tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37363654914010436722024-03-08T20:52:32.250-04:00Anderson Brown's Philosophy BlogA working philosophy professor's notes with emphasis on philosophy of mind, metaphysics, Ancient Greek philosophy, Buddhism, WittgensteinAnderson Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358008464457746997noreply@blogger.comBlogger130125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3736365491401043672.post-14709093964513259162017-04-10T14:33:00.001-04:002017-04-10T14:34:06.372-04:00The Virtues of Knowledge<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The
Virtues of Knowledge</span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Anderson
Brown</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>We are
experiencing a collective epistemological crisis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Meritocratic ideals, the culture of
professionalism, the ideal of journalistic responsibility and the legitimacy of
the scientific enterprise are all called into question.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are always critical voices challenging
complacency, corruption and superficiality in our epistemic norms and that is
right and proper.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And there is a long
philosophical tradition of epistemology, or the study of knowledge, dating back
in the European tradition to the ancient Greeks, and a great variety of
attitudes towards the concepts of “belief,” “knowledge” and “truth” can be
found in that tradition as the centuries have passed and cultural and political
circumstances have arisen and fallen away. But from time to time the nihilistic
impulse gains enough momentum that the dangers that would be posed by a general
collapse of epistemic norms become clear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Times such as ours call for reflection on our concepts of “knowledge”
and “truth” and on the commitments these concepts entail and the values they
reflect.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
current wave of skepticism in our public discourse is part of a larger wave of
reactionary populism driven by a sense of alienation from and distrust of professional
elites by a significant faction of the population.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is, at least so far, more sinister as a
political phenomenon than as an epistemological one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Reactionary populists and opportunistic
plutocrats are fomenting confusion and mistrust in pursuit of power and money.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The tyrant and the pirates try to overcome
authority by subverting authority.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
created crisis does not, at least not yet, amount to a society-wide collapse of
epistemic norms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The scientific
community, for example, feels under attack but the center is holding. The
situation of the media is, unfortunately, more interesting, but enormous
technological changes are another complicated factor, one beyond anyone’s
control. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We are not (yet) witnessing the
end of civilization as we know it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Nonetheless the potential dangers of nihilistic skepticism are greater
than usual. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>We
typically find philosophers working on the epistemology of ethics: What kind of
thinking is ethical thinking?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Are there
moral facts?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How are moral prescriptions
justified?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And so on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But now we need to spend some time working in
the other direction: What can we say about the ethics of epistemology?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What can we say about our duties as believing
beings?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What are the epistemic virtues?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The meta-ethical/epistemological question is
this: is knowledge valuable for its own sake?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Affirming the intrinsic value of knowledge both grounds the normative
discussion of the epistemic virtues and sheds new light on that topic.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There
is a global skeptical objection that should be dispensed with at the outset.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Global skepticism is the view that knowledge
is not possible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Global skepticism can
be motivated in a variety of ways, some more interesting than others, but
asserting that there is no such thing as knowledge is much like asserting that
there is no such thing as ethics in the sense that we spend a great deal of our
daily lives trying to determine what is true and what is right and no amount of
philosophizing, nihilistic or otherwise, is ever going to change that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If the skeptic prohibits our conventional use
of the words “knowledge” and “ethics” then we will just have to use new words,
say “schmoledge” and “schmethics,” because it is in our quotidian, day-to-day,
pre-reflective world where ethics and epistemology press themselves on us in an
inescapable, existential way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is in
this world of ordinary life that the bipolarities of right and wrong and truth
and falsity are givens, not constructs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>So, as the character Garcin says at the end of Jean-Paul Sartre’s play <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">No Exit</i>, “let’s get on with it.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>We want
to think about the intrinsic value of knowledge as distinct from its
instrumental value.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We can sharpen this
distinction with some analysis of the concept of “knowledge.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It might seem obvious that knowledge is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">true</i> belief, but one can come to have a
true belief by accident, say, or perhaps even randomly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For a belief to be knowledge – for us to be
able legitimately to say “I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">know</i> it” –
a belief needs, somehow, to be grounded or connected to the external
environment, and this connection needs to be causal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These causal connections with the world are
what make a belief justified.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Think of a
causal chain that starts with a real entity, event, property or process of or
in the world and ends with the formation of a belief.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Links in this chain can include sensory
perception, memory, introspection, logical and mathematical cognition,
testimony and links further downstream, notably inference and coherence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We can refine our concept of knowledge as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">justified</i> true belief: belief that is
produced by reliable connections with the world.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>However,
as the philosopher Edmund Gettier famously pointed out, justified true belief
may not be enough to constitute knowledge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It is not hard to invent counterfactuals that show this.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Say I have a friend and confidant who is the
most reliable source of testimony in my life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>She has told me countless things over the years, she has never lied to
me and everything she has ever told me has been true.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She tells me something yet again: this time,
she tells me that “P.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As always, what
she tells me is true, and I believe her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I now have a justified true belief.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But this time, for whatever reason, my friend is lying to me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She doesn’t believe that P, but she wants me
to believe what she thinks is a falsehood.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Only it is she who is mistaken, and P is in fact true.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It doesn’t appear that I know that P (does
it?), even though I have a justified true belief that P.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If we followed the causal chain from my
belief back towards its’ anchor in reality we would find the lie: the causal
chain has a broken link.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We have refined
our concept of knowledge further: knowledge is a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">causally grounded</i> justified true belief.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Now we
can examine our intuitions about the intrinsic value of knowledge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Let’s sharpen the question with a
counterfactual that appears more trivial (more connotatively neutral) than the
first one but that makes the same point: a newspaper reporter observes that P
with his own eyes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He reports to his
newspaper the (true) fact that P.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
paper publishes the story but at the printers there is a typo and the sentence
is printed that not-P.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I read the story
over my morning coffee but (perhaps because I already suspect that P is true) I
miss the typo.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I understand the story to
be asserting that P.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once again I have a
justified true belief but again it’s not causally grounded.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If a friend asked, “Where did you read that?”
and I handed him the paper he could look at the article and notice that it read
“not-P.” </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What do you feel?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Do you value knowledge for its own sake?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Do you feel that it is regrettable when your
justified true belief is not causally grounded, even when you don’t know that
it is not, even when you never will know that it is not?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I cannot dictate other people’s intuitions,
but my intuition is strong: I prefer genuine knowledge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I want to know, not just truly believe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why is this?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>To use a big word from ethical theory, it feels deontological: it feels
like I have, somehow, a duty to prefer knowledge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It also seems that ethics and epistemology
are closely related at this “meta” level: my sense of a duty to know feels
closely related to my sense of a duty to be good, and to the degree that I feel
these duties I also believe that other people should and (normally) do feel
them as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is significant that
these feelings are what philosophers call “non-cognitive”: they do not appear
to be the products of logical chains of thought (remember we are putting to the
side our instrumental or pragmatic reasons for desiring to know and to be good,
in order that we might consider their intrinsic value).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are, instead, intuitions, intuitions
that I think most people share.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
fact, it appears that these impulses run deeper than duties.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A duty is something I might have without
knowing it, something I might have to learn.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But while my childhood caregivers taught me and the less-forgiving real
world continues to teach me about specific epistemic and ethical virtues (be
diligent about finding good sources, always tell the truth) the underlying
impulses to goodness and truth <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">per se</i>
are innate sentiments that must already be present if the derivative virtues
are to be cultivated and sustained.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
Plato’s dialogue <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Theatetus</i> Socrates
confronts defenders of several varieties of relativism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He asks why, if the relativists believe that
false belief is not possible, are they arguing about anything at all?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In seeking the epistemological truth through
argument, they are refuting their own premise that truth is not something that
can be found.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Socrates’ claim is that it
is essential human nature to seek the truth and to love the truth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His definition of “philosophy” (which word in
the 4<sup>th</sup> century BCE referred to knowledge production and
intellectual activity in general: the love of Sophia, goddess of wisdom) is the
discipline of trying to determine what one believes to be true and, having
determined that, of stating these beliefs as clearly and courageously as
possible (Plato absorbed his teacher Socrates’ message that philosophy must not
distinguish the personal from the political: the love of truth is a social
virtue as humans are social animals).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This activity is not specialized; it is the essential activity that
defines the human being.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Philosophy
defined this way, Socrates wants us to understand, is nothing less than human
life itself.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Classical
philosophy had much broader aims – and readership – than contemporary
philosophy which is one specialized discipline among others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Classical philosophy was conceived as an
investigation into what it was to live a good life and how the goal of living a
good life might be pursued.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
investigation necessarily included a concentrated focus on human nature, human
virtues and human failings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whereas
modern ethical philosophy centers judgement on the motives and consequences of
discrete actions, classical ethics centers judgement on the whole person and
the life that person is living.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We call
this approach to ethics “virtue ethics” and over the past fifty years or so this
approach has enjoyed a revival, co-existing today with “rights” theories (that
center judgements on motives) and “consequentialist” theories (that center
judgements on outcomes).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Over the past
twenty years or so virtue theory has spawned another area of philosophical work
known as “virtue epistemology,” a small but quite vital literature that, as the
name indicates, attempts to delineate the epistemic virtues in a normative
spirit.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Plato,
like most classical writers, is clearly a virtue theorist at the normative
level (in his case rationality, discipline and sobriety are the three virtues
that correspond to the three respective parts of the soul).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the foremost classical avatar of virtue
theory is undoubtedly Aristotle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With
Aristotle as our guide we can develop the present theme of the connection
between the “meta” argument for the intrinsic value of knowledge and the normative
project of delineating the epistemic virtues.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>On
Aristotle’s view <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">all</i> human virtues
are useful virtues in that all human virtues function as part of the
realization of a flourishing human being.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It is true that Aristotle, the great categorizer, goes on to distinguish
among several groups of virtues notably including what he called the
“intellectual” virtues and what he called the “practical” virtues, but this is
not to isolate any one group of virtues as essential relative to the rest
(Aristotle, like Plato before him, considers rationality to be the essential <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">property</i> that defines the human being).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For Aristotle being “good” is being an
exemplification of a flourishing member of one’s natural kind (roughly, one’s
species): a good horse, a good songbird and a good human will each have their
own constitution of virtues.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Virtues are
potentialities that can contribute to the ultimate actuality which is the
realization of one’s nature (the state of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">eudaimonia</i>,
a word usually translated somewhat inadequately as “happiness.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A better word might be the more Stoic
“satisfaction”).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Virtuous behavior is
behavior that serves to convert potential virtue into actual virtue (virtue
realized through action).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A key
Aristotelean concept is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">phronesis</i>,
the synthesis of thought (theory) and action (practice): goodness is not a
static property of a person, rather it is realized at all and only those times
that virtuous potentiality is converted to virtuous actuality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On this view to say of someone that they are
a good person is to say that they are consistently realizing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">eudaimonia</i> through <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">phronesis</i>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We now
have the conceptual tools to explain the innate desire to be good (and to know
the truth) that runs deeper than normative duty: prior to deontology (the study
of duty) is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">teleology</i>, the study of
the function of a thing, in the case of a living being the study of the
realization of that organism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To be
fulfilled as a human being is to realize one’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">telos.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Understanding
Aristotle’s virtue theory this way we can go on to make some further
observations about the relationship between virtue epistemology’s normative
project and the intrinsic value of knowledge.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Aristotle
makes no distinction between qualitative virtues (“That’s a good knife,”
“That’s a bad refrigerator”) and moral virtues (“She’s honest,” “He’s
intemperate”).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Any potential to realize
human fulfillment is virtuous, such that the sense of “virtuous” broadens out
from our contemporary sense of “ethical” to something closer to our sense of
“biological.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Strong and healthy stand
side by side with honest and temperate (this is what fascinated the
existentialist Nietzsche about ancient Greek ethics).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is enough that a quality that
characterizes a flourishing human being is present as a potential that can be
cultivated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The reason that virtues are
valuable is simply that oneself is valuable: choosing to live is more than
merely choosing not to die.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(This
suggests an interesting discussion of the moral status of suicide that could be
developed further: the suicide could be said to have <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">opted out</i> of the normative discussion altogether, if prescriptions
are only coherent in the context of the choice to live.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That sets an interesting limit on our warrant
to characterize suicide as morally transgressive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But this is a digression just now.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If there is any “duty” prior to ethical and
epistemic duties it is the duty to live, “living” understood as the project of
realizing one’s telos as best one can.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>All virtues have equal standing, as the realization of each one is
intrinsic to whatever degree of fulfillment one manages to attain.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Virtue epistemology is conventionally divided
into two areas, the respective territories of the “reliabilists” and the
“responsibilists.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The reliabilists focus
on virtues that contribute to occurrent justification (the justification
provided by immediate experience and thought) such as sensory acuity, logical
acuity, memory and attentive focus.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We
might call these “cognitive” virtues.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Responsibilists focus on dispositional virtues that are conducive to
knowledge production in the long run such as curiosity, impartiality, open-mindedness
and responsibility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We might call these
“character” virtues.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Any number of
commentators have pointed out that these two projects are in no way mutually
exclusive, but with Aristotle’s teleological approach in mind we can make two
further observations that might expand the discussion in salutary ways.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>First, because
virtue epistemology is a normative enterprise, any virtue that is cultivable presents
an epistemic prescription: right conduct is meeting the ongoing challenge of
turning our potentialities into actualities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This prescription extends with equal force across both the cognitive and
the character virtues: I can correct my nearsightedness with lenses, I can take
steps to correct for my implicit biases (say by adopting a “blind” protocol
when grading student papers), I can practice memory-enhancing exercises, I can
expose myself through travel to other cultures to increase my open-mindedness
and so on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Considered as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">epistemic </i>normative prescriptions these
all carry equal weight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A question
suggests itself as to how far one can reasonably be expected to self-improve. (Here
we should remind ourselves of Aristotle’s insistence on moderation in all
things lest this mischaracterizes him as unreasonably demanding.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For example, are we under some <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">obligation</i> to exercise our memories? All
other things being equal, it looks like the short answer is yes, we are, if we
accept that our nature as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">believing</i>
beings entails a normative obligation to strive to be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">knowers</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Which
brings us to the second point: granting that for Aristotle the ongoing
actualization of potentialities is the definition of human life itself, this
definition dissolves any difference between any virtues at all when considered
as grounding normative prescriptions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The overall project of Aristotelean virtue theory is neither
specifically “ethical” nor “epistemological.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>As I said above I think the best word to capture Aristotle’s sense of
virtue is a very broadly understood “biological.” (This is a fine example of
Aristotle’s fundamental ontological difference with Plato: for Aristotle
primary being is the unity of form and matter, a kind of non-reductive
materialism, as opposed to Plato’s dualistic ontology of form and matter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus, for Aristotle virtue is only present in
action.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So not only is there no
coherent distinction between the cognitive virtues of the reliabilists and the
character virtues of the responsibilists when these respective catalogs of virtues
are used to generate normative prescriptions, but there is also no coherent
distinction between whatever virtues any virtue epistemologist or virtue
ethicist might choose to enumerate and any other human potentialities,
normatively speaking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Normative prescriptions
of any kind necessarily presume that we have chosen in the first place to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">live</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Life itself is the process of actualizing our potentialities and this
encompasses all possible exercise and improvement of the body and the
mind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Plato opposed the Manichean idea
that evil existed as an antipode to good.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He understood evil as (merely) the absence of good, and so he insisted
that no one who truly knew the good could act wrongly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the same way to exist as a believing
being, but without the love of truth, is in a sense an impossibility, something
inconceivable, incoherent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Underlying
the motivation to love goodness and truth is the necessary, encompassing love
of life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To fail to love ourselves in
this way (perhaps this is to fail to have the virtue of dignity?) is to fail to
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">truly</i> live.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: .5in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Note</span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The counterfactual
involving the typographic error is owing to Alvin Goldman (Goldman 1967).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Bibliography
of Virtue Epistemology</span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"></span></b></div>
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Axtell, Guy, ed. 2000. <i>Knowledge, Belief, and
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Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology</i> (Oxford: Oxford UP).</span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Fairweather, Abrol and Linda Zagzebski. 2001. <i>Virtue
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Greco, John. 1993. "Virtues and Vices of Virtue
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Greco, John. 2000. "Two Kinds of Intellectual
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Anderson Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358008464457746997noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3736365491401043672.post-65544033243537944822013-03-19T13:20:00.000-04:002015-05-31T09:48:57.974-04:00Lawrence Krauss, David Albert, Jim Holt, Freeman Dyson<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Philosophy, Physics and the Great Kerfuffle</b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></b>Recently there has been quite a
kerfuffle about <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/a-universe-from-nothing-by-lawrence-m-krauss.html?_r=0">a
review by David Albert of Lawrence Krauss’s book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Universe from Nothing</i> in the New York Times</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Stung, <a href="http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2012/04/lawrencekrauss.html">Krauss
has been on something of a war path directed against “philosophers” generally</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Meanwhile I was quite smitten this year with<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/03/books/why-does-the-world-exist-by-jim-holt.html">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Why Does the World Exist?</i>, an excellent
little book by the science writer Jim Holt</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Much to my dismay this book was slammed, along with philosophers in
general, in a (to my mind) <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/nov/08/what-can-you-really-know/?pagination=false">very
self-indulgent review in the New York Review of Books by the distinguished physicist
Freeman Dyson</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That finally spurred
me to get in my own two cents.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">I.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Origins of the Great Kerfuffle</b></div>
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The initial motivation for the
title, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Universe From Nothing,</i> and
indeed the whole project was essentially polemical: if the physicist can show
how something came from nothing there is no need to postulate God as the
creator.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A powerful blow struck for
atheism!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That was the idea.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That was the (polemical, not scientific)
original mistake, an unfortunate but tempting choice of words that led
Professor Krauss to try, quixotically, to redefine “nothing,” that caused the
kerfuffle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Professor Krauss’s own
reputation is based on his excellent popularizations including <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Physics of Star Trek</i> (which I read
with great pleasure) and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Quantum Man</i>,
his biography of Richard Feynman, among several other volumes, and on his
enthusiastic participation in the contemporary “New Atheist” movement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was a close associate of the late essayist
Christopher Hitchens and continues to work with the polemical biologist Richard
Dawkins (both of whom, I want to stress, I admire greatly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have spent many hours reading both Hitchens
and Dawkins.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was gratified once to be
quoted, although not by Dawkins himself, on Dawkins’ own very large and lively
blog).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dawkins provided Krauss’s book
with an embarrassingly over-the-top jacket blurb: “Even the last remaining
trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’
shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages. If <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">On the Origin of Species</i> was biology’s deadliest blow to supernaturalism,
we may come to see <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Universe From
Nothing</i> as the equivalent from cosmology. The title means exactly what it
says. And what it says is devastating.”</div>
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Except that, as Albert pointed out, it’s not
devastating for any actual cosmogony, religious or otherwise, not only because
physicists cannot, as I will follow Alpert in arguing, show that the universe
came from nothing, but because “theologians” (Dawkins’ term for believers) are
equally unable to do so: they claim that the universe came from God.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If someone claimed that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">God</i> “came from nothing” (I would be genuinely curious to hear of
anyone who ever claimed that) they would have the exact same problem as the
physicists do, whether or not they abjured the need for some kind of causal
explanation (an option that physicists, by definition, do not have).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Neither physical nor “theological”
explanations can <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">use</i> the concept of
nothingness in any kind of explanation whatever.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What is vexatious to the atheist vanguard is
that no physicist or biologist is ever going to prove that there is no God,
because that is not an empirical question: they are heavily invested in a
particular <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">philosophy</i> of knowledge,
and when one claims not to have any philosophy at all one is in particular
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or other, regardless of whether they care to or wish to).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>
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It is quite misdirected, though, to
direct this anger at philosophers, a mixed bag of people including, probably, a
majority of atheists (like me) with a generous sprinkling of believers and one
of the few contemporary groups of professional academics who continue to
welcome study and debate on issues of faith.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In fact there is a philosophical discussion that is (unlike big bang
cosmogony or evolutionary biology) genuinely subversive of religious and
specifically creationist belief, and that is the logical question about the
apparent contingency of existence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There
are large numbers of people who are committed to the necessary existence of
God.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Admittedly, a believer could
acknowledge that there might have been no God (that the existence of God is
contingent), but insist that there is one, but most believers, and certainly
most creationists, take the position that God necessarily exists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If this is true then an argument that subverts
the notion that there is a reason to think that something exists necessarily is
going to be, unlike the empirical arguments of the scientists, genuinely
subversive for believers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact the
only arguments that could even possibly support atheism with actual reasons are
logical arguments and not empirical ones.</div>
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No one reading this has any reason
to think that something ever “came from” nothing, whatever that means.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One could mean at least two things by saying that
something came from nothing: first, one could simply mean that there was once
nothing and then something appeared.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This interpretation does not implicate “nothing” in the appearance of
something.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On this interpretation it’s
not precise to say that something came “from” nothing; the absence of anything
merely preceded the appearance of something (I am setting aside here a
technical problem raised by big bang cosmology, whereby space and time as we
experience them are not present in the “singularity”).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This interpretation requires that the
appearance of something was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">uncaused</i>,
since there was nothing to play any causal role in the appearance of
something.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe every event doesn’t
have to have a cause (can anybody show that they must?), and maybe we could go
even further and say that the appearance of something is an event that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">couldn’t</i> have a cause, since nothing
preceded that event that could have played a causal role; different people will
feel more or less comfortable leaving it at that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A perhaps more attractive alternative,
though, is to doubt (as I do) that at any point something came from nothing,
especially since no one reading this has any reason to think that it did.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But on either alternative – that the
appearance of something was an uncaused event, or that such an event never
occurred – there is no work for physics to do.</div>
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">The sterility of that conclusion, though, may be
another reason why some physicists prefer to investigate the second possible
interpretation, which is that something actually <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">came</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">from</i> nothing, that
is, that there was something about nothing that played a causal role in the
origin of the universe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
interpretation raises the further question as to whether, given whatever it was
about nothing that caused our universe to appear, this causal process was
nomological (law-like), versus contingent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This is important because an explanation from physics would have to
appeal to some nomological principles or other to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">be</i> an explanation from physics, and there’s no <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a priori</i> reason to think that </span><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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something) is necessary, much less to think that, necessarily, something came
from nothing, which means that there is no <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a
priori</i> reason to think that physics can (even theoretically, even with
hand-waving towards some “knowledge” that we currently lack) explain the
appearance of something starting from the assumption that there was an initial
“state” (actually it’s not a state) of nothing.
