Fodor and Spinoza

Spinoza has what is called a "double-aspect" theory of mind. Spinoza argues that the universe is both the mind and the body of God. Thus everything comes under both a physical and a psychological description. This is a promising line of argument for philosophy of mind: if Spinoza is right, our project is not to reduce or translate the psychological to the physical. (A puzzle is what is called Spinoza's "panpsychism": on his view everything comes under both descriptions. What seems promising in the case of humans is just mysterious when said about, say chairs.)

Last week during class it occured to me that Jerry Fodor elaborates a line of reasoning that has some striking similarities to Spinoza. (I'm writing this here in class with the students, by the way.) Fodor's idea is that the semantic properties of the intentional mental states/processes and the physical causal properties of the brain states/processes might come together at the level of syntax. In a way Fodor pushes the approach further than Spinoza: his appeal to the formal structure of the grammar of the proposition, on the one hand, and the formal structure of the physical causal mechanism, on the other, could serve as the bridge between the two "aspects" (descriptions), thus producing "psychophysical laws," lawful relations between the two kinds of formal organization.

Notice that it's going to turn out that the brain (or nervous system, or body, or what have you) is also formally organized. My view is that (so far at least) this is right, and important: traditionally (Plato, Descartes) the formal structure of the rational mind was a metaphysical bar to translation between the intentional and the physical. But for an approach like Fodor's to work, it must be that the physical system is also something that comes under a formal description. It is the two formal descriptions that might map onto each other. If this is true than we can draw two conclusions.

First, there is no metaphysical problem here that is unique to the philosophy of mind. The rational structure of thought is (just) another instance of the formal structure of physical objects in general. The question about why the physical universe is formally organized may be interesting and important, but once we see that it is a general metaphysical problem we have effectively overcome this particular problem qua a problem for philosophy of mind.

Secondly, another bit of mysterious 17th century philosophy is called to mind: the "synchronicity" of Leibniz and Malebranch. Here the idea was that some third causal power (they used "God" here in a technical sense) has caused the mind and the body to be coordinated. This is also not as strange an idea as it seems at first. The formal structure of the world informs both the form of the body and the form of the language/mind.

I continue to think that there are no "representations" in the brain, and that intentional predicates are made of whole persons, not brains. But my appreciation of Fodor has deepened. The main problem I have with Fodor is that his arguments have been so extensively elaborated (by him!) that they are a kind of rabbit whole; one either writes a book on Fodor, or leaves him alone.

Etiology and Meaning

Two people have the same (true) belief. However, one person has the belief because of personal experience. The other person has the belief because a clever lawyer has talked him into it, using deceptive arguments. In what way are their respective beliefs different? The propositional content is the same, and the proposition is true. And yet one has the intuition that the two "beliefs" are not the same kind of mental state. As Plato sees it in the Theatetus (200e-201e), one of them has knowledge and the other does not. One can have a belief by accident, or for the wrong reasons. Thus there is a difference between an accidentally true belief and a belief that is true for the right kind of reasons. One might compare such a belief, as Hilary Putnam does in his article "Brain in a Vat," to an ant trail, say, that bore a resemblance to a face. That would not really be a representation of a face, and nor would one really know anything about the world when possessed of a representation of the world that was only accidentally true.

To see the metaphysical point, imagine that a skywriter perfected the art of cloud-portriature: for a price he can render a likeness of anyone you choose in the medium of clouds, let's say Elvis. Suppose another cloud, unmanipulated by any skywriter, happened to form next to the cloud-portrait. The two clouds might be molecule-for-molecule identical, and both might have the same uncanny similarity to Elvis, but the cloud-portrait seems to differ from the natural cloud in having the property of meaning, or representing, Elvis. Here's a final example that makes just the same point: one day you notice that you have two copies of the city phone book. Thinking nothing of it, you keep one upstairs and one downstairs. You've used them both any number of times, for example to call out for your favorite pizza. However, unbeknownst to you, one of these objects is not a phone book at all. Through a near-miraculous event of quantum randomness (just making that up!), a doppleganger "phone book"-object has appeared in your house. It is both physically and functionally identical to the actual city phone book. Except for one thing: it contains no names, addresses, or phone numbers. It contains accidental conglomerations of matter that resemble such symbols, but it does not contain any actual symbols.

There is a conclusion wrapped in a moral wrapped in this point. The moral is that the significance (the intentional/semantic content) of a symbol is not just a function of the physical properties of the concrete symbol (the physical token), nor is it (more surprisingly) picked out by the functional role that the symbol supposedly plays in some larger process. The significance of a symbol (a name, say) depends on the etiology of the symbol, the process through which that symbol came to function as it does. "Meaning" is a complex relational property, a description, really, of relations between some person or persons and the world. Putnam's slogan for this moral is "Meaning just ain't in the head."

Notice the close affinity between Putnam's externalism and Saul Kripke's account of proper names as "rigid designators." (The affinity is not coincidental, as both philosophers are inspired by Wittgenstein.) Kripke claims that a symbol is an actual name of a thing or a substance just in case that symbol was originally used to designate the thing or substance in question. The payoff of this simple account is that the "meaning" of the name turns out to be nothing more than the history of that symbol in human behavior. There is no mysterious property of meaning left over.

The conclusion from this moral is about intentional predicates (predicating "propositional attitudes" of persons). When we say that {Sam believes that "The fish are in the bucket"}, externalist approaches hold not only the relatively clear point that intentional states are not any sort of brain- or body-state "in the head" (they are predicates of whole embodied persons), but that they are not "mental" states at all, they are "states of affairs": historical and behavioral relations between the person and his/her environment. Seen this way they need not advert to any "mental content": externalism is eliminativist as to mental representation, at least insofar as intentional descriptions are read as adverting to mental representations. The semantics of words like "belief," "desire," "hope," "fear" and so forth are handled without reference to internal "states." There are all sorts of causes inside the body of the person, of course, but these can all be described functionally within the context of the overall intentional description (and only within that context). To say that my intentional state is about something outside of my body is to say that I am in a certain relation to something outside of my body. (Nor is there any reason to think that this account fails for imaginary things like Santa Claus: I am not imagining that Santa Claus is in my head, I'm imagining that he's in my chimney.)

Ten Basic Articles for The Philosophy of Mind

A facebook friend tagged me on a note: he wanted everyone to list "Ten philosophy articles that blew your little fucking mind." The stipulations were a) to name the first ten that came to mind, articles of personal interest and b) to restrict oneself to journal articles. I'm not sure about his phraseology, but I did take a minute to think of the ten philosophy articles that first came to me.

Confession: I barely read articles any more. There comes a point where one must write things, not read them, and I’ve been there for a while. Nor am I endorsing anyone either in terms of quality or rightness. These are the ten that came to me. My list is tightly focused, and does not represent the breadth of my interests or reading by any means. As I said, I don't really read much of the gladiatorial nit-picking that goes on in the journals. But of course that is only a matter of taste. I paint with a relatively broad brush, I guess.

The exercise turns out to be useful for me as some workbench stuff for my project on the metaphysics of the philosophy of mind. It's very much "the basics" for me. It also will serve as the bibliography of my fall philosophy of mind class. So a nice little exercise found whiling away some minutes on facebook, thank you Devon B.

1) Daniel Dennett, “Why the law of effect will not go away,” Journal of Social Behavior, 1978. The theory of natural selection is not a biological theory, it’s a proof of mathematical logic: not the kind of thing that could be “false.” Classic Dennett: simple as pie, closes the discussion. People think Dennett must be an overrated philosopher because of his success as a popular writer, but this is definitely an underrated article. I also find Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995) to be one of Dennett's best books. My two basic criticisms Dennett in general are 1) I think his conclusions about the minds of non-human animals are a failure, and 2) it may be that reductive materialism fails in a way that he does not acknowledge, given his apparent identification of Enlightenment ideology with reductive materialism (contra "sky hooks").

2) Jerry Fodor, “Fodor’s Guide to Mental Representation: The Intelligent Auntie’s Vade-Mecum,” Mind, 1985. I’m an eliminativist about mental representation. Fodor of course is an intentional realist all the way. He fascinates me. A brilliant, eccentric writer. I would also mention “Why paramecia don’t have mental representations,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 1986. My basic issue: I take Wittgenstein's point that any naturalized account of anything isn't going to refer to intentional or semantic "properties," or to any other kind of non-physical properties, so I'm not disposed to representational theories of mind. But it might be that I take all that back. That's one of the questions that continue to sustain my interest.

3) Donald Davidson, “Mental Events,” Experience and Theory, 1970. His exposition of “anomalous monism.” Another great philosopher who I think I don’t agree with. I tell students in my philosophy of mind course that if they can do exegesis of this one and get it all, and get it right, they get an “A.”

4) Hilary Putnam, “Brains in a vat,” Reason, Truth, and History, 1981. An actual phonebook denotes actual names and numbers, but an identical object without the right etiology would not. Now that’s philosophy! For a long time I just waved my hands at the “Twin Earth” stuff, or I should say waved the white flag. Nowadays externalism/wide content is a crucial part of my overall position: I think intentional predicates are predicates of whole persons, and that gets the "meaning" out of the head. Certainly one of my all-time favorites.

5) David Lewis, “Mad Pain and Martian Pain,” Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology, 1980. A really hard article. I continue to feel resistance to it although at this point I agree with Lewis that the problem of qualia is a pseudoproblem. I tell students that a good philosopher is “sporting.” Lewis is very sporting. Don’t ask me to explain that any further.

6) Jaegwon Kim, any of the articles collected in Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays, 1993. The supervenience (multiple realizability) of intentional states is a metaphysical problem right at the heart of the mind/body problem. It is the essence of functionalism (the thing one has to understand to motivate functionalism). It is the link to Plato. Kim is one of my most important teachers.

7) Paul Churchland, “Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes,” Journal of Philosophy, 1981. I can’t say I care for the Churchlands much; she disses Wittgenstein in a way that alienates me, and their view is the opposite of mine: they hold that intentional psychological explanation may be eliminated, but mental representation cannot be, I hold the reverse. But I had to admit that this one had to be on the list. Basics. (I think Paul Churchland's The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul, 1996, is the best basic statement of their view.)

8) Saul Kripke, “Identity and Necessity,” Naming, Necessity and Natural Kinds, 1977. Famously elaborated in Naming and Necessity, 1980. The argument is that “pain” necessarily refers to the feeling of pain, and necessarily cannot be identified with some physical state (“C-fibers firing”). Notice how this engages with his subsequent interpretations of Wittgenstein (Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, 1982): W. holds that no words can refer to “inner experience.” Which brings me to the last two articles.

9) John Searle, “Minds, Brains and Programs,” Journal of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1980. It was crucial for me to realize that a) I agree with the conclusions of both this article and the next, and b) these two conclusions appear to be mutually exclusive. That is, both the Chinese Room Argument and the Turing Test Argument persuade me, but it looks like one of them has to be wrong. Resolving this is a major part of my project The Mind/Body Problems. Point number one is that we have not one but two metaphysical issues here and we can make progress if we disentangle them.

10) Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 1950. Basically a classic statement of philosophical behaviorism. If you can see how Wittgenstein is more nuanced and deeper than this, you’re starting to appreciate Wittgenstein. What is the same is that Turing and Wittgenstein both take the semantics of psychological terms to be necessarily public.

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.

Hume's Naturalism

If claiming to be a "naturalist" means anything at all, it must mean that one is some sort of metaphysical monist; put the other way around, if "nature" just refers to whatever exists, metaphysically heterogenous or not, it is a vacuous term.
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). Before we follow this reference, note that Hume is not, as commonly supposed, some sort of happy sceptic, whose empiricism entails codifying Cartesian scepticism as irrefutable. Very much to the contrary, Hume takes the much more ambitious position that Cartesian scepticism is a pseudoproblem, based on misunderstanding. The very idea of a distinction between "external existence" and "perception" is absurd. Thus the idea that we are "stuck inside our heads," unable to see around our "mental representations," is absurd. The representational theory of mind itself is an absurdity. And if this interpretation of Hume bears textual scrutiny, as I think it does, the whole main trunk of Hume interpretation, sympathetic and hostile, of the past 250 years is spurious root and branch.
This absurdity is shown, Hume claims, at 1.2.6, Of the idea of existence, and of external existence. "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." This is Berkeleyan. Berkeley, who seems so bizarre to generations of undergraduates who are simply presented with his idealism without enough context, is basically a competent philosopher trying to clean up a mess: if we can't make our way from the "properties of the things-in-themselves" and the "properties of experience," granting that experience is what we have, let's go with experience and leave it at that. A thoroughly empiricist solution to be sure. But not one that warrants the bizarre (Cartesian) metaphysical interpretation to which Berkeley is commonly subjected. The point rather is that the whole discussion, from Descartes to Locke, is a mistake. It is meaningless to talk about some "reality" beyond the reality of experience. This (one must repeat the point to have any chance of overcoming centuries of indoctrination) is not at all the same as saying that there is an external world to which we do not have access, trapped as we are within our experience. "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 refers us to a citation of 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 recal 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).
The idea is common to scholars of Buddhism. Dogen, the classical sage of Zen, says that experience (the mind) is "the blade that cuts, but does not cut itself." The mind cannot perceive itself (Hume: there is no "self" other than experience itself). Thus there is no Cartesian mystery as to "the world-in-itself" vs. "the world as I experience it." When the distinction breaks down, both sides of the Cartesian dilemma vanish simultaneously: it is equally absurd to refer to "representations" as it is to "mind-independent reality."
I have to go to K-Mart to buy a laundry basket and a dish-drying rack, and take a comforter over to my mother-in-law's house (speaking of reality). Final chunk of argument for this afternoon: it turns out that perceptual states, on Hume's view, are not "copies" of external reality (this has been shown to be absurd). Rather they are states of the body. That is, there is no metaphysical distinction between the mind and the body. It is true enough that when we talk about our "perceptions" we are talking about states of our own bodies; this need not involve us in the concept of "representation." And here's a remarkable outcome: this is Spinoza's view as well.

Hume's Value Naturalism

The Hume Society has chosen the topic of "naturalism" for the 2009 conference, and since a) I think I've got a line on naturalizing Hume's ethical theory, and especially since b) the conference is to be held in Halifax, Nova Scotia in August, my project this week is putting a submission together (not that that's an easy thing: if you check out their journal Hume Studies you'll see that these are indeed the preeminent Hume jocks, and a wonk I am not, although I've been a member for some years. But it's in Halifax so I have to give it a whack). So it's Saturday and I'm done with the kitchen and now I'll try blocking out the basic line here.
As most of my readers will know, Hume's best-known claim about ethical theory is that one cannot derive an "ought" from an "is." That is, descriptive propositions about the world do not as such contain any prescriptive meaning (it's important to remember that Hume is talking about propositions). Imperative prescriptions are motivated rather by "moral sentiments," non-cognitive feelings with which we have been endowed by nature, Hume knows not how. I think that Hume would be satisfied with Darwin's subsequent account of the etiology of ethical response. In fact Hume not only neatly flags the missing explanation, but asserts that the question is one for natural science, not philosophy (today I'm not going to provide any citations or passages, this is just off the top of my head). Part of Hume's bigger-picture agenda here is to debunk rationalist approaches to ethics, which the "schoolmen" took to involve ethics in transcendental metaphysics (Plato, by way of 17th century rationalism): Hume denies that ethical thinking is a branch of logic.
On my view, the most important thing to get about Hume is that he was not a skeptic, as is widely expounded. Rather Hume saw Cartesian skepticism as a pseudoproblem, and empiricism as the way out. Later the English phenomenalists of the early 20th century obscured this and now, with the aid of Wittgenstein, we are reconstructing Hume. Specifically Hume's is/ought distinction is frequently confounded with G. E. Moore's "naturalistic fallacy," which in fact is a very different sort of argument than Hume's. So if I can articulate the Humean critique of Cartesian skepticism, and show how Hume's is/ought distinction fits into that critique, this would help to nail down a persuasive account of Hume as a kind of naturalist about value.
Central to this is Hume's denial that it made any sense to speculate about an "external world" that might or might not be "corresponding" to the world of our perceptions. Experience cannot be distinguished from the world, and the world cannot be distinguished from experience. Thus there can be no question of "phenomenal properties," since any discussion of phenomenal properties is necessarily a discussion of experience, and any discussion of experience is necessarily a discussion of the world. There is no sense in which "my experience of blue" is different from "blue." To use Hume's language, mental contents consist of impressions and ideas, "impressions" being directly caused by interaction with the environment, "ideas" being fainter versions of impressions conjured by the mind during thought (e.g. memory).
The problem in interpretation of Hume's ethical theory is that often even people who grasp the anti-phenomenological import of Hume's empiricism don't interpret his ethical theory in a way that is consistent with his epistemology. When Hume says that there is no way to derive propositions about causality from propositions about correlation, or propositions about personal identity from propositions about self, he is saying no more nor no less than when he says this about propositions about value and propositions about fact. The is/ought distinction is simply another variation on the general theme that there is no need (no possibility) of "theory" over and above what is given by experience. And values (or rather, goodness and badness) are as much a given of experience as are causal relations and self-awareness. Thus Hume is not a "subjectivist" nor a "relativist" about ethics. In fact one of his targets is systematizers, for example of the religious variety, who claim that ethical responses are produced by embracing their systems, a form of cognitivism. The goodness and badness of experience is no more subjective or relative than is the blueness and redness of experience. On Hume's view there simply is no distinguishing between the "mental representation" and the "fact," and there are no exceptions to this general truth. Thus there is nothing to be said about "mental representation" nor about "facts," if either of these are taken to be somehow distinct from experience. Subjectivism is just as vacuous as realism on Hume's view.
Finally, notice that this is a general account of value, ethical and aesthetic. Arguing for the moral rightness of something is not different from arguing for the beauty of something. While we may feel queasy about this, realizing that the quality of experience is not always intersubjectively consistent, this is how it goes; there is no logical proof or refutation of the quality of experience. That does not mean that someone cannot learn to appreciate the goodness or the badness of something.

Which Animals Have Minds?

Some of us (OK, I) have an intuition that dogs, say, are accurately described as having beliefs and desires, but crickets, say, are not. What about carp? There seems to be a threshold problem. How do we fix the set of beings that come under intentional psychological explanation? On a Wittgensteinian view this is not a problem, because psychological descriptions are necessarily descriptions of publicly observable phenomena. Like life, consciousness is either there or it is not. There is the well-worn objection that it is at least conceivable that there could be a being that behaved as if it were conscious, but that was not. David Chalmers, for one, has built an entire philosophical position on this claim, so debunking it would be significant. Wittgenstein's response is interesting if perhaps not knock-down: he suggests that in fact such a being is not conceivable, that we are confuting reference and use when we say that it is (we can name a round square, but we can't conceive one). As with many of Wittgenstein's arguments, this one seems awfully fast. Still, I feel its pull: for example, I suspect that a disembodied mind is actually inconceivable, even though people claim to be conceiving of them all the time. Reading the Investigations, it may be that Wittgenstein is more interested in the property of "being alive," as a property that he might take seriously, while he may be more skeptical about the claim that "having a mind" is a property at all.

A Problem for Evolutionary Psychology

I've just sent off my chapter "Real Behaviorists Don't Wear Furs" for Nandita and Vartan's book Animals in Human Signification or something like that, and I have two little chunks of argument that emerged this morning pursuant to that, I'll split them into two posts, this one and the next.
There is a mistake, I think, in the premise of evolutionary psychology. According to a strong version of this view, adaptationist explanations of behavior (explanations that appeal to the fitness-conferring value of various behaviors) replace intentional explanations (explanations that take intentional states to be causal, as in, "He went to the river because he wanted some water"). (Let me note in passing that to whatever degree evolutionary psychology is a valid way to explain behavior, it is equally valid when applied to humans as when applied to other species; the evolutionary psychologist has no grounds for claiming that humans have "minds" while other species do not. But that is not my point today.) The mistake here is to confuse the "why" with the "how." We are in need of various explanations. One thing that needs to be explained is why the organism behaves the way it does. Adaptationist explanations may serve to satisfy that explanatory need. But how the organism manages to achieve the behavior is a different explanandum entirely.
Here's the little bit of argument that came to me this morning: An adaptationist explanation might explain how a tiger came to have a sharp claw. That doesn't mean that the sharpness of the claw itself is no longer of interest to a zoologist. The sharpness must be referenced if we are to understand how the tiger satisfies its nutritional requirements. It is an indispensable part of the "how" explanation.
Adaptationist explanations, as "why" explanations, lie "upstream" from "how" explanations. As Aristotle pointed out long ago, there are in fact various types of causal explanation. No one would think that the claw's sharpness was causally irrelevant to the tiger's functioning. But evolutionary psychologists (Dawkins) make the same mistake when they suggest that the intentional properties of psychological traits are causally irrelevant on the grounds that the real cause is genetic replication. Thus to explain that the dog is adapted to love you doesn't constitute any kind of argument that the dog doesn't really love you. (Same as in the infant's case.)

