Naturalizing Normativity A Reply to Scott Bakker

Naturalizing Normativity A Reply to Scott Bakker




In Leaving it Implicit, Scott Bakker throws down the gauntlet: normativity, our idealistic judgments about
good and bad arent what we assume they are in our everyday social dealings,
because those judgments could apply only to mechanisms, there being no such
things as goodness or badness in the natural world. If you think otherwise,
Scott says, youve got a lot of explaining to do, given science-centered
ontology. Moreover, naturalism doesnt imply normativity just because
naturalists use terms that can be interpreted normatively, because those terms
can also be interpreted in mechanistic ways. Thus, the time of reckoning is nigh
and the apocalypse will come not at the hands of some angry parent in the sky
but through our advances in objectively understanding the world.Framing the Issue


Im going to try to break down Scotts argument and my
response to it with a minimum of jargon and I aim to chart new territory
instead of rehashing our previous discussion. So what I noticed when
I read “Leaving it Implicit” is that Scotts conclusions follow in part from his
way of framing the issue. He makes certain background assumptions and if you
accept them, youll be more favourably inclined to heeding his prediction that
all folk psychological categories will be eliminated as premodern bits of
magical thinking. Three of these assumptions are as follows.

First, he assumes that Western philosophy is a
protoscience, that philosophers are after theories that explain the facts,
that they employ a second-order, meta-language which is meant to support our
first-order, natural one. For example, Scott says, “From the mechanical perspective,
in other words, the normative philosopher has only the murkiest idea of whats
going on. They theorize takings as
and rules and commitments and entitlements and uses—they develop their theoretical vocabulary—absent any
mechanical information…” (my emphases). Notice how normative philosophy is here
assumed to be in the business of providing theories, but because philosophical
theories are worse than scientific ones, the former are at best murky ideas.
Scientists use their methods to test their theories of the external world,
whereas normative philosophers rely on intuition, which makes for less reliable
theories. Likewise, Scott speaks of philosophies of meaning and normativity as
“controversial sketches,” compared to what we know of the brain, the latter
being the “most complicated mechanism known.” Finally, Scott says, “My first
order use of use no more commits me to any second-order interpretation of the
meaning of use as something essentially normative than uttering the Lords
name in vain commits me to Christianity.” This distinction between first- and
second-order interpretations, which Scott makes in a number of writings, is
consistent with the science-centered construal of philosophy as a protoscience.
The assumption is that philosophers are trying to reductively explain the
phenomena that reveal themselves in ordinary language, such as our talk of what
symbols mean or of which actions are morally better than others.Second, he thinks of mental processes as heuristics and he interprets heuristics
not just as naturally selected procedures, but as solutions to what he calls “narrow problem ecologies” (my emphasis).
This means that a mental process is a naturally selected and thus flawed
shortcut to aid us in our endeavour to survive, because Mother Nature is a
blind designer and she had limited resources at her disposal. One flaw of our
thought processes is that theyre blind to their mechanical nature: we evolved
to be preoccupied with external threats, not with internal truths, which is why
our main senses point outward, leaving us with little information indicating
the minds nature. Scott further assumes that because heuristics are made more
efficient in so far as they leave out information, that deficiency limits their
optimal areas of application. Scott says, for example, that “They [normative
philosophers] have no inkling that theyre relying on any heuristics at all,
let alone a variety of them, let alone any clear sense of the narrow problem-ecologies they are
adapted to solve…We know that heuristics possess problem ecologies, that they
are only effective in parochial contexts”
(my emphases). By “parochial,” Scott means that those heuristics have a very
narrow scope of effectiveness. Again, he says, “On the mechanical perspective,
normative cognition involves the application of specialized heuristics in specialized problem-ecologies—ways weve
evolved (and learned) to muddle through
our own mad complexities” (my emphasis). Notice the connection here between the
fact that nature equips us only with ways of muddling through the problem of
figuring out our inner nature, and the specialized or narrow range of problems
our heuristics are adapted to solve.