<br />
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One reason for the interest among
physicists in “something from nothing” is the big bang theory itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On this theory there was a “singularity”
(very roughly this is a state of matter/energy so dense that it is
immeasurable) about 14 billion years ago and then a rapid expansion and cooling
into the present universe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This sounds a
lot like something from nothing, but it isn’t.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It’s the present something from an anterior something (the
singularity).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Moreover some physicists
(including Lawrence Krauss) are interested in “multiverse” theories, theories
that hold that there could be multiple universes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On multiverse theories big bang-type events
could be happening many times.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The story
of the big bang, in short, is not the story of the origin of existence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is the story of the origin of this
particular universe from another state of being that preceded it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When Hawking says that if you give him,
roughly, the force of gravity he can get you the rest of the universe, or
Krauss says that if you give him, roughly, quantum dynamism he can get you the
rest of the universe, that’s impressive but not the same as explaining how
something came from nothing, nor does anyone need to follow the technical
reasoning (or even to read the books) to know that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact none of the recent popular physics books
on cosmogony actually even tries to explain how there was nothing and then
there was something.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They all begin with
something or other and then try to show (whether successfully or not is
irrelevant) how more something can be got from the initial something.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That includes “laws”: it may or may not be
incoherent to say that there could be a “law” (whatever that is) in the absence
of anything else, but the obtaining of a “law,” whatever that is, is not the
same thing as nothing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Physics can only
explain how some state of affairs (such as the presence of the force of
gravity) led to, or relates to, some other state of affairs (such as the
presence of the rest of the universe), and nothing does not qualify as a “state
of affairs,” although that merits some discussion and I’ll get back to that.</div>
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I don’t mean to imply that all, or
even most, physicists don’t understand this (and of many of those about whom
one might say “they don’t understand” it would be more accurate to say that
“they’re not interested,” which is, I want to stress, just fine).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Steven Weinberg has said, “Why there is
something rather than nothing (is) just the kind of question that we will be
stuck with when we have a final theory (of physics). … We will be left facing
the irreducible mystery because whatever our theory is, no matter how
mathematically consistent and logically consistent the theory is, there will
always be the alternative that, well, perhaps there could have been nothing at
all.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Right, that is the philosophical
issue: the apparent contingency of existence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Is there any “problem” here?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>There is at least one coherent question: do we <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">know</i> that existence is contingent?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This is not a question for physics or, at least, no one reading this can
explain how the method of physics even in principle addresses this question (as
Weinberg, for one, understands).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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If this juncture is a parting of
the ways, though, one of the two parties is going to have to take “cosmogony”
with them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My sense is that cosmogony
should go with the physicists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The sense
of the word has changed over the centuries as the sense of the word “universe”
has changed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In ancient times (and
etymologically) “universe” means the totality of everything that exists, what
I’ve been calling “existence” itself, and thus the proper subject of the
philosophical discussion about the contingency of said totality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But nowadays “universe” has a more specific
meaning reflecting the progress of physics in constructing a model of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">this </i>universe, the one we live in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is ultimately a question of usage, but
“cosmogony” on most contemporary tongues refers to big bang theory and other
discussions in astrophysics that pertain to the age and origins of this
(specific) universe (which, the physicists and logicians agree, is not
necessarily the only universe there is).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Besides, the philosophical question at hand is not ultimately about the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">origin</i> of existence (if, as I doubt,
existence ever had an origin), rather it is about whether existence is
contingent or necessary.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">II. Is the
contingency of existence logically demonstrable?</b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The philosophical discussion of the
contingency of existence uses “existence” in a more traditional, generic sense to
refer to anything that exists, what we can just call “existence,” as opposed to
the physicists’ tendency to conflate “existence” with “the universe” (or “the
multiverse”). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As mentioned earlier that
discussion need not take it as axiomatic that existence ever had a beginning at
all, or that if existence did have a beginning that event was caused, or that
there was ever any event such that before the event nothing existed and after
the event something existed, because no one reading this has any conceivable
reasons for claiming to know that any of those things are true.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No matter how existence, which is not logically
identical to our universe, got started (on the dubious assumption that it ever
did), or even, as it seems more sensible to think, it never got started at all,
one can still ask the question about its contingency.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So physics rightly takes “cosmogony” (and I’m
sure it’s in good hands) and the philosophers are left with the question about
the contingency of existence, which is a (very deep and strange) question for
modal logic. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Modal logic deals with possibility and probability: we
say about different ways things could be (“states of affairs” is the term of
art) that they are possible or impossible, contingent or necessary, probable or
improbable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The way that these terms are
formally modeled by logicians is with “possible worlds”: a possible world is a
world where some state of affairs could “obtain” (please bear with the jargon,
it’s really quite manageable and it does make things easier).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These “worlds” can be thought of as
universes: maximal states of affairs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To
say that something is possible is to say that there is a possible world where
that state of affairs obtains, while an impossible state of affairs is one that
does not obtain in any possible world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A
contingent state of affairs does not obtain in at least one possible world; a
necessary state of affairs obtains in all possible worlds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Probability, of course, has to do with the
obtaining of a state of affairs in relative numbers of possible worlds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is a colorful way of talking that lends
the subject a fanciful air, but in fact modeling modal operators as
quantifications over sets of possible worlds is a very <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">concrete</i> way of representing things, which makes it possible for
binary computers (those </span><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
In the “possible worlds” paradigm
of modal logic there is no world where there is nothing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is because the only coherent definition
of a world is the definition of what exists “in” that world. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As the philosopher David Lewis wrote in his
fascinating book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">On the Plurality of
Worlds</i>, a world is not like the bottle that holds the beer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What would count to distinguish one empty world
from another?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Possible worlds, which
are only logical constructs, do not share with each other the space and time of
some larger encompassing universe.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
fact if a world just is what exists in that world, then a “world” where nothing
exists is incoherent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The only coherent
idea of the universe is the idea of all of the things that are present in it:
those things just are the universe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If
nothing existed there would be no world (universe), which is not at all the
same thing as an empty world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is
the corollary to the earlier point that physics can’t explain (and has no need
to explain) how something came from nothing.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Ordinarily we want to somehow
represent to ourselves what we are thinking about (Kant famously argued that
all of our thinking is limited and structured by our ability to represent).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact this representative function is often
just identical with thinking (it is interesting to consider the example of
physics itself here; reading the autobiographical popularizations of both the
relativity theorist Einstein and the quantum theorist Feynman one gets the
sense that some kind of visualization is nearly synonymous with thought for
both men).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the case of the
contingency of existence what we are tempted to do is to picture, say, a spiral
galaxy against the background of black space, and then – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">poof!</i> - <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>imagine the galaxy
disappearing, leaving only “void,” in this case a black space in the mind’s eye.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But this is a misleading way to represent
nothingness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Any</i> way of representing nothingness is misleading.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If nothing existed there would be no universe,
no space, and no void.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There wouldn’t be
anything that was empty or devoid of matter/energy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It may or may not be incoherent to say that
existence is contingent (that’s part of the philosophical question), but it is
surely incoherent to say that one could <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">imagine</i>
what nothingness would be like, because it wouldn’t be like anything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It wouldn’t be a state of affairs in a world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus it cannot be represented.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Now we can see how thinking about
the apparent contingency of existence gets us into a mind-bending situation,
and how the problem is essentially philosophical: many people, including Steven
Weinberg and myself, share the intuition that existence is contingent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But our formal logical definition of
contingency is “false in some possible world.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But the absence of anything cannot be thought of as a state of affairs
in a possible world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So we must,
disconcertingly, step outside of our ordinary conception of modality and our
ordinary sense of “contingent.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
proposition under consideration is: That there exists at least one world is a
contingent fact.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is not necessary
that there be any worlds, including this one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Put this way the proposition appears to be question-begging: how could
we <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">know</i> that existence is
contingent?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Would justifying the belief
that existence is contingent require a demonstration of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">necessity</i> of the contingency of
existence?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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Rationalists like Rene Descartes
thought that a demonstration of the logical necessity of the truth of a
proposition (as in mathematics) was the only acceptable (indubitable) standard
of justification of a belief.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Notoriously Descartes then ran himself around in circles, arguing, for
example, that we could prove God’s existence by appealing to the evidence of
our reason and that we could trust in our reason by appeal to the goodness of
God.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He lacked the magical initial
premises that would bring the necessity of existence along in their train, because
there aren’t any.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even the premise that
God exists is merely regressive: where did God come from?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Empiricists like David Hume, on the other
hand, saw “justification” as a matter of demonstrable probability, as in
empirical science, not logical certainty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Of course empiricists (including physicists) don’t actually bother
(previously-discussed misunderstandings notwithstanding) with trying to prove
that existence is necessary or that it is contingent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s just not an empirical question.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s because the problem empiricism <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">would have</i> with demonstrating that there
must (or needn’t) be something that exists is that there is only one “fact” in
the data set (namely, something exists): no probabilities there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A singular fact can underwrite no empirical
law: “laws,” on the empiricist’s view, are expectations (inductions) about the
future grounded in regularities of past and present experience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Conversely one cannot generate some set of
natural laws (generalizations) that explain (deduce) the necessity or
contingency of existence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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We philosophers find ourselves, for
the thousandth time, foundering in deep water, having been, for the thousandth
time, abandoned a while back by our more sensible scientific brethren.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or more likely it was we who wandered off,
hopefully without forgetting to bring the lotus leaves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some things never change!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But there is more than one way to go from
here.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One attractive option is to argue
that the contingency of existence is not a proper object of knowledge: we
neither “know” nor do we “not know” that existence is contingent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The argument is that there are necessary
conditions for the proper use of the verb “to know,” and the contingency of
existence doesn’t meet those conditions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>When I tell you that I know where my car keys are that is informative,
it means something, because I might not have known that: you didn’t know
whether or not I knew until I told you, and now you do, and your knowing may
have practical significance for both of us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Also I could be mistaken: you could show that even though I believe that
I know where the keys are, in fact I do not know that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When those conditions (when it’s informative
to find out that I know or don’t know and when it’s possible that I could be
mistaken) do not obtain there cannot be any coherent (meaningful) use of that
verb.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Basically this is an
instrumentalist theory of meaning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
think that this argument is persuasive when, for example, someone tries to tell
me that I don’t “know” if the external world exists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The right response is to say that I neither
know nor do I not know (the world of experience is the “ground” of knowing and
not a proper object of knowledge itself): <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the skeptic is posing a pseudo-problem.</div>
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Is the question about the contingency of existence
like the question about the existence of the external world?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In neither case would the respective
alternatives be reflected in experience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
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exist, that means that it might not exist <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">right
now</i> and our experiences have some other sort of explanation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course that’s exactly what’s incoherent about
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it’s not “explanatory” to say that the external world <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">does</i> exist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That claim is
just as incoherent as claiming it might not, because both claims go beyond
experience, which, for Hume, was the only possible basis for knowing
anything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now consider the claim that
existence might be either contingent or necessary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In possible-worlds modeling the necessity or
contingence of some state of affairs at some possible world makes sense in the
context of other possible worlds (other ways that the world could be). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But in the case of the alleged contingency of
existence the only choices are existence and nothing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Existence cannot be the cause of itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since there is no other variable at all there
can be no other relevant variable: nothing else could possibly show that
existence was either necessary or contingent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This parallels the situation where the skeptic is making claims about my
knowledge of the existence of the external world: just as “I know that the external
world exists” and “I don’t know that the external world exists” are equally
meaningless propositions, so “I know that existence is contingent” and “I know
that existence is necessary” are equally meaningless.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So one plausible response to the question is
to say that there isn’t really a logical problem here at all, just as the
global skeptic’s epistemological question is really a pseudo problem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This kind of argument from criteria for
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">However, although the
Hume/Wittgenstein argument to the effect that global skepticism is a pseudo-problem
is one that I find both persuasive and satisfying, I cannot shake the intuition
that existence is contingent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is, I
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<br />
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Editors<span style="mso-tab-count: 12;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>New York Review of Books</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<br /></div>
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">
</span></span><br />
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">To the Editors:</span></span></div>
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Having
immensely enjoyed Jim Holt’s excellent <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Why
Does the World Exist?</i>, and being an avid reader of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>all of the writing on physics in NYRB,
including Freeman Dyson’s, I was eager to read Professor Dyson’s review of
Holt’s book in your most recent issue.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed
I brought it home from the post office and sat down and read it on the
spot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am compelled to write partially
in defense of Mr. Holt, and partially because there are some interesting issues
here, but also out of unexpected disappointment.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>At
the beginning of the twenty-first-century there is no doubt that physics is the
preeminent science of the past one hundred years and of the foreseeable future,
certainly for the popular culture, and notwithstanding the epochal advances of
biology and chemistry, and the physical sciences in general, during the same
time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Educated lay people around the
world can name many twentieth-century physicists, from Einstein, Bohr and
Schrodinger to Feynman, Hawkins and Weinberg.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Their cultural status is of the highest, their real achievements are
stunning, and their popular writings and biographies are avidly read by
millions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The same cannot be said for
philosophy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most lay people could not name
more than two or three of the leading philosophers of the past century, and
their ideas are even more obscure than their names.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Only a tiny elite of professional
philosophers command high salaries, while the rest labor in tenuous
circumstances, publishing an insular literature that is unknown to the
public.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While a physicist today is
synonymous with a powerful intellectual, philosophers are as often as not
regarded as vaguely subversive charlatans, condemned from the right as
lotus-eaters and from the left as obtuse logicians, acknowledged all around as
writers of impenetrable jargon.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Then
why, oh why do physicists have such a raw resentment of philosophers?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It goes beyond the usual xenophobic
inter-departmental food fight familiar to every university professor in the
land.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On that tedious tribal level it
makes no more sense for the old silverback physicists to snarl at philosophers
than at, say, geologists, or poets.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Part
of it can no doubt be explained by the fact that the awkward duty has recently
fallen to the low-status philosophers to explain to the high-status physicists
that no natural scientist can, even in principle, explain how something could
have come from nothing, since natural science by definition must appeal to some
accepted constants to make a case for some causal relationship between existing
entities and circumstances. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s how
natural scientists, including physicists, develop testable hypotheses that can
be proven or disproven by experiment – something they are fond of throwing up
to philosophers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nothingness cannot
enter in to such relations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The point is
indisputable, but of course that very fact only enrages the high-status
physicists even more (we’re all most angry when we’re wrong).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then there is the matter of the concept of
“nothing.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Physicists, whose purview is
the actual, existing universe, have no reason to think about the essentially
logical concept of nothing (they sometimes say that it is the philosophers who
do not understand “nothing,” and then go on to explain that nothing is
something - “gravity,” say, or ”quantum perturbations” - after all).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is also no reason to think that
thinking about the concept of nothing could ever have any practical
application.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nor is there any reason, as
to that, to think that something ever came from nothing in the first place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The physicist’s rebuke of the lowly
philosopher for this impertinence is unattractive, but philosophers (many of
whom are adoring physics groupies, by the way) tend not to mind
unattractiveness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is worse to be
uninteresting, and I’ll venture a further impertinence: m’lord’s wrath on this
point is not of philosophical interest.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Philosophers
have not much better luck, but from the logical point of view the question is
at least interesting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The question is,
“Is existence contingent?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Contemporary
modal logic formalizes modal operators (“necessary,” “contingent,” “possible,”
“impossible,” “probable,” “improbable”) by quantifying over sets of possible
worlds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This sounds fantastic but it is,
among other things, the only way to enable computers, those most literal of
creatures, to handle modality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So in the
case of contingency, the proposition “X is contingent” is analyzed: “X is false
in at least one possible world,” possible worlds being understood as ways the
world could be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the proposition
“Existence is contingent” cannot be analyzed in this conventional way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To say “There is at least one possible world
where nothing exists” is to posit a possible world, and a possible world is
still something, just as the null set is still a set.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So it seems that there is no way to logically model of the contingency of existence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course one cannot construct a "possible worlds" model of
the necessity of existence either, for the same reason.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just as traditional skepticism is best appreciated
as pressuring our standards for justifying beliefs, rather than our ordinary
beliefs themselves, so the question about the contingency of existence puts
some interesting pressure on our understanding of modal logic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Of course different people will have
different intuitions about the contingency of existence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I for one can’t shake it.)</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Professor
Dyson has nothing to say about any of this.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In fact he finds nothing to discuss anywhere in Mr. Holt’s delightful
book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He simply uses the occasion as an
opportunity to slam philosophers and philosophy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He claims that he appreciates philosophy as
literature and laments, more in sadness than in anger, that philosophy is not
what it used to be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s true that
philosophers used to be polymaths.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
great seventeenth-century rationalists were mathematicians and physicists, and
fourth-century BCE Greeks would have had to be instructed for some time to
understand how a philosopher and a physicist and a psychologist were not all
doing the same thing (if you could ever get them to accept that).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But we live in a different time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Few lay people today could name the greatest
contemporary biologists or chemists, or the greatest poets or literary
critics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The role of the individual
thinker has changed in profound ways since the days of Aristotle or of Leibniz.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Professor Dyson’s lament is equivalent to
saying that young people don’t have values like people used to do, a complaint
prominent in Plato’s writings.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: .5in;">
Jim Holt
interviewed physicists and philosophers, a fact Professor Dyson acknowledges
about halfway through this non-review.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Professor Dyson dispenses with this complication by defining all of the
physicists who spoke to Holt (one chapter is devoted to Steven Weinberg) as
physicists who use physics as “a basis for philosophical speculation,” and then
simply goes on to lump them in as philosophers with the rest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One wouldn’t know from this review that the
book includes more pages dedicated to discussion with physicists and
cosmologists than it does with philosophers. Professor Dyson’s last line is
supposed to be the kicker, the one to make us all stare into our beer: “Modern
departments of philosophy have no place for the mystical.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But
quite a few of both the Dyson-designated “philosophers” (Roger Penrose, David
Deutsch, John Leslie) and the actual philosophers (Richard Swinburne, Derek
Parfit) interviewed here are unabashed mystics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Professor Dyson’s assertion is merely bizarre, and his qualifications
for making it are none.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The only
interesting question he raises is the one I started with: what are philosophers
doing that gets up the noses of physicists so much?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They must be doing something right. </div>
</span></span></div>
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Anderson Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358008464457746997noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3736365491401043672.post-44829438594126961302013-02-28T09:14:00.000-04:002013-02-28T09:14:43.035-04:00The Metaphysics of Propositional Attitudes<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Think of a tiger.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Alright: now, how many stripes does your
imaginary tiger have?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Probably your
“mental image” of a tiger turned out not to have a specific number of stripes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Representational theories of mind hold that
it is literally true that cognitive states and processes include
representations as constituent parts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To
some this may seem self-evident: isn’t remembering one’s mother, for example, a
matter of inspecting an image of her “in the mind’s eye”?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Isn’t imagining a tiger similarly a matter of
composing one’s own, private image of a tiger?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But there are good reasons for thinking that mental representations must
be<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> formal</i>, like linguistic
representations, rather than <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">isomorphic</i>,
like pictorial representations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Formal
representations, like novels, have the flexibility to include only relevant
information (“The Russian guerillas rode down on the French encampment at
dawn”), while isomorphic representations, like movies, must include a great
deal of information that is irrelevant (How many Russians, through what kind of
trees, on horses of what color?).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While
there are those who argue for isomorphic representation, most cognitive
scientists believe that mental representations must be rule-governed sets of
symbols, like grammatical sentences of language.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Cognitivism,” while a broad term, can fairly
be defined as the view that cognition is an internal (neural) kind of
information processing using symbols: that is the cognitivist’s model of brain
function.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></b><span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Noam Chomsky is perhaps the
most influential founder of cognitivism which at the time (late 1950s-early 1960s)
was conceived as a challenge to the dominant behaviorism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Cognitivists like Chomsky argued (as
Descartes had 300 years earlier) that language distinguished humans from
non-human animals in such a way that, unlike non-linguistic animals, humans
could not be modeled as stimulus-response learning mechanisms as (very roughly)
the behaviorists maintained.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Chomsky,
critiquing B. F. Skinner’s account of “verbal behavior,” made the enormously
influential proposal that formal syntactical structure was “generative”:
grammatical frameworks like “The_is_the_” allowed for multiple inputs and thus
for the generation of indefinitely many (linguistic) representations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus human speech was not “tropic”: the
tropic calls of non-linguistic animals were determined by natural history and
environmental stimuli, but human speech was, through its generative nature,
liberated from these natural determinants.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>According to Chomsky, this generative grammar was the cognitive
foundation that enabled humans to have mental lives of a qualitatively unique
sort.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The early, canonical Chomsky under
discussion here held that while the behavior of non-linguistic animals could
indeed be explained solely through appeal to behaviorist learning models and
biological determinants, the behavior of humans could not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(In recent years Chomsky has modified this
view somewhat, but mostly by acknowledging that some non-linguistic animals
have <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">conscious</i> experiences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Consciousness will be discussed in Chapter
Three.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am not aware of Chomsky
anywhere repudiating his original position that non-linguistic animals cannot
be said to have <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">intentional</i> states.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Taken to its extreme this argument appears to
show that it is necessary for a being to have an innate (“genetic”) syntactical
system for generating propositions in order to be in an intentional state at
all (this is what was at stake in the famous primate sign-language research,
which was initiated by behaviorists seeking to debunk Chomsky by showing that
grammar could be learned by non-linguistic primates).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">When Bertrand Russell coined the
phrase “propositional attitude” in his 1921 book<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> The Analysis of Mind</i> he wasn’t thinking of “proposition” in the
sense of a piece of language.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was
thinking that what was represented was a situation or what would today most
likely be called a “state of affairs,” a way the world (or some part of the
world) could be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The latter-day
cognitivists took a much more literal view of propositional attitudes as
linguistic entities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their claim was
that the syntactical structure of language was, in fact, the basis of
representation in the first place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On
the cognitivist conception of intentional states (beliefs, desires, etc) all
intentional states can be described as attitudes towards propositions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By “attitudes” here one means attitudes
towards the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">truth values </i>of
propositions: To believe that the drinking fountain is down the hall is to have
the attitude towards the proposition “The drinking fountain is down the hall”
that it is true, and to have a desire for water is to have the attitude towards
the proposition “I will drink water soon” that one intends to make it true,
hopes it to be true and so on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Propositional
attitudes are understood as attitudes towards content that can be expressed in
“that”-clauses: one has a belief <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that</i>
“The cookies are in the jar,” a hope <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that</i>
“There is milk in the fridge,” a fear <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that</i>
“Mom will say no to eating cookies,” and so on.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The defender of propositional attitudes
argues that intentional states can only be individuated by virtue of their
respective contents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What makes Belief X
different from Belief Y is that X is about Paris, say, and Y is about something else.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This looks like a block to reduction: to
correlate electrochemical activity in the nervous system with Belief X, we must
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">already</i> be able to specify <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">which</i> belief Belief X is (for example by
asking an awake subject what they are thinking while their brain is being
simultaneously scanned).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We don’t have
any way of getting from no-content to content (from the non-mental to the
mental).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This motivates the contemporary
version of the problem of mental causation: it appears that the content (the meaning)
of the proposition is what plays the causal role in the production of behavior:
when told to proceed to the capital of France
he went to Paris because he believed that “Paris is the capital of France.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All the explanation in physical
(neurophysiological) terms one could possibly make wouldn’t be explanatory if
it didn’t at some point reveal the meaning that is expressed in the
proposition, and it doesn’t: “He believes that Paris
is the capital of France”
is not shorthand for a causal chain of neurophysiological processes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is an argument for the ineliminable role
of the semantic property: “intentional realism” is the view that mental
representations are an ineliminable posit of cognitive science. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Donald Davidson famously pointed out a
further problem for the development of “psychophysical laws” (as he called
them), laws that systematically identified brain processes with particular
contents of intentional thought: no <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">one</i>
propositional attitude could ever suffice as the discrete cause of a behavior
because the causal implication that the propositional attitude has for the
acting subject necessarily emerges from the logical relations that that
“attitude” has with all of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">other</i>
intentional states of the subject (this is the point where the problem of
representation and the problem of rationality connect).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Davidson’s phrase for this was “meaning
holism,” the view that meaning (inasmuch as meaning can be posited as something
playing a causal role in the production of behavior) is a property of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">networks</i> of propositional attitudes, not
of individual ones.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is not an
assortment of individual intentional states that constitute a person’s mental
content such that one or another might be identifiable as the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sole</i> cause of behavior (although one
might be the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">proximate</i> cause): each
person has an intentional economy, if you will, and our immediate reasons for
acting are the running product of the unfolding logical relationships among
this network of propositional attitudes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Finally, getting down to ontological
bedrock, some philosophers argue that since physical entities and processes
don’t have semantic properties (the properties of meaning something, of having
truth-values and of having logical relations with each other) then there must
be some other sort of entities that do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They nominate propositions, considered now as matter-independent,
mind-independent entities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This dualist
suggestion is usually called “Platonic realism” about propositions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Propositions, according to this view, are not
identical to their corresponding sets of physical tokens (sentences).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The idea is that, as with proofs of
mathematics, the entire set of physical tokens of a given proposition (written,
spoken or otherwise) could fail to exist without effecting the existence of the
transcendental, non-physical entity that is the proposition itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These philosophers invite us to consider all
of the propositions that have never been uttered or written, or even thought:
aren’t they in some sense nonetheless “there,” just as there are certainly many
still undiscovered proofs of mathematics?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>On this view propositions, like math proofs, are eternal, unchanging,
mind- and matter-independent non-physical entities that possess the
non-physical (semantic) properties that the propositional attitude model of
intentional states (or for that matter any representational theory of mind)
entails.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Those of us with an interest in
metaphysics are willing to at least consider this sort of suggestion on its own
terms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hard-headed experimental
cognitive scientists, on the other hand, perhaps already impatient with the
very idea of metaphysical problems as such, may feel that now this discussion
has gone too far: “We’re not Platonic dualists, for heaven’s sake!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it’s not obvious that representational cognitivists
can really distance themselves from this kind of anti-naturalism (patent
dualism in fact).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The representational
theorist of mind needs representations precisely because representations, and
only representations, are the kinds of things that could possess semantic
properties.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“No computation without
representation,” as Jerry Fodor put it with his characteristic impishness.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The representational cognitivists,
then, appear to be at least tacitly committed to the position that intentional
(semantic) properties are real and non-physical, and this position entails
further ontological commitments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of
course anyone is free to embrace some kind of dualist ontology if that is what
they are convinced the world is like.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But
I, for one, will opt for some kind of monist ontology if that is one of the
plausible options.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I would sooner try to
eliminate non-physical properties from the theory of mind than grant the
existence of the non-physical entities that must exist to have them if it turns
out that we can do without the original non-physical properties in the first
place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And while one may pursue the satisfactions
of philosophy for their own sake the fact is that these ontological
difficulties need to be worked out if psychology (or at least cognitive
science) is ever to be naturalized. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Bookman Old Style","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">In any event, one can summarize the
standard representational cognitivist view as holding that representation is necessary
for intentionality (it’s the representations that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mean</i> something and this semantic content plays an ineliminable
causal role), that syntactical structure (formal rules of composition) are
necessary to generate representations and that, therefore, the central project
of cognitive science is the investigation of this syntactical structure. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the late 20<sup>th</sup> century this
cognitivist paradigm supported a great flowering of work in theoretical
psychology (much as the behaviorist paradigm had supported a great flowering of
experimental psychology in the earlier decades of that century). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
Anderson Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358008464457746997noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3736365491401043672.post-20526469799949174062012-03-18T11:46:00.001-04:002012-03-18T11:47:48.485-04:00The heterogeneity of intentionalityThe problem of intentionality itself decomposes further into two interrelated but distinguishable problems. The topic of this chapter is the problem of mental representation. Formal systems of representation such as languages have, supposedly, the property of meaning (that I will usually call the semantic property or, interchangeably, the intentional property). Symbols refer to, are about, things other than themselves (the neologism “aboutness” also expresses this property) while physical things (or things described and explained in physical terms) do not have any such property (physical explanations are “closed,” that is they include only physical terms). A naturalized semantic of psychological predicates would be free of reference to non-physical properties, but even our current neurophysiology textbooks tend to present information-processing models of nervous system function (and the popular conception of the mind is of something full of images, information and language).
