Agnosticism and Philosophy

This is a response to the really excellent round of comments published at the end of the last blog post. I think the substance of the respective comments is consistent enough not to do a "1),2)" kind of thing (that I often do, finding distinct arguments). But this topic is also fun, I notice, because everyone's got something to say.

Kevin Vond has in the past expressed to me that metaphysics, in any literal sense of that word, might be impossible if our conceptual structure was so 1) arbitrary: could have been radically otherwise within the same natural world, and 2) important in the role it played in our science, our general describing and explaining of the world, for us to ever be in a position to claim that we were actually doing "metaphysics." (And interesting that Kevin tends to be the critic of Wittgenstein vs. my attempts to apply what I take to be Wittgensteinian interpretations).

This is recognizably a descendant of German Idealism, and of course it is the whole drift of the Continental version of language philosophy (Habermas,Foucault, Derrida) of recent decades. It is also the popular view: the story one gets from an intelligent person with a passing interest in philosophy. I am part of a resurgence in metaphysics that has developed among English-speaking philosophers over the past thirty years or so, I think it is to some degree a consequence of the enormous attention that community has given to the philosophy of mind for many years.

I do think that what I like to call "metaphysics" may, for the existentially squeamish, be translated to "semantics." But I for one think that I can think about what sorts of things exist. Probably this all starts in thinking about materialism and the mind/body problem. I studied the metaphysics of universals, say, or propositions, possible worlds, essences and all sorts of things motivated by trying to get a handle on the metaphysics of reductive materialism vs. functionalism etc. N.N. mentions Alvin Plantinga, his debate with David Lewis about possible worlds as a battleground for nominalism vs. Platonism is out towards the deeper waters.

So first I want to talk about Kevin's experiments with concepts in his comment here. Let's think about "America," "justice," "God," and "the external world." If Kevin is right, all of these concepts ought to function in the same way. I like the anthropological behaviorist (a kind of reading of Wittgenstein) criterion that we can be said to be communicating when our communicative act makes a difference, when a person's choices are influenced. This is a definition of "meaning" intended to be eliminativist about Platonic entities, about some nonreducible semantic "property" and so forth.

I think that {"America" and "ethics"} are distinct from {"God" and "the external world"} as subjects of sentences thus: "I believe/don't believe that X exists." By the way I don't need to suggest that agnostics are disengenuous, only that they are confused. I take it that confusion on the present issues is the problem, not wanton disregard of these issues (fully understood!). We might say that "America does not exist" for any number of reasons. We might be talking to an American who was too nationalistic, or we might be talking to a foreigner who was too anti-American. Looks like the same case: we want them to see that they ought not be using the concept to do so much work, because it is leading them into reactionary territory. We want them to use their imaginations a little more and appreciate that the concept "America" is highly complex and has its explanatory and justificatory limits. That is, when we say that they go "too" far, we mean that we no longer accept that their account of things is reasonable. Fair enough. But notice that we cannot possibly mean to make a blanket metaphysical claim such that we claim that every time you mention "America," you are talking about a non-existent entity that in fact has no explanatory or causal role to play in our talk about the world. People just don't talk that much about unreal things. I know that sounds fast, but let me elaborate using the concept "ethics."

What happens in the undergraduate ethics class is, there's always someone who argues that "ethics does not exist." This has to be a metaphysical claim, and it has to be wrong. It has to be a metaphysical claim because it can't be any kind of pragmatic claim: it's a strange description of reality to say that "ethics doesn't exist" if your own metaphysical attitude tends to hold that the only thing there is to "existing" is what people think about and talk about all day. Whatever that is, the epistemological idealist is also, by definition, committed to saying it's real, if "knowing" is only a matter of having a concept that is functioning to influence behavior. Thus, as with "America," I sometimes say "There is no justice" (I admit that I might never say, "There is no ethics," but I could to the same end). For example when I am talking to my students about the importance of education and having a good future. I want them to see that an education is a precious thing that few people receive. I'm giving them some tough talk. But that we live in a world where we are confronted with ethical problems is as nonnegotiable as that we live in one where we are confronted with America.

"God" and "the external world" are not like that. Let's think about "the external world." One can't say, "Well look, we talk about the external world all the time. Not a minute goes by that we don't think and talk about the external world: same as ethics." But this is wrong. We never talk about the external world, if we mean by that something that might not exist given the experiences that we are having right now. Wittgenstein thought that there could be no propositions about ethics (or aesthetics: values in general), if by that a philosopher meant that he was explaining why some things are good and some things are bad. They just are, W. insisted, detecting a limit to language (this is what he and Popper got into a fight about that is described in the book Wittgenstein's Poker, that I haven't read). Note that here we can clearly see the empiricist Wittgenstein: Hume, Mill, the Modernists all share in this non-cognitivist tradition, vs. Continental rationalism.

But he thought it was nonsense to talk about either "the external world" or "phenomenal experience" if one claimed to be talking about anything over and above description of plain experience. (That is a basic reason why I am interested in Wittgenstein: I think he has a good argument for the elimination of phenomenal properties.) If God is (according to you) something in the world, then maybe it is something that exists or does not exist, and that you cannot now know about for one reason or the other. But if God is global the way the external world is global then the concept plays no real role and thus refers to nothing. If we are talking about the kind of thing about which one can neither "know" nor "not know," then agnosticism is impossible to the extent that agnosticism is the claim that "I do not know whether God exists."

However, Wittgenstein also appears to hold that there was "spiritual" reality that was as much a part of the (inexpressible) world as values. He himself took these things to be among the most important in life. That is what gets us finally to the concept "God." It looks like I can use the concept of God to the same rhetorical effect as in the first two examples. I can influence others by saying "There is no God!" I'm trying to shake up a hidebound thinker of one sort or another: a narrow dogmatist, or a paralyzed fatalist, or a self-pitier, or any number of other cases. Of course we also very frequently do this by saying "There is a God!" I'm pretty sure most people (both of us) who have read this far would interpret people, who mentioned God a lot while discussing what to do in daily life, as talking about some ethical character of the world: aiming for good outcomes and to avoid bad ones. But there is another thing, and maybe Plato gets it right.

There is the organized nature of the world. Now let me state out front that I take that in no way to demonstrate the existence of some "designer." In fact to claim to explain design by appeal to a designer just pushes the problem back a step: from whence the designer? It is a perfectly vacuous argument, taken that way. But I see the formal organization of the world as a plain fact like the existence of ethics: the world is like that. This may commit me to some kind of dualism after call: if "The world exists" is not the only existential truth, if "the world that exists is formally organized" is also true and ineffable, then Plato is right: there are two distinct ontological facts: 1)the bare existence of matter/energy, and 2) its formal organization. If that is what is taken as "God" (Plato thought it was "the Good," the source of intelligibility and value in the world), then that is something real that might not have existed, but does.

But that's perfectly acceptable as a pagan fact. I don't need to add God to that. Formal organization is already doing the work. Why is the universe formally organized? Why does it exist? There is no sense of "might/might not be" in either case. Not a subject of "belief" at all. If God is like that, agnosticism is impossible.

"Agnosticism" is Not a Theological Position

A "theological position" would be an opinion of some sort (that's the "position" part) about something (say, existence or lack thereof) specifically about God (that's the "theological" part). "Either God exists, or God does not exist" is a theological position, because it contains the premise that both sides of the disjunction make sense. Put in metaphysical terms: that it's possible that God exists, and possible that God does not. But I'm not sure the agnostic is entitled to that much.

This is because the agnostic looks to me to be committed to the view that "Knowledge about God's existence is impossible." I think this is necessarily true about the agnostic because it makes no sense to say, "I choose not to have a belief one way or the other about X." As Socrates insists, one believes what one believes, whether one wants to or not. The attempt to reflect on our own beliefs, to honestly and courageously evaluate our reasons for holding them, is the beginning of philosophy. That is why "Because my family raised me to believe in God" is not an adequate answer to the question "Do you believe in God?" The question is about one's beliefs themselves, not the etiology of those beliefs, although that may be revealing (as it is, embarrassingly, in the example).