Rule-following and "Rule-following"

Many processes can be modeled mathematically. Hurricanes, gene dispersion, baseball statistics, insect wingbeats, galaxy formation: really, the list is endless. All of these processes can be said to "follow rules." Computers follow rules in this sense. But when we say about various natural processes that they "follow rules," it is important to keep in mind that the phrase is here used figuratively: there is no conscious rule-following going on, the way there is, say, after you have just taught me a card game and I try to play it correctly. We often use this figurative sense of "rule-following" when describing processes in our own bodies. The retina, for example, is an on-board computer of a sort that measures the amplitude of light coming in to the eye and "encodes" this "information" for transmission to the brain. "Encodes" and (importantly) "information" are also figurative terms in this context. The eyeball no more literally (intentionally) encodes things than, say, a tree encodes its age in its tree-rings.
Brain processes are "rule-following" only in this figurative sense. Stomachs digest food, but they don't eat lunch. Persons eat lunch. Brains compute (or, they do whatever it is that they do that is the equivalent of digestion in the stomach: our Cartesian error is in the way of our seeing what exactly that is). Persons think. I can't think without my brain any more than I can eat lunch without my stomach, but that doesn't mean that there's a little person in my brain thinking any more than it does that there's a little person in my stomach eating. And the processes going on in my brain are no better explained by saying that there's a person in there "interpreting" than are my digestive processes by positing a micro-gourmand. Inside my head there's lots of "rule-following" going on, but there is no rule-following. Actual rule-following is done by persons, out in the world. Thus the savant is "rule-following" (computing with his brain), but he is not rule-following (thinking with his "mind').
(Thanks to Kevin Vond for a lively exchange on this topic. See the comments below and go to Kevin's website for more.)

Reconciling Turing and Searle

Two arguments that seem persuasive to me lead to a contradiction. The contradiction is resolved when we appreciate that "mind" is a complex concept, and that we are faced with two metaphysical problems, not one. Getting clear on this clears up a whole lot of confusion in the philosophy of mind.
The two arguments are owed to Alan Turing and to John Searle, respectively. Turing makes the basic operationalist case: confronted with a system, any system, that behaved (reacted to us, interacted with us) in a way that was indistinguishable from a rational person (for example, a computer terminal that could converse rationally and sensibly), we would have no option but to consider that system rational ("minded," if you will). The claim is deep and strong: granting consistently rational behavior, to deny rationality to such a system would be the equivalent to denying that another normally-behaving human was rational; there would be no evidence to support such a denial. More strongly still, the only meaning we can assign to the concept "rational" must be pegged to some observation or another (Wittgenstein's behavioristic point).
Searle's "Chinese Room" argument, on the other hand, appears to demonstrate that the mind cannot be (merely) a formal rule-governed, symbol-manipulating device. The non-Chinese speaker in the Chinese Room follows a set of formal rules ("when a squiggle like this is entered, you output a squoggle like that"), and these rules are such that the Chinese-understanding person inputing Chinese-language questions is receiving appropriate Chinese-language answers as output. But it seems persuasive that neither the homonculus inside the Room nor the Room as a whole has any idea of what is being said: like a computer, the Chinese Room understands nothing whatsoever.
How can the seemingly mutually-contradicting intuitions that are motivated by the two arguments be reconciled? Here's how: Turing is talking about intentional mental attributions: psychological descriptions using terms such as "belief" and "desire." The meaning of intentional psychological descriptions and explanations is necessarily grounded in observables. Intentionality must be understood operationally, and Turing is right that any system that can be successfully understood using intentional predicates is an intentional system: that's just what intentionality is. Searle, meanwhile, is talking about phenomenal mental attributions (consciousness). The meaning of phenomenal terms must be grounded in intersubjective phenomena, just like intentional terms (or any terms in language), but there is something more (Wittgenstein: an inexpressible something more) whereas to be in an intentional "state" is entirely public. Only conscious beings "know" anything at all in Searle's sense. Wittgenstein too is skeptical of the possibility of "zombies." "Just try - in a real case - to doubt someone else's fear or pain," he writes in the Philosophical Investigations Section 303. And now we have sailed out into somewhat deeper water.

A Linguistic Argument Against Relativism

One of Wittgenstein's most famous arguments is known as the "Private Language" argument but it might be more accurate to refer to it as the "Public Language" argument, as the starting point is that language (like playing games) is the kind of thing that happens between people, out in the world. There are neither words nor rules "in the head" (Wittgenstein also doubts that there are any images or anything else to "look at" in the head, but that requires some additional attack. Roughly, I think that the idea here is that it explains nothing to posit any sort of "mental representation"). Language, furthermore, does not generally function on the model of "object-designation," rather there are myriad functions that are performed using language, all of them coordinations between subjects. Thus classical "meaning" semantics is replaced by a kind of functional-role semantics: the "meaning" of the utterance is just the pragmatics of the performance of the utterance. This public account of language, if correct, precludes the possibility of phenomenology. We can talk about "blue," but we cannot, using language, gain any purchase on "blue-for-me," or "blue-to-you." These are literally meaningless constructions, not because we are zombies (my students keep thinking that Wittgenstein is claiming that we are zombies), but because the quality of experience is beyond the reach of language. If "relativism" is the claim that there is no such thing as Truth, Wittgenstein's language argument exposes some philosophical (Wittgenstein would say "grammatical") confusion. On the one hand, he would take the point that there is nothing meaningful in any attempt to talk about "Truth" as something that "exists" independently of some specific, contextual "language-game." So what epistemologists have lately been calling realism (Arthur Fine?)is a misguided project. But by the same token, there is nothing in statements such as "What's true for you is true for you, what's true for me is true for me." Anything that's "true" (any actual use to which we might put the concept of truth) is necessarily intersubjective. I suspect also that the "end of objectivity" rhetoric of Richard Rorty, informed as it is by some serious consideration of Wittgenstein, is a misapplication: commitment to beliefs and principles doesn't evaporate along with classical semantics, any more than consciousness does.

Semantics and Uniqueness

For a while I've been thinking that I'm stuck between the two poles of Plato and Wittgenstein, although on some days I'm better at explaining what that means exactly than on others. Today in Epistemology we chewed over an inchoate idea that floated through my mind yesterday. (Wilbert Munoz pointed out that we were talking about metaphysics more than epistemology, which was true enough, but we got there honestly: we've been thinking about Nagel's attempt in The View From Nowhere to establish some way of talking about subjectivity as something in the world, and I'm pretty sure that Wittgenstein is right (contra Nagel) that this is not possible.)
Anyway, the half-baked ("inchoate" is a fancy-pants way of saying half-baked) idea was this: Wittgenstein argues that the semantics of all language is necessarily grounded in public, intersubjective referents, and that this extends to psychological ("phenomenological") terms (for example in the "beetle-in-a-box" passage). Meanwhile Plato seems committed to the view that any description of a particular is necessarily in terms of properties, and thus descriptions are composed of assignments to categories (I guess Aristotle thinks this too, although they have opposite accounts of primary being). If some particular had a property that was unique to that particular, could we name it? I have the feeling that the answer is going to have to be "no." So, the connection: the Cartesian claims that the taste-of-chocolate-for-me is a real element in the world, one that only I can know about etc. Wittgenstein counters that we can only talk about plain old taste of chocolate. Is the putative (or possible) uniqueness of the taste-for-me what precludes the possibility of meaningful reference to it? And does this reveal an unexpected similarity between Plato and Wittgenstein, inasmuch as both think that reference amounts to a kind of categorization? Just an inchoate note, I have to go make some photocopies for 11:30 class.

Philosophy and Ethics Across the Curriculum

This week we're discussing a bureaucratic issue here at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez. The university is trying to develop "Ethics Across the Curriculum," specifically ethics seminars in the Agriculture, Business, Computer Science, Engineering, and Nursing programs, among other possibilities. The problem is, should my fellow philosophers and I insist that courses in ethics necessarily involve input from philosophers? (And, for example, should such courses be "cross-listed," given two course codes, one in philosophy? As I say, our problems are largely bureaucratic.)
I think that the answer is no. There are non-philosophical elements of my opinion, such as the fact that our little Philosophy Section is "the mouse that roared" so far as the Business School or the College of Engineering are concerned, but there is also a substantial philosophical point so I'm posting about it here.
It's true that in the classical tradition moral instruction, understood as How to Live the Good Life, was considered to be the province of philosophers. But at that time the term "philosophy" was much broader than it is now: there was "natural philosophy" and "moral philosophy," moral philosophy encompassing what today we would call history, political science, and in general the humanities and social sciences, although it is true that we have lost the classical idea that students ought to be studying to be good persons (perhaps this is too collectivist for us).
Today, philosophy is something much more specific. I would define it as the study of metaphysics and epistemology. However, that doesn't mean that ethics is not an area of philosophy. Ethics, like aesthetics, religion, psychology, science, and mathematics, to name some prominent examples, is interesting to philosophers because ethical propositions have a metaphysically and epistemologically ambiguous relationship to "natural" propositions, propositions about, roughly speaking, the physical world (I say "ambiguous," I don't necessarily believe that ethical propositions cannot be naturalized; I don't accept the "naturalistic fallacy" argument, for example).
I'm not, then, a metaphysics jock who "doesn't do" ethics. I'm covering ethical theory in my Intro course right now, as a matter of fact. I'm interested in empiricism and ethics, specifically non-cognitivist theories and the role of logic in ethical reasoning, and the difference in the way rationalist approaches and empiricist approaches fix the extensions of the sets of moral patients and moral agents (Kant thinks they're coextensive, Mill and Singer, say, do not), and I have discussed the naturalistic fallacy in earlier posts as well as the law of effect as a basic empiricist principle. I definitely "do" ethics.
It's just that I don't think that the metaphysical and epistemological investigations of philosophers qualify philosophers in any way as experts on normative ethical codes (specific ideas about what sorts of things are right and wrong), or as social and political critics (analyses of the justice or lack thereof of social and political arrangements). I think that there is a basic conceptual error here: the fact that ethics is philosophically interesting doesn't make it the exclusive domain of philosophers, or necessarily any domain of philosophers. Physics is philosophically interesting too, but if one wants to learn about physics the place to start is Intro Physics.
Where do we start if we want to learn ethics? I think that "ethics" is a highly heterogenous concept. Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics that if you want to learn how to be a good person, find someone who you feel certain is a good person and watch what they do. So for Agricultural Ethics or Business Ethics or whatever it may be, it seems sensible that one finds an instructor with some experience and reputation of ethical conduct in that field. I don't see how the student in another profession is going to be much improved by listening to a professional philosopher explain consequentialism vs. deontology, say, as philosophically interesting as that distinction may be.
One final thought for the blog (not something to belabor in a faculty meeting, in my opinion): philosophy isn't the most important thing in the world. Discussions of cultural and ethnic biases, of sexism and racism, of economic and social justice, are discussions that in my opinion, and speaking as a philosophy professor, are all more important than the rather abstruse topics philosophers choose to chew on. As a society we should be (and we are) spending more time on those issues than we are on philosophy. But that doesn't mean that those are the topics that a responsible philosopher ought to engage with, any more than a good professor of, say, organic chemistry or 17th century Italian opera needs to stop everything and plunge into a political consciousness-raising session.