Third, Scott employs a
mechanistic vocabulary. He speaks of mechanisms, heuristics, and gadgets in
the mind. On the surface, then, he assumes the mind is a kind of machine. All
of these terms have unfortunate connotations, from a naturalistic perspective,
and although Scott may not be committed to those extended meanings, they might
inadvertently do some of the work in his rhetorical case against folk
psychology. On the naturalistic view, there is no intelligent designer of organisms,
so biological systems cant literally be machines in the ordinary sense. The
mechanistic vocabulary must be metaphorical, so we should distinguish between
the literal, naturalistic meanings and the extended, commonsense ones that
Scotts explanations have to abandon. For example, Scott says, “Evolution has
given me all these great, normative gadgets—I would be an idiot not to use
them! But please, if you want to convince me that these gadgets arent gadgets
at all, that they are something radically different from anything in nature,
then youre going to have to tell me how and why.” Now, a gadget is a
mechanical contrivance and a contrivance is something thats planned with great
ingenuity. Nature plans nothing, so Scott must be using “gadget” as a metaphor.Do you see how these three ways of framing the debate
between the mechanist and the transcendentalist or normative philosopher all by
themselves cast doubt on normative discourse? If normativity is defended by
philosophers, not by scientists (in their professional capacities), and
philosophy is only a protoscience, we ought to favour the scientific view of
the normative, which means we should stop talking about it since scientists
dont do so. If we philosophically learn about ourselves through intuition and
other heuristic processes, and those processes arent designed to work well in
that context, since our minds are adapted to coping with the external world, we
have no reason to trust what we think we discover with those innate modes of
access. Finally, if we accept the mechanistic discourse, we lose the ability to
conceive of what normativity might be, since good and bad are clearly nowhere intrinsically to be found in something
as material and objective as a machine.Philosophy as the Search for a Wise Way of Life


I have problems with all three of those background assumptions
and Ill take them up in order. To be sure, much ancient and modern Western
philosophy is indeed concerned with acquiring empirical or transcendent
knowledge, and to this extent premodern philosophy might be looked at as an
inchoate attempt to do what scientists now excel at doing, while modern
philosophy is clearly influenced by scientific methods. But what Scotts
concept of philosophy leaves out is the old interest in wisdom as opposed to knowledge.
Wisdom is the ability to live well. Wisdom may require some knowledge, but
wisdom itself is more like the skill of living well than like any set of
statements. In fact, while the ancient Greek philosophers did seem to love
knowledge regardless of its uses, which is why they followed their often
counterintuitive hypotheses to the furthest logical reaches, they also saw the
search for knowledge as being in harmony with the searches for beauty and
goodness. And so what we might think of as empirical science wasnt taken to
overshadow aesthetics or ethics. In the modern period, though, that
overshadowing did take place, especially in academic philosophy and even more
specifically in analytic, science-centered circles. To the extent that
philosophers cleave to what scientists say, and scientists dont directly
address normative questions, philosophers too ignore the latter or else reduce
them to questions that might be answered by protoscientific methods, such as by
the use of thought experiments. So this is the reason why Scott construes philosophy as he
does, but the fact is that philosophy neednt be thought of as excluding
normativity at the outset. The fact
is that we shouldnt beg the question one way or the other. After all, the traditional
search for wisdom presupposes the reality of the normative, so if we define philosophy in those terms, we beg
the question against Scotts mechanistic conclusions. The best course, then, is
to be open-minded about the nature of philosophy. If our independent arguments
establish that theres no such thing as normativity, then to the extent that
philosophers are interested in wisdom (in what we ought to do in all situations),
philosophy is in danger of being a sham. But those arguments had indeed better
be independent of any framing of philosophy as being concerned merely with theoretical matters, meaning with highly
general questions of fact. Any argument for or against normative
philosophy which assumes either framing begs the question and carries no weight.



The same goes for an argument against normativity which
assumes that the first- and second-order language distinction exhausts
philosophys role, since if philosophy includes the search for wisdom (for a
way of living) and not just for
knowledge (for a set of statements of
fact), philosophy transcends that distinction. Philosophy might be more
like a kind of training to turn people into mental athletes, as it were, and to
the extent that philosophers speak when they train, that speaking might play
some causal role in shaping the philosophers skills, so that the content of
the statements is relatively unimportant. In a similar way (but with a much
different lesson), it doesnt matter so much what Muslim children in parts of
the Middle East are saying when theyre forced to repeat the Koran out loud, over
and over again. What matters is that they come to love the Koran, that theyre
turned into Muslims. Here, language is
part of a practice of personal transformation which a mechanist should be able
to appreciate. To take another example, philosophical texts might amount
not to theories in the protoscientific sense, but to myths, fictions, or
artworks which likewise are meant to affect us and change our way of life. To
this extent, philosophy would be closer to religion than to science. And just
as treating religious questions as empirical ones about scientifically
discoverable facts provides us with only a cheap and irrelevant refutation of
theistic religion, since religion is likewise about practice and not just
knowledge, so too we might doubt such a science-centered approach to
philosophy.To see the relevance of this, consider Scotts set-up of a
certain rhetorical question: “Normative cognition, in other words, is a
biomechanical way of getting around the absence of biomechanical information.