If this is so then another problem for agnosticism is that it is a consequence of a general epistemological attitude, that is, an attitude towards knowledge in general, and nothing particular to do with God. Aristotle's objections to Plato's metaphysics, Hume's objections to 17th century rationalism's metaphysics, are epistemological arguments with general application. Aristotle and Hume, hearty philosophers both, breathed deep and followed Socrates' dictum: they concluded (for closely related but interestingly different reasons) that they believed that various putative entities did not exist. They were willing to accept the consequences of the epistemological standards that they had set for themselves.

The agnostic wants to be a kind of sceptic: not sceptical of God's existence, but sceptical about the possibility of knowledge of God's existence. The move is to avoid the unpleasantness of denying God's existence by denying the possibility of knowledge of God's existence. Wittgenstein would say, "When you say that asserting God's existence or denying God's existence is impossible, because there is no way of knowing which possibility is fact, you are (merely) stating that it makes no difference, that neither proposition carries any meaning because there are no pragmatic consequences either way." That is he would apply his general criticism of sceptical arguments. In fact Wittgenstein holds that propositions about spirituality are impossible for the same reasons that he holds that propositions about aesthetics, ethics and phenomenal experience, for examples, are impossible. But a crucial point here is that he denies that this makes them insignificant (as Hume or A. J. Ayer, say, might do): he affirms the great significance of many aspects of experience that lie beyond the bounds of language.

Where does this leave the agnostic? (I am fighting off the urge to go on to Kierkegaard.) The agnostic cannot say, "I believe that God might exist or God might not, but I believe that knowledge of which is true is impossible." This is self-contradictory. In order to (really) believe that God might or might not exist, one must believe that there are (somewhere, somehow) reasons for believing one or the other. But the agnostic must claim that there are no such reasons, else why not examine them with Socrates and the gang? (Just as an aside, I think that there are reasons for and against believing in God: thus I am not agnostic, even if I have not reached a conclusion.) No, the agnostic is simply refusing to examine his or her own beliefs. Pascal was right: just doesn't want to get into trouble. Agnosticism is a refusal to do theology, not a theological position.

Buddhism and Guilt

There are two issues to think about when we consider the relationship between Buddhist teachings and guilt:

1) Buddhism is primarily a preventive approach to wrongdoing, rather than a curative one. This is wise: much better to prevent bad things from happening than to have to deal with them once they have happened (a failure to recognize this is, maybe, the main problem with modern medicine, for example). Someone who cultivates the discipline to follow the Eight-Fold Path will, to the extent that they succeed, succeed also in doing no wrong. Basic Buddhist teachings are primarily aimed at cultivation of right being. They do not tend to dwell on atonement and expiation.

2) The First Noble Truth of the Dharma, that all life is suffering, refers of course to all forms of suffering. But as a human cultural artifact, Buddhist teachings over the centuries pay particular attention to mental suffering: negative thoughts and feelings. I do not wish to digress into a discussion of variants on Buddhist teachings here (trying to be brief), but it is worthwhile to point out that Tibetan (Tantric, Mahayana) Buddhism stresses the essential goodness of human nature and aims at liberation through positive self-realization, while Zen (Chinese, Taoist) Buddhism stresses the non-existence of the self and aims at liberation through selfless mindfulness (I have no intention here of judging between the two or even claiming that they are fundamentally different: I neither favor any school nor claim that there are ultimately fundamental differences). All Buddhist teaching aims at the end of ego-suffering through identification with the whole world (nirvana).

What I want to think about is the problem of real guilt. That is, for the sake of discussion, let's assume that one has in fact acted wrongly: willfully transgressed one's own moral principles. It is not a question of being "made to feel guilty" in some illegitimate way, and it is not an illusion of the ego, as when the ego leads us to think that negative outcomes are a result of our actions as a way of making us feel significant. (And perhaps there are other examples of false guilt.) No, let's assume that we are actually guilty. It's not impossible!

Buddhism teaches us that only ourselves suffer from the negative thoughts and feelings that we are experiencing. This is one of the most important insights of Buddhist psychology. Say someone negligently ran over my foot with their car and broke it. They may be rightly called upon to pay for the treatment or some civil responsibility like that. But they, the negligent driver, are hardly the right person to help to heal my injured foot. I will need a doctor for that, and above all I will need to follow the regimen, practice the physical therapy, and do everything necessary to cure my foot. That will be wholly my own responsibility.

Negative thoughts and feelings are like the injured foot. It is not a question of whether the negative thoughts and feelings are understandable or even justified. That is besides the point. The point is that it is I who now carry around the negative thoughts and feelings, that repeat themselves in a "crazy mind" tape loop in my head, just as the suffering of the injured foot persists until it is dealt with. It is I who am suffering, and so I must somehow overcome and lose the negative thoughts and feelings.

But notice that that discussion is from the point of view of the innocent. Today I want to think from the point of view of the guilty. And so we can see a potential danger if we misunderstand Buddhist teaching: granting that it is possible to be guilty, which I take to be a plain fact, we do not want to become so proficient at clearing the mind of negative thoughts and feelings that we lose our conscience altogether. That would be a grave misunderstanding of both Buddhism and Taoism. But at the same time it achieves nothing for the guilty person to be masochistic: to say to their self, "Yes I deserve these negative thoughts and feelings - I deserve to suffer." That by itself only makes the world worse, not better.

For ourselves, we can learn from our transgressions. We can meditate and become more mindful of the necessity of right action, right speech, and the other elements of the Path. There is nothing magical or mysterious about this. There is nothing mysterious or magical about Buddhism, at all; that is a very important point. For others we have wronged, I have only humble suggestions:

1) Atonement through concrete actions of restitution, when possible. Quotidian examples: returning stolen property, repairing or paying for damage, admitting lies and telling the truth. Replacing antagonistic actions with supportive actions.

2) Apology. But the act of apology is not without some risk of seduction by the ego. Perhaps further contact with you will only prolong or exacerbate the suffering of the person you have harmed. Perhaps your apology is a selfish act: perhaps it is only for your own sake that you want forgiveness. (Slanderers: the only person who does not need to hear from you is the person you have slandered. It is everyone else who you must speak to now.) Better to show contrition through deeds, and remember that non-action is often the best path. Assuming that you are the cure is just as egotistical as assuming that you are the disease.

This is not much to offer after bringing up such a promising topic, I realize. In the end I think that Buddhist practice is preventative, as I said at the beginning: cultivation of spiritual discipline and mindful character should aid us in avoiding bad action. And what would we call someone who did no harm? We can make up words. We'll never meet anyone like that.

Marshley's Project for Eastern Philosophy Class

"Mind" is a Heterogenous Concept

By "heterogenous concept" I mean one that turns out, under analysis, to refer to multiple, distinguishable things. All I mean by "analysis," that I am not using in any sort of technical manner, is thinking about the meaning of the term (semantics and metaphysics often come to the same thing). Examples of heterogenous concepts from outside of philosophy of mind are value terms like "ethics" or "beauty," or for that matter very many abstract nouns such as (opening the dictionary randomly) "resemblance" or "reservoir." Heterogenous concepts are common (I'm not sure I even like the word "concepts." To me it feels like I'm just thinking about words). We can understand the continuity of meaning between "That man's reservoir of good will" and "The city's reservoir of water," but if we are thinking metaphysically (in the sense of our ontology) about reservoirs the two uses are different enough that (I would say) it makes most sense to say "'Reservoir' is a heterogenous concept," meaning that it is a word that refers to multiple, distinguishable things.