On Plato's Dualism

Plato's dualism is a dualism of matter and form. For Plato, the distinction between mind and body is one example of the larger distinction between form and body. As matter nears closer to form, it becomes more and more formally organized, the reverse as it recedes from form. Circular objects are good examples: the more perfectly circular particulars are closer to the form of circularity. But then the roundness of my finger, say, is a case of my person being a mix of matter and form. There are many ways that my body is exemplifying form. The fact that I can do logic and mathematics, then, is not the only form/matter distinction that I exemplify. This is the sense in which the mind/body distinction is only one example of a larger distinction, the real metaphysical distinction, matter and form. The significance of this for philosophy of mind, I think, is that there is nothing metaphysically unique about my rational capacity. Dualism, for Plato, is already established by my finger's having the property of circularity, a formal, not physical, property. The further intuition that thinking logically is somehow mental, whereas simply being round is not, is no part of Plato's dualism. So, perhaps, the claim that the "rationality assumption" in intentional psychology has no correlate in physical description is incorrect. Physical descriptions are shot through with references to formal properties, and so intentional psychological descriptions are not metaphysically exceptional in that sense.

Do You Have to be Good to be Guilty?

We're transitioning from free will/determinism to ethical theory in Intro this week. The literature of action theory is old and hoary, so I'm not hopeful of plowing new ground, but it sure is fun. Here's today's discussion (7:30AM, no less): it appears that the notion of responsibility involves us in a paradox.
1) A free action must be the action of an agent: agents are free.
(I take this to be the indubitable compatibalist point of the empiricists. "Free" is an adjective. You've got to be somebody in order to be free, because you've got to exist in order to be a cause; if you're not the cause, then it's not your act.)
2) To be someone, one must have a nature/essence/character/personality.
(We recognize you from one time to the next, not just on the basis of your physical constancy, but on the basis of your psychological and behavioral constancy as well. Otherwise we could not say that you were a person. You must have at least that much stability and continuity. This is why quantum indeterminacy, for example, cannot underwrite freedom of action. Randomness or chaos or absence of causes may be real, but their consequences are not your acts, and it's your acts that are free or not.)
3) But to have a nature appears to be equivalent to being determined.
That is the paradox of responsibility. R. M. Hare captures the paradox nicely in the title of his book Freedom and Reasons: to the extent that I have reasons, we can say that my actions are my own (those that are caused by my reasons). But to the extent that I have reasons, it appears that I am not free. Hobbes doesn't mind this. He thinks that the only coherent definition of freedom is "the ability to pursue my desires." Hume says that "Reason is the slave of the passions." And it is Mill's view that values emerge in a world where there are beings that have experiences that are good and bad, this fact being entirely contingent.
I think that this empiricist compatibalism is right. The problem for Sartre and the existentialists, say, is that freedom vanishes along with the concrete (psychological) self, whereas Plato, Kant and the rationalists lose freedom in the grip of logical necessity. But this still leaves much to be said. How can I do good, if I am a good person by nature? That is, what can be praiseworthy about my action, if it follows from my essential good nature? And how can the bad man (that other man!) be said to do wrong? When we say that the good person is good, isn't that like saying that he's lucky, or good-looking? But that's not how we mean ethical praise, is it?

Kant's Cure and the Disease

This morning I'm thinking about Kant. Usually these days for me, Kant is a big source of a sort of rampant Cartesianism that I see in the classroom and in the popular culture. This is a teacher's perspective. His idea that the mind projects a conceptual structure onto the world (Kant thought that space and time, cause and effect, were more creations of the mind than perceptions of real being) is variously presented as obviously the thesis of Plato and as obviously the thesis of Nietzsche, and I've even encountered people who insisted that Plato and Nietzsche were complete opposites and that they were both Kant. All the facile rhetoric of "I believe what I believe, you believe what you believe" that we swim in seems to smell of Kant (is it the same river that smells of Kant from day to day?). It also appears to me that Kant, in his insistence that a transcendent rationality was what set humans (to be fair, he's careful to always say "any rational beings") apart from the rest of creation, and that ethical thinking is just equivalent to rational thinking applied, is indeed very like Plato. So I often think of Kant (Hume guy that I am) as the representative of the old regime, a synthesis of Plato and Descartes to be undone by the "bottom-up" post-Enlightenment scientists.
So I got to thinking when I saw in a post on Tractatus Blogico-Philosophicus that cited Schopenhauer as writing that Kant "had circumnavigated the world and shown that because it is round, one can not get out of it by horizontal movement." Kant saw himself as saying something new, notoriously comparing his own insight to that of Copernicus. I think that roughly the idea is that the classical tradition sought for an external cause of the intelligibility of the world (The Good, God), whereas Kant had demonstrated that the intelligibility of the world could only be understood as a property of the mind. So the irrationality of faith that is emphasized in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche is present in Kant's formulation that God, like freedom, must be a part of the ineffable noumenal world. But on Kant's view Mind is just as metaphysically separate from matter as Form ever was for Plato. He just took over from Descartes the task of additionally sticking us in our heads. Still it's technically speaking very modern for Kant to argue that a lot of traditional metaphysics just couldn't be done, as things couldn't be known otherwise than as how our minds organize the representations of things. Totally Cartesian.

Two Senses of "Eliminativism"

Any number of theories of mind might be described as "eliminativist," but there are two very different senses of that term depending on the theory on offer. "Operational" theories of mind such as behaviorism and functionalism are eliminativist in the sense that they deny the existence of non-physical, Cartesian minds (or at least the need to refer to such entities in order to do psychology). In general materialist theories are eliminativist in this sense (by definition materialism eliminates the non-physical). More specifically, behaviorism, for example, eliminates internal symbols, or mental representations (that's really what is most significant about behaviorist approaches). If we redefine "Cartesian" to mean representational models of mind, this type of elimination also turns out to be a feature of materialist theories in general. Wittgenstein understood this, and he also extended the point to philosophy of language: there can no more exist semantic properties than there can be intentional properties, both must turn out to be figurative language at best. The other sense of "eliminativism" is the one promoted by Paul Churchland. This is the claim that the traditional categories of intentional states ("beliefs," "desires," etc.) will not survive the maturation of neuroscience. But materialism does not necessarily imply this. A behaviorist sees the traditional categories as categories of behaviors, and the reductive materialist sees them as categories of physical states. The problem of multiple realizability, an essential motivation behind the development of functionalism, is predicated on the ineliminative nature of the categories, in fact. I think that Churchland makes the mistake of assuming that psychological predicates must refer to states that are "in the head" one way or another, while Wittgenstein understands that the key is to see that psychological predicates necessarily refer to public phenomena (and note that the Churchlands disdain Wittgenstein in their disdainful way; they don't grasp him). In fact the eclipse of representational models of mind would not entail the elimination of the traditional intentional categories. I doubt that they are eliminible at all. They pick out basic features of persons. They are not part of a theory. Meanwhile I doubt that there are anything like symbols (or language) in the head, the current vogue for representationalism notwithstanding.

Exopsychology

My four courses have come together this week more than usual. In Intro we're reading Bertrand Russell's version of the argument by analogy for other minds and Ryle's "ghost in the machine" rejoinder, in Epistemology we're reading Thomas Nagel's The View From Nowhere, but at the moment we've detoured to reading Nagel's "What is it Like to Be a Bat" article and Frank Jackson's "What Mary Didn't Know," and that led us on to David Lewis, "Mad Pain and Martian Pain." So the six of us are trying to figure that article out. In Contemporary we're reading Kenny's chapter on philosophy of mind, which covers Bentham vs. Kant, psychoanalysis, and the Tractatus. And in Philosophy of Psychology we're moving out into Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson's Philosophy of Mind and Cognition, finishing Part One explaining "commonsense functionalism," the view they espouse.
So I was struck by the article in today's NYT "Smaller Version of the Solar System Is Discovered," which turns out to be an excellent illustration of functionalism's advantage over reductive materialism, in addition to being philosophically significant in itself. In our age we're used to physics and biology being philosophically significant sciences, but for much of the history of the modern world astronomy has been seen as posing as great a threat to established ideas as, say, evolutionary biology or big bang theory is seen today. The culture that existed before Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo displaced humans from the center of the universe is not the same culture afterwards. This process continued during the 20th century, when Hubble showed that our Milky Way Galaxy is only one of a great many galaxies, and recent observations with the Hubble Space Telescope have caused the estimation of the number of galaxies to be greatly increased. Meanwhile we have seen through spectroscopy, for example, that the natural processes that we observe on Earth, as well as other constants such as the distribution of elements, is apparently much the same in the rest of the universe as it is nearby. The right combination of common ingredients, between a heat source and a heat sink, will start forming the "primal soup," protein chains out of which organic life is built up. The universe is full of life to a mathematical certainty; it's not rational not to believe it. Since 1995, over 250 exoplanets (planets in orbit around stars other than our own) have been discovered, using the wobble effect (the gravitational pull of a massive satellite observed as a tidal pulse on the star surface). Now a new technique called microlensing exploits the refraction caused by one object's gravity bending the light from a more distant object. Today's story informs us, among other things, that the number of nearby stars with planets seems greater than had generally been imagined, and that systems with gaps where temperate, Earth-sized planets might be are being observed.
One type of functionalism is a kind of non-reductive materialism: every token of a mind is a token of a physical thing as well, but mental types supervene on physical types (multiple physical types can realize the same mental type). So psychology doesn't just analyze down into the physical understanding of human nervous systems. To see the point think of the exobiologists: their job is to think about what exoorganisms might be like, what they must be like, what they can't be like, and so forth. The magic of it, as someone else said somewhere, will not be just in the differences or just in the similarities. The magic will be the blend of similarity and difference. Exobiology suggests exopsychology. Functionalism aspires to be a kind of exopsychology: what must be true of a thing in order for it to come under psychological description? What defines the set of "persons"?

W. K. Essler on Buddhism

This is the second week of a two-week "mini-course" offered here at UPR/Mayaguez by Wilhelm K. Essler, professor of philosophy at the University Mamat in Germany, and author of Die Philosophie des Buddhismus (2006). Dr. Essler is an authority on Kant and a scholar of Ancient Greek philosophy, as well as someone with a lively interest in words and in the ancient languages of Sanskrit, Pali, and others important to Vedic and Buddhist philosophy. In our class he is explicating the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, having spent some time on earlier Vedic influences. His presentations are quite interesting and useful.

I want to raise some questions about taking a Kantian-eye's view of Buddhist teachings. I'm not actually attributing any of these arguments or positions to Dr. Essler, because I am frankly not that confident that I understand his ultimate position on these things, but I have my own thoughts on Kant and Buddhism that I am writing out here so that, among other reasons, I can show them to Dr. Essler and see what he says.

The good idea in Buddhist philosophy of mind that I see, and that Dr. Essler is also focused on, is that the self, as constitutive of the world, cannot be included in the ontology of that world. It makes a big difference, however, if this is interpreted to mean that consciousness is the ground of the world (to use Kantian language, a necessary precondition for the possibility of the world), or it is interpreted to mean that consciousness is identical to the world (Hume: phenomenal experience=mind).