The problem of meaning is also addressed in philosophy of language, but language and other symbol-systems are conventional (albeit the products of long evolutionary processes): the location of the ur-problem is in philosophy of mind. Consider the chair in which you sit. It (the chair) does not mean anything. Of course you can assign some arbitrary significance to it if you wish (“When I put the chair on the porch the coast is clear”), or infer things from its nature, disposition and so forth (“Who’s been sitting on my chair?”), but that doesn’t affect the point: physical objects in and of themselves don’t mean anything or refer to other things the way symbols do. Now consider your own physical body: it doesn’t “mean” anything any more than the chair or any other physical object does. Nor do its parts: your hand or, more to the point, your brain, or any parts of, or processes occurring in, your brain. Your brain is just neural tissue humming and buzzing and doing its electrochemical thing, and the only properties included in our descriptions and explanations of its workings are physical properties. But when we predicate of a person mental states such as “He believes that Paris is the capitol of France,” or “She hopes that Margaret is at the party tonight,” these mental states appear to have the property of referring to, of being about, something else: France or Margaret or what have you. It looks, that is, like the mental state has a property that the physical state utterly lacks: a non-physical property.
The operationalist theories of mind developed by philosophers in the early 20th century are largely a response to the problem of representation, although there are a variety of conclusions: behaviorism is straightforwardly eliminativist about mental content, limiting the possible criteria for use of psychological predicates to intersubjectively observable things (granting that there are “strong” and “soft” versions of the theory). Computationalism holds that minds are formal rule-governed symbol-manipulating systems. It aims at radically minimizing the symbol system (as in binary-code machine language for example) but is committed to symbolic content per se, as a computer is defined, a la Turing, as a formal rule-governed symbol manipulating device.
Functionalism proposes a psychology that is described purely in functional terms rather than physical terms. This allows for replacing references to representations with references to functionally equivalent, not-necessarily-representational states, but in its very abstraction functionalism does not commit to eliminating representations (functionalism may be more of a method than a theory). This chapter develops an operationalist semantic of intentional predicates that not only dispenses with any references to mental representation (as behaviorism and functionalism do) but that also develops an eliminativist account that actually rules out the possibility of mental content.
The other part of the problem of intentionality is the problem of rationality. Rationality is multiply realizable (a synonymous term is supervenient). For example a human being, a dolphin, a (theoretically possible) rational artifact and a (probably existing) rational extraterrestrial can all grasp and make use of the function of, say, transitivity (“If X then Y, if Y then Z, therefore if X then Z”). But these beings are made of various different substances organized in various different ways. There are, apparently, no physical states or properties that are necessary for all rational beings: no physical criteria that fix the extension of the set of all rational beings. There are no psychophysical laws regarding rationality, generalizations to the effect that any being with such-and-such logical capacity must have such-and-such physical characteristics or vice versa.
The problem of mental representation and the problem of rationality can be distinguished as separate metaphysical problems. We would still be confronted with the problem of rationality even if nobody subscribed to a representational theory of mind. Nonetheless the two sub-problems should be grouped together under the general rubric of the problem of intentionality because both are problems for the same set of psychological predicates, the intentional predicates: “believes,” “desires,” “hopes,” “fears” etc. Intentional predicates name states that apparently entail mental content, as one believes that X, fears that Y etc., and also apparently entail rationality, as it is only explanatory when I say to you about a person that he left the room “because he was thirsty” if we share the background assumption that if he believes that there is water at the fountain and desires to have water then, all other things being equal, he will form an intention to go to the fountain – that is, a person must show some minimal grasp of the logical relations between intentional states both to be a subject of intentional predication and to make use of it (this is commonly referred to as the rationality assumption).
I think that I can provide a satisfactory response to the problem of propositions as bearers of logical relations and to the problem of rationality generally, although the result is somewhat surprising in the context of the overall naturalist project of this book. However the problem of mental representation will be discussed first, because it is important to see that even if we were to reject the representational theory of mind (as I think we should) we would still be confronted with the problem of rationality.Anderson Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358008464457746997noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3736365491401043672.post-63502249399415043712011-11-11T13:38:00.001-04:002011-11-11T13:39:57.083-04:00Aristotle and WittgensteinI’m afraid that some readers will be growing impatient as they read the foregoing discussion of a kind of Platonic resolution to the problem of rationality. Hadn’t I just, in the first half of this same chapter, argued for an operational theory of intentional predicates? Not only that, but when one suggests that the non-physical property of “meaning” can be washed out of the ontology of mind and language (replaced with an externalist account of intentional predicates as describing relations between persons and environments), that would be about as nominalist as one could go, surely?
Maybe not. The Platonism that I am offering has only one element of basic ontology besides matter. Form is indivisible, not divisible; a unity, not a multiplicity. There is only one form really: only one (perhaps inexplicable) ontological fact beyond the fact of the existence of something rather than nothing. Putting the question of Plato and Aristotle’s own views of species as “fixed natural kinds” to the side in favor of a view of species informed by evolutionary biology, it can be seen that putative “forms” such as the property of “cowness” or “lyrehood” are not genuine examples of form. Some categories (types of species, types of artifacts) come-to-be and pass away.
In its Aristotelian version Platonic form-matter dualism becomes a kind of non-reductive materialism: primary being is substance, the unity of form and matter. From the doctrine of the unity of form, though, it appears that this must be a kind of “non-reductive formalism” as well, as every particular with a formal property has that property, not by virtue only of the formally-organized parts of that particular, but by virtue of the entire formal organization of the material world: all geometric shapes (for example) are tokens of the one thing.
We know that by this point Wittgenstein would be fuming, but as usual with him we might not be certain exactly why. Of course Wittgenstein would have none of this Platonic talk. “The idea that in order to get clear about the meaning of a general term one had to find the common element in all its applications has shackled philosophical investigation; for it has not only led to no result, but also made the philosopher dismiss as irrelevant the concrete cases, which alone could have helped him to understand the usage of the general term. When Socrates asks the question, ‘what is knowledge?’ he does not even regard it as a preliminary answer to enumerate cases of knowledge.” (Blue and Brown Books; italics in original). Wittgenstein’s operationalist account of functional-role semantics is an arch-nominalist position: there is human behavior, a highly-adaptive and plastic process that changes over time, whose constants are determined by the biological (probably the best choice) nature of the human body and the human “mode of life.” “Property” names (like all names) really pick out parts of language, and the criteria for the proper application of language are essentially operational. Insofar as this line is developed as a strategy to naturalize meaning I think it’s a good one.
But I have never thought that philosophy of mathematics was a particularly strong point for empiricists, and that is troubling considering that Wittgenstein devoted a considerable portion of his writings to the development of an operationalist theory of mathematics. In any event I am unpersuaded by Wittgenstein’s view that extending the known proofs of mathematics is nothing more than an elaboration of a kind of “language game,” specific to humans by virtue of our particular “form of life,” such that there was no such system of entailments until some human (for example) elaborated it. It’s counterintuitive: isn’t the fact, that we can work our way from one part of mathematics to another, evidence that mathematical reasoning is coherent? Doesn’t Wittgenstein’s ultra-nominalist view of mathematics overstate the possibility space: the different ways “mathematics” could go?
However, it may be that the two treatments of the two different parts of intentionality - an eliminativist, operationalist argument to the effect that mental representation/content is not part of the reference of intentional predicates, on the one hand, and an Aristotelean argument to the effect that rationality is nothing more nor less than a formal property and that formal properties, if they exist at all, are ubiquitous – are compatible. According to Wittgenstein there are no abstract entities, of course, but it is important to appreciate how far Wittgenstein went in his naturalization of meaning, and how central to this were his ideas about mathematics. Wittgenstein saw mathematical behavior as a “technique,” a technique for living. “Living” is the operational verb that replaces the Cartesian verb “knowing”: a case of knowing how rather than knowing that. Wittgenstein rejected the passivity of the representational theory and insisted on viewing language as a physical behavior that aimed at getting on with the business of life.
Granted that the Aristotelean world is one where every concrete particular is a union of matter and form, the “form of life,” understood as the vital activities of a being of that kind, would exhibit formal properties. In fact “behavioral ecology” develops an entire narrative, largely mathematical, about the ratio of nutrients per square meter to species population per square meter, showing the correlations between these functions and genetic transmission and so forth. The human “form of life,” if it is anything at all, is a product of the same natural history as that of the human organism; the rationality of humans, like the harmony of musical instruments, is an expression of form.
Within this form of life, that stress made no more emphatically by anyone than Wittgenstein himself, the criteria for use of psychological predicates can be understood operationally such that no mental content is implied. In fact Wittgenstein and Aristotle come together in a sense around “form of life” or what Aristotle would call the telos of an organism. They both suspected that explanations about what sort of thing a thing was and what sort of life a thing led were more informative than explanations about what sort of things a thing thought. Wittgenstein thought that the notion of mental content made no sense. I take the argument from the form-matter distinction to show that “computation” need not necessarily entail mental representations; organizational complexity equivalent to the syntactical complexity of language is found throughout nature. Finally, Wittgenstein’s functional-role semantics and Aristotle’s teleological account of biological explanation are very similarly motivated. They come together in the area where functionalism replaces reductive materialism as a response to the supervenient nature of the functional property.Anderson Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358008464457746997noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3736365491401043672.post-36188077120096688692011-10-09T15:20:00.000-04:002015-05-31T09:58:12.546-04:00The Mereological Fallacy and representational Theories of MindStomachs don’t eat lunch. Eating lunch is something that a whole, embodied person does. We understand the role that stomachs play in the lunch-eating process; we appreciate that people can’t eat lunch without them. Brains don’t think. They don’t learn, imagine, solve problems, calculate, dream, remember, hallucinate or perceive. To think that they do is to commit the same fallacy as someone who thought that people can eat lunch because they have little people inside them (stomachs) that eat lunch. This is the mereological fallacy: the fallacy of confusing the part with the whole (or of confusing the function of the part with the telos, or aim, of the whole, as Aristotle, who as usual beat us to the crux of the problem, would say).
Nor is the homunculus a useful explanatory device in either case. When I am asked how we might explain the workings of the mind without recourse to mental representations (students often ask this), the reply is that we fail to explain anything at all about the workings of the mind with them. “Remembering my mother’s face is achieved by inspecting a representation of her face in my mind.” This is explanatorily vacuous. And if reference to representations does nothing to explain dreaming, imagining and remembering, it is particularly egregious when mental content is appealed to for an explanation of perception itself, the original “Cartesian” mistake from which all of the other problems derive.<br />
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A person is constantly developing and revising an idea of his or her world; you can call it a “picture” if you like (a “worldview”), but that is figurative language. A person does not have a picture inside his or her body. Brains don’t form ideas about the world. That’s the kind of thing people do.
This original Cartesian error continues to infest contemporary cognitive science. When the brain areas in the left hemisphere correlated with understanding speech light up and one says, “This is where speech comprehension is occurring,” the mereological fallacy is alive and well. Speech comprehension is not something that occurs inside the body. Persons comprehend speech, and they do it out in the “external” world (the only world there is).<br />
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Positing representations that exist inside the body is an instance of the mereological fallacy, and it is so necessarily, by virtue of the communicative element that is part of the definition of “representation,” “symbol” etc. Neither any part of the brain nor the brain or nervous system considered as a whole interprets anything. The key to developing a natural semantic of intentional predicates is to realize that they are predicated of persons, whole embodied beings functioning in relation to a larger environment. Brain/body dualism can be presented as non-dualist (isn’t the brain a physical organ of the body?), but it is an insidiously Cartesian view that gets us no farther in naturalizing intentional predicates.<br />
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Suppose that you are driving down the freeway searching for your exit, and you’re worried you might have passed it. You remember that there are some fast-food restaurants at the exit, and you think that one always feels that they have gone too far in these situations, so you press on, keeping an eye out for the restaurants. However you manage to do this, it is no explanation to say that you have done it because your brain remembered the fast-food restaurants, and has beliefs about the phenomenology of being lost on the freeway, and decided to keep going and so forth. That’s like saying that the way you had lunch was that your stomach had lunch.<br />
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This realization may also be momentous for brain science. Go to the medical school bookstore, find the neurophysiology textbooks and spend a few minutes perusing them. Within the first minutes you will find references to the “movement of information” (for example by the spinal column), “maps” (for example on the surface of the cortex), “information processing” (for example by the retina and in the visual cortex) and so on. (Actually my impression is that brain scientists are relatively sophisticated in their understanding of the figurative nature of this kind of language compared to workers in other areas of cognitive science; the point is just that representational talk does indeed saturate the professional literature through and through.) But if brain function does not involve representations then we don’t know what brains actually do, and furthermore the representational paradigm is an obstacle to finding out: think of all those experimentalists developing protocols to try to “locate the symbolic architecture.” They might be looking for something that isn’t there. If there is any possibility that this is true these arguments need to be thoroughly explored at the very least.<br />
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Taking the argument from the mereological fallacy seriously also draws our attention to the nature of persons. It follows from what has been said that the definition of “person” will be operational. Operational definitions have an inevitably circular character: a person is any being that takes intentional predicates. In fact there is not a “machine-language” explanation of personhood. Kant, writing in the late 1700s, is fastidious about referring to “all rational beings,” he never says “human beings”; he understands that when we are discussing the property of personhood we are discussing (what I would call) a supervenient functional property (Kant would call personhood “transcendental”), not a contingent physical property. However Kant is programmatically intent on limiting the scope of materialism as such and thus fails to develop non-reductive materialism. Instead he imports the mental (“reason”) from the noumenal world and ignores the problem of the relationship between transcendental reason and the human body (this is not to say that he does not acknowledge the role of our particular, contingent sense organs in shaping our representations of the world to the extent that those representations are themselves contingent and particular to us).<br />
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With Kant we remain in our bodies but not of them.
Once one recognizes that intentional predicates are predicated of whole persons – once one sees that positing mental representations necessarily commits the mereological fallacy – the question of representation is settled. It is I, and not some “brain state,” that is remembering my mother’s face. However there is a tight network of arguments and assumptions, centered on a model of intentional states as “propositional attitudes,” that will have to be disentangled to the satisfaction of readers who are disposed to defend representations. After that unpacking is done the reader will also reasonably expect some account of a non-representational analysis of intentional predicates, something that is not achieved by simply pointing out the mereological fallacy.