What else would it be?” Heres what else: a step in the process of turning one
sort of creature into another sort. Specifically, normativity might be needed to turn animals into people. The fact
that this remains a mechanistic
possibility leads me to puzzle over why Scott says, “Not only are we blind to
the astronomical complexities of what we are and what we do…” (my emphasis). Normally, Scott says only that
were blind to what we are on the inside, but here he adds that were blind to
what we do. Thats clearly not so, since our actions are observable along with
the rest of the external world. And the relevance of this, of course, is that
if philosophers are after a certain way of living, what we are on the inside
might not be as relevant as the differences between our apparent actions. Thus,
when Scott asks the rhetorical question, “But aside from intuition (or whatever
it is that disposes us to affirm certain inferences more than others), just
what does inform normative theoretical vocabularies?” the answer might be that
those vocabularies rest on experience of
human behaviour. We can learn about our behaviour in the same ways we learn
about that of the animals we hunt or about the weather or other environmental
factors with which we have to cope. We learn that some actions lead to failure while
others lead to success and some are heroic while others are destructive and
counterproductive. And no blind intuition need be instrumental in that
experience.


That experiential basis of normative discourse can be entirely
causal—and indeed protoscientific! We can ignore the content of words like
“good” or “evil,” and just appreciate the impact these concepts have on our
behaviour. We can even understand how these conceptions might have evolved: by
helping to civilize our prehistoric, animalistic ancestors, notions of meaning,
beauty, and goodness helped open up the niche in which weve dominated for some
millennia. We may survive partly because
of the utility of our fictions, including
our self-deceptions, and a mechanist need have no quarrel whatsoever with that
possibility. This is because that possibility is entirely consistent with
the mechanistic view that semantic and normative properties are unreal. I
havent appealed to the factual basis of any normative statement; instead, Ive
posited some process of enculturation in which normative conceptions are links
in a causal chain that neednt subtract from our evolutionary fitness. No
magic, no premodern superstition, no romantic, Luddite or otherwise
antiscientific prejudice, but a charitable
mechanistic interpretation of the
role of normative philosophy. In everyday interactions, we presuppose
normativity and part of the philosophers job, mechanistically or
instrumentally speaking, isnt to get at the facts, but to explore what were
doing in everyday experience, to chart the territory, to speculate on how the
territory might be expanded or altered, and so on. And the philosophical
creativity reinforces or reorients the everyday experience.Yet another science-centered way of looking at philosophy is
to emphasize the lack of consensus among
professional philosophers. In many of his writings, Scott bemoans the fact that
philosophers cant agree on how to naturalize meaning and normativity. In the
above-cited article, he does the same with regard to mathematics: “In fact, it
seems pretty clear that we have no consensus-compelling idea of what
mathematics is.” But any such lack of consensus should be of little concern.
First, consensus is ideal in science, but who says philosophy or mathematics should
be scientific? Who says philosophers or mathematicians are concerned just with
objectivity and the facts? Evidently, these are more creative, free-wheeling
disciplines. (Indeed, physicists are often surprised
by how useful mathematics has turned out to be in explanations of phenomena.) So
one of many reasons why philosophers may disagree on the nature of goodness,
for example, is that the point of philosophy may not be to get us to agree on
the facts; more neutrally, the point may be to relish our freedom to create
ideas, to test them, in effect, for exaptive value in terms of their potential
to transform us. Also, theres currently a lack of consensus in physics as to
the ultimate nature of matter at the quantum level, but surely Scott doesnt
think this undermines science. This would be because his naturalism is presumably
of the methodological rather than the ontological variety, which is to say hes
pragmatic about the benefits of science. Likewise, we might be pragmatic about
the benefits (and the weaknesses and drawbacks) of philosophy and math. Heuristics and the Freedom to Create Ourselves


As for Scotts talk of heuristics, I doubt his use of that
term is standard in cognitive science. We can define our terms as we like, as
long as were upfront about it, but I dont see why the fact that a heuristic
is an evolved quasi-algorithmic process that skips over various steps so as not
to use up precious mental energy, entails that a heuristic works best under
only limited circumstances. On the contrary, the notion of “specialized
heuristics” strikes me as oxymoronic (unless “heuristic” is taken more broadly
to mean any procedure that helps in learning, which would include the algorithm).