Once we are alert to the possibility that one concept-word can turn out to refer to distinguishable things we can sometimes clear the smoke away a bit from philosophical arguments. For example ethical theorists (not the best ethical theorists, but quite a few ethical theorists) might see themselves as involved in some sort of partisan contest: are the rights theorists correct (or better or what have you), or are the consequentialists getting it right(er)? Or maybe virtue theory is preferable to both? But wait: people can be "ethical" at a civil, legal sort of level (respecting others' rights), and "ethical" at a phenomenal, qualitative sort of level (minimizing felt harm), and they can be "good" people in the sense of being an example of a well-realized person. And in fact real good people (that is, good people when they're not doing philosophy) use Kantian-style "golden rule" reasoning and Millian outcomes-based strategies and they make Aristotelean evaluations of themselves and others, all at the same time, because "ethics" turns out to be a heterogenous concept. The intentions of self-aware beings and the phenomenal experiences of conscious beings and the health or pathology of living beings are all different things, such that there turn out to be not so much differences of opinion among "ethical theorists" as there are changings of the subject.

"Mind" is a heterogenous concept. Specifically, when people use the word "mind" they are sometimes referring to (using these words in their philosophy of mind sense) the intentional (beliefs, desires, hopes, fears), which is about persons and sometimes to the phenomenal (pains, tastes, sensations, tingles), which is about bodies. Thus we can use the same strategy that I just used to try to sort out "ethical theory" to try to sort out "theory of mind." Operationalist theories (such as functionalism) are addressing the problem of intentionality while materialist theories are addressing the problem of phenomenology. And both approaches work in their respective applications. Thus we can cut the contemporary gordian knot of philosophy of mind. That's why I am calling this project The Mind/Body Problems, plural.

One more point, about why it has been so hard for so long for people to realize that "mind" presents us with (at least) two metaphysical problems, not one. (Gilbert Ryle got this point right.) That is because most cultures and thus most persons have deeply internalized the ontology of the soul: one body, one mind. The body indisputably is something, some one thing, a very fancy physical object. The grammar (as Wittgenstein would say) of the word "mind," suggesting as it does that it refers to some one, individuated thing, combined with the idea that the mind is something separate from the body, creates a strong intuition (a wrong one) that there is one metaphysical problem here. And that has led to a great deal of heat and not much light at all.

What Should We Be?

Readers of this blog know my main interests lie in the area of contemporary philosophy of mind and metaphysics. However, I enjoy, through my teaching duties, the luxury of regularly studying any number of other topics. Spring semesters one of my regular courses is Contemporary Philosophy. This spring I decided to conduct a survey of the 19th and 20th centuries in "two movements," an effort to get to the bottom of the so-called "Continental/Analytic" distinction, a polarizing categorization towards which I am generally skeptical, and of which I warn my students off (and I do feel that anyone who comes on as a strong partisan one way or the other is probably a mediocre philosopher, definitely a mediocre reader). The course outline can be found two posts previous to this one.

I started the first "movement" (in the compositional sense) with Kant, moving through the German Idealists, Hegel (and Kierkegaard presented as a reaction to Hegel), Marx (who I believe straddles the two so-called traditions), Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, De Beauvoir, the "Critical Theory" of the Frankfurt School (Marcuse, Habermas), "Structuralism" (Foucault, Lacan), and finally, yesterday, Derrida. Now we will go back to the 18th century and start all over again with Hume, moving through a similar survey (this time composed almost entirely of English-language philosophers) through to the metaphysical revival of David Lewis and Alvin Plantinga.

So this week we are discussing and evaluating so-called Continental (I insist on the "so-called" when using either name). It was, I think, a very useful survey, illuminating a striking continuity of concerns and affirming the truism that there is "nothing new under the sun"; virtually the entire conversation called "Continental" philosophy follows in a thoroughly formulaic way from Kant and Hegel (I don't say that pejoratively).

What I want to discuss today (thinking about our classroom discussion tomorrow) is the question that emerged for my students in a persistent way starting around Nietzsche and Freud. (I argued that these two taken together represent the bridge from Romanticism to Modernism.) Even earlier Kierkegaard insists on the essential absurdity of our life-choices, and the real sense in which Schopenhauer is a "pessimist" is in his advice that we simply give up the existential struggle and find peace by sinking down into thinghood (the worst sin for existentialists like Nietzsche and Sartre). The question is: if so-called Continental philosophers have worked so hard to establish our fundamental freedom and to deconstruct our assumptions about our own natures, than what should a body do?

My student Kristian Rullan raised the question during the discussion of Sartre: if Sartre is right that consciousness is negation and nothing but negation, and that therefore (as Nietzsche also argued) we are entirely responsible for the most "essential" aspects of our own identities, then what is/would be the "existential person"? What would the existentialist have us do/be? My student Yasmin Zapata, chaffing a bit perhaps under the insistent subversiveness of de Beauvoir's existential feminism and the "permanent revolution" prescribed by modern Western Marxism, asked why it was necessarily so terrible, after all, to be a product and a creature of an historically conditioned and socially constructed culture? And it does appear that starting at the very beginning with Kant's distinction between a noumenal world-in-itself and a phenomenal world-of-experience, there is nothing less than a fetish in the so-called Continental tradition with the idea that "ordinary" people are trapped in an illusory world and that "enlightenment" would consist of a breaking through the wall of illusion into authenticity. And this fetish is still wholly present in the Althusserian notion of the "prison-house of language" that is the basis of Derrida's work. (I don't necessarily have anything against fetishes, by the way!)

This is the basic question that we will be discussing in class tomorrow. I have two thoughts about it just now (and of course I have no agenda of defending or promoting so-called Continental). First, it is of the essence of existentialism (pardon the pun) that there is no prescription: there is precisely no Existential Man the way there was supposed to be, say, a Soviet Man (and indeed the Western Marxists reject the idea of a Socialist Man as well). Sartre's gift to us of an argument for freedom, whether it is effective or not, necessarily precludes any prescription as to what we ought to be (and before him Nietzsche wants us only to "go over and go under" the sickly essentializing of "human nature," and Heidegger defines thinking as moving towards what is not known and cannot be said). The existential version of feminism developed by de Beauvoir and explored by subsequent French psychoanalytic feminists such as Kristeva similarly rejects the conception of feminism as a mere power play between the given "masculine" and "feminine." All of psychoanalysis, for that matter, is properly understood as emancipatory rather than prescriptive. And Derrida claims to write on "the margin," outside of the logocentric tradition of "metaphysics," the function of deconstruction being entirely to throw us into the necessity of self-creation.

Speaking critically, I find all of this tradition to be something of a "prolegomena to some future act of self-creation": they all insist on the reality of choice and the virtue of authenticity above all, but one rarely sees them actually choosing anything. This is why I have some affection for Kierkegaard: he out of the whole group actually manages to digest and embrace the conclusion and makes a choice.
My second thought is this: Socrates tells us that human nature is to think about what it is that we believe to be true, and that philosophy is to state that belief as clearly and courageously as possible. Try as you might, he taunts his relativist antagonists in the Theatetus, your arguments will never free you from this human condition. In a way the so-called Continental tradition draws a similar moral: the permanent revolution, the overcoming and the going under, is otherwise known as living. It is nothing more or less than having a life, and when we cease to interrogate ourselves in this way we have ceased to be persons.

(Footnote: If you are moved by existentialist discussions of the nature of consciousness, try reading some Buddhism. It is a much older tradition that elaborates these ideas to a much deeper level.)