Anderson Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358008464457746997noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3736365491401043672.post-43135326515963103762011-06-19T10:56:00.002-04:002011-06-19T11:00:08.251-04:00A Short Introduction to the Philosophy of Artificial IntelligenceThis is a rough draft, I participated in an interdisciplinary class and I'm thinking of submitting to maybe "Teaching Philosophy."<br />
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I. The historical background <br />
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AI is not only a rich source of new technology produced by interdisciplinary syntheses. It also, in its theoretical component, is an extension and elaboration of some of the central, canonical debates about “intelligence,” “mind” and “rationality” that have defined philosophy and psychology for hundreds of years. Specifically we find ourselves participating in the conversation that dates back to the “Early Modern” period of philosophy, roughly the 17th and 18th centuries, between so-called “Rationalists” (Descartes, Spinoza, Kant) and so-called “Empiricists” (Locke, Berkeley, Hume). The Rationalists, impressed by humans’ apparently unique ability to formalize mathematics and logic, held that the human mind was endowed with innate abilities and knowledge, and that these abilities could not be understood using the methods of natural science (these views were anticipated by Plato). The Empiricists of the 18th century Enlightenment, eager to develop a naturalistic account that integrated humans into nature, proposed a simplified psychology that essentially saw the mind as a learning machine and concentrated on perceptual psychology and learning theory. (Nowadays historians of philosophy tend to see the Rationalist/Empiricist distinction as a bit overstated, as we can see in perspective that they were all discussing the same set of issues with many of the same premises.)<br />
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An important product of this Early Modern discussion, introduced by Descartes in the first half of the 1600s (Descartes 1637) but crystallized by Kant at the end of the 1700s (Kant 1789) was the representational theory of mind. According to this view the mind works by constructing a representation of the world; Kant developed the idea of a <br />
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“conceptual framework” such that our “picture” of the world was as much a product of our own innate mental structure as it was of our perceptual experiences. Thus the issue of mental representation is an essential issue in the elaboration of the nativist/learning theorist divide as it plays out across the 19th and 20th centuries. For example, the behaviorists of the early 20th century are nothing neither more nor less than Humean empiricists: they applied “operationalist” ideas from the philosophy of science to try to develop a psychology that was cleansed of any reference to unobservable, “internal” mental “states,” including representations (mental content). On the other side the phenomenologists of the same period advanced the thoroughly Kantian argument that the study of the structure of experience would always necessarily stand apart from physical science. (Here we can stop and notice an even deeper root: the medieval question of the duality of the body and the soul.) In the middle of the 20th century the “nature/nurture” debate, as this same set of issues was then called, was of central importance in debates about the social sciences in general, a central battleground of the “culture wars” of the 1960s and 1970s. The nativist/learning theory divide also shaped the 20th century ethological literature about the mental lives of non-human animals.<br />
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II. Computation and representation<br />
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The issue of representation is central to contemporary debates about models of computation. In fact the theory of computation is yet another version of the same argument that constitutes the theory of the social sciences and the theory of ethology. Alan Turing in 1936 introduced his “Turing machine,” a thought-experiment that showed that a simple machine could instantiate any algorithm of mathematics and logic. This was a seminal moment not only in the development of computers but also in the course of artificial intelligence research. For the next fifty years many in the cognitive science community and the public at large saw “artificial intelligence” as just synonymous with computer science. Two crucial points here: first, to understand what is happening in artificial intelligence research today it is necessary to understand the computationalist era, because what we are currently living through is a departure from that era. Second, computationalism, as conceived by Turing and others, required representation: classical computation is rule-governed symbol-manipulation. <br />
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At this point we can consider some basic premises of linguistics. The classical computationalist view reached its apotheosis in 1975 with the publication of Jerry Fodor’s The Language of Thought. Noam Chomsky had launched what seemed for a time a devastating attack on behaviorism with his critique of B. F. Skinner’s 1957 book Verbal Behavior and Chomsky’s subsequent Aspects of a Theory of Syntax (1965). Chomsky argued that a syntactical structure (a grammar, or set of rules for constructing sentences and statements) was generative (it could generate novel linguistic representations and therefore novel thoughts), and was thus necessary for higher-order thought (this argument led to the sign-language research with chimpanzees of the 1960s-80s). This was, as Chomsky himself stressed, Cartesianism in a new bottle.<br />
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Fodor applied these ideas to cognitive science in general. Any representational theory of mind requires a symbolic architecture: this is simply the material instantiation of the symbols: the pixels in the computer screen, the ink marks on the page, the sound-compression waves caused by vibrating vocal chords, the chalk marks on the board. If the nervous system is a symbol-manipulating system then there must be a material instantiation of the symbols as part of the physical structure of the system. Fodor proposed that syntactical structure (the program, if you will, of the brain) could account for the causal role of the seemingly semantic mental content. This arch-computationalist view took it as axiomatic that the mind/brain necessarily involved representations.<br />
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III. Computers and the brain<br />
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Computers are our own creations, so their workings are not mysterious to us. The same thing cannot be said of the brain. Each age draws on the current technology as a metaphor/theory about how the brain works: the 17th century physicalist Thomas Hobbes, for example, drew heavily on hydraulics in his discussion of the mind. He speculated that memory might be a kind of vibration, as in a spring, that lost coherence as other vibrations passed through. In our time it is commonplace to speculate that the brain is a kind of computer and that a computer is a kind of a brain. However there are two very different approaches to developing this idea.<br />
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Classical computation is based on codes (programming languages) that contain explicit instructions for the transformation of states of the machine. The actual “machine language” is binary code (this is the meaning of “digital”). The symbolic architecture in a traditional computer is located in the “chip.” This is a series of gates that might either allow or block an electrical impulse to pass through. Thus the “1s” and “0s” of digital codes stand for actual physical states of the machine. If the human brain is also a system that functions through instantiating representation than the goal of cognitive science is to uncover the machine language of the brain: to make the connection between the psychological description of the subject and the actual physical state of the nervous system.<br />
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The brain does, in fact, possess physical features that lend themselves to a theory of symbolic architecture similar to that found in digital computers. The brain is a massive assemblage of individual neurons that interact with each other through the flow of electrical impulses (“cascades”). The impulses do not pass arbitrarily, of course; the brain shows immense organizational complexity. But essentially one neuron or group of neurons will, upon being “lit up” by a cascade of electricity, either send the event onward to the downstream neurons of fail to do so, and this can be seen as the “1/0” analog. What’s more, between neurons there is a space, the synaptic cleft, which contains a soup of neurotransmitters that buffer the electrical connection (they can be more or less conductive). So instead of an “on/off” potential, like a light switch, there is a gradient potential, like a volume control. This vastly increases the potential number of physical states of which the brain is capable. All of this constitutes a non-arbitrary reason for thinking that the brain may indeed function like a traditional computer: the synaptic pattern could be the symbolic architecture of the brain just as the disposition of the gates in the chips is the symbolic architecture of the computer.<br />
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However a new generation of computer models now challenges classical computation and its axiom that representation is necessary for computation. In this new generation of research, computers are actually modeled on brains while at the same time the new computers are contributing to new insights into how brains themselves work. This movement is sometimes referred to as “parallel distributed processing” and as the “neural net model,” but it has come to be popularly known as “connectionism.”<br />
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Classical computation has some limiting and apparently intractable problems. As anyone who has worked with computers knows, they are insufferably single-minded. This is natural, as they can only do what they are told to do by their programmers; “garbage in, garbage out.” One of the central problems for traditional computers is the “framing problem.” Consider any homonym, for example “bank.” An ordinary human has no trouble during conversation distinguishing between the two senses in sentences like “I was laying on the bank of the river” versus “I made a withdrawal from my bank.” Traditional computers are strictly limited in terms of contextualizing. This is because computers don’t actually know anything. They are devices for manipulating symbols and nothing more.<br />
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What’s more, traditional computers can’t learn anything new. They know what they are told. Now, remember the Rationalist/Empiricist debate. The Rationalists thought that there was an innate conceptual structure, incarnate in language, of essentially mathematical and logical principles, and this structure (the mind, or soul) was the source and basis of rational behavior. The Empiricists argued that a naturalistic psychology required that there be nothing more than an ability to learn from experience on the basis of trial and error, and were skeptical of non-physical states and entities. Connectionist computer models are empiricist approaches to computing in the same way that behaviorism is an empiricist approach to psychology. Connectionist machines do indeed show some primitive ability to learn on their own; they function (ideally) with no recourse to internal codes or representations; and they are solidly based on basic principles of evolutionary biology.<br />
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Connectionist machines function, as brains do, by forming patterns of activation. An input layer of nodes are electrically stimulated and this layer accordingly stimulates some number of “hidden,” internal layers which ultimately stimulate the output layer. Activation potentials can be weighted in various ways but the basic mechanism is the number of nodal connections which can constitute a threshold for downstream activation:<br />
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(Insert figure of simple connectionism: input layer, hidden layer, output layer)<br />
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This technology underlies handwriting-, voice- and facial-recognition functions that are now commonplace (an original application was for submarine sonar submarine-recognition and missile-recognition). This is achieved through trial-and-error. A trainer adjusts the activation potentials to increase correct outputs and to extinguish incorrect ones. This process does not require any internal symbolic content.<br />
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Here it is useful to note that Darwin’s model of evolution as outcomes-based selection over random variation is very much a product of empiricism. In fact Darwin was reading the Scottish Enlightenment economist Adam Smith’s 1776 Wealth of Nations, with its account of larger economic structures formed from the bottom up through iterations of economic exchanges between autonomous, self-interested individuals when he was developing his account of natural selection (Darwin 1859). An important distinction between the Rationalist program and the Empiricist one is that Rationalists tend to see complex systems as organized from the top down whereas Empiricists see complexity as emerging from the bottom up. The distinction between classical computation and connectionist computing mirrors this distinction.<br />
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However the field of AI is moving in even more radical directions. Although modern cognitive scientists will obviously disavow Cartesian dualism about the mind and the body, in a sense the Cartesian model has often been simply transposed into a brain-body distinction. On a common view it is the brain that is (now) the “cognitive theater,” the seat of representations, the CPU where thinking takes place: the same role Descartes assigned to the res cogitans (Hacker). This view underlies the assumption that AI research is simply an extension of computer science. That collective assumption is now collapsing.<br />
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IV. Robotics<br />
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On a representational model, “beliefs” and other mental states are instantiated in the form of mental content: language, images and so forth “in the head.” As I said, this is recognizably a continuation of a kind of Cartesian dualism. Indeed representational models are essentially dualistic if representations are taken to have semantic properties that are not analyzable as physical properties (this is one of a number of philosophical issues that I went into to some depth in the class). An alternative view is that psychological predicates are predicated not of brains but of whole persons. <br />
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Stomachs don’t eat lunch. People eat lunch. True enough that one needs a stomach to eat one’s lunch, but it doesn’t explain how a person eats lunch to say, “Their stomach eats lunch for them.” Brains don’t think. They don’t imagine, dream, solve problems or recognize patterns. People do those things, just as people believe, desire, hope, fear, etc. In fact, committing this mereological fallacy – the fallacy of confusing the part with the whole – obstructed our ability to learn what it is that brains actually do. We were sidetracked by the misconception that brains are little people in our heads.<br />
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“Embodied cognition” is the name given to a recent movement in cognitive science that rejects representational models of thought. The idea is that “thinking” is an activity that is distributed over the whole body. This movement has been in a particularly fertile dialectical relationship with robotics. (Not surprisingly this community has developed some excellent internet resources where students can see footage of robots in action.) It is clear enough that the future of AI lies as much with the field of robotics as with the field of computer science. What is important in an interdisciplinary context is to see the underlying, and quite old, philosophical considerations that make that clear. This also presents an opportunity to discuss the history and philosophy of science.Anderson Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358008464457746997noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3736365491401043672.post-22517710118440835962011-05-29T12:29:00.000-04:002011-05-29T12:29:14.744-04:00A little bit of naturalist apologiaWe live in a world where most natural phenomena, from the micro level of atoms, cells and molecules up to the macro level of galaxies and the universe itself, seem to be describable and explicable in physical terms. Physicalism (I mean by this term the metaphysical position that only the physical universe exists) is, as I said, by no means triumphant (and it is a reasonable point that contemporary physics itself presents us with a still-mysterious and newly-strange picture of the universe). There are ongoing popular metaphysical arguments about evolutionary biology and about cosmology, for example. But it is a striking fact about contemporary culture that psychology (and by extension the behavioral and social disciplines) are still not considered to be integrated into our otherwise generally physicalist metaphysics. Put another way, while many people today have firmly internalized physicalist intuitions about organic life, say, or about distant celestial objects, physicalist theories of mind still meet with resistance today, even among secular people who have broadly physicalist attitudes.<br />
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I’m not someone motivated mostly by ideology. I’ve always been impressed by Socrates’ description (in the Theatetus) of the search for knowledge as the activity of becoming aware of what it is that one truly believes, and then stating that belief, above all to oneself, as clearly and courageously as possible (in fact Socrates is claiming, contra his relativist antagonists, that this is the essential, unavoidable human activity). I’ve had the salutary experience of changing my mind and reversing myself several times during my relationship with philosophy of mind. Now I just want to develop the soundest view of the matter that I can, as one climbs a mountain. One of the worst faults a philosopher can have is the tendency to magical thinking: trying to make a brief for what one wants to be true. <br />
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However another couple of paragraphs of self-explanation are warranted. I know this because I have spent the past ten years or so teaching the philosophy of mind to undergraduates at two large state universities. Inevitably this involves, among other things, leading a lay audience to discuss, usually for the first time, the topic of naturalism with regard to human nature and to the mind. Of course there are people who arrive in the classroom already thoroughly naturalistic. But consistently there are people who struggle with this topic for deeper, cultural reasons. Although this discussion is rarely included in books on philosophy of mind, I have found that it is best to present some apologia at the beginning for students who may have some preconceptions that can turn them off, as well as to reassure them that I too think that these are legitimate concerns that can be discussed if they wish.<br />
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OK, so here’s an ideological argument: Humans are depressingly alienated from nature. Our relationship with the rest of the biota on this planet is not a good one. Urgent action is necessary to stem climate change, species extinction and other environmental problems that pose grave threats. However we also need longer-term cultural evolution, a change in our attitude towards our relationship with nature, and this change is effected to some extent by cultural workers such as artists, philosophers and writers. <br />
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It is my opinion that human exceptionalism, and a lot of bad metaphysics down a lot of centuries that came with it, is one root of our dysfunctional relationship with nature. I think that naturalism about psychology is the most progressive view. I think that naturalism is also the most spiritual view. And it is the healthiest view of human nature. I may be all wrong on all of that. But the reader ought to understand that I concede no quarter of the argument between physicalism about the mind and its alternatives, including discussions in terms of enlightenment, ethics, freedom, spirituality and so forth. Those discussions, however, will form little or no part of this book.<br />
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A programmatic point that will be discussed, though, is the importance of clearing up some of the logical and linguistic problems that we continue to have with our concept of “mind” in order to make progress in experimental science. Theory can have a good deal to say about the development of experimental protocols, and good theory will make these implications clear.Anderson Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358008464457746997noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3736365491401043672.post-20969249287553022962011-05-22T13:00:00.002-04:002011-05-22T13:00:27.399-04:00Metaphysics and the philosophy of mindThis is a book about the metaphysics of the mind/body problem. Metaphysics (or “ontology”) is the study of what exists (Aristotle called it the study of “being”). To many people today metaphysics seems anachronistic. Haven’t we settled the issue of what exists, they might ask, in favor of the physical universe? And isn’t natural science the way we produce knowledge about this universe? How could more work in metaphysics possibly generate any persuasive arguments, if “metaphysics” is not simply “physics”? Arguments about the relationship between the mind and the body that aren’t grounded in empirical research of some sort can’t hope to be legitimate in a world awash in data from experimental psychology, neuroscience, computer science, evolutionary biology, linguistics and the myriad of interdisciplinary areas of research that today we call “cognitive studies.” Isn’t a metaphysician a mere poet of speculation? Diverting at best, but such a person has no hope of producing useful knowledge. That, anyway, is often the initial reaction one meets with the topic of the metaphysics of the mind/body problem. I will respond to this initial “meta”-challenge in two ways.<br />
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First, I completely embrace the spirit, and much of the letter, of this initial objection. I too take it as axiomatic that what exists is the physical universe (by “physical” I mean the universe of matter and energy, or maybe matter/energy; I don’t pretend to be sophisticated about theoretical physics). I don’t think that humans are composed of physical bodies and non-physical souls, like a traditional mind/body dualist. I think that humans are physical through and through, animals that evolved here on earth through a long process of evolution the contingencies of which were, and continue to be, bounded by the constants of biology, chemistry, and physics. I don’t expect to discover that humans are angels, or that the physical universe is an illusion and humans are non-physical spirits, or anything like that.<br />
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The universe is as magical, mysterious and mystical as it may be; I don’t know anything about the ultimate composition or nature of the universe. I have no interest in making a brief for reduction, as if natural science can address every one of our wonders, or even potentially could. I don’t even know what we’re talking about when we use that kind of language. My claim is much humbler: whatever nature in general is like, humans are like that. Humans are not miracles, if a “miracle” is defined as an exception to the laws of nature. Call me an “anti-humanist.” I hold the anti-humanist view simply because I know of no reason to think that humans are miracles; I stress it because a deeply internalized assumption of human exceptionalism continues to be a barrier to progress across the whole range of the behavioral and cognitive sciences.<br />
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Which brings me to the second response to the objection that metaphysics is anachronistic: it is certainly not true that the contemporary society of educated people embraces anti-humanism as I just defined it. A great many college students, most people walking down the street and the overwhelming majority of the world’s population today continue to think that the mind is something distinct from the body or, at least, that mental phenomena cannot be adequately described and explained in wholly physical terms. This conviction has various sources that range from traditional, usually religion-based beliefs about souls, afterlives and so forth to more modern notions, such as the view that a naturalistic view of human nature is perniciously reductive and to be resisted by the liberal-minded, or perhaps that science itself is nothing more than a socially-constructed “conceptual scheme” with no particular claim to legitimacy, and so on. For another thing, very sophisticated versions of human exceptionalism exist in the academy today (for example among some linguists), such that it is by no means established conventional wisdom that physical science subsumes psychology by metaphysical axiom.<br />
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Metaphysics is not something that is replaced by physics. Physicalism is a particular metaphysical position. Everyone has metaphysical assumptions, articulated or not, whether they want to or not, and they always will. The person who chafes at the idea that there is still a need for explicitly metaphysical discussion is claiming that our shared metaphysical assumptions are currently stable, not that “there is no such thing as metaphysics,” although they may unreflectively put it that way. It’s true that physicalism is currently the ruling metaphysical paradigm among cognitive scientists, psychologists, philosophers and so on, and I too labor within this paradigm, albeit with some important qualifications that are discussed in the second part of Chapter Two.Anderson Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358008464457746997noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3736365491401043672.post-18640797552087491722011-05-15T10:36:00.000-04:002011-05-15T10:36:23.995-04:00Elan MentalThe claim that there is something (the quality of phenomenal experience) that cannot be explained by physical science is strictly analogous to the 19th century “vitalist” claim that the property of being alive could not be explained by physical science (the phrase “élan vital” was actually coined later, in 1907, by Henri Bergson in his book Creative Evolution). Consider all of the physical facts about physical states and processes in the body, the vitalist argued: singularly or together none of these facts entail that the body be alive. <br />
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This “hard problem” was never “solved.” It simply faded away as organic chemistry and physiology steadily explicated the physical mechanisms and processes occurring in various parts of cells, and in the various organs of the body. This took some time, well into the 20th century, but by the 1940s, anyway, it was no longer credible to claim that “life” was something that might not be present when these mechanisms and processes of organic chemistry were present, or might be present in their absence. “Life” will always be an ambiguous concept to some extent (there is ongoing debate as to whether viruses are living, for example), because it is an emergent property, but its physical nature is no longer seriously challenged. The concept of “consciousness” is now undergoing the same evolutionary process – not a similar process, the very same process.<br />
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This analogy has been prominently rehearsed by Patricia Churchland and by John Searle, among others. I will consider Searle’s version a little more closely by way of setting up the last chapter, where I will discuss the relationship between intentionality and consciousness. Searle makes an analogy between the solidity of a table and the consciousness of a brain: the table’s solidity is a macro-property that emerges from the micro-properties of the wood molecules (which are lattice-like). Consciousness, he suggests, is a macro-property that emerges from the micro-properties of neurons (although he doesn’t claim to know which micro-properties or why).<br />
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There are two problems with Searle’s analogy. First, in the case of the wood molecule and the table, they share the same property in the first place: the lattice-like structure of the wood molecule, like a folded piece of paper, just is solid (can bear weight by virtue of its structure). So solidity is not an “emergent macro-property,” solidity is already a property of the “micro” ingredients. If the question is “How can physical objects support weight?” then appeal to the weight-bearing nature of the wood molecule only pushes this question back a step. This problem with the analogy is irremediable: if the argument is that brains are conscious because neurons are conscious we have once again committed the hard-to-avoid error of including something mental in our purported recipe for the mental. If not, then the analogy does not go through: the wood molecules and the table share a property in common, so we do not have an actual example of a macro-property emerging from a micro-property (that is not to say that we couldn’t find such an example, only that this one isn’t it).<br />
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The second problem is more serious and to the point of the present discussion. Psychological predicates, as I argued at length in Chapter Two, are not predicated of brains or nervous systems but of whole persons. This goes for consciousness every bit as much as it does for intentionality. Brains no more feel or sense things than they think about or imagine things. Persons think and feel. Asserting this does not exclude me from the club of materialists in any way. <br />
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The crucial difference between intentionality and consciousness is that while intentional states are supervenient and therefore unexplainable through reductive materialism, phenomenal states are not supervenient and so a legitimate answer to the question “Why does it feel like that?” is “Because it is that specific physical body interacting with that specific physical feature of the environment (chocolate molecule, blue-reflecting surface, soft pillow etc)” – strict reductive materialism. We can say this, I think, even if we accept the argument that the question “Why does it feel like that?” is itself in a sense illegitimate since there is no way to fill in the sense of “that,” as Hume, Wittgenstein and the Buddhists argue. The basic insight is that having these conscious experiences is indistinguishable from having this physical body in this physical world.<br />
