Just to flag: I’ve nearly finished another paper where I explore whether measures of subjective states are cardinally and conclude they probably are (at least, on average). Stay tuned.
There are many parts to this topic and I’m not sure whether you’re denying (1) that subjective states are experienced in cardinal units or (2) that they are experienced in cardinal units but that our measures are (for one reason or another) not cardinal. I think you mean the former. But we do think of affect as being experienced in cardinal units, otherwise we wouldn’t say things like “this will hurt you as much as it hurts me”. Asking people to state their preferences doesn’t solve the problem: what we are inquiring about are the intensities of sensations, not what you would choose, so asking about the latter doesn’t address the former.
But we do think of affect as being experienced in cardinal units, otherwise we wouldn’t say things like “this will hurt you as much as it hurts me”
I think this is merely a statement of ordinal ranking (of course compatible with cardinal ranking). The issue is with statements like “X was 2x more intense than Y”. I’m skeptical that these can be grounded. We could take people’s intuitive judgements of relative intensities, but it’s not clear these are reliable and valid/get at anything fundamental.
And even if they are reliable, they may well end up conflicting with most people’s (and animals’) intuitions about what kinds of tradeoffs they’d prefer to make in their own lives. Should moral value be exactly equal to the signed intensity? I guess we have more reason for this on an internalist account (I remember you recommended Hedonism Reconsidered to me).
If we look at brain activity, there won’t be any obviously correct cardinal measure to come out of it, since brain functions are very nonlinear. We can count how many neurons are firing in some region, but there’s no reason to believe intensity scales linearly with the number, rather than the square or square root or anything else.
Just to flag: I’ve nearly finished another paper where I explore whether measures of subjective states are cardinally and conclude they probably are (at least, on average). Stay tuned.
There are many parts to this topic and I’m not sure whether you’re denying (1) that subjective states are experienced in cardinal units or (2) that they are experienced in cardinal units but that our measures are (for one reason or another) not cardinal. I think you mean the former. But we do think of affect as being experienced in cardinal units, otherwise we wouldn’t say things like “this will hurt you as much as it hurts me”. Asking people to state their preferences doesn’t solve the problem: what we are inquiring about are the intensities of sensations, not what you would choose, so asking about the latter doesn’t address the former.
I think this is merely a statement of ordinal ranking (of course compatible with cardinal ranking). The issue is with statements like “X was 2x more intense than Y”. I’m skeptical that these can be grounded. We could take people’s intuitive judgements of relative intensities, but it’s not clear these are reliable and valid/get at anything fundamental.
And even if they are reliable, they may well end up conflicting with most people’s (and animals’) intuitions about what kinds of tradeoffs they’d prefer to make in their own lives. Should moral value be exactly equal to the signed intensity? I guess we have more reason for this on an internalist account (I remember you recommended Hedonism Reconsidered to me).
If we look at brain activity, there won’t be any obviously correct cardinal measure to come out of it, since brain functions are very nonlinear. We can count how many neurons are firing in some region, but there’s no reason to believe intensity scales linearly with the number, rather than the square or square root or anything else.
Looking forward to your next paper! :)