Darwin the Empiricist

On the occasion of Darwin's 200th birthday, I'd like to put Darwin in his philosophical context. Most of the time we think of the empiricism of Anglophone philosophy as the doctrine that knowledge is gained through observation and experiment, an epistemological formulation that was stressed by the greatest empiricist, David Hume. But there is another important aspect to empiricism that is often overlooked, partly because empiricists themselves have tended to spurn the idea of metaphysics (Hume aimed to do away with metaphysics altogether, and the early 20th century "positivists" such as A. J. Ayer also explicitly embraced that program). Empiricism (using that label broadly: liberal Enlightenment thought, English-language philosophy since Hobbes) represents a revolution in systems dynamics: the model of transformative processes in nature, which is ultimately a cosmological topic. Explaining the persistence of the identity of a thing across changes to the properties of that thing was a basic issue for the Greeks. Heraclitus simply denied persistence, Parmenides simply denied change. The Platonic solution was to bifurcate the world into an eternally unchanging component (form) and a transient polymorphic component (matter). (And I'm not so sure whether this is all wrong, by the way.) Thus change was explained as the (metaphysically problematic) interaction of the earthly with the divine (to put it in neoplatonic Christian terms). This model persisted beyond the Christian era in the Rationalist tradition through Descartes and Spinoza to Kant and Hegel. I call this the "top-down" model: the particular states of affairs at the micro level are explained by appeal to a macro transcendental force (Platonic universals, the Christian personal God, Kant's noumenal rationality, Hegel's Absolute Spirit, etc.).
Modern empiricism's development of an alternative model (the "bottom-up" model) is, I think, one of the most important developments in the history of philosophy, perhaps the greatest revolution in thought since Plato's metaphysics. The idea is that complex systems organize themselves through the iteration of simple algorithms at the micro level. In Locke this was the organization of society through the repetition of consensual behavior of self-interested individuals (democracy). In Hume this was the organization of a system of knowledge through regularities of observation (science). The kinship between Enlightenment democracy and science cannot be overstressed. One of Darwin's principal influences was Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. Smith argued that complex economies organized themselves through the iteration of exchanges between individuals. His economics is an example of an application of the law of effect: actions resulting in negative consequences tend to be extinguished, actions resulting in positive consequences tend to be reinforced (Note: I think that one of Daniel Dennett's best articles is "Why the Law of Effect Won't Go Away"). Of course this is also the basis of behaviorist and other operationalist approaches to psychology. It is also the premise of Pragmatism, a thoroughgoing empiricist development of a theory of truth. Darwin's theory of natural selection is another application of the law of effect.
What did Darwin "discover," or what "theory" did Darwin develop? He pointed out that a proof in mathematical logic applies to all transformative processes in nature: given a set of replicators, the members of that set will have an average probability of reproductive success. That goes for conspecific breeding animals, flea market swaps and jokes. Any individual member with an above-average probability will tend to have more descendants in the next generation. That's not circular reasoning, because it leaves open the question of the reasons for the above-average probability. Selection of the fittest (most adaptive) from a variegated set. This is a proof that can be formalized. It's logically valid, which is not the same thing as empirically true. That is, it's not the kind of argument that can even potentially be false. Darwin did not develop a "theory." He simply pointed out the indubitable operation of a homely truth about the world, the law of effect, and in doing so he is coming straight out of the Scottish Enlightenment thought of Hume and Smith.
One more point: the law of effect operates on all levels. That is, genes, actions, beliefs, species, tribes, nations, come-on lines, ecosystems and all manner of replicating things, biological, cultural, and otherwise, come under this principle. Thus group selection and indeed selection at any level of organization whatever occurs, as Darwin himself recognized (for example in his discussion of the altruistic warriors of Tierra del Fuego). Thus the "selfish gene" doctrine of Dawkins is false. Not a question of science, it is a question of logic.
Happy birthday Charlie!

Teaching Contemporary Philosophy and the Continental/Analytic Distinction

Every spring I teach the Contemporary Philosophy course that concludes our four-part history sequence (Ancient, Medieval, Early Modern, Contemporary) here at UPR/M. I've been struggling with it for a couple of years, having trouble finding a text, organizing a coherent narrative and so on. Two big problems are 1) if "Contemporary" is philosophy since Kant, or since 1800, there's just too much to cover, and 2) modern philosophy diverges and branches into several different narratives; the question emerges as to what "philosophy" even is. Adding to my frustration was my conviction that the distinction between "Analytic" and "Continental" was overstated, divisive and misleading (and further complications such as doubts about whether anything like "Analytic" philosophy really exists any more. The Spanish-speaking academics around me, with all due respect, simply use the blanket term "positivism" and haven't paid any attention since, say, A. J. Ayer). I try to get my students to see the reductive limitations of dividing things up ideologically between "Rationalist" and "Empiricist" or "Continental" and "Analytic." This taxonomy mostly just closes minds I think. Still and all, I have some very bright students here and some of them are curious enough to ask me to explain what "Analytic" philosophy is.
This semester I have developed a curriculum that covers the 19th and 20th centuries in "two movements," with the goal of uncovering and examining the roots of what I call "so-called Continental" and "so-called Analytic." What is happening for me (a good professor is always Student #1 in the class) is that I'm seeing that there is indeed a fundamental parting of the ways, and it does indeed have its roots in the arguments of Hume and Kant. I know that to some this will seem like a banality, perhaps it is, but the project here is to introduce, explain and interpret both of these strains. The main distinction textually speaking is between German-language philosophy and English-language philosophy, with an appreciation of the achievement of French-language philosophers of commuting between the two. Many important philosophers and topics are left out, but this is due to the fact that this is the outline of a one-semester class, after all, and we're blazing along as it is. Also the material at the very end reflects my own interest in philosophy of mind; there are any number of other directions one could take for the late 20th century.
Here is my outline of this semester's Contemporary Philosophy course:

THE HISTORY OF 19TH AND 20TH CENTURY EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY, IN TWO MOVEMENTS
Anderson Brown, Contemporary Philosophy, Spring 2009


I. So-called “Continental”: From German Idealism to Deconstruction

A. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Critique of Pure Reason, 1781-1787

B. German Idealism: J. G. Fichte (1762-1814); G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), Phenomenology of Spirit, 1807; Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854)

C. The Metaphysics of Politics: Hegel, Karl Marx (1818-1883), Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1848; Friedrich Engels (1820-1895)

D. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), The World as Will and Representation, 1819-1844

E. The Invention of the Unconscious: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886; Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

F. Phenomenology and Existentialism, The Germans: Edmund Husserl (1859-1938); Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Being and Time, 1927

G. Phenomenology and Existentialism, The French: Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), Being and Nothingness, 1943; Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), Phenomenology of Perception, 1945; Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), The Second Sex, 1949

H. Critical Theory (The Frankfurt School): Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), One-Dimensional Man, 1964; Jurgen Habermas (b. 1929), Knowledge and Human Interests, 1968

I. Structuralism: Michel Foucault (1926-1984), Archaeology of Knowledge, 1969; Jacques Lacan (1901-1981)

J. Deconstruction: Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), Of Grammatology, 1967


II. So-called “Analytic”: From Enlightenment Liberalism to the New Metaphysics

A. David Hume (1711-1776), A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739

B. The Law of Effect: Adam Smith (1723-1790), The Wealth of Nations, 1776

C. The Revolution in Systems Dynamics: Charles Darwin (1809-1882), The Origin of Species, 1859

D. Empiricist Ethical Theory: John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), Utilitarianism, 1861

E. The Pragmatists: Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914); William James (1842-1910), The Will to Believe, 1897; John Dewey (1859-1952)

F. The New Logic: Gottlob Frege (1848-1925); Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947); Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), Principia Mathematica, 1910-1913

G. Logical Positivism: A. J. Ayer (1910-1989), Language, Truth and Logic, 1936

H. “Ordinary Language” Philosophy: J. L. Austin (1911-1960), Sense and sensibilia, 1959

I. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921, Philosophical Investigations, 1951

J. The New Philosophy of Mind: Hilary Putnam (b. 1926); John Searle (b. 1932), Minds, Brains and Science, 1984; Jerry Fodor (b. 1935), The Language of Thought, 1975; Daniel Dennett (b. 1942)