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There is only one sense in which we can coherently say that our own phenomenal experiences are in any way similar to those of other conscious beings, such that we can grasp a link between intentionality (universal among all intelligent beings) and consciousness (unique to each conscious being). In this book I have emphasized the distinction between intentionality and consciousness. The last chapter will explore the connection between them.Anderson Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358008464457746997noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3736365491401043672.post-54713068641038189512011-05-08T18:36:00.000-04:002011-05-08T18:39:48.359-04:00Hyper-chauvinistic type-to-type reductive materialismOK, it’s not really hyper-chauvinistic type-to-type reductive materialism, because there isn’t anything to “reduce,” if the above arguments are persuasive. But the fact is that so far as qualitative experience is concerned, yours is what it is because you have the body that you have. “Experiencing” is just identical to living in a body like that. <br /><br /> A crucial difference between intentional states and phenomenal states is that phenomenal states are not picked out operationally, while intentional states are, even though the criteria for use of phenomenal predicates is operational just as they are for the use of intentional predicates. This is because phenomenal experience is outside of the reach of language altogether: precisely because it is unique to oneself and thus incommunicable to another. This is a difference between bodies.<br /><br /> Saul Kripke, much of whose work was inspired by Wittgenstein, argued that reduction was impossible on linguistic grounds. A phenomenal word like “pain” could never be defined as, say, “C-fibers firing” because the word “pain” referred to the feeling of pain (that phenomenal experience), and, Kripke argued, one can imagine being in pain without one’s C-fibers firing (or without having C-fibers at all) and that one’s C-fibers might be firing (or what have you) without one feeling pain. Of course Kripke’s point is about all phenomenal language but, as we have seen, there is no coherent way to separate “experience of the world” from “the world.”<br /><br /> Kripke’s claim amounts to saying that one can imagine experiencing this world without this world (which includes one’s body), or that this world (including this body) could exist without these experiences. I take Hume’s point that these sorts of claims about what can be conceived or imagined are meaningless, because phenomenal experience of the world and the world itself cannot be metaphysically distinguished from each other. <br /><br /> However this does not mean that “pain” might be defined as C-fibers firing: it could not. Use of the word “pain” will be determined operationally (as David Lewis insisted) as the use of all words is determined operationally. Constructions such as “pain-for-me” have no functional role in communication, but one’s (actual) pain can be mentioned even if there is no use for a term that designates it: it is no less real for being inexpressible. Meanwhile Kripke is not entitled to the claim that one’s body (one’s C-fibers firing) is causing one to have a sensation of pain that is distinct from its cause. Such a claim is irremediably dualist: one’s body is not the cause of one’s phenomenal experience. One just is one’s C-fibers firing etc.<br /><br /> Better, then, to drop the “reductive.” But “type-to-type” is also a dubious phrase. Unlike in the case of intentional states, there is no distinction between types and tokens when we are referring to conscious experience: each body is to some extent unique, and consciousness (unlike intentionality) is not supervenient. And the suffix “hyper” is perhaps a bit of rhetoric on my part. Better, perhaps, to call our theory of phenomenal mind simply “chauvinistic materialism,” if the need is still felt for a “theory” to account for a pseudoproblem. <br /><br />This is no problem for science; since science, understood as a cultural artifact, is limited to the intersubjective, and phenomenal experience is wholly subjective (that’s why it’s a little silly to say that we have a “theory” here at all). Thus we can contemplate the resolution of the so-called “hard” problem of consciousness.Anderson Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358008464457746997noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3736365491401043672.post-66637926911836884862011-05-01T13:09:00.000-04:002011-05-01T13:10:53.054-04:00Phenomenal states are not supervenientIntentional states are multiply realizable, and functionalism was motivated by this fact. The supervenient nature of intentional states constitutes a real block to reductive materialism for intentionality. However intentional states can be individuated operationally. The intuition that the psychological description “He likes chocolate” involves a reference to the subject’s qualitative experience of tasting chocolate is wrong (or, we can mention the qualitative experience but we cannot actually convey it). In the case of the Martians we might not know if they even “taste” things at all; nonetheless we might come to know that they like chocolate.<br /><br /> A consequence of the necessarily operational basis of intentional descriptions is that, to use an example made famous by Daniel Dennett (although I don’t know that Dennett would agree with my line here), a lowly thermostat is a kind of intentional system: we can determine when it thinks that the room is too cold, just right or too hot. The intuition that this can’t be, that a thermostat is clearly not a mind, is a consequence of internalizing the traditional homogeneous concept of “mind” (because the thermostat has no Nagelian experience), aggravated by the prevailing dogma that thinking necessarily involves representations. When we disambiguate “mind” and see that intentionality is something altogether different than consciousness there is no denying that the thermostat is, in fact, an intentional being; nor does that fact in any way compromise our philosophical use of the term “intentionality.”<br /><br /> The qualities of experience, on the other hand, are not supervenient. It is plainly true that humans, dolphins, probable intelligent extraterrestrials and possible intelligent artifacts, among an indefinitely large set of other beings, can all believe that the chocolate is in the box, desire the chocolate and so forth. But there is no reason whatever to think that chocolate tastes like that (the way it tastes to me, say) for all of the members of the set: there isn’t even any reason to think that all of the members of the set of chocolate-desirers taste anything at all. <br /><br /> Ironically what this amounts to is that intentional properties are more ontologically mysterious, not less, than phenomenal properties. Consciousness has been called the “hard problem,” but in fact the right metaphysical account of consciousness is, relative to that of intentionality, positively straightforward.Anderson Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358008464457746997noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3736365491401043672.post-82212893683525739322011-04-24T13:17:00.001-04:002011-04-24T13:20:27.238-04:00Troubles with the zombie argument in philosophy of mindFirst of all it is important to keep in mind my initial disambiguation of intentional states and phenomenal states. It is already established that intentional states, since they are supervenient on physical states, can only be categorized operationally. Phenomenal states, as the friend of qualia has characterized them, cannot be categorized operationally (since they are beyond the reach of language). Of course an android could distinguish color surfaces without recourse to qualitative experience. We don’t think that there is “something that it’s like” for welder-directing robots in automobile factories to locate the seams with lasers. So when we are told that we can conceive of zombies it must be that we are meant to be conceiving of beings that are physically identical to humans but have no conscious experience. That functional descriptions can supervene on multiple physical descriptions has no bearing on the ontological status of qualia at all. I will make two arguments that are variations on the larger set of arguments presented here. First that the zombie counterfactual assumes something that it purports to show, and second that the zombie argument is an example of skepticism and is vulnerable to some counter-skeptical arguments.<br /><br /> The zombie counterfactual turns out to be question-begging: the friend of qualia has included qualia-body dualism as one of the premises. The claim is that we can conceive of beings that are physically identical to humans but that do not have immaterial phenomenal mental properties, unlike, presumably, the actual humans. To see this, try the same thought experiment only with the initial assumption (the most reasonable one, on the principle of parsimony) that qualitative experience will ultimately be explicable in wholly physical terms (that is, assume materialism as the default metaphysical position). The thought experiment now looks strikingly different.<br /><br /> Now (assuming materialism to be axiomatic, instead of dualism) the zombie argument is not question-begging: our initial assumption is that both the “blueness” of the surface of the plastic chair and the “blueness” of the phenomenal experience of the surface of the plastic chair are qualities had by virtue of the physical properties of the perceived chair and the perceiving body respectively. Now try this assertion on for size: “I can conceive of the plastic chair as having the identical physical properties that it now has (including its light-absorbing and –reflecting properties) but not having any color at all.” This is definitely inconceivable. When I try to conceive of an object with no color I for one try to imagine that the objects are transparent - I’m not sure if that counts as an object that has no color but it’s the best I can do. I cannot conceive of a physical object that is physically identical to an object that is colored but that has no color. This is just an application of the argument that to the extent that what I know, I know through “experience,” it makes no sense to draw a distinction between the phenomenal and the physical.<br /><br /> A second line of argument is suggested by the way Wittgenstein’s linguistic arguments can be deployed against skepticism. “Philosophical skepticism” is any argument to the effect that you don’t know something that you’re certain that you do know. Modern skepticism is closely connected to rationalism: Descartes thought that logical proof was the paradigm of “knowledge,” and it turned out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that by that standard we know very little. “The Problem of Other Minds” is a skeptical argument: you’re certain that other people have experiences and thoughts like yours but it seems that you can’t prove it. The Zombie problem is a variant on the problem of other minds: can’t you just see that other people are conscious? What would it be to doubt this? If the Zombie argument is an example of skepticism then we should be able to extend Wittgenstein’s treatment of skepticism to the Zombie argument. <br /><br />A famous back-and-forth between Wittgenstein and G. E. Moore is good for illuminating this. In his essay “Proof of an External World” (1939) and elsewhere Moore is arguing in much the same philosophical spirit as Wittgenstein (they both think that skepticism is a pseudo-problem with roots in a faulty understanding of language), but Wittgenstein’s remarks on Moore’s arguments (included in On Certainty) make a crucial difference clear. Moore, presaging the “Ordinary Language” movement, wanted to show that “common sense,” by which he meant, roughly, ordinary talking and thinking about our physical selves in our physical world, was better defended with reasons than the speculative bases of skepticism and the “idealism” (really a kind of phenomenalism) still powerful in English philosophy at the beginning of the 20th century. Moore thought that our perceptions of our own bodies in the environment were instances – paradigmatic instances - of knowledge, not belief. Holding up his hand he would say, “I know I have a hand.” From the plain fact that I know I have a hand there arises similar knowledge of, ultimately, the external world: the keyboard is a reason for (believing in) the hand, the hand is a reason for the keyboard; the desk is a reason for them both and so on.<br /><br />Wittgenstein’s response to skepticism is altogether different. Drawing on his premise that language must have operational criteria for determining appropriate conditions of use, Wittgenstein challenges the skeptic’s use of the verb “to know.” Take an ordinary (non-philosophical) instance of using that verb: “Do you know where your keys are?” The question makes sense because one might know or might not know, and “knowing” can be defined operationally: one can put one’s hands on one’s keys or one cannot. The question, “Do you know that the external world exists?” has no criterion for use: nothing could count as demonstrating that the external world either does or does not exist. That is, we neither “know” nor do we “not know” that the external world exists. The word “knowledge” has no place here. Where Moore proposed a kind of normative epistemology that would, if accepted, constitute an argument for the existence of the external world, Wittgenstein denies that there could be any argument one way or the other: Moore has taken the bait and tried to play a game that can’t be played.<br /> <br />Here we can see Wittgenstein’s “soft” arguments about language and his “hard” argument called “solipsism” come together. It is important also to see that Wittgenstein is much closer to Hume than Moore is. Hume (like Berkeley) stresses that the assertion that the external world “exists” is just as untenable as the assertion that it might not. Both sides of the disjunction are nonsense, if either side is.<br /><br />The problem of other minds is exposed to the same treatment as a pseudo-problem. PI 246:<br /><br /><br /> In what sense are my sensations private? – Well, only I can know whether I am really in pain; another person can only surmise it. – In one way this is wrong, and in another nonsense. If we are using the word “to know” as it is normally used (and how else are we to use it?), then other people very often know when I am in pain. – Yes, but all the same not with the certainty with which I know it myself! – It can’t be said of me at all (except perhaps as a joke) that I know I am in pain. What is it supposed to mean – except perhaps that I am in pain?<br /> Other people cannot be said to learn of my sensations only from my behavior, - for I cannot be said to learn of them. I have them.<br /> The truth is: it makes sense to say about other people that they doubt whether I am in pain; but not to say it about myself.<br /><br /> If I say “I know he’s conscious” and you challenge me by excluding all operational criteria from counting as justification for my claim, all you will do is change the ordinary meaning of the (public) word “conscious.” But then I’ll just have to start using another word for the same purpose, because what I have to say will remain exactly the same. PI 403:<br /><br /> If I were to reserve the word “pain” solely for what I had hitherto called “my pain”, and others “L. W.’s pain”, I should do other people no injustice, so long as a notation were provided in which the loss of the word “pain” in other connexions were somehow supplied. Other people would still be pitied, treated by doctors and so on. It would, of course, be no objection to this mode of expression to say: “But look here, other people have just the same as you!”<br /> But what should I gain from this new kind of account? Nothing. But after all neither does the solipsist want any practical advantage when he advances his view! <br /><br />As for “consciousness,” its meaning will now be anything you care to stipulate – in other words nothing - since you’ve stipulated that one can’t hear, see, smell, taste or touch anything that could even possibly indicate its presence: much like the word “god.” Thinking about the semantics of the word “god” brings us back to the first argument about the question-begging nature of the Zombie counterfactual. If the claim is that an operational theory of mind such as functionalism, specifically, has a problem with qualia, it must at least be a tacit assumption that there could be some non-operational theory of mind (a traditional one? a popular one? a philosophical one?) that does not: one that actually incorporates information about “what it’s like” into psychological descriptions and explanations. But there is no theory of mind like that, and if the arguments rehearsed in this chapter are correct there cannot be one.<br /><br />Even after all of this, though, Nagel’s point still stands: there is “something that it’s like” for me to have a qualitative experience, and mine might very well be different from a Martian’s, or a dog’s or even yours. Although language cannot express these “qualia,” much less produce coherent claims that they are “properties” distinct from physical properties, our progress here has not been wholly destructive. I am now in a position to say a few things, after all, about the metaphysics of phenomenal experience.Anderson Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358008464457746997noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3736365491401043672.post-10941903799037001662011-04-17T12:48:00.000-04:002011-04-17T12:49:22.759-04:00Turning the Inverted Spectrum on its HeadThe inverted spectrum argument is first found (remarkably full-blown) in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (II, xxxii,15, “Of True and False Ideas”):<br /><br />"Neither would it carry any Imputation of Falshood to our simple Ideas, if by the different Structure of our Organs, it were so ordered, That the same Object should produce in several Men's Minds different Ideas at the same time; v.g. if the Idea, that a Violet produced in one Man's Mind by his Eyes, were the same that a Marigold produces in another Man's, and vice versâ. For since this could never be known: because one Man's Mind could not pass into another Man's Body, to perceive, what Appearances were produced by those Organs; neither the Ideas hereby, nor the Names, would be at all confounded, or any Falshood be in either. For all Things, that had the Texture of a Violet, producing constantly the Idea, which he called Blue, and those that had the Texture of a Marigold, producing constantly the Idea, which he as constantly called Yellow, whatever those Appearances were in his Mind; he would be able as regularly to distinguish Things for his Use by those Appearances, and understand, and signify those distinctions, marked by the Names Blue and Yellow, as if the Appearances, or Ideas in his Mind, received from those two Flowers, were exactly the same, with the Ideas in other Men's Minds."<br /><br /> Locke composed this counterfactual as part of his effort to show that “tertiary” properties (the properties of mental “ideas”) were different from secondary (the causal properties of the object of perception to cause ideas) and primary (the physical properties of the objects themselves). This was the property dualism repudiated by Berkeley and Hume. In the 20th century the inverted spectrum has had a strong career as a demonstration of the failure of functionalism to handle qualitative properties and, more to the point, as a supposed demonstration that there are such properties (in substance this is very much the same as Locke’s original application).<br /><br />Imagine someone whose color spectrum was inverted (the “invert”): where normal people saw red, the invert saw blue, where blue, red. Such a person, raised among normal, English-speaking people, would be functionally indistinguishable from anyone else: asked to go out to the car and get the blue bag, say, they would perform this task exactly as anyone else would. Neither they nor anyone else would have any way of knowing that the invert’s experience of seeing the blue surface of the bag was the same experience that everyone else had when they saw a red surface, since the invert, like everyone else, would refer to such a surface as "blue." Since the invert would be functionally identical to a normal person, a functionalist is committed to the position that there is nothing different about their mental state. But (the argument goes) of course there is something different about their mental state: the quale, or phenomenal quality of the experience, is different. Thus functionalism is false. <br /><br />Wittgenstein argues that the absent qualia argument demonstrates just the opposite of what the friend of qualia claims: since it is not even in principle possible for public language (the only kind of language there is) to pick out private sensations, phenomenal properties are not a problem for operationalist approaches. No theory of mind (or science of mind or description of mind) will ever include any actual discussion of the specific quality of any specific private sensations, because they cannot be discussed. As for the alleged discussion of phenomenal experience we find in philosophy, this is an instance of confusing mention with use - just as one can mention “all sentences that have never been expressed,” but cannot cite one. Outside of (misguided) philosophical conversation there is no context for use of indexically subjective language such as “blue-for-me” as opposed to the intersubjective “blue” which, like all words, necessarily has public criteria for appropriate contexts of use. This is why even the very best of the phenomenologists (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty) never seem to get beyond a sort of “Prolegomena to Some Future Actual Practice of Phenomenology”: after the manifesto there is nothing more that can be said.<br /><br />So far this is a version of what I am calling the soft argument: the argument is about language, not about the ontological furniture of the world. It has conclusions that perhaps all non-philosophers would find definitive. Qualia do not constitute any sort of obstacle to the naturalization of psychology from the point of view of the scientist because science never could be expected to go beyond the limits imposed on language by its public nature in the first place. Nor is there anything inadequate about our ordinary, colloquial speech about qualitative experience (about, that is, the flavor of the sauce or the hue of the sunset), notwithstanding our individuality, for the same reason. But what about that ontological furniture?<br /><br />The metaphysical argument will be about the identification of consciousness with experience. The Kantian will say (confining ourselves to the terms of the present discussion) that consciousness is a necessary precondition for the possibility of experience, hence not identical to it. This argument might gain some traction if we concede to the Kantian the point that “experiencing” an object entails bringing the object under a concept (although see the discussion of Kant in Chapter Two), but that very distinction between sensation and perception in the case of objects itself entails that sensation (phenomenal experience) is something prior to the formation of a Kantian “representation.” (If the reader is thinking of Aristotle’s nous at this point I beg your indulgence until Chapter Four.)<br /><br />I have been using the word “consciousness” as synonymous with phenomenal experience, but the word is also sometimes used in regard to intentional states. Used in its intentional sense, to be “conscious” of an object is, on the traditional view, to form a representation of it or, on the view that I advocate, to be in some sort of relationship to it. But it is incoherent to say that to be conscious of pain, say, is to form a representation of pain or to be in a relationship to pain. In its phenomenal sense the word “consciousness” just refers to the sum of phenomenal experience: pain is a constituent of consciousness, not one of its objects. I may be intentionally conscious of pain at some higher level of psychological organization (one that can be picked out with operational criteria), but it makes no sense to say that I have to form a representation of pain or be in a relationship to pain to have an experience of pain.<br /><br />The same is true for color qualia or for any qualitative experience. Kripke famously pointed out that the word “pain” just refers to the sensation of pain. “Blue,” in its phenomenal sense, just refers to the sensation of blue. It is one of the components of experience, not some object of experience. Experience is qualia; qualia are experience. So (to get back to the supposed metaphysical implications of the inverted spectrum) it makes no sense to say that experience has properties. Only the objects of experience have properties.<br /><br />Where this leaves us is at the point of distinction between Frank Jackson’s “What Mary Didn’t Know” essay and Thomas Nagel’s equally famous essay “What is it Like to Be a Bat?” In that article Nagel makes an argument very close to but not identical to Jackson’s. No matter how much we come to know (physiologically) about the echolocation organ of the bat, Nagel argues, we will never know “what it is like” to experience the world in the way the bat does. The difference between Nagel and Jackson is that, granting the present argument that (qualitative) experience itself has no properties, experience itself does not constitute any sort of information (experience is rather the ground of information). We can concede that different conscious beings have different experiences without conceding that this entails any ontological implications.<br /><br />Some writers have argued that the invert cannot, in fact, be conceived (Douglas Hofstadter holds this view, for example). I do not take that position. Since I do not see how to refute the Wittgenstein/Buddhism non-duality version of “solipsism,” I have no motive to try to prove that we do, in fact, grasp the qualitative nature of the experiences of others. Even if we could do so we could not express this “grasp” linguistically. However there is a different application of the “absent qualia” argument, one that holds that we can conceive of beings functionally (“behaviorally” is a more appropriate word here) equivalent to humans that have no qualitative experiences: “zombies.” David Chalmers’ entire argument for qualia-matter dualism hangs on this claim. I do not believe that we can “conceive” of any such thing.Anderson Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358008464457746997noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3736365491401043672.post-15571988394651875812011-04-03T13:03:00.000-04:002011-04-03T13:05:15.995-04:00Buddhism and Qualia“Buddhism” is the name of an ancient tradition (with roots in the older Hindu tradition) that includes both philosophical and spiritual ideas and practices. After 2,500 years it is no surprise to find that classical Indian and Chinese philosophy, including Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, encompass a gamut of positions at least as diverse as those found in the European philosophical tradition. There are, in the philosophical senses of the terms, materialist Buddhists and idealist Buddhists, foundationalist Buddhists and relativist Buddhists. By titling this section “Buddhism” I do not mean to suggest that the arguments discussed here are characteristic of all of Buddhist thought. However these particular arguments do constitute a persistent and venerable thread and I will discuss several different sources. These arguments have roots in some of the most basic elements of Buddhist teaching. While I have chosen to concentrate on the Mahayana tradition that is not meant to suggest that other traditions and schools may not include similar arguments.<br /><br /> There is a complex mix of philosophical, psychological, spiritual and social motivations informing the life of Siddhartha Guatama and his ultimate focus on the nature of the self. The severe caste structure of Indian Hindu society was tightly tied to traditional Hindu concepts of karma and reincarnation. Souls rose and fell over the course of thousands of lifetimes, and humans were low on the scale of karmic life: overall the effect was fatalistic and conservative. At the same time the sixth century BC in India was a period of transformation when a vernacular Sanskrit brought cultural upheavals that included the beginnings of the Epic Hindu literature and the flowering of diverse Hindu sects, Jainism and other movements besides Buddhism.<br /><br /> The basic Buddha Dharma is the most well-known piece of Buddhist philosophy. These are the “Four Noble Truths”: All life is suffering (“duhkha”), says the Buddha; we suffer because we are caught in a cycle of sensual satisfaction and craving; this suffering can be alleviated and even brought to an end altogether; and the “Eightfold Path” of right attitudes and practices will lead to the cessation of suffering. From this starting point Buddhism developed, among other things, a philosophical tradition with a sustained interest in the nature of consciousness, experience and the relationship between the self and the world. The idea that the “ego”-self, the self that arises through the cycle of duhkha, is the encumbrance that the “bodhisattva,” or enlightened self, needs to lose in order to achieve nirvana is prominent in the earliest teachings attributed to Siddhartha. <br /><br />It is a somewhat dangerous business bringing a discussion of Buddhism into a book focused on contemporary philosophy of mind. I want to stick closely to the line of argument that has brought us to this relatively exotic territory. The overall claim is that the metaphysical problem of the alleged existence of phenomenal properties as distinct from physical properties is a pseudoproblem. I have presented arguments of Hume and Wittgenstein that I think are persuasive versions of this claim. In the case of Wittgenstein I argue that the “solipsism” argument common to the early and late works entails that phenomenal properties do not exist (are not part of this world). The view that the self is “emptiness,” and that the overcoming of the duality between the self and the world constitutes nirvana (enlightenment) is extremely similar, if not identical, to Wittgenstein’s solipsism argument. I will describe the Mahayana version of the argument and then present some textual evidence for my interpretation from classical sources.