Its the algorithm thats limited because it can be over-specialized, not the
heuristic. A heuristic isnt like a giraffes neck, for example. The giraffe
has all its stock in one company, as it were, and its long neck makes certain
tasks very awkward for that animal. Likewise, the more steps you pile into an
algorithm to prevent any possibility of error due to the systems improvisation,
the more narrowly you define the conditions under which the program can
succeed. For example, take the recipe of baking a cake. If this recipe is an
algorithm, the recipe must list all of the steps to be followed, leaving
nothing to chance. This means you must have on hand all of the ingredients to
complete the steps. If you lack an ingredient, the recipe wont work! The
algorithm will grind to a halt and youll be spinning your wheels, unable to
complete the process. But suppose the recipe is a heuristic so that instead of
specifying exactly what you have to do, such that even a robot could follow the
procedure, the recipe says something like, “Add ingredients X, Y, or Z in
whatever measurements you like; its up to you, since this part is just a matter
of taste.” In this case, the recipe has more domains of application, since now
the recipe will work if you have Y but X or Z, or Z but not X or Y, and so on.


So as I understand the distinction between algorithms and
heuristics, its the algorithm thats in danger of being overspecialized, while
the heuristic is more flexible and has a greater range of potential
applications. The heuristic ignores
certain information as inessential, which means the heuristic is open to being
tried in different contexts. You try the simplified procedure and see if it
works with this or that ingredient, but unlike with an algorithm, theres no
guarantee of success. What you get
instead of that guarantee is precisely greater freedom of application. In
fact, “heuristic” is often synonymous with “rule of thumb” or with “trial and
error process,” meaning a process thats trotted out as a last resort in many
different situations because of its flexibility. So this whole business of
saying we shouldnt trust our intuitions, because theyre heuristics and
therefore they werent adapted to informing us about our inner nature has
little merit, as far as I can see. Its true that with any heuristic, if you
apply it here rather than there, theres no guarantee of success. Still, unlike
with an algorithm, you have at least a chance of success with the heuristic
even under strange or unforeseen circumstances, whereas an overspecialized
algorithm (thought process) would land you flat on your face when youre out of
your element. This is why computers, for example, look amazing when doing math,
but foolish when trying to understand emotions or the history that makes for
cultural meaning. Algorithms arent flexible enough to deal with such
subjective matters. For those, you might need intuitions and rules of thumb.The fact that we didnt evolve a reliable way of processing
inner information doesnt preclude the possibility of hitting upon some truths
with intuitions. True, theres little reason to think well learn about neural
mechanisms just through introspection, but this assumes were identical with
those mechanisms. As I suggested above, the point of normative discourse may be
not to inform us about any such mechanistic fact, but to transform us from an
animal, which is indeed identical with its bodily mechanisms, into a civilized
person who extends his or her body in the form of social and technological
systems. And those latter systems are observable by our reliable outer senses,
so they cant be so easily gainsaid. Whats the relevance of technological extensions of the
mind, for example? Well, as I write elsewhere, the
modern philosophical discussion of meaning and value takes for granted only the
relatively recent use of symbols, which assumes symbols are supposed to add up
to statements that correspond with facts. Our ancient ancestors apparently had
a rather alien mindset, the so-called mythopoeic mode of cognition, as
expressed by their bizarre myths and religious practices. What were symbols to
the ancient Egyptians or Babylonians, let alone to their ancestors, who
believed in magic and who had no thoroughgoing distinction between subject and
object? On the science-centered reading, the ancients were simply deluding
themselves with panpsychist fantasies of an enchanted world. On a more
charitable interpretation, the ancients were using normative conceptions in an
early phase of converting themselves from animals into people. It doesnt
matter so much what they were saying; what matters is the effect of that step
in the processes of personalizing ourselves and of creating civilization. For
example, the empirical falsehood of ancient myths is irrelevant if those myths arent
theories. What they are instead are phenomenological
journals, poetic records of what it felt like subjectively to be a newly
evolved person living in a particular time and practicing the linguistic powers
to express not just reason, but imagination, emotion, and willpower. If we look
at everything through science-tinted lenses, we miss that forest for the trees.