K. The New Metaphysics: Alvin Plantinga (b. 1932); David Lewis (1941-2001), On the Plurality of Worlds, 1986

Metaphysics, Semantics, and the Mind/Body Problem

We can bring the idea of "metaphysics" down to earth by relating it to the idea of "semantics." If metaphysics is the study of what exists (in our time this is essentially the confrontation with materialism), semantics is the study of the meaning of words. If my friend is talking about "angels" I can think about whether such putative entities exist but, more subtly, I can ask what he means, or aims to communicate, by this word. Thus even if we tacitly accept (as many of our contemporaries do) a physicalist axiom (metaphysically speaking), that doesn't mean that there is no longer anything to discuss about the mind/body problem. In fact the semantic analysis of intentional and phenomenal terms (the psychological vocabulary) remains an open and even a pressing issue, even for the thoroughly modern physicalist.
For Descartes the mind/body problem was essentially an interaction problem. He did not question (that is, he had his reasons for accepting) the existence of both physical substance and mental "substance." The metaphysical problem as he saw it was about causal relations between them. Thus there was one sort of entity, body, and another, mind. But if we don't accept Descartes' underlying ontology the problem is altogether different. Specifically we needn't see "mind" as referring to one thing or having one meaning (this was Ryle's enduring point expressed in the very title The Concept of Mind). Once we see this we can take a crucial step: we can distinguish the intentional psychological vocabulary ("belief," "desire," etc) from the phenomenal psychological vocabulary ("pain," "sensation," etc). We can see that there are (at least) two metaphysical (semantic) problems here, not one.
To apply this, I think that the eclipse of reductive materialism in favor of functionalism on the grounds that intentional states superevene on (are multiply realizable in) physical states is justifiable (there is indeed a problem for reductive materialism here), but that doesn't preclude identity theory as applied to phenomenal states. And that insight opens up a whole new discussion in philosophy of mind.

Externalist Non-Reductive Materialism vs. Internalist Non-Reductive Materialism

Non-reductive materialism is the view that mental states are multiply realizable. As humans, dolphins, Martians and androids might all come under the intentional predicate of "believing that the fish are in the bucket," say, it follows that type-to-type identity fails: the type of intentional state we call "believing that the fish are in the bucket" cannot be identified with any specific type of neural state (some human neural state for example). The "materialism" part of non-reductive materialism is token-to-token identity: every token intentional state is identical, on this view, to some token physical state. This is a basic premise of functionalism: functional descriptions must replace physical descriptions because functions are multiply realizable (or, functions supervene on physical systems).
We can think about the difference between externalist non-reductive materialism and internalist non-reductive materialism. The internalist thinks that intentional predicates pick out states that are in the head (or body anyway, if you wish to be more careful). To say that "He believes that the fish are in the bucket" is to say that there is a particular state of affairs in his head, presumably some neural one. On the internalist view, what is multiply realizable is this internal process that in humans is essentially neural. We can see that this view is closely tied to representational models of nervous system function: if believing that the fish are in the bucket is a state of affairs (or a process) that is happening entirely in the subject's head this may entail that "fish," "the bucket" and so forth are somehow (images? formal symbols?) represented in the head.
But there is also the option of externalist non-reductive materialism. On this view intentional predicates apply to whole, embodied persons interacting with their environment. This looks to me to be right. Brains don't think any more than stomachs eat lunch: stomachs digest, persons eat lunch. Persons think, brains do...what? Seeing this question feels like progress. The externalist view is that mental predicates do not refer to brain states. That insight is interesting on the mental side, but it also washes back onto the question of what it is that neural processes in fact accomplish.

Does "Naturalism" Mean Anything?

Yesterday I made a presentation of my work on the mind/body problem on the occasion of inaugurating a student philosophy colloquium here at UPR/M. It turned out to be a pretty good event and thoughtful responses from some good students (and from some generous faculty members) gave me much to think about.
A book-length project is hard to set up for an hour or so of informal discussion. One can't expect an audience of undergraduates (or of faculty with dissimilar interests for that matter) to simply jump in. It would be easy to spend an hour just lecturing on the nature and scope of "metaphysics." So I did something at the beginning that is fairly standard for me in class: I said that my interest in the metaphysics of the mind/body problem was motivated by an interest in "naturalizing psychology." All I want to do with this phrase is indicate something about my attitude; "I don't do ghosts and goblins, I don't do angels and demons," is something else that I say (and said yesterday). But a smart sociology major fixed on this issue of naturalism and the graybeards picked up on it and collectively they convinced me that this little bit of introductory business is too glib as it stands. Two things:
1) a) I don't actually know (news flash) all about the metaphysics of the universe. I have a programmatic "antihumanism": I do insist that humans are not exceptional, or miraculous, or otherwise different from the rest of nature. Resistance to this basic (metaphysical) fact (if it is a fact), for example among the linguists, hampers on my view progress in cognitive science and psychology. Nature might be as miraculous, mysterious and magical as you like, my claim is just that whatever nature in general is like, humans are like that.
b) I think that there are two claims that are both common and false in discussions about the mind/body problem: 1. That mental processes involve representations; that there is mental content. 2. That physical descriptions and explanations do not convey the quality of individual experiences ("qualia"), and therefore an autonomous "phenomenology" will always coexist with physical psychology (I disagree with the part after the "therefore").
I think an important thing I learned yesterday is that in my introductory exposition I should maybe limit myself to those more specific claims. Otherwise I commit myself to defending more than I am able, or care to, defend: I'm not writing a book an "naturalism." I don't even know what that means, it's way too broad of a concept and sweeping of a claim. A tricky thing in philosophy is not to toss out some bone that is not really essential to the argument, that people will then pick up and worry, at the expense of the intended project. Once I received the comments from two blind reviewers who had read an article of mine: both reviewers complained that I had not defined "behaviorism" properly, and both offered their own definitions, mutually contradictory. Moral of the story? Don't define it! We are too much ships passing in the night. I think that I should definitely not have a full-blown section advocating "metaphysical naturalism" in the introduction. My aims are much more specific.
2) Nonetheless there is a rich discussion to be had. It's got to mean something, after all, to say that one is a materialist. I think that that means that the metaphysical assertion has to have some sort of epistemological implication. Like Aristotle, like the functionalists, I eventually want to help myself to some sort of "nonreductive materialism," but I wonder if we are entitled to help ourselves to that. Aristotle thought that he had taken Plato's insight into the distinction between form and matter and "naturalized" it with his claim that substance, the unity of form and matter, was primary being. Nonreductive materialism: every token of form is material. Is that satisfactory? (As to that, some functionalists point out that functionalism need not commit itself to a materialist ontology. That might be fair enough, but there is still a question as to whether or not a materialist ontology is correct.)

How Do Lists Work?

If I were at the supermarket and I had to remember what to get, one thing that could happen would be that I got out of my pocket a list that G. had written out and given me for this purpose. If you asked me how I remembered and I told you about the list in my pocket, that would be genuinely explanatory: that would explain how I remembered the items. But if we try to use such an explanation for cognitive operations inside the head, this kind of explanation will not be explanatory. If the model claims that the brain has already stored information and "remembering" is a matter of accessing this database then the "explanation" assumes what needs to be explained, that is, how the nervous system "stores information" in the first place. In the case of the piece of paper with writing on it in my pocket this is not mysterious. Similarly with supposed explanations of dreaming, hallucinating, but most basically with theories of perception itself. As soon as perceiving something is modeled as forming a representation the problem is full-blown.
In class this week a student asked, "But then how do you explain perception, memory etc. if not with reference to mental content?" The point is that the concept of "mental content" itself fails to be explanatory, thus the question is loaded. It does no good to say that I remember my friend's face by mentally "inspecting" a mental "picture" of my friend.