<br /><br />The earlier Abhidharma School taught that “dharmas” were individual, autonomous atoms of experience; something akin to Leibniz’s infinity of monads. This is idealist ontology: primary being was dharma which was understood as consciousness (more or less: the bulk of Abhidharma metaphysics consists of discussions of just what “dharma” is after all). Although the arising ego-self, on this view, dissolves into infinitude of discrete dharmas, these dharmas are constitutive of the world. Mahayana Buddhism attempted to go further and collapse the duality between the mental and the non-mental: a kind of ultimate erasure of the self from the world that resulted in freedom from the bonds of the karmic cycle, the traditional goal of both Hinduism and Buddhism. Their formula was<br /><br />MIND = EXPERIENCE = WORLD<br /><br />One must resist the Cartesian instinct to interpret this formula as stating that the world collapses into the mind (as it does on the idealist view). The idea is that each consciousness is a universe. That universe at the middle of which you are sitting is you: it/you came into existence when it/you became conscious. When you pass away the universe you inhabit will pass away: for that universe is you. This is a line that could be defended by Hume: he might point out, for example, that if all any talk about “the world” could possibly be referring to is experience, then it makes no sense to refer to “a world” beyond experience, and thus it is incoherent to speak of a common world for all of the “microcosms” – a pseudoproblem. <br /><br />An account of nirvana as the realization of the non-duality of mind and world can be found in Mahayana Buddhism and its descendents. The Prajna-paramita, or Wisdom Sutra, was traditionally taken to be the word of the Buddha, but scholars trace its origins to the first century AD and it appears that it was composed over the next several centuries. In a chapter titled “Mara” (a malevolent deity who lays traps for spiritual seekers), we find: <br /><br />Subhuti: Is it then possible to write down the perfection of wisdom?<br />The Lord: No, Subhuti. And why? Because the own-being of the perfection of wisdom does not exist, nor that of the other perfections, the emptinesses, the Buddhadharmas or all-knowledge. That of which the own-being does not exist, that is nonexistence; what is nonexistence cannot be written down by the nonexistent.<br /><br />The spiritual goal here is to free the self from the cycle of satisfaction and craving, and that is accomplished by showing that the self is not part of the world (I am not claiming that our present question about phenomenal properties is what Mahayana Buddhism is all about!). The Wisdom Sutra emphasizes the nonexistence of “own-being,” the being of oneself in one’s world. I chose this passage because the topic is language, and the message conforms to Wittgenstein’s treatment of the alleged problem that arises when we think of phenomenal language, say the word “blue,” as referring to something internal (mental) versus external (physical). Here the predicate “exists” is understood as meaning “exists in this world,” the world of experience: but the experiencing subject is not in this world. This also conforms to Hume’s argument that it makes as little sense to speak of the physical as distinct from the mental as it does to speak of the mental as distinct from the physical. Both sides of the distinction drop away simultaneously.<br /><br />In the chapter titled “The Exposition of the Nonexistence of Own-Being” the point is more explicit that karma (one’s involvement with duhkha, the cycle of satisfaction and craving) is based on “own-being” and “own-marks,” worldly characteristics of persons. “Dharma” means something in the area of “consciousness,” “self” or “view.”<br /><br /> Subhuti: If, however, these dharmas are empty of own-marks, how can with regard to dharmas which are empty of own-marks a difference or distinction be apprehended (to the effect that one says) “this one is a being of the hells, this one an animal,…this one a god, this one a human….” And as these persons cannot be apprehended, so likewise their karma or its karma result.<br /> The Lord: So it is, Subhuti, so it is, as you say. In respect of dharmas which are empty of own-marks no karma or karma result can be apprehended....But when those too ignorant to cognize dharmas as empty of own-marks manufacture a karma…then, through badly done karma they are hurled into the three states of woe, through what is well done they are reborn among gods and men….Here the Bodhisattva, who courses in perfect wisdom, does not see those dharmas in such a way that, when seeing them, he apprehends any dharma whatever. Not apprehending them he sees that “all dharmas are empty.” <br /><br /> Hundreds of years later and thousands of miles away Eihei Dogen (1200-1253), the classic avatar of Japanese Zen Buddhism, had refined the teaching of the non-duality of mind and world into a meditation practice (“zazen”) and a literary genre (“koan”) that were more minimalist and practice-oriented than the ritual-encrusted, syncretic and generally more baroque Sanskrit and Tibetan traditions, although like Tibetan Tantric Buddhism, Zen and Chinese/Japanese Buddhism in general are descendants of the Mahayana tradition. In his Shobogenzo (“Treasury of the True Dharma Eye”) the solipsistic view has crystallized considerably. Here are quotations from the section “Actualizing the Fundamental Point” (written around 1230):<br /><br /> As all things are buddha-dharma, there is delusion and realization, practice, and birth and death, and there are buddhas and sentient beings.<br /><br /> As the myriad things are without an abiding self, there is no delusion, no realization, no buddha, no sentient being, no birth and death.<br /><br /> The buddha way is, basically, leaping clear of the many and the one.<br /><br /> To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and experience themselves is awakening.<br /><br /> When you see forms or hear sounds fully engaging body-and-mind, you grasp things directly.<br /><br /> To study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the body and mind of others drop away.<br /><br /> Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken.<br /><br /> When the fundamental truth of mind=experience=world is realized things are grasped directly. The idea that there are qualitative experiences that are distinct from the objects of experience reflects the same Cartesian duality of mind and world that underlies representational theories of mind; the Buddhist aim in criticizing this duality as a misconception is essentially spiritual. The Wittgensteinian position is clearly echoed in the Zenrin kushu, a 15th century Zen text, which describes consciousness as “Like a sword that cuts, but cannot cut itself; Like an eye that sees, but cannot see itself”: what is constitutive of the experienced world cannot be considered as part of, or as in, that world.Anderson Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358008464457746997noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3736365491401043672.post-53356284795440536162011-03-27T10:56:00.000-04:002011-03-27T10:57:57.378-04:00Non-duality as a response to the "hard problem"The respective ideas of Hume, Wittgenstein and Mahayana Buddhists are interrelated and are characterized by empiricism and naturalism. Not surprisingly the response they invite most prominently is a Kantian one. But Kant deduced that there had to be necessary preconditions for the possibility of representational experience: it was the representation of the world that had to be “conditioned.” None of these thinkers – not even Hume on my reading – defines experience as involving the formation of representations in the first place. Furthermore remember that the subject of this chapter is consciousness, and consciousness is not obviously amenable to a representational “explanation” even for those who are inclined to address intentionality that way. In any event if one balks at, say, the “solipsism” argument I certainly agree that it is a bit breath-taking, but I wouldn’t introduce it here if I knew of an argument that refuted it.<br /><br /> The present set of arguments, that will now be deployed against the “absent qualia” arguments that purport to show that there is a metaphysical problem about phenomenal properties, can all be attributed to some combination of Hume, Wittgenstein and/or Buddhism. The first two arguments are “soft”: they start with two respective points about the nature of language and conclude that private qualitative experience, whatever its ultimate ontological status may be, cannot be the subject of language. This is a soft conclusion because it sets aside the question of whether there really is anything that can coherently be regarded as “inner,” private experience. The remaining arguments are “hard”: they start with the inseparability of mind, experience and world and conclude that it is incoherent to posit the existence of phenomenal properties if these are taken to be mental properties distinct from the physical properties of the experienced world. However although the first two arguments are soft they do, if persuasive, suffice for the naturalization of psychology, because they demonstrate that qualitative experience, whatever that may be, could never have been a subject for natural science, and so is not a problem for natural science.<br /><br />1) If language needs inter-subjective criteria of appropriate conditions of use then the phenomenal vocabulary, like all language, cannot function in virtue of referring to anything “private” to the individual. This argument is explicit in Wittgenstein, a case can be made that it is implicit in Hume’s verificationist epistemology. It is “soft”: it leaves the ontological status, if any, of qualitative experience alone. It naturalizes psychology the way that classical, early 20th century behaviorism naturalized psychology: an operationalist protocol excludes reference to the “inner” from science, so understood.<br /><br />2) If the “meaning” of language/symbols is nothing more nor less than everything that has been accomplished through the use of individual, concrete tokens, then the phenomenal vocabulary cannot function by referring to anything private. This is functional-role semantics and it is unique to Wittgenstein among this group (although other philosophers, such as Pragmatists, also develop this sort of operationalist account of language). It is soft; the ontological status of qualia is not addressed directly.<br /><br />3) If the self is nothing neither more nor less than the experiences of the world by the self, then there can be no duality between the “self” and the “world.” This is Wittgenstein’s “solipsism” argument, first presented at the end of the Tractatus, and the same idea is found in the Mahayana sutras of classical Buddhism and in Zen Buddhism. This is a “hard” argument: on this view the existence of phenomenal properties is denied. It is another argument that seems implicit in Hume, but Hume does give a very explicit argument to the same effect:<br /><br />4) If experience defines the limit of what can be known, it is absurd to posit a distinction between the “mental” and the “physical.” Hume’s version is quite as hard as #3 because it produces the same conclusion that it makes no sense to speak of either side of the duality of mind and matter: both concepts collapse simultaneously. It is neither materialist nor idealist, but a position of non-duality. This view is shared by Berkeley.<br /><br />5) Consciousness cannot be located in the world, so consciousness cannot be said to have any properties. This argument follows from #3. It is explicit (and elaborated at great length) in its Buddhist version but also clearly implicit in both Hume and Wittgenstein. It does not follow from this that consciousness cannot be a property. Just what we mean when we predicate consciousness of a thing is what is at question, although I take it as now established that the criteria for predications of consciousness are necessarily operational.<br /><br />If the most tempting line of rebuttal to all of this is a Kantian one, remember that these arguments are here deployed to show that there are no phenomenal properties. This question about consciousness has been disentangled from the problem of intentionality. The motivations of the three sources of the set of arguments are varied: Hume fills out the radical implications of empiricist epistemology as far as they go; Wittgenstein has a vision about the foundations and limits of logic; and the classical Buddhists appear to take the metaphysical implications of non-duality both literally and seriously. Whatever one makes of these sources (or of my interpretations of them), it is at least fair to say that they place the burden on those who would say that there are phenomenal properties, metaphysically distinct from physical properties, to articulate reasons why anyone should think so.<br /><br />However the discussion is far from over. Having assembled this set of arguments I now need to apply them to the various “absent qualia” arguments that have been the backbone of the critique of functionalism and the emergence of consciousness as a problem for cognitive science over the past thirty years.<br /><br />My aim is not to show that operationalist theories such as functionalism are adequate to address the problem of consciousness; I am not “defending” functionalism from the “absent qualia” critique. My view is that intentional predicates must be handled operationally, while phenomenal predicates cannot be – that is, they cannot be to the philosopher’s satisfaction, notwithstanding the fact that all predication, to be intelligible, must adhere to intersubjective operational criteria. Functional descriptions abstract away from hardware: they include no physical descriptions. In the same way they abstract away from consciousness: they include no phenomenal descriptions. Of course this is true because there is no such thing as “phenomenal description” if by that one means reference to “private” experience. But a further point is that there is no reason to think that phenomenal experience is multiply realizable (supervenient), while intentional states are self-evidently so.<br /><br />The point of the following discussions of the inverted spectrum problem and the zombie problem (both variants of the “absent qualia” problem) is not, then, to vindicate functionalism as a theory of consciousness. Theories don’t address pseudo-problems. The significance of the “absent qualia” arguments in the present context arises when they are offered as evidence that physicalism is ontologically incomplete.Anderson Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358008464457746997noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3736365491401043672.post-35458571186777382512011-03-15T11:28:00.000-04:002011-03-15T11:29:48.951-04:00Wittgenstein on QualiaAnyone who has read this far understands that Wittgenstein, for better or for worse, is the canonical philosopher who has had the most influence on the arguments that I am advancing here (even if I am merely Wittgenstein’s ape, as I rather suspect, from what I have read of him, that he would say I am). But when I started drafting this book Wittgenstein worried me. My strategy is to analyze the mind-body problem into separate problems that admit to separate solutions. But Wittgenstein seemed to be addressing both the problem of intentionality and the problem of consciousness, sometimes simultaneously. Perhaps I was mistaken to try to separate them?<br /><br /> Wittgenstein gives us a general treatment of language, and my method is essentially grounded in linguistic analysis as well. Metaphysics is brought down to Earth when regarded as a semantic inquiry: I don’t know, after all, what “primary being” is, or the limits of nature or anything like that. The only way to naturalize psychology is to develop a natural semantics for the psychological vocabulary. If the metaphysical theory of physicalism is right then our psychological talk has had natural, physical referents all along, and we should be able to determine what those are. Wittgenstein gives us, with his functional-role semantics, what is basically an operationalist account of meaning (“meaning is use”), and an operationalist semantic is a kind of naturalist semantic.<br /><br /> Now we can see the apparent problem: Wittgenstein argues that all language must have operationalist criteria of meaning, including the phenomenal vocabulary. But I have conceded that the “absent qualia” problem persuasively shows that operationalist theories of mind such as functionalism can’t handle the problem of consciousness. Isn’t there a contradiction in, on the one hand, embracing Wittgenstein’s argument that the word “blue” is meaningful (as it has intersubjectively verifiable criteria of use) while the construction “blue-for-me” is not, and on the other hand insisting that the naturalization of the phenomenal vocabulary requires a different treatment than the intentional vocabulary requires?<br /><br /> The tension is resolved by considering two other arguments of Wittgenstein’s, both of which are common to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations, unlike functional-role semantics (developed in the PI) which represents the major difference between the earlier and later work. A popular misconception is that there is no continuity between Wittgenstein’s two major works; this is an effect of the strikingly radical operationalist treatment of “meaning” in the PI, and a consequently radical difference in method of composition. However much is missed when one misses the common themes.<br /><br /> <br />Compare these quotations, first, the famous closing sentence of the Tractatus: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” Then PI 296: “’Yes, but there is something there all the same accompanying my cry of pain. And it is on account of that that I utter it. And this something is what is important – and frightful.’ – Only whom are we informing of this? And on what occasion?” (Italics in original). Granting that at the end of the Tractatus he is speaking broadly about something he calls “mystical,” it is apparent that he takes ethical, aesthetic and spiritual experiences to be varieties of qualitative experience that, like pain, cannot be expressed by language. (This was the point, regarding ethical “propositions,” that W. was making when he got into that brawl with Karl Popper.)<br /><br />The explicitly operationalist account of language in the PI develops from this earlier awareness of the limits of language (but note that this is not the same argument as the one tagged by his famous dictum “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” That is the other argument, discussed below). If language is necessarily intersubjective (that is, worldly) then there must be public criteria for its use, but the insight that the quality of experience is inexpressible comes before, not after, this treatment of language. Functional-role semantics is a response to the inexpressible nature of qualitative experience.<br /><br />So the great logical behaviorist turns out to acknowledge qualitative experience after all? The short answer is yes: he never denied it. At PI 296 his imaginary interlocutor is unchallenged when he says “this something is what is important.” Maybe the most important thing in life: remember that value itself is part of the inexpressible (and see Chapter Four). This does not involve him in a contradiction, although it needs some more consideration here.<br /><br />One objection is that Wittgenstein is what was earlier called an “atheistic” or “philosophical” behaviorist: he denies that it makes sense to think of the mental in terms of something “inner” vs. the “outer” world. But aren’t qualitative experiences essentially “inner” in this sense? Not necessarily. The nature of qualitative experience is what is at question.<br /><br />More importantly and more to the point of this discussion, Wittgenstein’s claim is not about qualitative experience, it is about language. The quality of personal experience is not expressible because of the intersubjective, public nature of language. Here is a link with the argument as deployed in Chapter Two: language (representation in general) does not exist “in the head,” either literally or figuratively. We saw in Chapter Two that the notion of the “inner” as something representational was vacuous, explaining nothing. Language (symbols, “meaning”) is something that exists only in the “outer” world. Thus whatever we make of qualitative experience, all language use has public criteria. <br /><br />The two related arguments, that language must have public criteria for use and that what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence, are sufficient to show that the problem of consciousness is not a problem for science (this point will be discussed at greater length below). But by themselves they give us only “agnostic,” methodological behaviorism, which may satisfy the empirical psychologist but will not satisfy the philosopher. The philosopher still has a question about ontology. In this discussion of Wittgenstein’s first two arguments I have been careful to use the phrase “qualitative experience,” leaving open the question of what it is of which such experience consists. <br /><br />The third argument of Wittgenstein’s, one that is also common to the early and later work, goes further and demonstrates that “qualia,” understood as real properties that are non-physical properties, do not exist. It gives us the “atheistic,” philosophical behaviorism that we need to naturalize the phenomenal vocabulary. As with Hume it will turn out that there is no coherent distinction between “qualitative” experience and just plain experience. (Note also that in this section I am using the word “behaviorism” rather than the word “operationalism.” Since “behaviorism” is more the standard term in the Wittgenstein literature this makes it easier to situate the present discussion in that literature, besides being much less clunky. And anyway the arguments discussed so far are in fact about language; “behaviorism” in the sense that we can use that word to describe Wittgenstein’s view is not really a “theory of mind,” although it may be a theory of psychological talk.)<br /><br />The third argument is known as the “solipsism” argument, and it is found in the Tractatus at 5.6 through 5.641. The most famous aphorism from this passage is 5.6, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (italics in original), but for the present argument 5.621, “The world and life are one,” and 5.63, “I am my world. (The microcosm)” may make the point most clearly. In fact on my view 5.6 is frequently misinterpreted in a sort of obvious way, a recognizably Kantian way: if one represents the world linguistically (this interpretation goes), then the world as one represents it will be limited as a function of the limits of ones’ language. This is backwards. “The limits of my language” (italicized) is the phrase under analysis, and it can only mean (it is defined by) the limits of my world, which are, exactly as in Hume, coextensive with the limits of my experience. <br /><br />5.632: “The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world.”<br /><br />5.64: “Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.”<br /><br />5.641: “Thus there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way.<br />What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that ‘the world is my world.’<br />The philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world – not a part of it.”<br /><br />The word “qualia” is a “grammatical” (to use a word ubiquitous in the PI) reification of qualitative experience, which is constitutive of the world, “the limit of the world - not a part of it” (experience is not in the world). Naturalizing psychology does not require what cannot be done, naturalizing metaphysics. “The world and life are one.” As a living being I am constitutive of my world; my life and my world cannot be distinguished: 6.431: “So too at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end.” <br /><br />The ontological idea of a Leibnizian parallelism between properties of the world and properties of experience makes no sense and it is the assumption of such a parallelism (of the coherence of such a parallelism) on which the alleged problem of consciousness rests. Kant, to be fair, is not so far from this insight himself (and Wittgenstein professed admiration for Kant): the rational mind, for Kant, is not a part of the phenomenal world. Only Kant’s followers did not heed his epistemological warnings.<br /><br />This crucial Wittgensteinian appropriation of the word “solipsism” remains intact and unchanged decades later in the Philosophical Investigations. In the discussion of the multiplicity of uses of language (the fact that there are many different “language-games”) that opens the book Wittgenstein writes at #24: <br /><br />“If you do not keep the multiplicity of language-games in view you will perhaps be inclined to ask questions like: ‘What is a question?’ – Is it the statement that I do not know such-and-such, or the statement that I wish the other person would tell me…? Or is it the description of my mental state of uncertainty? – And is the cry ‘Help!’ such a description?<br /><br />Think how many different kinds of things are called “description”: description of a body’s position by means of its coordinates; description of a facial expression; description of a sensation of touch; of a mood.<br /><br />Of course it is possible to substitute the form of statement or description for the usual form of question: ‘I want to know whether…’ or “I am in doubt whether…” – but this does not bring the different language-games any closer together.<br /><br />The significance of such possibilities of transformation, for example of turning all statements into sentences beginning “I think” or “I believe” (and thus, as it were, into descriptions of my inner life) will become clearer in another place. (Solipsism.)”<br /><br />All statements can be rendered “as it were, into descriptions of my inner life,” and this shows the actual vacuity of the allegedly significant distinction between “the inner life” and “the outer world.” The sense of the parenthetical “solipsism” is the same as in the Tractatus. It is important to see that Wittgenstein is not (as he admits) using the word “solipsist” in its usual metaphysical sense. In fact he inverts the ordinary sense of the word. Ordinarily the solipsist is understood to be saying that he only knows that one mind exists, his own (this is the Cartesian skeptical sense of the word). Wittgenstein is saying, with reference to certain uses of the first-person “I,” that one’s own mind is the only one that cannot be conceived as something in the world.<br /><br />From the Blue Book (pp. 66-69):<br /><br />“There are two different cases in the use of the word ‘I’ (or ‘my’) which I might call ‘the use as object’ and ‘the use as subject.’ Examples of the first kind of use are these: ‘My arm is broken,’ ‘I have grown six inches.’…Examples of the second kind are ‘I see so-and-so,’…’I’ have a toothache’…We feel then that in the cases in which ‘I’ is used as subject, we don’t use it because we recognize a particular person by his bodily characteristics: and this creates the illusion that we use this word to refer to something bodiless, which, however, has its seat in our body. In fact this seems to be the real ego, the one of which it was said, ‘Cogito, ergo sum’.”<br /><br />In fact this use of the first-person pronoun does not “refer” to anything in the world at all. PI 404:<br /><br />“’When I say “I am in pain,” I do not point to a person who is in pain, since in a certain sense I have no idea who is.’ And this can be given a justification. For the main point is: I did not say that such-and-such a person was in pain, but ‘I am….’ Now in saying this I don’t name any person. Just as I don’t name anyone when I groan with pain. Though someone else sees who is in pain from the groaning.<br /><br />What does it mean to know who is in pain? It means, for example, to know which man in this room is in pain: for instance, that it is the one who is sitting over there, or the one who is standing in that corner, the tall one over there with the fair hair, and so on. – What am I getting at? At the fact that there is a great variety of criteria for personal ‘identity.’<br /><br />Now which of them determines my saying that ‘I’ am in pain? None.<br /><br /> <br /> “Personal identity theory” is a branch of metaphysics: the study of the criteria by which we identify a particular entity in the world as the “self.” But the subject, on Wittgenstein’s version of solipsism, is not an entity in the world at all, insofar as we are thinking of the subject as having qualitative experience. The experiencing subject is metaphysically identical with the experienced world.<br /><br />So far I have presented two versions of this argument, Hume’s and Wittgenstein’s. I am not piling up these various demonstrations that the problem of consciousness is a pseudoproblem in order to commit the informal fallacy of the argument from authority: I have my own reservations about Hume, Wittgenstein and empiricism in general but I am persuaded by these particular arguments that the alleged metaphysical problem of phenomenal properties is a pseudoproblem. It is striking that Wittgenstein’s “solipsism” is very close, perhaps identical, to arguments found in an ancient tradition with origins very far from those of empiricism.Anderson Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358008464457746997noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3736365491401043672.post-91060393394740539882011-03-06T11:37:00.000-04:002011-03-06T11:39:43.556-04:00Hume on QualiaHume, a thoroughly modern anti-philosophy philosopher, argued that much confusion and intemperate speculation could be got rid of by acknowledging that knowledge, and therefore philosophy, had limits. There are what I call a “soft” and a “hard’ interpretation of Hume. On the soft interpretation, Hume flags an eternal question mark hanging over the limit of experience: we cannot know what lies beyond and we must simply accept that fact. This is Hume the cheerful skeptic, reassuring us that it’s alright that there are things we cannot know and cannot prove. On the hard interpretation, Hume defines knowledge as the output of experience. Belief is only habituation. In Of Miracles, for example, Hume is not telling the reader that Hume does not believe in miracles: he is arguing that the reader does not believe in miracles by virtue of the very definition of “belief.”<br /><br />Hume says, "For as to the notion of external existence, when taken for something specifically different from our perceptions, we have already shown its absurdity" (Treatise 1.4.2, Of scepticism with regard to the senses). Hume is not a skeptic whose empiricism entails codifying Cartesian scepticism as irrefutable. To the contrary, Hume takes the position that Cartesian scepticism is a pseudo-problem. An idea that unifies the Treatise is that, contrary to the rationalists’ assertion that logical proof is the paradigm of knowledge, there are in fact no logical proofs for anything we “know” (and Hume is very much focused, as any good epistemologist should be, on the appropriate conditions for the use of the verb “to know”). To “know” something, for Hume, is to be habituated to have a certain expectation of potential future experiences by the regularities of past experiences.<br /><br />The very idea of a distinction between “external existence” and “perception,” Hume says, is absurd. The idea that we are stuck inside our heads, unable to see around our mental representations, is absurd. At 1.2.6, Of the idea of existence, and of external existence, Hume writes: “Now since nothing is ever present to the mind but perceptions, and since all ideas are deriv'd from something antecedently present to the mind; it follows, that 'tis impossible for us so much as to conceive or form an idea of any thing specifically different from ideas and impressions.” It is meaningless to talk about some “reality” beyond the reality of experience since on the empiricist criterion of “meaningful” a statement is significant to the extent that it can be confirmed or disconfirmed on the basis of experience. This is exactly Berkeley’s view, stated in less paradoxical language: the Humean version of the argument that the problem of phenomenal properties is a pseudoproblem hinges, as Berkeley’s version does, on the absurdity of stating that there are physical properties when these are taken to be properties separate from the properties of experience.