Of course mythical and normative discourses are likely not factual. Theres no
such thing as goodness. What there is
instead is a creative, natural process of evolution, which transformed certain
hairy primates into people who tell stories and who obsessively turn our more
threatening, natural environments into technological, functional ones that fulfill
our myths about our elevated status, by serving us as if we were gods. Ironically,
I speculate, the consolation of technology is that far from furthering
scientific disenchantment of nature, our machines re-enchant the world by
making something like the mythopoeic mindset viable once more.This is where exaptation comes together with heuristics.
Both are matters of flexibility, deriving from the fact that theres no mind
dictating what has to evolve. A mechanist has reason to be open-minded at this
point. Im not talking about the evolution of anything supernatural or magical.
What Im saying is that if a species has its survival taken care of by certain
reliable means, such as by its knowledge of natural mechanisms and thus its
mastery of weapons and other tools, that species is free to play, to develop
heuristics, tinker with its onboard faculties, and see what becomes of that
experimentation. Thats apparently what our ancestors did. They used language
to gain control of their thoughts, which gave them ways of organizing and
regimenting their mental states. That was how certain animals learned to personify
themselves. Lots of animals have weapons; where we differed was the magnitude
of our curiosity, creativity, and self-control, which exploded once our skills
at surviving together (by using fire and farming and building shelters, and so
on) gave us the luxury of free time. We told stories (myths and philosophical
speculations), which broadened the mind and tamed our behaviour. The truth status of those stories is
irrelevant from the mechanistic perspective, but that doesnt mean the mechanist
can afford to dismiss them, because those stories and delusions may be
instrumental in an evolutionary process with which we must contend. Refuting
our myths from a science-centered perspective will have zero effect if they
operate on a nonrational level. The Age of Reason hasnt come close to ending
superstitions, because its not enough to understand our cognitive biases; we need a practice, a nascent posthuman
lifestyle to develop the form of life that matches our postmodern ideals. Metaphors and the Mechanists Neutrality


Finally, “mechanism,” “gadget,” and even “heuristic” all
derive from commonsense experience of our artifacts which presuppose normativity.
“Mechanism” became a popular description of a natural system during the
Enlightenment, when scientists struck a deistic compromise with the theistic
masses. Early modern scientists affirmed that there is a God, but maintained
that his creation runs more or less by itself—like the machines we create. This
was a metaphor, and if we leave behind deism for atheism, the metaphor loses
its rationale. Maybe, the word still has some use when applied to natural
systems like the brain. Words are free to change their meaning if we find the
new meaning useful. But this apparently vestigial use of “mechanism” is
suspicious. Naturalists should avoid
confusions by coining words that express the radical, one-sided philosophical implications
of naturalism: no meaning, purpose, goodness, God, and so on. Notice that “natural process” is likewise metaphorical (and
technically oxymoronic), since “process” is again a teleological notion, having
to do originally with a series of actions directed towards some end, as in the
process of building a fire. The notion that the brain or a cognitive capacity
is a “gadget” is obviously metaphorical, as Ive said. The point of this
metaphor, I take it, is that, to the extent that mental processes are like
gadgets, we shouldnt assume theyre equally useful in all contexts, to say the
least. You cant tell time with just a chair, for example. And indeed,
worldviews, or thoughts we deliberately put together, might be compared to
gadgets, but the metaphor is stretched when we speak of evolved gadgets, as
Scott does. He says, “Evolution has given me all these great, normative
gadgets.” Here, you dont have to go far to see whats implicit in this
metaphor, namely the connotation that the gadgets function derives from the
designers normative thought about which effects are good, as it does in the
case of a human-made gadget. But in evolution theres no such designer, so the
metaphor is misleading. Again, in the cognitive scientific context, “heuristic”
derives from computing. Computers implement algorithms or heuristics, because
we interpret their internal changes as steps that follow the rules we program
into them. Applying that anthropocentric discourse to products of natural
selection leaves us with connotations to which the “mechanist” or naturalist
isnt entitled. Nature doesnt program anything into us, our neurons dont
follow rules (unless were consciously programming ourselves), and theres no