The Two Problems of Intentionality

To understand the metaphysics of the mind/body relationship we have to see that there is not one metaphysical problem, there are several (and this also requires us to recognize that "mind" is a heterogenous concept, referring to several different things at once). The problem of phenomenal "properties" requires, I think, a metaphysical solution that is completely different from how we address the problem of intentional "properties" (ultimately I don't think there are any mental properties, hence the scare quotes). Intentionality itself breaks down further into two distinct metaphysical problems.
The first problem is the problem of meaning, that is, the question of how a physical thing can mean anything, be a symbol, refer to something else. There is a keyboard, a mouse, two pads of paper and a cellphone on the desk in front of me (in class I usually hold up my piece of chalk, Luddite that I am). None of them means anything. Physical objects don't mean anything: that's not a property that they have. Books don't mean anything either: readers of natural languages look at the printed marks (letters, words, sentences) on the pages and attribute meanings to them via conventional rules understood by readers of the language. But it has appeared to many over the centuries that mental states do genuinely have this intentional property of meaning, or referring to, something other than themselves. Think of a rhinocerous, the story goes: now your mental state is about a rhinocerous (the little picture in your mind's eye is a picture of a rhinocerous). But wait: if we opened up your head and poked around in there, we wouldn't find any little picture (or word). We'd just find brains, neurons, biomush of one sort or another, with some electrochemical humming and buzzing going on. Brains (human bodies) are just physical things, like pieces of chalk and notepads, and those sorts of things don't mean anything. But mental states do. That's the first problem of intentionality. (Teaser: yes, I have solutions to propose to these metaphysical problems, but just now I'm just trying to get more clear on sorting them out).
The other problem of intentionality doesn't get as much attention, although it is the main problem according to Plato, and it is key to understanding Descartes, Chomsky and Davidson among others. That is the problem that we often see picked out in our contemporary literature with the phrase "the rationality assumption." When we predicate intentional states to persons we not only attribute mental contents to them (that's the first problem again), but we also (must) make an assumption that they are possessed of some minimal degree of rationality: our attribution of such-and-such beliefs and such-and-such desires is only useful in predicting and explaining behavior if the subject connects these contents through a system of logical relations. He believes that the drinking fountain is down the hall, he desires a drink of water: these two intentional states only link up assuming he has a minimal capacity for reason. And this appears metaphysically puzzling as there do not appear to be any logical relations between (after all, contingent) physical states, including brain states. Thus Davidson argues that there can be no psychophysical laws linking any given brain state to any given intentional state, Plato argues that the capacity for logic possessed by rational beings frees them from the determinations of physical laws, and Chomsky argues that the ability to formalize mathematics and logic represents a radical break between rational beings and non-linguistic beings whose behaviors can be explained using learning models (behaviorism) and adaptationist explanations (evolutionary psychology). In fact all rationalists develop some variation on this theme.
As I said, I do have metaphysical solutions to offer to these problems, but right now I have to go home to play with my three-year-old and to bake a quiche with the chicken left over from last night. Subscribe!

Against the Cynical Reading of the Early Moderns

There is what I think of as the Cynical Reading of Early Modern philosophers, notably Descartes and Spinoza but the claim extends to every 17th and 18th century philosopher who discusses God (with the exception of Berkeley who is clearly in earnest, and whose reasoning for the existence of God is quite original and unique, whatever its other merits). The Cynical Reading claims that Early Modern philosophers are closet secularists who affirm the existence of God so as to not get into trouble with the authorities and, more importantly, to make the new science of nature palatable for the popular culture. For example Spinoza, on this interpretation, identifies God with nature in order that we can simply get on with studying nature, the "intellectual love of God" (similarly Newton famously remarked that in explicating the mathematical constants of nature he was "revealing the face of God"), much as Berkeley, concluding that Locke's account of "extended substance" vs. perceptions was hopelessly muddled, proposed that we simply ditch extended substance altogether and start over with perceptions only.
I don't think that the Cynical Reading is coherent. Even Leibniz, who did in fact have a public philosophy and a gnostic philosophy, continues to discuss God in the gnostic writings. Newton, for that matter, hid the extent of his religious convictions, which were intense, rather than the other way around. Even Hobbes, who has an austere materialist metaphysics of "matter in motion," devotes the second part of Leviathan to a (to my eye very murky) discussion of religion. The only Early Modern who is patently and outspokenly atheist is Hume but he appears to be quite sincere in this after all. And when Nietzsche dismisses Kant's "noumenal" world as simply a place to store God now that He is banished from the natural ("phenomenal") world Nietzsche is accusing Kant of fooling himself, not us.
I think that there is a more interesting response to the Cynical Reading than just appealing to textual evidence that the Early Moderns were sincere. The problem with the Cynical Reading of the Early Moderns is that it requires the proposition that philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries had already absorbed the secularist implications of the new science, and sat down to write their works after some prior process of coming to understanding. And when did this difficult process occur, since we have no record of it? No, these people may be investing the term "God" with some technical meanings (Spinoza, Leibniz), but when we read these texts we are looking at the process of moving from the old faith-based epistemology to the new science-based epistemology. This is a transitional period (part of what accounts for the incredible philosophical richness of the relatively short historical period from Descartes' Discourse to Kant's Critique), and what we see in these discussions of God is the process itself unfolding. The Early Moderns are both theologians and naturalists, these conceptual systems cohabiting the same heads, an historical condition fraught with difficulty, and that very difficulty is driving the process of philosophical creation. The Cynical Reading's worst fault is its mediocrity: a facile reading that avoids the real issues.

The Inverted Spectrum Argument

The "inverted spectrum argument" was developed as a critique of functionalism. Imagine someone whose color spectrum was inverted: where normal people saw red, this one saw blue, where blue, red. Such a person, raised among normal, English-speaking persons, would be functionally indistinguishable from normal persons: 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 their experience of seeing the blue surface of the bag was the same experience the rest of us have when we see a red surface, since they, like everyone else, would refer to such a surface as "blue." Since such a person 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.
This is, I think, the very same argument as the "zombie argument" made famous by David Chalmers: imagine a person who behaved exactly as a normal person does, but who has no conscious experience whatsoever. Again, there would be no way of knowing that one was interacting with a non-conscious "zombie." The arguments can be run using two imagined persons, or one person and a machine. Imagine that I have a wine-identifying device. I put a drop of wine in the device and it spins out the molecules in a centrifuge, and then identifies them using an on-board data base, and has a readout telling me that it is a merlot from such-and-such a vineyard, of such-and-such vintage etc. If I encountered a true wine afficionado I could match him identification for identification, but he would be using his familiarity with respective gustatory qualia whereas I would be using my device. Or imagine an android who was functionally identical to a person but non-conscious. "Inverted spectrum" and "zombie" are two variations of one argument, we can call this the "absent qualia argument." Typically this argument is presented as showing that functionalism (and behaviorism, and operationalist theories of mind in general) founders on the problem of phenomenal properties.
Wittgenstein, for one, noticed that in fact the absent qualia argument demonstrates just the opposite: since it is not even in principle possible for public language (the only kind of language there is, according to Wittgenstein) 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 discussion of the quality of private sensations. These are beyond the range of language.
Wittgenstein deploys the "private language argument" in two different ways. Regarding intentional mental states, he denies the possibility of mental content altogether: there can be no representation, symbolic, isomorphic, or otherwise, in the head. Regarding phenomenal mental states, he does not deny that experience has quality, only that these qualities can be picked out using language. While the problem of intentionality and the problem of phenomenology are, on my view, two distinct metaphysical problems, Wittgenstein can address them both because his thesis is in fact about language, and this thesis can be applied in any number of ways.