The Kantian interpretation holds that the technique of the transcendental deduction yields a proof of the existence of the mind as something apart from the experienced world.The problem that I have with the Kantian interpretation, which appears to infect the entire German Idealist tradition of the 19th century, including Schopenhauer, is that the Kantian interpretation underwrites a further metaphysical discussion of the self, this time as part of a noumenal aspect of reality. Thus Schopenhauer attributes to the Will a kind of Parmenidean unity, among other fantastic properties.

Meanwhile, the interpretation that is suggested by Buddhist language (Dogen: "The blade that cuts, but does not cut itself") and, I think, by Wittgenstein in the "solipsism" passages in the Tractatus and upheld later in the Investigations is a kind of eliminativist interpretation: that phenomenal properties do not exist. There are no such properties, and there is nothing like traditional notions of "mind" or "consciousness." The discussion of dependent arising in the Four Noble Truths is the genealogy of bad karma that is just identical with the "self," which is something that must be addressed through Buddhist practice. (My own interest in this point, by the way, developed not so much from my interest in meditation as from my interest in the problem of phenomenal properties as a block to naturalism about the metaphysics of the mind/body problem, notably modern versions like Frank Jackson's "Mary" argument and discussions of phenomenology as a problem for behaviorism and functionalism, such as Chalmers' "zombie" discussion. My current view on these matters, inspired by Wittgenstein and Buddhism, is that the problem of phenomenology is a pseudoproblem, as phenomenal properties do not exist.)

Meanwhile, just a comment on Essler's dismissal of meditation. Whether we take what I am calling a "Kantian" or an "eliminativist" interpretation of the Buddha Dharma, either way meditation is a key technique in the Buddhist tradition that roughly tracks on to what we call "phenomenology." As with many older traditions, they have plenty to offer to people with similar interests. For example I would recommend "mindfulness" meditation to anyone with an interest of the theory of self developed in Being and Nothingness. Essler wants to approach Buddhist metaphysics and epistemology in a spirit of philosophical excavation and reconstruction, but his dismissal of meditation is a shortcoming.

Silencio Bouche made the following excellent comment near the time I originally posted this blog. Now Dr. Essler has been kind enough to send a substantial response to us both, which I have posted after Silencio's remarks.

Silencio Bouche writes:

My understanding is this:
Ultimately the "self" in Buddhism is considered merely a thought or a sense---and there is no personal self beyond this. The foundational insight of the practice of Buddhism is that personal self is the power of the notion that a personal self exists and that this self is a confining limitation on what there is.

It is not that there is an entity which mistakenly sees itself as a personal self and is limited by that notion--rather the dominance of the notion is the entity itself--there is no entity beyond the notion that there is a self that is limiting. Liberation is then a dissolving of the dominance of the notion of a self as a limitation over what is.

The notion of self persists but not as a limit-- thoughts arise on liberation expressing amazement that such a notion could have constituted a limitation. And to the question as to what we are--the answer closest to the matter is that what you are- or rather what there is--(there being no difference) is forever undefined and yet in that there is nothing missing, there is only completeness and fulfillment. No definition touches this undefined and nothing needs be added.

Take a common current conception of consciousness wherein consciousness and the content of consciousness are completely separate. If this is so then anything present to consciousness cannot be consciousness--since consciousness cannot be any content--and any notion of consciousness must be merely a thought of consciousness and not consciousness itself.

But this means that consciousness cannot be known by any content--sense, thought, feeling. It is not even possible to know if there is such a thing or not , since nothing present to consciousness is anything but the content. And any notion then --even the notion of consciousness--cannot be consciousness- (So, is there even such a thing?)
You can note the pending infinite regress. Better, from a philosophical point of view then, not to posit a something separate from what appears---self or a conscious being or some other entity. One can argue too that the entity --consciousness-- is superfluous--and by Ockham's Razor may be dropped. So rather than "things appear to an x" it would be " things appear".
The only impetus to preserve a self or a conscious entity or some such in the mix--is to preserve the human ego as the center of things---a poor practice according to Buddhism.

2/23/09: Dr. Essler has been kind enough to send me these substantial comments:

"I am not the first one who sees similarities between the epistemology of Kant and Buddhist epistemologies, especially the Mahayana epistemology: decades earlier such a similarity was asserted by Kurt Schmidt. And most probably he, too, was not the first one who recognized such parallels. For during the period of Neo-Kantianism, large parts of the Hinayana sutras of the teachings of Buddha Shakyamuni were translated into German; and I am sure that these texts were recognized by the philosophers of that period, not only by Ernst Mach.

Keeping in mind Kant's hint "... wie tuechtige englische Seeleute berichten ...", and recognizing that during those past centuries -- contrary to our time -- the sailors and merchants and businessmen were not narrow-minded, the assumption of his being influenced by such reports on Indian philosophy in general and Buddhist epistemology in particular is, of course, not provable but not unreasonable.

In a rough way, Kant's epistemology may be described as follows: There are two limits of the world, which both do not belong to the world: an outer limit, and an inner limit.

The outer limit is the Ding an sich selbst. For the world is constituted out of the appearances (including the results of measuring) by concepts (determined by suitable background-theories); and this constituting is structured by the categories, including the category of causality. Therefore, the empirical meanings of the category of causality and of the other categories are restricted to the appearances and what is established out of them by empirical concepts; in other words: They are restricted to the world established in that manner.

Therefore, assuming a causal chain from the Ding an sich selbst to the appearances is without any empirical sense; and the WASP-philosophers who nevertheless assert such a causal chain are in advance refuted by Kant's arguments.

Kant, being mostly very cautious in his use of philosophical terms, nowhere uses the expression "causal" in this particular context; what he writes here is that the Sinnlichkeit - the sensority, the subtle sense organs - is afficirt - is touched, is affected - by the Ding an sich selbst, which is something outside of our experiences and thus outside of what can be described by empirical means. But, in my view, this is not cautious enough: Hume, who was admired by Kant, was completely cautious in this respect; for, in speaking about the world, he avoided using such expressions which are without any empirical meaning.

Kant was very cautious with regard to the inner limit of the world, i.e.: concerning the transzendentales Ich, as I may call it here. For he himself avoided using such a concept: The concepts "Ich" and "empirisches Ich" are used synonymously and therefore exchangeable by him. And, according to him, the empirical I is, of course, part of the world, constituted - like other parts of the world - by empirical concepts out of (outer as esp. inner) appearances structured by the categories.

But, alas, also at this point Kant did not follow Hume's path of being completely cautious. For, lead by his hope to establish timeless truths at least for the background-theories of empirical knowledge, and perhaps also seduced by the Pre-Buddhist philosophy of Yajnyavalkya, Kant introduced the concept "transzendentale Apperzeption", consisting solely of his re-interpretation of the "sum" -- the "ich bin", the "I am" - of Descartes.

According to Kant, this "Ich bin" is not to be regarded as knowledge, neither empirical nor aprioric; but it is a knowledge-establishing Idee - idea, in the Latin sense of the word - which (is not added but) may be ad ded to every knowledge, guaranteeing in this way this knowledge's timeless validity.

Of course, the empirical I - which is, according to Buddhist philosophy as well as Heraclitus's philosophy as well as, later on, Mach's Philosophy, always changing - may be observed a moment later by some new empirical I, however small this period of the mind's moment may be; and this observer may be observed some moments later by another empirical I of that later period; and so on. No transcendental I - no unchangeable I, no Self - is to be found on this path, as was already observed by Yajnyavalkya, who - being hereby less cautious than Kant - postulated the existence of such a Self, of such an Atman. But Kant's transzendentale Apperzeption is not a Self, but merely an Idea, a knowledge-constituting idea, therefore being itself.

Concerning my dismissal of meditation within the last lecture on the philosophy of Buddha Shakyamuni at Mayaguez, I should confess that I hesitated to explain this Fourth Noble Truth because of several reasons, especially because of these ones:

* First of all, I was not aware that someone at this Campus was interested in receiving information upon this important part of the Buddha's teaching.

* Secondly, in order to try to explain this part, I would have needed at least four additional extended evening sessions in order to present these teachings in a roughly-complete form.

* Thirdly, I was trying to avoid the term "meditation" because of its vagueness, using instead terms like "internalize" or "deepening (in one's mind)".

* Fourthly, and mainly, I should confess that I do not have any remarkable experiences concerning the internalization of what I understand and accept of Buddha's teaching.

But there are people today who are fullfilling this condition. One of them was Geshe Tandin Rabten, who is regarded by all of those who met him as a living Buddha, as a fully-enlightened person. He died about twenty years ago in Switzerland, and his reincarnation is Tenzin Rabgye Rabten Tulku. His main disciple is Lama Gonsar Tulku, a fully-liberated person, the fourth reincarnation of the first Lama Gonsar. Lama Gonsar Tulku is able not only to explain Buddhist philosophy in its particular cases, but especially to present the Fourth Noble Truth not merely, like me, in repeating what was heared and read, but out of his own experiences in applying these methods in a fruitful and directed manner.

Dr. Essler sent a seperate message responding to Silencio Bouche:

I am not sure whether I got the point of Silencio Bouche's comment; therefore let me explain here my view of the early Buddhist philosophy in some of its main semantical and epistemological aspects.

As to semantics, first of all it should be noted that Buddha Shakyamuni very often used expressions -- e.g. Sanskrit-terms for "world", for "suffering", for "I", and for "Self" -- in different senses, depending on the presuppositions of the men to which he explained his doctrine: To laymen who were not philosophically educated, he used such expressions mostly in their everyday-meanings, but to philosophically educated people -- not everytime and not solely to ordained ones -- he used these terms, and especially the term "atman", i.e.: "Self" -- like it was used among the philosophers at that period, namely: in the sense of Yajnyavalkya, a philosopher who lived in India about three centuries before the Buddha. According to Yajnyavalkya, the Self is the perceiving one which is per se different from everything which it perceives, and the thinking one which is per se different from everything which it thinks, and the creator of the -- phenomenal -- world together with its men and gods which is per se different from everything which it creates. This Self is the unchangeable substance, thus the stable basis of all the changeable appearances resp. phenomena; it is -- so to speak -- the Archimedian point for the phenomena. And Buddha Shakyamuni then used this meaning of the term "Self" in arguing that believing in the existence of such a Self is a fundamental error, an avidya.

According to the epistemological aspect of the Buddha's philosophy, every perceiving one may become the object of some perceiving, every thinking one may become the object of some thinking, and every acting one may become the object of some acting. For the person in all its bodily and mental aspects as well as in particular the mind is not regarded to be some stable object. The mind, in particular, is regarded by him -- and that's what I, too, accept from his doctrine - not as a mental substance but as a continuity of mental states solely, whereby every single state is causing its subsequent state, dissolving itself thereby completely, which is comparable to the continuities of, e.g., electromagnetic energies. In even this way, the thinking one of this moment -- i.e. the mental state of this moment -- may easily become the object of thinking within some subsequent mental states of the same continuity of these states. Nothing else than the mental states are performing the mental aspects of perceiving, of thinking, and of acting: No unknown and unchangeable substance is needed for explaining this continuity of mental states - in short this mind - and no substance of this kind - no Self - is to be to determine elsewhere, not even in a conceptualized kind, in using Kant's resp. concept: not even as a transcendetal apperception.