<br /><br />This is not at all equivalent to saying that there is an external world to which we do not have access, trapped as we are within the conceptual framework of our representation (remember it is Kant who insists on that): empiricism rules out any such speculation. When Hume says that there can be no proof of the external world he is simply iterating another example of his refutation of Cartesian rationalism: if there are no rational proofs of anything than the word “knowledge” cannot refer to beliefs grounded in rational proof as distinct from experience.<br /><br />“The world,” understood in any meaningful way, refers to the world of experience. It is literally inconceivable that there might be a world distinct from experience, or experience distinct from the world. Technically the position is nominalist: “the world” is the name of the category of all experiences. And on that point, Hume, in a footnote to 1.2.6, explicitly cites Berkeley: “A great philosopher (Berkeley)...has asserted, that all general ideas are nothing but particular ones, annex'd to a certain term, which gives them a more extensive signification, and makes them recall upon occasion other individuals, which are similar to them” (1.1.7, Of abstract ideas: the “external world” is an abstract idea of this kind).<br /><br />Perceptual states, on Hume's view, are not “copies” of external reality (this has been shown to be absurd by extension of the absurdity of the concept of “external reality” itself). Rather they are states of the body: the (physical) process of perception has caused a (physical) change to the body (the “impression”). Crucially the impression is not identical to the experience. The formation of the impression is one physical part of the larger physical event of experience. There can be no metaphysical distinction between the mind and the body for Hume, who denies the possibility of any metaphysical distinctions whatsoever (exactly as Berkeley does). When we talk about our “impressions” we are talking about states of our own bodies; this need not involve us in the concept of representation. This is why Hume says that we cannot even assume a numerical correspondence between impressions and “actual objects”: impressions, understood as the physical effects of physical causes, cannot be assumed to perform a representational function in the first place.<br /><br />Aren’t we discussing qualia here, as distinct from mental representations? Can we sort them out? Yes: there are, on Hume’s view, no representations, but there certainly are experiences. Experiences don’t represent the world; they are constitutive of the world. So the qualities of experience are identical to the qualities of the world, nothing more or less. That is, if it makes no sense to speak of “qualities of the world” if these are meant to be distinct from the qualities of experience then by the same token it makes no sense to speak of “qualities of experience” either.<br /><br />What remains is to decide how to talk (philosophy often comes down to making decisions about how to talk). Berkeley and Chalmers propose radical solutions: say that the world is constituted by “ideas” rather than by “matter” and say that the qualities of experience are non-physical properties, respectively. However, to accept Berkeley is to reject Chalmers and vice versa, because where Chalmers would codify the metaphysical distinction between mind and matter Berkeley would abolish it. I’m guessing most readers will agree that abolition is a better solution than codification, because codification amounts to simply throwing in the towel and conceding that naturalization is impossible. For myself, I am a staunch abolitionist.<br /><br />Hume, writing with Berkeley well-digested, develops the essential argument without the outré metaphysical language. Hume collapses the subject-object distinction into the subject as Berkeley did before him. But Hume recognized that once the distinction was collapsed neither of the categories “materialism” or “idealism” made any sense. The distinction simply vanishes. If there are no “physical” properties when these are meant to be separate from “phenomenal” properties the argument works with equal force in the other direction as well. It is on this point that the early 20th century empiricists misinterpreted Hume so grievously, understanding him as a “phenomenalist,” one who holds that we can refer only to “phenomena” as distinct from the “actual” (else why use the word at all?). On empiricism properly understood there is no meaningful (semantic) distinction on which to hang the metaphysical language. This insight is also the crux of the next two versions of the argument, but both are worth considering in detail by virtue of differences in language and emphasis, and to cement the point.Anderson Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358008464457746997noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3736365491401043672.post-86927600753875392002011-02-27T14:09:00.000-04:002011-02-27T14:10:08.045-04:00Qualia and Operationalism“Phenomenology,” the study of the qualities of experience, has a long history in both Eastern and Western philosophy. In its modern European version phenomenology has two post-Enlightenment roots. First, in its claim that experience has its own structure that can (and must) be explicated in order to establish the foundations of epistemology, the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger is thoroughly Kantian (by way of 19th century German transcendental idealism), as are the subsequent “Continental” movements of structuralism, deconstructionism etc. (Merleau-Ponty, with his emphasis on the role of the whole body in defining the phenomenal field, is an exceptional character in this community, and I will have something to say about Sartre in the discussion of Buddhism below.) Second, modern phenomenology is a response to the dramatic development of modern science and particularly to the perceived threat posed to humanism by the potential triumph of empiricism and the resulting absorption of the study of human nature into physical science.<br /><br /> It is not hard to see, then, why the naturalist movement in philosophy of mind, primarily a movement of English-language philosophers and scientists, resisted acknowledging the troublesome significance of phenomenology through the middle of the 20th century. A partisan narrative developed where the “Continentals” were resolutely non-scientific (holding, as they mostly did, that phenomenology was wholly autonomous from physical science) and often anti-scientific while the “Analytics” studiously ignored phenomenology and developed materialist philosophy of mind as part of a larger interdisciplinary (and largely empiricist and scientific) movement that eventually came to be called cognitive science, and that for its first fifty years or so had a strong ideological commitment to operationalism, and to some extent still does. Only in the past few decades has “consciousness studies” become an active area for cognitive scientists.<br /><br /> This doesn’t mean that phenomenology didn’t bedevil the naturalists from the first. The first major operationalist movement, behaviorism, had many variants, a lively theoretical literature and was an impressive generator of experimental protocols, but as a popular psychology (a theory of psychology intuitively persuasive to the average person) behaviorism was never really even a candidate for widespread acceptance, and the essential (popular) problem was, without doubt, behaviorism’s manifest failure to accommodate ordinary intuitions about qualia.<br /><br /> The primary motivation for behaviorism was to make a science of psychology. The primary strategy was methodological: strictly hew to the methods of empirical science and ipso facto science will be the result. This operationalist ideology entailed the elimination of reference to “unobservables.” Behaviorism developed a semantic for psychological words that held that psychological predicates referred to intersubjectively observable dispositions to behave. There is more to be said for this approach than is commonly recognized nowadays; Wittgenstein, who had much to tell us about the problem of meaning, also advanced what I find to be persuasive arguments about qualia and I will return to him in what follows. However at the moment we want to see how behaviorism, popularly understood, floundered over the problem of qualia.<br /><br /> Consider the word “pain.” If we take the behaviorist line in its literal, popularly-understood sense the word “pain” refers to wincing, grimacing, certain vocalizations (such as “ouch!”) and so forth. One problem with this is that the set of behaviors that might be identified as pain behaviors is indefinitely large (that is, it is not apparent what parameters fix the extension of the set), and there are other problems, but the crucial problem in the current context is that most people have a strong intuition that wincing, grimacing and so forth are caused by pain, that is that the word “pain” in fact refers to the feeling of pain and furthermore that this feeling is playing a causal role in the production of the “pain behavior.”<br /><br /> Behaviorism’s more sophisticated descendent, functionalism, turned out to be no better able to handle the issue of conscious qualitative experience. Consider this problem for functional-role semantics, which holds that the “meaning” of a word is nothing more or less than what the speaker achieves by its utterance: imagine a person whose color spectrum is inverted. Where ordinary people see red, this person sees blue and vice versa. However, growing up in the same linguistic community, this person would use color words exactly like the rest of us. Ask the inverted-spectrum person to, say, go out to the car and get the blue bag and they will return with the correct bag just as reliably as anyone else. But, the defender of phenomenology argues, what everyone else means by “the blue bag” is the bag with that quale, which is the ordinary person’s experience of the color blue: and the “invert” does not have that experience.<br /><br /> Here one might respond by pointing out that we have no way of knowing if any two people experience “blue” surfaces the same way. This is Wittgenstein’s point with the analogy of the beetle in the box: it can’t be that the phenomenal word refers to an individual’s private experience. At this point the defender of qualia ups the ante. Suppose there was a person who behaved, responded and so forth in appropriate ways such that they seemed to take psychological predicates just as naturally as everyone else. Imagine further, however, that this person had no private experience: a non-conscious “zombie.” Surely, the argument goes, one couldn’t consider such a creature to be a “person”? Surely we mean by “person” a being that has some experience? Aldous Huxley in his novel Brave New World, an early critique of operationalism’s qualia problem, is making the same point: when the quality of experience comes to be considered simply insignificant for “psychology” then that discipline is no longer what most people would consider to be psychology at all. <br /><br /> This whole genre of thought experiments comes together as the “absent qualia” argument. The argument is that complete functional descriptions fail to capture the quality of experience just as utterly as complete physical descriptions do. One of the biggest successes in philosophy of mind in recent years has been the work of David Chalmers, who argued in The Conscious Mind that, faced with the problem of qualia, we have no choice but to concede that materialism is false and that reality includes at least two kinds of properties, physical properties and phenomenal ones. <br /><br />The philosophy of mind community acknowledged the problem of consciousness in the 1970s and 80s through some seminal work by Ned Block, Frank Jackson, Saul Kripke, Thomas Nagel, John Searle and others. Prior to Chalmers the “mysterians” such as Colin McGinn had argued for a kind of epistemological (or “property”) dualism (we must concede that consciousness cannot be incorporated into physical science, but maybe we can concede this without giving up materialism). But Chalmers’ sporting brief for metaphysical dualism represents a kind of apotheosis for the problem.<br /><br />I read Chalmers as writing in a Berkleyan spirit. John Locke elaborated a system of various “properties.” There were primary properties, the essential physical properties of the object; secondary properties, the causal properties of the object such that it caused the mental representation to be as it was; and tertiary properties, the properties of the representation (Locke would say “impression”). In other words a fairly messy tangle. Berkeley, whose views appear strange when presented out of context, made what was in fact a common-sense (and thoroughly empiricist) suggestion: if the mental representation (the “idea”) is the only thing that we, in actual fact, experience, and there is an intractable problem about the relationship between the idea and the “material world,” why don’t we cut the Gordian knot by simply saying that ideas are constitutive of the world, and be done with the problematic “matter” altogether? After all we can only know about the ideas. So let’s just call our ontology “idealism” and move on. Chalmers’ move is very similar: embrace mind-body dualism so that we can forget about it.<br /><br />I appreciate Chalmers not only because he is audacious, but because he focuses on the metaphysics, which is where the problem and any possible solution of the problem of consciousness lie. The key strategic move in the present book is to point out that “mind” is a heterogeneous concept. Thus we have not one “mind-body problem” but (at least) two. Granting this we can apply different theories to different problems without self-contradiction. In the last chapter I advanced a version of meaning externalism as the right semantic of intentional predicates, to replace the representationalist account. The view that intentional predicates refer not to mental contents but to relationships between whole persons and their environments is essentially an operationalist view. At the same time I do not think that any kind of operationalism will do for phenomenal predicates; that is, I agree that the absent-qualia problem cannot be overcome by any operationalist strategy. The problem of consciousness needs an entirely different treatment than the problem of intentionality.<br /><br />However the only sort of “dualism” that I am willing to consider seriously is the dualism of form and matter to which I appealed in the discussion of rationality (and I take that to be a major concession). The question of the form-matter distinction is an interesting question for general metaphysics (and physics), and it is at the level of general metaphysics that it will have to be resolved one way or another: it is not ultimately, I argue, a problem particular to the metaphysics of mind. So the hope for a natural semantic of psychological predicates is still alive, granting that human beings may be possessed, like everything else in nature, of formal properties that are different from physical properties. Other than that (admittedly major) caveat, it is my view that there are only physical properties. So I will now have to argue that there are no phenomenal properties. A successful argument will have to persuade the reader that the absent-qualia problem has been satisfactorily addressed.<br /><br />In fact three arguments (or perhaps three versions of one argument) will now be presented, drawing from three separate canonical sources. As in the discussion of Plato in the last chapter, it is not so much my goal to explicate the canonical sources with an historian’s precision as it is to use some excellent philosophy as a springboard and inspiration. This does not mean that I am giving myself a license to anachronism or idiosyncrasy. I am simply asking the reader to consider the arguments (and the interpretations) on their merits as they pertain, if at all, to the problem of phenomenal properties. The second part of the chapter will again appeal to heterogeneity and explore the implications of recognizing that consciousness, unlike intentionality, is not a supervenient quality. When this is recognized it turns out that we can avail ourselves of a kind of materialist theory that fails when used to address intentionalityAnderson Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358008464457746997noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3736365491401043672.post-9968491648286910452011-02-13T13:03:00.000-04:002011-02-13T13:05:35.706-04:00A Resolution to the Problem of RationalityTo summarize, the proposal is that the property humans (and any number of other probably-existing forms of life) have of “being rational” is a formal property, “formal properties” understood as mathematical (relational) properties that can be formalized (another way of saying they supervene on physical things). If this is correct then the metaphysical problem will be about formal properties: is materialism incompatible with the existence of formal properties? <br /><br />Form/matter dualism is the only plausible version of dualism that I know of, and Plato’s arguments for the immortality of the soul from the eternal nature of form are the only plausible arguments for dualism I know. One doesn’t get as much out of it as one might think. One doesn’t even get one’s very own soul, because there’s really only one indivisible soul. Not much of an account of freedom, either: being as rational as possible is being optimally free.<br /><br /> What can be said is that the present argument locates the problem of form in the general area of “metaphysics,” showing that it is not in any metaphysically unique way a particular problem for “philosophy of mind.” While that may seem a fairly innocuous conclusion I think it does have some merit. The conclusion shows that predicates like “rational” and “computational” need not entail reference to representations, only to formal organization (and isn’t that Fodor’s goal?) If this is right then the Platonic resolution to the problem of rationality is not only compatible with the operationalist elimination of mental representation, it reinforces it with the observation that formal organization is ubiquitous in nature. The argument that rationality is a formal property blocks human exceptionalism, when exceptionalism is argued for from the supposed (ontological) uniqueness of rationality.<br /><br /> I don’t know what I think about the cosmological question about the innate organization of the universe or the lack thereof. I don’t know enough. But I have made a little progress on the dilemma seemingly posed by Plato and Wittgenstein. The key move was to see that “mind” is a heterogeneous enough concept that different psychological predicates turned out to be about very different things. The technical expression of the dilemma was that although mental representations seemed untenable, rationality understood as grasping and respecting the logical relations that obtained between the propositions seemed ineliminable. If form is accepted into our ontology then we can see how logical relations are “built in” to states of affairs themselves. What would it mean to say that a Platonist was a realist about “states of affairs” if he or she didn’t think that states of affairs had the same logical relationships with each other as those shared among propositions? <br /><br />The interpretation of form/matter dualism that I have developed here holds that there is only one ontological fact aside from the fact of the physical world itself. This is Aristotelean in that there is nothing other than the physical particulars, only they are formally organized to a degree that seems contingent (I take Aristotle’s substances to be like this). This view might be incompatible with a strict interpretation of materialism (like Daniel Dennett’s prohibition of “skyhooks”). For me that would not be traumatic. There is the question of just what a sophisticated physicist or cosmologist might say about what primary being is. That is a worthwhile question but unfortunately I fear that I may already have strayed too far from the metaphysics of mind. The short answer is that you will not find a great deal of unanimity.<br /><br />Meanwhile the real caper here is to try to square the operationalist account of representation offered in the first half of the chapter with this Greek-revivalist story about rationality. The idea is that the operationalist picture of language as use is one that can be developed in the context, if you will, of a world with some formal organization. In fact locating formal organization in the world looks like another way to eliminate representations, since part of their justification was that their semantic contents were needed to explain logical relations.Anderson Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358008464457746997noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3736365491401043672.post-13201939197734858862011-02-06T15:53:00.000-04:002011-02-06T15:55:39.559-04:00Wittgenstein and Aristotle?I’m afraid that some readers will be growing impatient as they read the foregoing discussion of a kind of Platonic resolution to the problem of rationality. Hadn’t I just, in the first half of this same chapter, argued for an operational theory of intentional predicates? Not only that, but when one suggests that the non-physical property of “meaning” can be washed out of the ontology of mind and language (replaced with an externalist account of intentional predicates as describing relations between persons and environments), that would be about as nominalist as one could go, surely?<br /><br /> Maybe not. The Platonism that I am offering has only one element of basic ontology besides matter. Form is indivisible, not divisible; a unity, not a multiplicity. There is only one form really: only one (perhaps inexplicable) ontological fact beyond the fact of the existence of something rather than nothing. Putting the question of Plato and Aristotle’s own views of species as “fixed natural kinds” to the side in favor of a view of species informed by evolutionary biology, it can be seen that putative “forms” such as the property of “cowness” or “lyrehood” are not genuine examples of form. Some categories (types of species, types of artifacts) come-to-be and pass away.<br /><br /> In its Aristotelian version Platonic form-matter dualism becomes a kind of non-reductive materialism: primary being is substance, the unity of form and matter. From the doctrine of the unity of form, though, it appears that this must be a kind of “non-reductive formalism” as well, as every particular with a formal property has that property, not by virtue only of the formally-organized parts of that particular, but by virtue of the entire formal organization of the material world: all geometric shapes (for example) are tokens of the one thing.<br /><br /> We know that by this point Wittgenstein would be fuming, but as usual with him we might not be certain exactly why. Of course Wittgenstein would have none of this Platonic talk. “The idea that in order to get clear about the meaning of a general term one had to find the common element in all its applications has shackled philosophical investigation; for it has not only led to no result, but also made the philosopher dismiss as irrelevant the concrete cases, which alone could have helped him to understand the usage of the general term. When Socrates asks the question, ‘what is knowledge?’ he does not even regard it as a preliminary answer to enumerate cases of knowledge.” (Blue and Brown Books; italics in original). Wittgenstein’s operationalist account of functional-role semantics is an arch-nominalist position: there is human behavior, a highly-adaptive and plastic process that changes over time, whose constants are determined by the biological (probably the best choice) nature of the human body and the human “mode of life.” “Property” names (like all names) really pick out parts of language, and the criteria for the proper application of language are essentially operational. Insofar as this line is developed as a strategy to naturalize meaning I think it’s a good one.<br /><br /> But I have never thought that philosophy of mathematics was a particularly strong point for empiricists, and that is troubling considering that Wittgenstein devoted a considerable portion of his writings to the development of an operationalist theory of mathematics. In any event I am unpersuaded by Wittgenstein’s view that extending the known proofs of mathematics is nothing more than an elaboration of a kind of “language game,” specific to humans by virtue of our particular “form of life,” such that there was no such system of entailments until some human (for example) elaborated it. It’s counterintuitive: isn’t the fact, that we can work our way from one part of mathematics to another, evidence that mathematical reasoning is coherent? Doesn’t Wittgenstein’s ultra-nominalist view of mathematics overstate the possibility space: the different ways “mathematics” could go?<br /><br /> However, it may be that the two treatments of the two different parts of intentionality - an eliminativist, operationalist argument to the effect that mental representation/content is not part of the reference of intentional predicates, on the one hand, and an Aristotelean argument to the effect that rationality is nothing more nor less than a formal property and that formal properties, if they exist at all, are ubiquitous – are compatible. According to Wittgenstein there are no abstract entities, of course, but it is important to appreciate how far Wittgenstein went in his naturalization of meaning, and how central to this were his ideas about mathematics. Wittgenstein saw mathematical behavior as a “technique,” a technique for living. “Living” is the operational verb that replaces the Cartesian verb “knowing”: a case of knowing how rather than knowing that. Wittgenstein rejected the passivity of the representational theory and insisted on viewing language as a physical behavior that aimed at getting on with the business of life.<br /><br /> Granted that the Aristotelean world is one where every concrete particular is a union of matter and form, the “form of life,” understood as the vital activities of a being of that kind, would exhibit formal properties. In fact “behavioral ecology” develops an entire narrative, largely mathematical, about the ratio of nutrients per square meter to species population per square meter, showing the correlations between these functions and genetic transmission and so forth. The human “form of life,” if it is anything at all, is a product of the same natural history as that of the human organism; the rationality of humans, like the harmony of musical instruments, is an expression of form.<br /><br /> Within this form of life, that stress made no more emphatically by anyone than Wittgenstein himself, the criteria for use of psychological predicates can be understood operationally such that no mental content is implied. In fact Wittgenstein and Aristotle come together in a sense around “form of life” or what Aristotle would call the telos of an organism. They both suspected that explanations about what sort of thing a thing was and what sort of life a thing led were more informative than explanations about what sort of things a thing thought. Wittgenstein thought that the notion of mental content made no sense. I take the argument from the form-matter distinction to show that “computation” need not necessarily entail mental representations; organizational complexity equivalent to the syntactical complexity of language is found throughout nature. Finally, Wittgenstein’s functional-role semantics and Aristotle’s teleological account of biological explanation are very similarly motivated. They come together in the area where functionalism replaces reductive materialism as a response to the supervenient nature of the functional property.Anderson Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358008464457746997noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3736365491401043672.post-50371858168925023672011-01-30T21:10:00.001-04:002011-01-30T21:11:47.064-04:00Materialism and the Two Existential QuestionsIt is hard to see the import of a metaphysical argument that has no epistemological implications. If dualism about body and mind is correct an interaction problem will have to be dealt with. By the same token if materialism is to be taken seriously it will have to provide a naturalized account of causal explanation. I take this to mean that to espouse materialism is to commit oneself to the view that a “closed” physical explanation, that is an explanation that refers only to physical causes, is possible. Many materialists understand this to mean that there can only be one “existential question,” if an existential question is one that might not have an answer: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” The idea is that there must be absolutely nothing inherently organized about the something that exists, because materialism is the bare claim that only matter exists and must accomplish everything starting from that sole axiom. Remember, too, that early modern materialism was closely linked with empiricism, forged in opposition to the classical tradition of Neo-Platonism, Christianity and rationalist philosophy and programmatically hostile to metaphysics.<br /><br /> Consider, for example, the argument traditionally called “the teleological proof for the existence of God” or more recently “the intelligent design argument.” Put in currently popular terms, the argument is that the complex design of the natural universe is evidence for an intelligent designer. In this context there is a significant difference between this sort of view and double-aspect theories that see mind and matter as one ontological being, under two kinds of description. (In addition to Spinoza many Hindi and Buddhist philosophers develop versions of double-aspect theory.) In so far as the design argument is an argument meant to demonstrate the existence of another being, the intelligent agent nominally responsible for the design of nature, the argument fails. The design argument starts by asserting that any finely-organized entity must have some sort of explanation. In the case of the natural world, an evidently finely-organized entity, the explanation offered is that there exists an intelligent designer. But the advocate of the intelligent design argument, in so far as he or she takes the argument to show that an intelligent designer ontologically distinct from the natural world exists, now looks committed to the need for an explanation of this finely-organized entity in turn.<br /><br /> To read this back into theory of mind, a materialist theory of mind has to get to mind from no-mind. The intelligent design argument fails because it is intelligence itself (in Platonic terms, the intelligibility of the universe) that we are trying to explain, and pushing the problem back a step is a failure to explain, just as saying that representations are interpreted in your head fails to explain how you, an actual person out in the world, actually interprets anything.