Anaximander and Heraclitus

Starting off my course in Ancient Greek Philosophy I am very much enjoying Beginning With the Pre-Socratics by Merrill Ring, a brisk little book that moves quickly into serious philosophical issues and sticks there, very nice discussion of Parmenides for example. (I've also drug out my old buddy The Presocratic Philosophers by Kirk and Raven, always a treat, and On Reserve for the students are Irwin's Classical Philosophy and Kenny's Ancient Philosophy, both thematically arranged instead of the usual chronological treatment of the ancients.)
Anyway, I noticed from Merrill Ring's book a nice connection between the Milesian Anaximander and Heraclitus that I probably should have noticed long ago but hey. Runs like this: the basic problem is to explain why change occurs, or why action in general occurs. To say, "Because there is energy coursing through the world" is to express a type of theory, it turns out to be a good one so far as it goes, but the Ionians were approaching the question of energy at a more basic level. "What generates and organizes this energy?" Anaximander's idea was that there were sets of opposite qualities (dry/wet, cold/hot) that generated change as they struggled with each other. The tension between the opposites is the source of the energy. If these qualities were essentially linked with physical elements - (dry:earth/wet:water), (cold:air/hot:fire) - then maybe we could generate a systematic explanation of change. Our one existing fragment of Anaximander reads, "Existing things perish into those things out of which they have come to be, as must be; for they pay reparation to each other for their injustice according to the ordenance of truth."
Or as Heraclitus says, "Things taken together are whole and are not whole, something which is being brought together and brought apart, which is in tune and out of tune; out of all things there comes a unity, and out of a unity all things." Specifically one of Heraclitus's doctrines is the unity of opposites: "And as the same thing there exists in us living and dead and the waking and the sleeping and young and old;: for these things having changed round are those, and those having changed round are these" (trans. from Kirk and Raven). So the treatment of "opposites" in Anaximander and Heraclitus is the same: they are the right concepts to use to understand the energy that is causing change. Furthermore, both Ionians are trying to practice "physis," that is to discover basic principles of material interactions. Noticing the connection to Anaximander makes Heraclitus look more materialistic: the unity of opposites is an attempt to develop a dynamic model of nature rather than a static one.

What Are "Intentional States," Anyway?

I'm traveling with my family, going out on a boat on the Delaware River tonight with all of my mother's sobrinos, but can't resist a nice basic question.
Billie Pritchett asks, "Do you think intentional states are natural kinds?" I think that an underlying kind of big question is what "natural kinds" are, I for one don't know, Aristotle thought that individual things were primary being and that natural kinds were ineliminable categories of those, species being his paradigm example. Plato thought that logical relations, such as are described in mathematical proofs, were "universals," which were the-most-interesting-being, anyway, so far as he was concerned. I think that this metaphysical discussion lies at the heart of functionalism and in general for the philosophy of mind. In fact my interest in metaphysics grew out of my interest in the metaphysics of mind. If, in addition to the existential fact that something exists rather than nothing, it is a different (contingent) fact that the universe is formally organized, if there are two existential questions instead of one, then "materialism" is false. Progress is to see that on this view the mind/body problem is not a particular problem in metaphysics, rather it is just an instance of the more general metaphysical problem. That looks like a little bit of resolution for the mind/body problem, at least as to the metaphysics of intentionality.
So getting more focused on your question, it is my view (the short answer is) that intentional states are ineliminable. But what are they? (You see that metaphysics is a matter of taking your assertions seriously.) My (admittedly circular) claim is that something is a person to the extent that it takes intentional predicates (a jargon way of saying that we use belief/desire psychology to explain and predict its' behavior). It looks to me that humans, some (actually I think many) non-human animals, possible aliens and possible artifacts can all be (equally) persons, so I conclude that intentional predicates aren't tied to any specific matter or even any specific kind of organization of matter (note that the problem of phenomenal properties requires a whole separate treatment here).
I think that intentional descriptions are descriptions of relations between the person and the environment. This is the connection between my views and behaviorism, also "wide-content" (externalist) accounts, and of course my interest in Wittgenstein. I don't know if relations are properties ("relational properties"), maybe not (John Heil says no). Certainly the whole discussion of "properties" is just as inchoate as the discussion of "natural kinds."

Behaviorism and the Mereological Fallacy

Gerardo Primero is interested in the question of whether or not intentional predicates applied to brains are meaningful. His idea is that there is a difference between saying something that is meaningful, but wrong (his analysis), and saying that such predications are nonsense (devoid of meaning). His take on Wittgensteinian analyses (such as that of Bennett and Hacker in Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience) is that they claim that e.g. saying that there are images or sentences or other forms of representation "in the brain" is meaningless. So the question is whether or not Gerardo has a good criticism of Bennett and Hacker in this regard.
Note that this discussion is to a large extent a version of the oldest and biggest problem for behaviorism, that is that we have strong intuitions that phenomenal experience is distinct from outward behavior, as in the case of the man who pretends he is in pain when he is not. Surely this exposes behaviorism as incomplete at best, if the behaviorist claims that "Sally likes chocolate" does not entail a reference to the quality of her gustatory sensations when she puts the chocolate in her mouth? Daniel Dennett is trying to untangle this in The Intentional Stance (unsuccessfully, I think), and David Chalmers in The Conscious Mind takes the alleged possibility of "zombies," operational duplicates of conscious persons who have no conscious experience, as grounds for metaphysical dualism about "phenomenal properties" (spuriously, I think).
But today I want to stick to Bennett and Hacker's theme of the "mereological fallacy," the fallacy of attributing to parts properties had only by the whole. I'm not myself too wedded to the idea that B & H hold that committing the fallacy is equivalent to "nonsense," maybe they just think it's unhelpful, or vacuous; but I want to write more generally today.
Gerardo writes, "People do ascribe mental terms to things that are not persons (i.e. to corporations as in 'Microsoft believes that...,' to machines and robots as in 'it sees and recognizes visual patterns,' to brains and brain parts, to animals), and people usually understand each other..." The definition of a "person," it seems to me (and I am making no effort to defend or even necessarily represent B & H here) just is "any being that takes intentional predicates," I take that to be the idea of operationalist approaches.
Viewed in this light, Gerardo's list of examples turns out to be quite heterogenous. Long-time readers of this blog (are you the one?) know that I take animals to be paradigmatic examples of persons: dogs, say, believe and desire and hope and fear etc., and the semantics of those predicates are the same, on my view, when applied to humans and to dogs and many other non-human animals (contra Davidson, by the way). Similarly with possible conscious androids: as a materialist, since I am committed to the view that human consciousness is a feature of physical properties that humans possess, ipso facto an artifact that had those properties would be conscious (but computers ain't it; the relevant properties are not merely computational - John Searle gets this right). Corporations are a stranger example (remember Ned Block's Chinese nation example), and I'm not sure what I think about that: my intuition is pretty strong that animals and possible conscious artifacts are conscious as bodies (I'm pretty sure I have a physical criterion of personal identity), and that a "being" composed of unconnected parts maybe could not have consciousness in this (admittedly vague) sense. Still, a corporation, or nation, or team, is after all a kind of body, so there is at least room for discussion there. So "brains and brain parts" seem to be the odd man out on the list.
Years ago when I first heard about functionalism my first naive response was "But persons don't have any function!" Maybe that's right: the person is an embodied being with preferences and aversions. (Are the values a hard part for the possible conscious artifact? Maybe yes.) I'm thinking about the difference between the telos of the car battery (starting the car) and the telos of the car (driving people around). You might say that all there is is just nested functionality, all the way up and all the way down (I read William Lycan this way). If that's how you see it, then maybe car batteries and brains have as much claim to personhood as cars and humans. Dennett says that a thermostat comes under intentional description: it believes that it is presently too cold, or that it is not. On this version of operationalism the only problem with saying, "My car battery doesn't like the cold weather" as a further explanation of my claim that "My car doesn't like the cold weather" is that there is some (informal) threshold of obtuseness when it's just not necessary anymore to replace physical predicates ("It's frozen") with intentional ones ("It's unhappy"). And maybe that's right.
What I take B & H to be claiming is that there are no neural correlates of intentional states. There is not some brain state that embodies my belief that Paris is capital of France, or my desire for some chocolate. That is the sense of the mereological fallacy: that it is a mistake (a mistaken research paradigm) to search for neural correlates of intentional states. This goes to my problem with representational models of mind. It doesn't help to explain how it is that I believe that Paris is the capital of France to claim that there is some formal token of the proposition "Paris is the capital of France" inside my body somewhere. I don't think that intentional states are neural states at all. I think that they are states of embodied persons. What kind of "states"? (John Heil does good work on the metaphysics of "states," "properties," and so on.) Right now I'm thinking that "intentional states" are relations between persons and their environments (this is a type, I think, of externalism/"wide content").
Anyway I'm off to do the recycling and sign my daughter up for swimming lessons.