There is per se no such limitation of the abilities of the mind, which -- unfortunately for the not yet liberated ones -- does not prevent one's mind from being captured and imprisoned by self-made limitations like wrong views concerning the mind and its functions.

This is -- according to the Buddha as well as, in succession, to me -- the result of a cogent philosophical analysis.

But deeply entrenched in the mind of a not yet liberated being is that -- besides the mind -- some precious imperceptible and unfathomable and unchangeable leader -- the atman, the Self, the soul, or whatsoever -- is leading the mind and thereby everything which the mind is leading. This wrong view leads the mind to perceive its objects of perceiving in a biased manner, to think about its objects of thinking in a biased manner, to act concerning its objects of acting in a biased manner. And one of the re-actions of such biased perceiving, thinking, and acting is: to maintain the being familiar with that wrong view, and furthermore to strengthen and to deepen this wrong view in one's mind, i.e. to strengthen and to deepen one's being captured and imprisoned by such views.

Becoming liberated, therefore, consists in abandoning this wrong view completely, i.e.: not only at the surface of one's mind, as I am able to do it when -- from time to time -- thinking about these things, but at every outer and inner areas of one's mind, within all its gross as well as subtle states.

Early and Late Wittgenstien

The Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, with his "atomic", "picture" theory, was still seeing the issue as one of the way language and mind represent the world. He had the idea that what pictures represented was not so much individual things as relations between individual things, or what he called "facts." Language captured (or ought to capture) logical relations. His fascination with the relationship between logic and pictures is very High Modern, like one of those Cubist paintings by Braque or Picasso.
In the later Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein moves away from representational ideas altogether. The fundamental insight was that an authentically naturalized account of mind and language would have to have done with intentional and semantic properties altogether. This is a kind of behaviorist/functionalist reading of Wittgenstein: there are no such things as symbols. There is nothing "under the surface" of language (no meaning) and thought (no "inner space").
It is important to see the continuity between the earlier and the later work. The idea that consciousness and qualitative experience (and "good and bad," for example) were not possible objects of representation is common to both books, and an exploration of the limits of language is an organizing principle of both. Sometimes people who like the Tractatus dismiss the P.I. and vice versa, but that is a mistake.

Hume's Response to Skepticism

Most traditional interpreters of Hume have read his language of "impressions" as Cartesian/Lockean, in the sense that he is wedded to a representational view of mind such that skeptical doubt is an inevitable (albeit perhaps trivial) problem. Thus the empiricist is a kind of cheerful skeptic, suggesting (as Hume does) that rationalist approaches overstep their bounds in the face of inscrutable nature. I've been wondering if Hume wasn't perhaps closer to Wittgenstein, with his idea that skepticism is a kind of pseudoproblem, than he was to early 20th century "analytic" philosophers, like Russell and the "phenomenalists" of early 20th century philosophy of science. So I was pleased to see that one of the selections in my Intro anthology was "Of scepticism with regard to the senses," Book 1 Part 4 Section 2 of the Treatise. Three paragraphs in we find "For as to the notion of external existence, when taken for something specifically different from our perceptions, we have already shown its absurdity" and we get a footnote directing us to "Of the idea of existence, and of external existence," Book 1, Part 2, Section 6.
Hume writes, "The idea of existence, then, is the very same with the idea of what we conceive to be existent. To reflect on anything simply, and to reflect on it as existent, are nothing different from each other. That idea, when conjoined with the idea of any object, makes no addition to it. Whatever we conceive, we conceive to be existent. Any idea we please to form is the idea of being; and the idea of being is any idea we please to form."
The Cartesian reading of this sort of thing is that we cannot get around our "ideas" or indeed past our "impressions" in order to know the external world directly. For all we know the external world might not exist, but there's simply no sense playing philosophical parlor games. Beyond experience lies the unknown. (I noticed reading Bryan McGee's Confessions that he was particularly enamored of this sort of idea, which he attributed to Kant.) But it looks to me that there is a much more powerful argument here, one that does aim to defeat Cartesian skepticism. On this more Berkeleyan reading the external world just is experience just is the external world. There cannot be any "abstract idea" (Hume thinks that the problem is that these are fishy abstract ideas) of an existing thing apart from our actual experience. So skepticism is a pseudoproblem motivated by a misconception of the meaning of "being." Experience is the ground of conception, so there are not any genuine concepts that extend beyond experience. This I take to be broadly equivalent to Wittgenstein's diagnosis. It is not a mere throwing up of the hands of an empiricist: I think that Hume positively rejects the Cartesian possibility as a demonstrable error. One can not be said either to "know" or to "not know" about the existence of the external world. Wittgenstein is making the same argument with his appropriation of the word "solipsism" at the end of the Tractatus.

Is Hume Moore or Wittgenstein?

G. E. Moore tried his hand (irresistible pun) at overcoming the Cartesian skeptical problem, that if one grants that we only experience our own mental representation of the world, knowledge (about the actual world) is impossible. In "A Defense of Common Sense" (1925) and "Proof of an External World" (1939) he proposed that we can recognize paradigm cases of knowledge (famously including "That I have a hand"), and that establishing the truth of such knowledge claims establishes the falsity of the skeptic's claim that any knowledge about the external world may be false. I find Moore's style of argument, both here and in his exposition of the "naturalistic fallacy" in Principia Ethica, to be awfully fast, but one can see how Moore felt that he was carrying on David Hume's legacy with this kind of Modernist, anti-philosophical philosophy. If there is a conflict, Hume teaches us, between what ordinary people take to be simply given and what the rationalist takes to be logically necessary, then so much the worse for logic. I'm always careful to suggest to my students that the way to think about the possible significance of Cartesian skepticism is that it shows that rationalist philosophy has problems, rather than locating the problem in ordinary belief (if the student calls me at 2AM worried that the world is not real, my counsel is that he drink some water, go for a walk, and lay off those funny cigarettes).
However, Wittgenstein zeroed in on Moore's work, which Wittgenstein felt failed to cure the philosophical disease. He wrote a short manuscript late in his life that was finally published in 1969 titled On Certainty. On Wittgenstein's view, the problem was that the skeptic used the verb "to know" in a context in which it could have no meaning. It means something to say that "He knows that Aguadilla is north of here," or "He doesn't know if there is any spaghetti sauce left," because these statements are predictive of his actions and prescriptive of ours (this is the behaviorist side of Wittgenstein); Wittgenstein develops a type of functional-role semantics. Put another way, we are genuinely informed by ordinary attributions of knowledge because it could have been different: to say "he knows" makes sense because he might not have known. The external world as such, then, is not a legitimate object of knowledge. It is part of the context in which "knowledge" is possible. Thus, we neither know nor do not know anything about the existence of the external world; the verb "to know" can gain no purchase here. Moore's strategy for defeating Cartesian skepticism fails because Moore continues to commit the same "grammatical" (as Wittgenstein calls it) error as the skeptic. Moore no more "knows" that he has a hand than the skeptic "doubts" it: both are failing to make meaningful statements.
So a question of Hume interpretation: is Hume Moore or Wittgenstein? This is significant because standard Hume interpretation holds that he was a kind of happy skeptic. The standard line is that, since he held that the boundaries of sensory experience are the boundaries of knowledge, he fully embraced the Cartesian condition, that we can never know anything other than the "impressions" that are mental, not physical things. But I think that this phenomenalist reading of Hume owes a great deal to the early analytic philosophers such as Moore and notably Russell. Hume says that knowledge has limits, and that the philosopher must be comfortable with the fact that understanding can only be extended so far and no farther, on penalty of sophistry. This strikes me as much closer to the Wittgensteinian view that "the limits of my language are the limits of my world" than the traditional interpretation of Hume, that skepticism cannot be refuted and we are left phenomenalists. Note that Wittgenstein meant that the world establishes limits for language, rather than the reverse, a common error in reading him I think. So I need now to spend some time with the Treatise, if only I had the time.
(This page was anthologized at Meaning More, thanks to them.)

On Teaching "Contemporary Philosophy"

Here at the University of Puerto Rico, as in many undergraduate philosophy programs, we have a four-semester history of philosophy sequence: Ancient, Medieval, Early Modern, and Contemporary. "Early Modern" philosophy is a canonical category that is, I think, a valid way to sort a particular part of the literature, basically 17th and 18th century European philosophy from Descartes to Kant. It's a tight, well-defined topic: from the Discourse on Method (1637) to the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) is less than 150 years, and Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Newton, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant are all part of the same conversation, investigating more or less the same metaphysical and epistemological issues.
The trouble is that about 100 years or so ago "Contemporary" philosophy was defined (for curricular purposes, anyway) as European philosophy since Kant (or since 1800, say), and in the year 2008 that is no longer a coherent sorting out of the literature. It has become mission impossible. There are two problems that I see as a professor. First, the historical period has simply grown too long, encompassing now the German Idealism of the early 19th century all the way to the Anglo revival of metaphysics of the late 20th century, by way of Hegel and Marx, Pragmatism, Modernism, Existentialism and Phenomenology, Analytic Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Deconstruction, Cognitive Science, and branch stations along the way too numerous to mention. I'm familiar with this problem of what to include from teaching Humanities. One just has to accept that it is not possible to include everything significant, and try to choose a selection of topics that are both central and fun (and, assuming that one is not just deadwood faculty, mix these up from semester to semester).
But there is another problem with the idea of "Contemporary Philosophy" that is even more difficult. Even if we restrict ourselves to writers and themes that are generally accepted as "philosophical," we do not find a coherent conversation across the 19th and 20th centuries like we do with the Early Modern period. I try to break down what I take to be the superficial and insidious "Continental/Analytic" distinction in Contemporary in the same way that I reject the "Rationalist/Empiricist" distinction in Early Modern, and I have some success with that (for example it's true that Descartes and Kant are, unfortunately in my view, the granddaddies of both phenomenology and logical positivism. The more time goes by, the more alike they seem. It's amazing how much of Sartre is implicit in Hume. Etc.). But even that work won't really do, as I am painfully aware on the first day of a Contemporary course here in Puerto Rico (yesterday for example), because students have a reasonable expectation that the story of 20th century "philosophy" is more than the story of professional work in metaphysics and epistemology. What about Post-Colonialism? Today's students want some Eastern philosophy, and I do have a two-semester Buddhism course here every other year (thank God), but in Contemporary there is a palpable sense of disappointment, at least among some students, with the material. What about Feminism? I for one feel strongly that an introduction to 19th and 20th century thought requires some discussion of Feminist ideas.
So, what to do? At this point in my own intellectual life, the fact is that my interests run to good old metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and so forth: contemporary Contemporary philosophy! And I just take my students along with me where I want to go; that's the best thing that I can do for them. I do always enjoy teaching existentialism, and talking about ethics and political theory is another thing I get to do in class even though my own work doesn't run to those topics so much these days. A basic tactic of mine is to find a good book and let the book do the organizing: if this is Tuesday, it must be Pragmatism. This semester I'm going to use Anthony Kenny's Philosophy in the Modern World, the fourth volume of his history of western philosophy. I have confidence in Kenny, but I'm going to have to supplement him a bit. He's small-c conservative, with coverage of the religious writer John Henry Newman for example; I think I'll give them a blast of Mary Daly's Beyond God the Father somewhere along the line.

