the predicted consequences as well as the probability that they will occur. If we have low confidence that the prediction is correct, then we might either work to improve that confidence or defer a decision until more information can be obtained. Common but pernicious is to reduce our assessment of confidence in the prediction so as to preserve the existing value structure. This is especially seen in cases where values are selected as a complete package (e.g., through religion), creating a defensive inclination. Note that this creates a secondary conflict of values, because the package of values is itself treated as a value that is in conflict with predicting their consequences. In such cases, to remain rational we must simply discard the analysis as irrelevant, rather than denying the knowledge it provides.

If the prediction of a conflict is likely to be correct, but is very low probability, we may be able to treat it as a special case. Otherwise, to maintain a coherent set of values, we need to either modify their relative priorities, or to elaborate them with greater specificity of circumstances, or perhaps rethink the structure as a whole. In the substance abuse example above, we might resolve our compassion conflict by, for example, making a distinction between compassion aimed at short- and long-term results, or by distinguishing between communicating compassion as opposed to acting on it.

In all this, we can distinguish between values themselves and our pursuit of them. Presumably, if we do not pursue a value then its predicted antagonistic consequences will not, or are less likely, to occur. By retaining that value in an idle state, if we then come by new knowledge, or circumstances change, such that we change the predicted consequences, then we may at that time wish to pursue it.