Anomalous Monism is Neither. Discuss Amongst Yourselves.

Kevin Vond left a comment on the last post (discussion with Gerardo Primero) and mentioned Donald Davidson's article "Mental Events," which got me thinking this morning. I think that Davidson is, in basic metaphysical terms, the very opposite of the sort of eliminativism that I am discussing: eliminativism about symbolic content playing a causal role in the functioning of the nervous system, on a reasonably well-naturalized model of nervous system function. And I think that Davidson is guilty of the mereological fallacy.
Davidson's view in "MEs" is that he can simultaneously hold that metaphysically speaking intentional states and causes just are identical with neural states and causes (or, intentional properties supervene on neural properties), and meaning holism, the view that parts of language have meaning (are interpretable)only within a larger context of an entire language and the web of intentional states that are also being attributed to a particular person. Thus the "anomalous" part is that there can be, according to this "anomalous monism," no "psychophysical laws," nomological rules for mapping back from the neural processes to the intentional processes.
Thus brain states, according to Davidson, just are intentional states under a different description (and I see where Kevin picks up on the Spinozistic side of this). This is precisely the view that Wittgenstein opposes. Davidson locates all of the causal power in the linguistic and logical relations between propositional attitudes (beliefs, desires, etc.). These attitudes are individuated in terms of their propositional content. This is sometimes called a "sentential" model of mental representation, involving as it does sentences, understood as tokens of propositions, in the head. It's more useful to call it a formal model: formal representation and supervenience on physical processes go together. This intentional realist camp includes Descartes, Kant, Chomsky, and Fodor as well as Davidson.
I think that this may be all wrong (I think that representational models of mind may be all wrong), on the basic grounds being discussed in the last post. Note also that elsewhere Davidson ("Thought and Talk") argues that non-linguistic animals can't have intentional states, because intentional states are propositional attitudes. Thus the subsequent interest in whether animals could learn grammar. This is Chomsky's view as well, at least the early Chomsky would argue that animals could not think (he's more liberal on that now). Of course that is backwards, thought precedes talk by a very long way. Understanding sea slugs is indeed a big help.
PS Kevin and Gerardo, "Discuss Amongst Yourselves" is a reference to a popular humor show in the US, just a joke!
(Also thanks and a tip o' the hat to Brood's Philosophy Power Blogroll for the shout-out.)

Is Your Brain Somebody?

Gerardo Primero, a psychologist in Buenas Aires, has been corresponding with me via e-mail. He is studying Wittgenstein and wanted to talk about Bennett and Hacker's 2003 book Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. That book takes a Wittgensteinian approach (P. M. S. Hacker is one of the leading philosophical interpreters of Wittgenstein) and builds an argument that a great deal of cognitive studies makes some version of the "mereological fallacy," the fallacy of attributing to the parts of a thing properties that are had only by the whole. Specifically "persons," who are full embodied beings, think, dream, desire, imagine, and so forth, whereas much philosophical psychology attributes these intentional states to brains, to consciousness, to memory, and so forth. The idea is that just as I eat lunch, not my stomach, so too I think about the election, vs. my brain. Note that if this turns out to be right, that psychological predicates are applied to persons and not to brain states, then the metaphysical problem about how the physical properties of the nervous system "map on" to the semantic properties of the representations may be shown to be a pseudoproblem, in that intentional psychological descriptions just aren't descriptions of states of the brain. Mind does not necessarily = brain.
Let me quote a little from Gerardo's e-mail from Sunday: "I'm not convinced by Hacker's arguments....The problem with the 'mereological fallacy' is not that applying psychological terms to parts 'has no sense': it has sense, but it's scientifically unsound...While my argument is epistemic ("that's not a valid scientific explanation"), Hacker's argument is semantic ("that has no meaning at all").
There are a lot of directions we could go with this, but since Gerardo seemed to approach me for maybe a "philosopher's opinion," I'll talk some basic metaphysics and epistemology this afternoon. The issue is metaphysical, to my eye: there is a language about "properties," and so we want to get clear on what properties are, because it looks like we would need to do that to understand how the brain works (properties are causal). Specifically the "property" of interest in terms of the mind/body problem is the "intentional/semantic property." What is this? That bears some discussion, but note a basic issue: if you think that the semantic property is a property, but it's not a physical property, then you have signed on to some kind of metaphysical dualism. Descartes thought this way. He thought that any physical thing, being ultimately a mental representation, had the property of dubitability (could be unreal, an illusion), whereas the fact of thinking (of a "thinking substance") was indubitable, and this is one of his arguments for metaphysical dualism (sometimes called "substance dualism"). Disparate properties, disparate things. Which is fine, maybe, but recognize the committments that come with such a view: a) there are "things" that exist that are not part of the physical universe, and b) therefore, in this example of the more general metaphysical point, scientific psychology is impossible. I don't buy that. That is, I think that humans are part of physical nature through-and-through. And if "physicalism" means anything, it's got to mean that everything about humans that we can "explain" (whatever explanation is) we can explain in physical terms (just like the rest of nature). So a naturalist like myself has two options: 1) Try to understand "mental representation" and thus symbols and meaning in general in some kind of physical terms, or 2) try to eliminate representational content from the model of mind.
So, as to Gerard's distinction between "meaningful" and "explanatory," I would say that physicalists (we could here say materialists or naturalists, I'm not making any fine distinction) who are eliminativists (like Wittgenstein and Skinner) think that to the extent that "meaning" is not the same thing as "causal power" there isn't any such thing. Think of a behavioristic, anthropological account of the development of speech: the latter-day "semantics" of the words emerged out of the functional role of making that sound. It isn't true that all words function in the same way (that is, as symbols). This is what Wittgenstein means with the analogy of the locomotive controls: they all fit the human hand, but one opens a valve, one puts on a brake, etc.; it is a mistake to try to explain them all the same way.
If you can't explain the "mental" property without including something "mental" in the explanation, then you haven't explained mind. An "explanation" of mind would be the story of how semantic properties emerged from simpler, non-semantic properties. Mind from no-mind. So a problem with representations is that they already assume mind. Semantic content needs an interpreter. Or, the story about how something came to "mean" something can't already assume that "meaningfulness" exists - if you have to do that, you haven't succeeded in naturalizing the concept of "meaning."
There is a contingent who want to develop a natural theory of information. I would recommend starting with Fred Dretske's Knowledge and the Flow of Information. For myself, at this point I feel pretty convinced that there can't be any such thing as mental content, at all. Just wrong, root and branch. But note that there is a representational vogue underway amongst the cognitive scientists (or was two years ago).
Looked at this way, one can see that the problem with attributing mental states to brains isn't, I wouldn't say, meaningful but wrong (as Gerardo argues), but in fact not meaningful. They are pseudoexplanations because they don't turn out to even potentially explain anything: they're not even wrong. "When I remember her face, I have an image of her face." "I just gave myself a dollar." Both examples of the same mistake.
Finally for today, Gerardo wanted a little more on Wittgenstein vs. Moore. Moore tried to argue from "usage," that is, he argued that the claim "I know I have a hand" was a paradigmatic case of knowledge. Wittgenstein objected (in On Certainty) that there was no ordinary circumstance in which holding up one's hand and saying, "I know I have a hand" could have any purpose. W.'s point was that Moore made the mistake of continuing to play the game that was the cause of the confusion in the first place. In fact I neither know nor do not know whether I have a body; that's not really an example of a situation where the verb "to know" can serve any function.