More on Kenny on God

The holidays are upon us so not much time for Daddy to philosophize but maybe a note about God would be appropriate for the season, so this by way of spreading holiday cheer.
The last remark by Prof. Kenny in Chapter 5 of What I Believe, "Why I am not a Theist - II," is as follows: "Human intelligence is displayed in the behaviour of human bodies and in the thoughts of human minds. If we reflect on the actual way in which we attribute mental predicates such as 'know', 'believe', 'think', 'design', 'control' to human beings, we realize the immense difficulty there is an (sic) applying them to a putative being which is immaterial, ubiquitous and eternal....we cannot really ascribe a mind to God at all." (pp. 52-53). I think that this is a very important argument, it is the one to which I alluded at the end of the last post but I didn't realize then that Kenny had himself stated the argument so prominantly. I think the argument goes like this: Say that God has the attributes of being omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent (I guess there will be other God-like properties that would also serve the point, omnitemporal etc.). In the case of an ordinary use of the verb "to know," to say of Tony, "Tony knows about X" is informative because it is possible that Tony might not know. That is the meaning of the verb, the semantic function of the word. In a world where Tony had the property of knowing anything and everything, there would be no epistemic verb for Tony's condition at all. There would be, quite literally, nothing to talk about. And so Tony would not appear to us to be the kind of thing that "knows" things, and similarly for statements like "God caused X" or "God is located at X." In all cases, it looks like it is the finitude of the ordinary person that allows them to come under mental predicates. And location is just a straight-ahead physical property, so far as I can see.
Here's what's exciting about this argument: I think that mental properties are a really fancy subset of physical properties. I think that being a person is a property that only a being with a finite physical body could have. So that looks like a credible argument for physicalism about the mind. Merry Christmas.

Reading Kenny on God

It's the week between the end of classes and holiday visiting, and the house-painting project is now in mopping-up stages, but I'm grabbing a minute here to think about God. Last year I used Anthony Kenny's Ancient Philosophy, the first of his four-volume history of western philosophy, in my Ancient class. It was very good, thematically arranged which I like (Irwin's Classical Philosophy shares this virtue). Coverage of Aristotle, a clear philosophical treatment of logic, etc. Next semester I'm going to use the fourth volume, Philosophy in the Modern World, in my Contemporary class and see what happens. My friend Jorge Ferrer has been reading Kenny's What I Believe (2006), so I Amazoned up a copy and am looking at it (or I should say not having time to look at it) this week. The philosophical memoir, as a sort of lucid summation of basic conclusions after a lifetime of study and exposition of the canonical texts, is a very brave and useful genre of philosophy.
Mr. Kenny can reasonably be expected to tell us something interesting about God, with his years of study under Vatican auspices and his subsequent 40+ years as an Oxford don and writer of numerous books on the topic. Although I think he compresses things a bit too much at points, he doesn't disappoint. I'm thinking of two sets of ideas just now:
First, the argument that "Since anything exists, something must exist necessarily" (Kenny doesn't necessarily endorse this argument). At first I thought it was transparently wrong, since I didn't see any reason why existence itself must be any less contingent than every existing particular. I'm not sure where I end up with that, but the Wittgenstein-inspired direction Kenny explores makes me nervous that maybe existence can't be considered contingent like particular existing things are (he also discusses Kant's handling of existence as a predicate). The Wittgenstein-like idea is that it makes no sense to talk about the universe not existing (what did Wittgenstein think of Parmenides?). The grammar-caused metaphysical illusion is the resulting sense of a "possible world" of empty space: we imagine "the universe" sitting in "space" one moment and then imagine it disappearing and leaving the "empty space." In fact this sort of argument is rehearsed by David Lewis, that master of talking about possible worlds, and I quote: "A world is not like a bottle that might hold no beer. The world is the totality of the things it contains....there isn't any world where there's nothing at all. That makes it necessary that there is something." (from On The Plurality of Worlds). The intuitive bother about these sorts of arguments is that they seem to involve an equivocation: surely there's a (metaphysical) difference between what can be meaningfully said and what is possible? Isn't it closed-minded to just stipulate that the bounds of reality are the bounds of sense? But that's the problem, I confess that I'm not so sure about that. Not so fast, Kant. On the other hand, this looks to me to be an entirely secular argument: a demonstration of the necessity of something is hardly a demonstration of the existence of God.
The second set of arguments might actually yield a plausible case for the existence of something that you could call "God." (Ironically Kenny's very learnedness brings up into relief the very fuzzy nature of this concept). I think that Plato and Hinduism ("atman") are on to this: if the evolution of consciousness is a reflection of the formally organized nature of the universe (impossible without it, inevitable with it), does this entail that the universe is itself in some general sense "mental"? (Spinoza). Another way of saying that if the universe is formally organized then materialism fails. Because it seems to me that if God is not a person then it's no longer the original concept of God, and this universal mind strategy is the only one that might be persuasive that accounts for a personal God. Provisionally my current view is that God can't be a person because persons are necessarily finite, such that they can be meaningfully said to "know," "act," "exist," etc. (notice that this is a Wittgensteinian argument as well). But the counter-argument that formal organization is constitutive of consciousness is interesting.

Buddhism and Civilization

One of my basic positions as a philosopher, programmatic for my work on philosophy of mind, is that I don't accept a distinction between human nature and the rest of nature. I reject, for example, the view that language (or "rationality," or God's will, or "negation") somehow releases humans from the causal relations and physical explanations that we apply to the rest of the physical universe. But that's not to say that humans aren't very fancy natural beings, a point that I am sometimes accused of missing (in discussions of animal mind, for example) but that seems to me too obvious to mention. It's just that my opinion about methodology is that we won't figure anything out by making human distinctness axiomatic (like the linguists mistakenly do), we've got to get to human consciousness and thinking from non-conscious, non-cognitive origins. Otherwise we have explained nothing.
Like all good philosophical questions, the question about the extent and nature of human uniqueness is a simple one that quickly takes us into deep waters. And like most good questions about mind and consciousness, it is one that is addressed by the fantastically rich Buddhist tradition. One of the pivotal historical developments of Buddhism was the Tibetan Renaissance of the eighth century, when the rulers of Tibet, hitherto a land of war lords and warriors, were converted to Buddhism and subsequently invited scholars and holy men from India to build a Buddhist society, the founding of the "Tantric" tradition (tantras are methods, and the name refers to a heterogenous approach including various types of yoga, meditation, teaching and other practices). My thought today is about meditation and our concept of ourselves, and the experience of the Tibetans of the early classical period as a case of "civilization," if we think of civilization as including the emergence of this sense of humans as apart from the (rest of the) physical world.
To meditate is to become aware of consciousness. Like Descartes, Buddha tends to identify the self with consciousness (as distinct from the body), and like Descartes Buddha quickly gets to the distinction between consciousness and the contents of consciousness (I don't mean to say that Buddhism has exactly the same metaphysical problems of mind and body as the European tradition, but I don't romanticize Buddhism nor do I demonize all things Western: all just people). Elemental point: this "discovery" (creation?) of mind is an element in the emergence of civilizations, constitutive of a sense that humans have volitions and thus are not just (determined) things. Notice that traditional (in the West think: Pre-pre-Socratic) peoples tend to think that all causation is intentional (causes are volitions of gods and spirits), so locating mind in humans simultaneously gives rise to the idea of physical causation as non-volitional, non-mental causation. Whether any of this is a good or a bad thing I cannot say. I'd like to discover that the Buddhist tradition, that I love, somehow cuts through the mind-body problem in a simple way that the dumb old Europeans missed, but I cannot say that.

Visit by Khenchen Tsewang Gyatso Rinpoche

When I saw the poster advertising Tsewang Gyatso's visit here at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez, I knew enough to know it was a must-attend event. In Buddhism, the two branches that are of widest interest are the Zen Buddhism of China and Japan and the Tantric Buddhism of Tibet (although there are others notably Theravada Buddhism in Southeast Asia). "Rinpoche" is the honorific spiritual title of ordained members of the Tibetan lineage, while "Khenchen" is an honorific scholarly title equivalent to "professor of Buddhist Studies." Right up my alley! But it got better: Tsewang Gyatso is the Khenchen of Palyul Nyingma Meditation and Study Centers, an international network of centers under the auspices of Namdrooling Palyul Monastery. There are four sub-branches of Tibetan Buddhism: Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya, and Gelug. Of these four, Nyingma (means "ancient") is the oldest, and the branch most closely identified with the body of classical Buddhist commentary originating in the Eighth Century "Tibetan Renaissance," the great flowering of Buddhism in Tibet. This literature is the specialty of the famous North American scholar Robert Thurman (see his The Jewel Tree of Tibet) and our deepest heritage of philosophical Buddhism. And here he was, a Rinpoche of the highest rank, visiting out-of-the-way Mayaguez: a unique event, to my knowledge (although San Juan has a Buddhist center and the Dalai Lama visited there last year).
Needless to say, there were only about eight or nine people there the first night, when Gyatso Rinpoche gave a basic introduction to the origins of Buddhism. One or two more showed up last night, when Rinpoche discussed dzogchen practice, the basic spiritual practice of nyingma tantra. Buddhism is such a simple thing, and yet it is so endlessly rewarding (spiritual) and fascinating (intellectual). Rinpoche was not talking about philosophy, he was talking about training the mind for loving kindness towards all living beings. I ask students in class sometimes, "Do you want to be nice?" A surprisingly subversive question, and one that often has a big impact considering how basic and simple it is. Philosopher that I am, in some moods I get hung up on the issue of idealism in the Buddhist tradition (idealism in the metaphysical sense: the view that primary being is somehow mental). It is certainly true that the language, at least as far as I can see reading English translations, is unequivocal: the mind creates the world. There is a Berkeleyan/Spinozistic subtext that here dates back to the original Vedic tradition: if the universe is the mind of God under some description (Spinoza) or if God is a transcendental constitutive mind (Berkeley), in Hinduism the atman, then idealism might be (just) an abstruse item of theological metaphysics. On the other end of the spectrum we could take it all as figurative (the way someone like me reads the Bible), smile at the world and the world smiles back at you, Gestalt, and all that sort of thing. Listening to Khenchen Gyatso, he didn't seem to fit either of those interpretations. He explained the destructive force of the atomic bomb, for example, as an effect of the mental states that created it (and he ran the same line on modern medical research). He was clear on the point that the mind was what made the difference. Everything is alright or not alright, he was sure, depending on the state of the mind. A very satisfying evening, a real treat for us far-off Mayaguezanos for sure.

