Of cats and humans

We acquired a cat around Christmas. Never having had a pet before in my life (except for a puppy for a few days decades ago), what have I learned philosophically? Maybe this:

All cats by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight they take in their senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when they are not going to do anything, they prefer seeing (one might say) to everything else. The reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes one know and brings to light many differences between things.

This is, of course, what Aristotle says in the first paragraph of the Metaphysics, except he says it about humans. We tend to think of the pleasures of the mind as distinctively human. But a focus on pleasures of the mind is not distinctively human. Observing and exploring are our cat’s most driving pleasures.

The difference between humans and other animals may lie in the type of intellectual pleasure. Aquinas distinguishes the rightly ordered pursuit of understanding from the vice of curiositas. The main difference is that in the virtuous pursuit, one seeks an understanding of how the world explanatorily fits together, rather than a mere listing of facts of the sort one gets from mere seeing (here’s a tree, here’s a squirrel, etc.).

Love of truth

Let's say I am grading final exams and am very curious how a student who had been struggling all semester will do in the course. So I forthwith submit a B+ for her to our grading system, without bothering with any more calculations, and my curiosity is satisfied.

There is something perverse here. Of course, there is a perversion of justice—that's clear. But I think there may also be a perversion of the intellectual life. Genuine love of truth is not satisfied by making a proposition true or false. Genuine love of truth, at least as proper to creatures, seeks to make the mind reflect the world, not to make the world reflect the mind. If this line of thought is wrong, then the counterexample to evidentialism in my previous post fails.

The issue comes also comes up in third-person cases. My friend thinks that I will be wearing a long-sleeved shirt today. Does a loving desire to promote his intellectual goods give me any reason to wear such a shirt? I doubt it. But if not, then this is very puzzling. For surely my friend is intrinsically the better off for getting right what I will wear.

Maybe the case is a bit like throwing a game. My daughter wants to beat me at chess. But she wants to beat me by her own powers, rather than because I didn't try hard. Is there any value to beating me if I don't try at all?

This example suggests that when I wear a long-sleeved shirt to make my friend be right, his being right is not an achievement of his, and hence it's not much of a victory. But maybe this makes the epistemic life sound too proud. Maybe we should rather see it humbly as a comformation of our minds to reality.

Maybe the direction-of-fit issue here is parallel to one with desires. I bought my friend a trinket for his birthday. I then slip him a pill that induces a desire for the trinket. Surely that's perverse—it gets things the wrong way around. I should make the world conform to my friend's (reasonable) desires, not the other way around. And to make my friend's beliefs conform to the world, not the other way around.

It might be different in the case of God. Aquinas says that God knows creation by creating. Maybe here is a crucial difference between God and creatures.

Curiosity and qualia

The standard objection to Jackson's Mary argument (in a monochromatic room she learns all that science can offer, but then she comes out into the larger world and learns what's like to see red—so what science can offer does not exhaust reality, since if it did, one couldn't learn anything more if one knew all that science can offer) is that "knowing what an experience is like" uses "knows" in a sense different from that in sentences like "Bill knows who won the World Series in 1973".

Here is a response. The object of curiosity is knowledge. But curiosity can both make one try to find out who won the World Series in 1973 (or some other bit of trivia) and make one try to find out what it's like to be stung by a scorpion (here you can substitute a whole host of things). Both are paradigmatically the sort of silly things that curiosity makes people want to find out. Thus if we are equivocating on "knows", we are either equivocating on "curiosity" or curiosity has a disjunctive object. The latter seems implausible. And it really seems like when we are talking of "curiosity" in the World Series and scorpion cases, we're talking about the same thing.