<br /><br /> However, it may be that some materialists have over-reacted to the danger posed by the slippery slope that supposedly leads from recognizing that the physical universe may have some innate organization to…what? Say, full-blown Roman Catholicism? Perhaps it is simply a matter of two existential questions, not one. In addition to “Why is there something rather than nothing?” maybe “Why is the something that there is organized such that complex physical systems with formal properties arise?” To come to accept that the universe is a formally organized place can be an entirely secular resolution, after all. Materialist biologists arguing against creationism in the public schools don’t want to work themselves into an even weirder position than that of their religiously-motivated, intelligent design-espousing opponents.<br /><br /> The question then becomes, does accepting that there are two existential questions, not one, entail conceding that materialism is false? I think that in a way it does. If it makes sense to say that formal organization a) exists (“obtains”: I take the Aristotelean view that formal organization, if it is real, is a feature of the physical universe) and b) is a further, contingent fact (that is, there could have been a physical universe that was not formally organized to any degree) then materialism in its most orthodox version is false. I will go so far as to say that this appears to me to be the most plausible resolution to the problem of rationality, and that I do not think that it would be the end of the world if materialism were modified in this way. It is often pointed out that contemporary physics’ picture of “matter/energy” is now so strange that the concept of “materialism” probably can’t do much reliable reductive work anyway. And it is striking that physics has become more and more mathematical as the modern movement of physics has progressed over the passed one hundred years or so.<br /><br /> I think, though, that I can have my resolution to the problem of rationality without settling the cosmological question about the existence (or lack thereof) of innate universal order. The orthodox materialist might be able to explain how complex, self-replicating forms emerged from random, chaotic interactions, such that there is no need for “innate order.” Or materialism may fail to do this. It is enough for my thesis if formal properties are ubiquitous in worlds where rational beings evolve. How those worlds got that way is irrelevant to the point, which is that rationality is (just) another formal property and, although rational beings may be breathtaking examples of finely-formed entities, they are not therefore ontologically distinct from the rest of the physical universe.Anderson Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358008464457746997noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3736365491401043672.post-75862177164466769102011-01-24T07:56:00.000-04:002011-01-24T08:18:23.088-04:00Plato and the Metaphysical Problem of RationalityPlato, like Kant, was reacting to contemporary currents of thought that he regarded as dangerous. He took seriously an epistemological problem that he thought was posed by Heraclitus’ doctrine of universal flux (Plato disregards Heraclitus’ view that “all things happen in accord with the divine Logos” and sets Heraclitus up as the materialist foil to Parmenides). In a world where nothing was eternal, unchanging and universal, knowledge with those qualities was also not possible: it had no object. To try to compose a description of an ever-fluxing world was like “shooting after flying game” (as Socrates says in the Theatetus). That sort of knowledge was a snapshot of a mere moment, quickly passed. Plato’s strategy for addressing this epistemological problem was metaphysical: identify the eternal, unchanging and universal object.<br /><br /> Plato also opposed the reductive materialism of Anaxagoras and the other Melisians, early natural scientists (Aristotle, who shared Plato’s opposition to reductive materialism, addresses Democritus’ atomism). The word “reductive” in the phrase “reductive materialism” is also epistemological in its import: the idea is that macro-level phenomena (such as the minds of persons) will ultimately be explained in terms of micro-level phenomena (such as the parts of bodies). Materialism understood this way is committed to the view that properties are caused by matter. The materialist answer to the question “Why is this property what it is?” is “Because the underlying matter is what it is.” Both Plato and Aristotle argued that causation (and thus explanation) ran the other way.<br /><br /> Plato and Aristotle hold respective versions of the form-matter distinction, the view that basic ontology includes both form and matter. Plato’s version is patently dualist. He holds that form is primary being, that it is mind- and matter-independent, and that formal being acts on material being such that matter can only be said to be something to the degree that it is involved in form. Aristotle, objecting to what he saw as Plato’s ontological promiscuity, argued that substance, a union of matter and form, was primary being. Among other advantages this resolved the interaction problem that afflicts Plato’s dualism. On the other hand, the price of collapsing matter and form together into substance in this axiomatic way was that one had to accept that primary being was heterogeneous. This is counter-intuitive, but that doesn’t make it wrong. Close attention to Aristotle’s metaphysical differences with Plato is rewarded with any number of insights into subtleties of the mind-body problem (for example notice the resonance with Spinoza). We will return to Aristotle and De Anima, his own great work on the philosophy of mind, in Chapter Four. <br /><br />However I will argue that these differences, significant as they are, are not relevant to the present, relatively broad point I want to make about the form-matter distinction, materialism, and the problem of rationality. Ultimately I’m more of an Aristotelian than a Platonist, but I think Plato’s more explicitly dualist discussion makes this broad point best so I will discuss two passages from Plato, the “analogy of the sun” at Republic 507b-509c and the treatment of the materialist argument that “soul is an attunement of the body” at Phaedo 93a-94e.<br /><br />The Sun, Plato says, makes the universe a visible place. Our eyes take advantage of this (Plato and Aristotle resisted Empedocles’ arguments for natural selection, which they saw as reductive, but the reader should join me in helping ourselves to evolutionary biology wherever it helps to fill things in here). We can see each individual visible thing because the whole universe is suffused with that one element, light, which emanates from the Sun. Analogously Plato claimed that something he called “the Good” suffused the universe with order and made it an intelligible place. The Sun is to vision as the Good is to rationality: both vision and rationality are possible because of the existence of a more general feature of the universe. Plato takes the analogy farther. The Sun’s light is necessary for the growth of plants and the Good’s order is necessary for the emergence of definite (definable, intelligible) things. The Sun is the source of warmth; the Good is the source of value. Darkness is the absence of light; badness is the absence of order.<br /><br />Describe any concrete particular thing. You will describe it (you can only describe it) in terms of its properties. Concrete particulars, as Heraclitus pointed out, are constantly coming-to-be and passing away. Properties (forms, universals) are eternal. The epistemological challenge posed by Heraclitus’ doctrine of universal flux is met with the Platonic doctrine that formal knowledge (knowledge of formal properties), as distinct from material knowledge (knowledge of concrete particulars), constitutes true understanding.<br /><br />However there are properties and then there are properties. I stated at the beginning of the book that I don’t like a lot of loose talk about “properties” and that ultimately I think that physical properties are the only kind of properties that there are. If I am going to qualify that at all (and at the end of this discussion you will be left with your own judgment to decide how far I have gone in that direction, and if too far), then I had better try to be a good deal more precise about what I mean by “formal properties.”<br /><br />Consider two putative properties: the property of “cowness” (or “being-a-cow” or what you will) and the property of circularity. According to Plato, as matter approaches nearer to form it comes to be something, “being” meaning “being intelligible,” which to Plato is a legitimate ontological category (Plato posits degrees of being, contrary to the materialist’s zero-sum understanding of being). However, while there are certainly well-formed cows and malformed cows, even a cow still-born with deformity is a cow (if someone comes into the barn and asks, “What is that?” the right answer is “That’s a cow.”). Plato and Aristotle thought that species were fixed natural kinds (to use the standard phrase), but we (well, I) don’t think so: species are the kinds of things that come-to-be and pass away, just as individuals do. With circularity the situation is different. Being a circle just is having (instantiating) that property, and there is a threshold of trueness short of which we will say that the concrete particular isn’t a circle in a sense that it cannot be said, of any animal born of cows, that it “isn’t a cow.” Once a cow, always a cow, but a concrete particular can gain and lose the property of circularity. <br /><br />The extension of the set of all formal properties can only be understood in the context of Plato’s central metaphysical thesis of the Good. Plato is clear on the difference between material being and formal being. Material being is divisible (Socrates’ body can be chopped up into pieces and scattered like leaves or burnt and blown away like smoke), it is a multiplicity (I am one body, you are another), and it comes-to-be and passes away (“All men are mortal, Socrates is a man…”). What part of reality is indivisible, a unity (oneness), and eternal?<br /><br />Imagine (if this is the sort of thing that can be imagined) that one’s sole mathematical practice was to name one set, {x,x}, let’s call it “2.” Now we reflect on our named set and it occurs to us that we need a name for the constituent set, {x}, so we call it something: “1.” It is now impossible not to notice a pair of functions, “+” and “=.” From these we will inevitably get to the other functions, and we also now have a practice of naming all sets; we have the set of natural numbers. In fact all of mathematics is entailed by any part of mathematics. Mathematics cannot be cut into pieces. To have it is to have, at least implicitly, all of it, including all of those proofs that no human has as yet discovered (it is mind-independent). Nor can any part of mathematics be considered, as physical objects can, in isolation from the rest. I can imagine a universe consisting only of this desk chair floating in the vast emptiness of space (I think), but if the proof of the infinity of prime numbers is floating out there, so is all the rest of mathematics. It is one, not a multiplicity of separable propositions. Not only that, but it looks like it is floating out there, since we discover the entailments. And those proofs would be valid, undoubtedly, whether or not there was any matter and energy at all. Mathematics is indivisible, a unity and eternal.<br /><br />At this point it is possible to be more specific about what a “formal property” is. I take formal properties to be mathematical properties, essentially. For what it’s worth, I even think that this may not be far from Plato’s actual theory, reflecting as it does the metaphysical influence of Pythagoras and Parmenides. To say that a thing has a formal property is to say that there is an aspect or part of that thing that can only be described in terms of mathematical or logical relationships that can be formalized without reference to the contingent physical properties of the thing. For example the property of circularity is a formal property. The set of circular things includes wooden things, clay things, bone things and metal things, but circularity is supervenient: its mathematical description is about the spatial relationship between one of its parts and another and this formalizable (mathematical) relationship does not “reduce” to any contingent properties of wood cells or clay particles etc. That is, “formal properties” are properties that can be formalized. All formal properties are supervenient on matter: there is no physical criterion that fixes the extension of the set of physical things that instantiate the property. <br /><br />Another way of saying the same thing is to say that any physical object might potentially be involved in any formal property. Formal properties are universal (sometimes they are called “universals”). A critical point here is that strictly speaking there is only one formal property, that property that the universe has of being formally organized by the Good. To speak of a plurality of “forms” (“circularity,” “rationality”) is figurative. There is only one form in which all formally organized things participate; only its expression in matter is multifarious as for example in the various geometrical shapes. (In the next section I will discuss whether and how much this literalist Platonism can coexist with materialism in general and particularly with the Wittgenstein-influenced eliminativism about mental content that I sketched above.) <br /><br />At Phaedo 93a-94e Socrates is responding to a kind of materialist theory suggested by Simmias. Simmias acknowledges that Socrates can raise difficulties for the identification of the soul with the body by pointing out apparently metaphysical differences between them (for example with the argument from “recollection,” which is Socrates’ term of art for innate knowledge), but Simmias argues that the soul might nonetheless be a kind of “attunement” of the body. This is an emergentist view: when all of the physical properties come together in the right way, a non-physical property emerges, not identical to but dependent on (caused by) the underlying physical properties. Emergentism is a creature of that murky area, populated by refugees and smugglers, where “non-reductive materialism” and “epistemological dualism” share a hopelessly porous border. People who wind up here wanted the goodness of materialism without the badness. Plato’s (dualist) response to the emergentist challenge provides the last link in my argument for a Platonic resolution (I don’t say “solution”) to the problem of rationality.<br /><br />Consider a musical instrument and the harmonious sounds it makes. On Simmias’ view the harmonious sounds are caused by the particular physical properties of the instrument. Thus while it’s true that the harmony is not identical to the body of the instrument, it is also true that with the passing away of the instrument’s body there will be a simultaneous passing away of the harmony. Socrates responds that harmony is a formal property. That is, harmony itself is not more or less harmonic, any more than circularity is more or less circular. It is physical particulars that can gain or lose circularity, gain or lose harmony. One can get more or less harmonious, but once a lyre always a lyre. The harmony, then, is nothing particular to the lyre; the lyre may have a particular sound in some other aspect, but qua harmonious it participates in the same harmony as every other harmonious object. “Harmonious” is the type, and the extension of the set of physical tokens (musical instruments) cannot be fixed with physical criteria; harmony is formalized in musical notation.<br /><br />In fact causation runs the other way. Instruments were developed (over a more or less long period of time involving trial and error) according to how well various materials, constructions, forms and so forth achieved harmony. Musical instruments come to be, and are caused to have the physical properties that they have, by virtue of the principles of harmonics. Music is a clear case where the formal property (of harmony) is the antecedent cause of the formation of a set of physical particulars (musical instruments) that exist because they participate in the property. If someone asks, “Why is the lyre shaped like that?” the right answer is, “Because that shape is harmonic.”<br /><br />Here is the argument towards which I have been working: Consider the three properties circularity, harmony and rationality. They are all formal properties: they are all supervenient and they are all formalizable. The property of rationality is a very fancy formal property compared to circularity, to be sure. But rationality does not constitute, relative to circularity and harmony, any new ontological category. A circular object is an example of an object that possesses both physical and formal properties (in fact both Plato and Aristotle thought that all physical objects possessed formal properties). Meanwhile “immortality of soul” is neither more nor less than “immortality of form.” Remember that ontologically speaking there is only one form: form is a unity, matter a multiplicity. That both a rational human and a circular piece of chalk are involved in the same dualism of form and matter seems difficult to dispute. <br /><br />Although Plato never, to my knowledge, uses panpsychist language to the effect that non-living objects such as pieces of chalk have souls (a view more explicit in the double-aspect ontology of Spinoza), neither does he say they don’t. Anyway he could be using the word “soul” to refer specifically to rationality and that wouldn’t affect the basic argument here. Socrates comforts his human friends with the argument that humans are constituted out of both matter and rationality, a formal property, and as form is immortal, so that element of humans will never pass away. But obviously a circular object is constituted out of both matter and circularity, and so anything said about a rational object also follows for a circular object as both are understood as possessing a formal property, and the argument turns on the immortality of form.<br /><br />The result is that what we have been calling “the problem of rationality” turns out to be an instance of a quite general metaphysical problem, the form/matter problem. Now I can discuss the “resolution” to the problem of rationality that this constitutes, but first there are two discussions that are owed to those who have read up to here. The first discussion is about the relationship between the form-matter distinction and materialism: is materialism unable to give a naturalistic account of the formal properties of the universe, including the mind? The second discussion is about whether or not an eliminativist, externalist solution to the problem of representation (such as the one I proposed in the first half of this chapter) can coexist with a Platonic resolution to the problem of rationality.Anderson Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358008464457746997noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3736365491401043672.post-90299370258058437362011-01-16T11:43:00.000-04:002011-01-16T11:52:57.863-04:00Plato is not KantKant’s self-styled “Copernican revolution” was a turning inward, to the study of the mind, for solutions to the perennial problems of philosophy. Kant is, among other things, something of a reactionary. Writing at the end of the century of the Enlightenment he sought to defend Christianity, freedom and morality from the threat posed, as he saw it, by empiricism’s atheistic, amoral worldview. Particularly Kant tried to devise an antidote to Hume, and realized that Hume’s Lilliputian psychology, with its denial that anything like the “mind” could even be said to exist beyond the “impressions” caused by sensory experience, was a weak spot in the empiricist argument. Developing an ambitious account of the way the mind organized the “sensory manifold” with a conceptual framework of its own (including the “concepts” of space, time, cause and effect, multiplicity etc), Kant contained the world as understood by the new natural science within a mental representation: the “phenomenal” world was the world as represented by the rational mind, not to be confused with the actual, “noumenal” world.<br /><br /> Kant’s revolution has practically defined philosophy, certainly popular philosophy, ever since. From the German-language transcendental idealists, psychoanalysts, phenomenologists and critical theorists to the French-language existentialists, structuralists and deconstructionists to the English-language phenomenalists, language philosophers and, yes, cognitive scientists, it is hard to find any major philosophical movement of the last two hundred years that does not reflect the influence of Kant. He is one of the few canonical philosophers, whose influence can be seen in the views of the general public, including a great many people who have never heard of him or who do not appreciate that their own views are substantially Kantian. His message that our own minds broadly condition “how we see things” is congenial to a modern world of great cultural, ethnic and political diversity (notwithstanding the fact that Kant himself thought that the rational mind, qua rational, was the same for all).<br /><br /> Although Kant was engaged in a close struggle with Enlightenment empiricism his revolution was not a turning back of the clock. He presented an alternative not only to the empiricists but to the classical metaphysical tradition as well. The eclipse of explicitly metaphysical philosophy for much of the 20th century is of course due to some extent to the cultural impact of modern science, but it also reflects Kant’s core argument that psychological epistemology is first philosophy. What license have we, stuck as we are inside our heads, to make metaphysical speculations about “the external world”?<br /><br /> As a consequence of this it is now difficult for us to appreciate Plato, that most metaphysical of philosophers. So deeply and widely internalized is Kant’s thesis - that the conceptual order of the world is a projection from the mind onto the world - that many people simply cannot hear Plato anymore. In fact many people, even some philosophy professors and certainly a great many students, simply believe that Plato is Kant: the Platonic universals are Kant’s categories. What else could they be, when it is taken as axiomatic that the mind constructs a representation of the world? A smart student, in a typical but relatively explicit exchange, insisted that there was no such thing as the property of circularity or, for that matter, the set of circular concrete particulars: our minds create such categories out of whole cloth, apparently: and this was the view that he ascribed to Plato (he thought that he knew nothing of Kant). He was not at all impressed when I pointed to the two identical circular ceiling fans. Similarity itself, he understood, was a projection of the mind, a feature of the mental representation. As for the textual evidence (which in reality is clear and systematic), Plato is gnostic, all riddles; no one can really understand him. After all, he can’t mean what he is manifestly saying. Attempts to disabuse people of these notions, when not rejected out of hand, are met with bewilderment, anger, and various stages of grief and disillusionment. The slightly more sophisticated perceive that Plato is a bad, bad influence, putting us all at risk of totalitarian dystopia with his irresponsible foundationalism. One of my students told me that her law professor informed the class that he would have voted for Socrates’ execution.<br /><br /> Ah, well. Forgive this old classroom veteran my hobby-horses. Suffice it to say that, for good or ill, Plato is not Kant. Plato is making assertions about the ontology of the universe (of being); just what Kant and his followers claim cannot be done. Listening to what Plato has to say will help us to develop a resolution of the problem of rationality, at least insofar as this problem is one of the mind-body problems. I am not here trying to determine exactly what Plato the individual man actually believed in its fine points. I am not an historian of philosophy. My interest in Plato is the same as my interest in Hilary Putnam or John Searle or Jerry Fodor or for that matter the person sitting next to me on an airplane: if they have interesting ideas that inspire me in my own thinking I am grateful for the acquaintance. The reader whose principal interest is in contemporary philosophy of mind can rest assured that that is my principal interest as well, and that I am not wandering off into exegesis for its own sake. It’s just that I sincerely believe that Plato is the best exemplar of the best argument for resolving the problem of rationality.Anderson Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358008464457746997noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3736365491401043672.post-157463711000329422011-01-09T13:21:00.000-04:002011-01-09T13:23:37.688-04:00Spinoza and FodorSpinoza wrote during the transitional 17th century, when the medieval use of the term “God” as a term of art in philosophy overlapped with the early modern interest in the new science, particularly the mechanistic physics that grew out of astronomy and achieved its greatest expression in the work of Isaac Newton at the end of the century. Spinoza took a particular interest in the mind-body problem within the century’s larger preoccupation with reconciling the well-ordered, necessary world revealed by logic and mathematics with the seemingly chaotic, contingent world observed by empirical science. Philosophers of this period are often accused of hiding a thoroughly modern secularism behind religious language so as to avoid trouble with the authorities and to make their modern doctrines go down more easily, but this is a specious interpretation: these thinkers were developing modern ideas out of the old and it was a confusing and difficult process. One has to learn their philosophical language and try to understand their use of the word “God” as a technical term.<br /><br /> Spinoza’s core metaphysical argument is that God can have no limitations: to say that there was anywhere a boundary such that God was on one side and not on the other violated God’s property of universality (notice that one can substitute “mathematics” for “God” here with no loss of sense). Spinoza concludes that the universe (he often uses the term “nature”) is identical to God. It follows that the universe is necessary and perfect. The idea is that the causal processes of nature, seemingly full of contingency and randomness, actually unfold following mathematical necessity (in this regard Spinoza’s views are very close to Newton’s). Humans cannot see this directly due to our own limitations, but we can cultivate an attitude appropriate to the insight.<br /><br /> From this central doctrine Spinoza developed what is commonly called a “double aspect” theory of the relationship between the mind and the body. Everything (the universe) is both the mind and the body of God. Thus everything comes under both a mental and a physical description, which are two ways of looking at the same thing. A benefit of this view is that there is no question about either mental-to-physical or physical-to-mental causation; nor is there any question of choosing between dualism, idealism or materialism: Spinoza presents a monism where the only item of ontology is “God.” Both our mental nature and our physical nature are in fact aspects of our “Godly” (that is, rational) nature. This helps to make sense of the seemingly bizarre doctrine of “synchronicity” developed by Spinoza’s successors Leibniz and Malebranche, which expresses essentially the same idea: the mental and the physical are both explained by a common, antecedent source, which also explains how they are linked (for Spinoza they are one).<br /><br /> Spinoza’s metaphysics leads him to the strikingly modern position of rejecting dualist language about, for example, the mind being the controlling cause of the body’s movements (the ghost in the machine). But also Spinoza rejects the idea that the physical world (the “mode of extension”) is anything random or otherwise contingent. The physical/extended world has structure that corresponds to the mental world. His insight that fine-grained physical processes in the body instantiate the fine-grained processes of the mind (the body is “the object of the mind”) is achieved not by eliminating rationality (as Hume attempts to do) but by merging the rational and the physical. <br /><br /> The contemporary philosopher Jerry Fodor develops a similar line. Fodor understands that physicalism requires that the non-physical property of intentionality be washed out of the ultimate account of things, but he is convinced that mental content is ineliminable: two positions that would appear to be mutually exclusive. What account of mental representation can be given that does not involve us in reference to the semantic property? Fodor proposes to translate semantic properties into syntactic properties. The syntactic structure of the proposition (that is, of the mental representation that is implicit in the intentional attribution) maps on to the computational structure of cognition, which can be cashed out at the machine-language level. A “machine-language” isn’t really a language at all, in the sense of “language” as a symbol-system with semantic content. In the case of computers, binary code (1s and 0s) represents the physical state of the electronic gates in the microchips (open or closed). As the creators of computers we can explain the words and images on the computer screen in terms of the underlying physical process. <br /><br />Uncovering the machine-language of the nervous system looks like a holy grail for cognitive science. But computers are artifacts that, ultimately, move symbols around for human beings to interpret, so the computer analogy doesn’t go through: actual mental content of the sort that (as Searle demonstrates, convincingly to my mind, with the Chinese Room) computers utterly lack has to be explained without appeal to an interpreter. The mental must be explained wholly in non-mental terms. Computers have the mental already built in: their human users. Fodor’s most expensive proposal is his idea that the causal role of mental content can be explained wholly in terms of the syntactical properties of the representation: that syntax alone can perform the function of sustaining and respecting the logical entailments between the propositions. This requires that he rejects meaning holism in favor of meaning atomism: like immune system antibodies, each mental concept must be latent and autonomous. This is also necessary if we are to keep cognitive psychology (as Fodor believes we must) “in the head.”<br /><br />I have already expressed my sympathies for externalism and my eliminativism regarding mental representation. However I come not to bury Fodor but to praise him. Fodor has the same insight as Spinoza: to understand the identity of the mental and the physical requires that we understand not only the mental as, in some sense, physical but also the physical as, in some sense, mental. The problem of rationality, unlike the problem of representation, will require something like the double aspect approach. Spinoza proposes the aspects of mind and body, Fodor proposes the aspects of semantics and syntax. That Fodor is a realist about representations and I am an eliminativist does not turn out to mean that we fundamentally disagree. Specifically I don’t think that syntax entails symbol entails semantics, a line of criticism that many materialists would take against Fodor. However, while Spinoza and Fodor both point the way to the resolution of the problem of rationality, to actually get there we must now consider the metaphysics of one of the greatest of all philosophers.Anderson Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358008464457746997noreply@blogger.com2