Response to Lamar H.

Lamar H. recently left a comment on my post entitled "Determinism is Skepticism, so what about Eliminativism?" I didn't notice the comment until today because that post is quite old, and I don't have Lamar's e-mail, but he asked for a response and his comment is good quality philosophy, so I'll post this and hope he sees it; he generates some good discussion here during the otherwise hectic last week of class.
My original post floated this idea: if we define a philosophically skeptical argument as any argument that purports to show that I don't know something that I am certain that I do know, then the claim of the hard determinist, that for any action I take I could not have acted otherwise, looks like a philosophically skeptical argument. If this is true, then any arguments that I have that seem to be effective counters to skepticism ought to be deployable against determinism (the further point in the original post about eliminativism does not enter in here). I won't reproduce Lamar's whole comment here, but you can read it by scrolling down to the post (or click on the December 2006 file). I'll quote from it: "(T)he claim that nothing can be known for sure and the claim that a particular thing we'd like to think we know for sure (viz., that we have control over our actions) is not true, are two different claims. One is an epistemological claim concerning the limits of human knowledge while the other is a metaphysical claim concerning the ontology of human behavior." Lamar takes the definitive point here to be, I think, that the determinist claims to know something (to have a positive argument), not to doubt that knowledge is possible, and thus determinism is "a precisely non-skeptical claim." I think that Lamar is right that the determinist is not making a skeptical argument. I take Lamar's point that the positive arguments for hard determinism are metaphysical and not epistemological: physicalism about persons plus causal determinism yield hard determinism. The determinist claims that accepting these premises entails hard determinism, and thus makes a knowledge claim, and thus is no kind of skeptic. Nonetheless I am still persuaded that the kinds of arguments that Wittgenstein makes against skepticism can indeed be deployed against the hard determinist (and, although this is a shakier claim, I still suspect that Hume, properly interpreted, aims at a Wittgenstein-like position that these are pseudoproblems. I don't think that Hume takes either skepticism or determinism seriously, although he cheerfully concedes to the impossibility of disproving them).
Lamar, if I get him right, is more interested in determinism than he is in skepticism (not that that matters to the argument), but I want to raise some questions about whether his characterization of skepticism is a) sound and b) distinct from mine. Lamar characterizes skepticism as the view that knowledge is impossible, while I characterize philosophically skeptical arguments as those that purport to show that I don't know something that I am certain that I do know. I will call Lamar's version "global skepticism" (sometimes "global skepticism" is used to denote the view that my senses might be entirely misrepresenting the world to me, or the view that the external world might not exist; here I mean the view that knowledge is impossible).
First of all note that the varieties of skepticism familiar from Descartes' Meditations tend to take the form that I suggest: I think that I know that I'm not dreaming, I think that I know that other minds exist, I think that I know that causal laws will remain in effect in the future, but, the skeptic says, I don't really know these things. I don't know, notably, that my senses are representing the world to me as it "really" is (and this worry depends on a representational theory of mind). But the global version propounded by Lamar (knowledge is not possible) is not like these Cartesian versions. There is no coherent sense of the meaning of the verb "to know" that can sustain global skepticism. If you don't mean to refer to some specific possibility - my senses may be deceiving me, other people may be zombies, I may be dreaming, etc. - then it is not possible to make sense of the claim.
The incoherence of this global version of skepticism is also apparent (the same problem with this characterization is apparent) when we consider the self-refuting character of the claim: that the global skeptic claims to know that knowledge is impossible. There is a trivial sense in which global skepticism militates against any claim whatsoever, including any claim that I am free, or any claim that I am determined, but that just shows, again, that global skepticism is philosophically uninteresting, since it can make no meaningful claim.
This kind of Wittgensteinian (and, I think, Humean) argument about meaning (and the limits of language) also yields (I still think) an argument against hard determinism. The argument, that is, is that hard determinism is incoherent, notwithstanding Lamar's (correct, I think) point that the hard determinist has a positive argument that he takes to demonstrate the necessary truth of hard determinism, rather than an epistemological worry that I can't prove that I act freely. Wittgenstein argues that I neither believe nor disbelieve that the external world exists; the "external world" is part of the ground (as Paul Tillich might say) of belief. Freedom, I am suggesting, is like that: it is not a proper object of belief or disbelief, I can no more choose to "believe" it than I can choose to "disbelieve" it. Notice that this argument overcomes Holbach's argument that a "phenomenological" defense of freedom fails because the experience of freedom could just be an illusion itself caused by the causal antecedents. The response to the hard determinist is: what you are saying does not mean anything, it does not perform (it cannot perform) any communicative function. But that is precisely the argument against skepticism about the senses, about the external world, about other minds, etc. Lamar?

The Is/Ought Distinction Defanged

Hume held the view that no amount of descriptive propositions could ever yield a prescriptive proposition: no "ought" from "is." G.E. Moore said that to locate goodness and badness in facts about states of affairs was to commit the "naturalistic fallacy." This has struck many people (including myself at an earlier time) as a pernicious doctrine. But this week, looking at the issue for the first time in a while, it doesn't look like as big an issue as I remembered it being. I think that Hume (and Mill, and the whole run of empiricist ethics) is right that goodness and badness (value) is a property of experiences. If there were no beings that had experiences that were good or bad, there would be no value in the world. I know that environmental ethicists, for example, have wanted to make a case for first-order values in nature (appealing to Aristotelean teleological ideas, notably), but to do philosophy we have to ask ourselves what it is that we truly believe, and I have to say that I don't see any way to account for value if there are no experiencing beings. Valuing is an activity, after all. But that doesn't mean that environmentalism, say, can gain no moral purchase. Badness doesn't go away because we've located it "in the head." In fact I think that I want to be some sort of moral realist - I think that there are moral facts. It's only if we are already otherworldly about experiences and mind that we assume that to say that experiences are what are good and bad is to espouse some sort of relativism or nihilism about ethics. For me, subjectivity is a worldly, even an earthy, sort of thing, naturalist that I am; my mind is no more or less a natural fact than my body. As to Hume, like Berkeley he holds that experiences are the basis of all mental content, after all, that is, any property we experience is a property of experience. So in that sense it's trivially true that goodness and badness are properties of experience. Hume isn't suggesting, so far as I can see, that this Cartesian account of value underwrites any difference in normative ethics at all. He's just trying to explain how value goes. "Colors" are properties of mental representations, according to 18th century empiricism, just as much as goodness and badness are. Hume might not agree that Moore was just elaborating a Humean line: the Humean line is that no physical description is going to tell us what the color of something is like, and that there would be no colors if there were no experiencing beings. Isn't it the spirit of Moore's piece to argue that our moral statements are more detached from physical facts than our color statements? But Hume wouldn't say so.

Hume, Neo, and Reid

Today in Early Modern class I'm finishing Hume and transitioning to Thomas Reid. I want to get a handle on Reid's attack on Cartesian notions of mental representation, and hopefully read through some of the Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764). I found a really cool-looking edition from Edinburgh University Press (Derek Brooks, ed., 1997) at the APA book fair a couple of years ago. Painters and plumber both coming this week, unfortunately. Reid correctly diagnoses Locke, Berkeley, Hume and the gang as in the grip of what he called "the ideal system," what I mean mostly when I use the adjective "Cartesian," that is the view that we do not experience the external world directly, rather our experiences are experiences of our mind's own representation of the world; or one might say that our experience of the world is mediated by our mental representations. Thus skepticism, thus The Matrix, thus one branch in the bush of relativist arguments (or is it wool?), thus Kant. There are a lot of things to think about here, I'm thinking about how to interpret Hume, and Wittgensteinian responses to the "ideal system." A central programmatic view of mine is that the Cartesian, representational framework cannot possibly be right. So if Reid lives up to his reputation of someone who makes a sporting critique of representationalism, his are depths that need be plumbed. (But I'll have to get back to this later today, I need to prep my class on Stoic treatments of causation and freedom for Ancient in thirty minutes, text Terence Irwin, Classical Philosophy).

Aristotle, Nominalism, and Personal Identity

Aristotle thinks that "substance" (the union of form and matter) is primary being. This puts him between the nominalist (only physical particulars exist) and the Platonic realist (transcendental things exist, like math). He looks nominalist when we consider that on this view the first things to exist are the physical particulars: the nested categories extend from the individuals outward, whereas with Plato the universals are primary being, organizing matter into categories. But he looks Platonic when we consider numerical identity and personal identity.
One might say, "I have two identical pieces of chalk." Usually when we say such a thing we mean that we have two pieces of chalk with the same form: it's clear that we consider each piece to be metaphysically distinct because it is a different piece of matter. So in our ordinary talk about physical things we don't accept identity between distinct pieces of matter. My idea of Aristotle the man is that he was the type of person who would say, "Sure, that's how it goes, and so you don't need to make up any exotic properties like 'The property of being identical to oneself' or anything like that," and wouldn't mind that his own analysis of substance doesn't technically underwrite this practice. According to Aristotle, the existence of all the physical particulars is just a brute existential fact (substance is primary being). Many physical particulars are similar enough to others that we can name these categories. So we have a category called "humans," but we don't have one called "Socrateses," but if primary being were arranged differently we could have a world where humans were further sorted into Socrateses and Aristotles. They're all horses, and they're all made out of distinct matter. I think that if we put Socrates through a malfunctioning transporter and two of him came out the other end, Aristotle does not hold that they are neither the original one. I think he has to hold that they are both Socrates. For better or for worse, Aristotle's substance account countenances the metaphysical possibility of simultaneous exemplifications of one thing: to him that's just quotidian, mere taxonomy. Of course they'd be two different bodies and in fact this makes all the difference. But then we'd make up new names to designate the two Socrateses. Which brings me to my final thought today: Looking at Aristotle's position here, it starts to seem like some criterion of physical identity isn't so obviously wrong. Maybe a person is just identical to their physical body.

Jorge Ferrer on Anglo Ethical Theory

I sat down for coffee with Dr. Jorge Ferrer, a bioethicist who studied at the Vatican, and we ended up having a nice chat about utilitarianism, Peter Singer, and related topics. Jorge made some observations about utilitarianism from a Latin point of view that I found interesting. On the one hand the criticism is that utilitarianism puts too much weight on the individual and the individual's acts. On the other hand, the criticism is that in restricting public judgements to public acts (Mill discusses this more explicitly in On Liberty), the moral stature of the individual is dropped from consideration. The idea that there is no element of classical "virtue theory" in Anglo ethics reflects, perhaps, differences in the way the relationship between the individual and society is conceived. This connects with the criticism that too much weight is put on individual actions. But in addition to these Aristotelean elements there is also a greater sense of fatalism that reflects the Catholic element in Latin thought. In any event these observations from the Latin point of view certainly help to turn one's thinking in some interesting directions about ethical theory.