intended end of our behaviour as far as natural selection is concerned. And
lets not even get into “progressive naturalism.” Whats the upshot of this point about metaphors? Well, once
we strip away the anthropocentric meanings of the naturalists terms, were
left with a more neutral viewpoint, I think, which should be open to the utility
of normative and semantic concepts. Where Scott and I should agree is that
there may be a big transformation afoot. Normative concepts were instrumental
in adapting our animalistic ancestors to the niche in which theyd have to
function as people, as creatures that transcended what they used to be. Myths,
delusions, and technology play roles in that transformation. Perhaps were
losing faith in that way of life, because of technoscientific progress, and so
were searching for a new way. Perhaps well have to give up the old ways of
thinking, to turn us into creatures that can survive in some new domain, such
as cyberspace or outer space. My point is that we should be charitable and
thoroughly “mechanistic” in our interpretation of philosophical and religious
speculations. Lets not dismiss them on empirical grounds, by presupposing an
ultrarationalistic worldview thats preoccupied with knowledge and with actual
facts, because we might then miss transformations that lead to future facts.
Normativity may have a causal role to play in such transformations, as may
philosophy as the search for a certain way of life. In fact, Scotts metaphor of normativity as an array of
“gadgets” or functional heuristics is consistent with what Ive said here about
the evolutionary role of fictions and delusions. We both suspect that the
manifest image, the ordinary conception of the self, corresponds to no reality,
that that self doesnt factually exist. But we seem to differ on the
implications of this naturalism and on what to make of philosophy. Scott thinks
philosophy is in big trouble to the extent that it takes the folk picture of
the self more seriously than it takes the scientific one. But this science-centered framing of the problem is insufficiently
mechanistic, since it credits scientific theories more than philosophical
“sketches,” whereas mechanistically, which is to say instrumentally speaking,
all symbols are equally meaningless, there being no such thing as meaning. If
Scotts point is that science is more efficacious or useful in evolutionary
terms, compared to philosophy or the folk conception of the self, his point is
far from obvious. You see, if we accept the radical implications of naturalism,
we must be more open-minded than before, not less so. A true pragmatist will
accept whatever works. With no ideology to take seriously anymore, with no
commitment to ideas as brainchildren, the inchoate posthuman has less reason to
judge or to exclude. We must be neutral in considering technoscience,
naturalism, theistic religion, and normative philosophy all as processes,
mechanisms, global developments, and the like. A radical naturalist has no
basis for saying that religion is bad or false, for example, if this naturalist thinks only
in terms of context-dependent transformations of systems. Now, I dont think
this necessarily lands us in postmodern relativism, because I think aesthetic standards remain. My question is whether the “mechanist” has some other
standards to license the devaluation of philosophy compared to science. If
philosophy isnt after the facts, we should watch what it does and see how it
fits into the bigger picture.Authentic philosophy, as distinct from science or religion, trains
us to be a type of person. As I say in a reply to another of Scott's articles, this is complicated by esoteric and exoteric, or elite and mass social
functions. Heres how the evolutionary transformation might work, in a
nutshell. The masses personify themselves by trusting in myths that function as
self-reinforcing delusions. That keeps civilization running; in particular, it
maintains our luxury and our freedom to create ways of life. The philosophical
elite stand apart from this process, not as godlike controllers, but as
marginalized observers who see the tragedy at work. Philosophers are trained to
be skeptics, to ask endless questions and to take nothing on faith. They know
there are no gods or moral properties, as matters of fact, but they also
suspect that these notions are part of some larger turn of events. Theyre
awestruck by natures audacity, as it were: our self-deceptions may be instrumental, in which case, to borrow the
inadequate and potentially misleading metaphor, were cogs in a machine.
Philosophers are specially equipped to know this, and wisdom is something like
the ability to live well in spite of those alienating doubts. What can it
be to live well if theres no such
thing as goodness and normativity isnt factual? Whatever it is, it must be
equal to a natural turn of events. Maybe the wise person sees how events are
largely going and realizes theres some role for skeptical outsiders, so that
even they can be part of the greater whole.