Blind Consciousness

Consciousness is information laden. Not only does it supply information about the external world, it also informs us about itself and our own body. In being conscious we find out about the world outside us and about our own subjective state and bodily condition. The faculties used to acquire these sorts of information are usually labeled perception, introspection, and proprioception. Consciousness is thus highly informative, a source of knowledge (do we have any other source?). It seems geared to disclosing facts about the world, providing us with a torrent of data; it is information rich. But there is one area in which it is conspicuously silent: information about our brain states. Nothing in consciousness reveals what is going on in the brain when consciousness itself is operative. True, we can look at the brain from the outside by opening up the head, but we receive no information about the brain simply by being conscious: no amount of concentrating and training can enable you to discover what is going on in your brain just by surveying your current state of consciousness. So far as consciousness is concerned, you don’t even have a brain—though assuredly consciousness affirms the existence of the external world, itself, and the body. This is a strange state of affairs, because the brain is surely, to put it mildly, closely involved in the activities of consciousness. Nothing is closer: everything that happens in consciousness depends on the brain (on neural activity), minutely and inescapably. Consciousness is basically a function of the brain—an aspect of the brain. You would think, then, that this alliance would show up in consciousness: consciousness would make it evident where its foundations begin and end. But no, nothing: it is as if consciousness refuses to acknowledge its origins in the brain. It won’t admit to its cerebral roots, keeping them discreetly out of the field of awareness. Nor are there any pathological conditions in which the activities of neurons force themselves into consciousness—no abnormalities in which the facts of neural life intrude upon the conscious state. No one ever suffers from “brain suffusion”—a sudden sense of cerebral susurration. It may be wondered why this is—why the deafening silence about the brain’s role in generating consciousness? Is it because it would be distracting and pointless? But consciousness is always distracting us from the main focus of the moment, and it might sometimes be useful to know what is going on inside your brain (injuries, diseases, etc.). This looks like a puzzle of nature: why the selective blindness? Consciousness is generally generous with information, but here it is stingy to the point of absolute silence. It is as if it has been designed to be selectively blind—as if the brain is a taboo subject. One would think it was ashamed of the brain, like a mad relative in the attic.  [1] Nor is this selective blindness a necessary truth: we can imagine that it was not so—a species of sentient beings might well enjoy consciousness of its own brain, treating this is as completely routine, like our awareness of our limbs or lungs. Knowledge of the brain might be part of folk psychology.

            What are the implications of this selective blindness? And what is its general character? You might think it provides an argument against materialism: for if materialism were true, wouldn’t its truth be evident to consciousness? Is it that consciousness supplies no information about the brain because it isn’t the brain—because it isn’t a material thing? Maybe so, but note that consciousness tells us nothing about a supposed immaterial substance either: it is equally blind about that. It is blind about whatever constitutes its underlying basis; it turns a blind eye towards its underpinnings. In any case, consciousness certainly has neural correlates, and it systematically ignores these correlates. The point concerns the epistemic capacities of consciousness not its metaphysics: it has a blind spot. It systematically conceals from itself its origins in the brain. Perhaps there is an inhibitory mechanism in the brain that prevents the brain from knowing about itself via consciousness: switch off that mechanism and knowledge of the brain will come flooding in. More likely, there are just no receptors capable of processing information about the brain in the brain—no “cerebroreceptors” analogous to photoreceptors. Whatever the mechanics of the matter may be consciousness evidently declines to dabble in its cerebral origins. Is it because consciousness itself has a nature that precludes such awareness? Does it form a kind of barrier to knowledge of the brain? People have felt that perceptual consciousness works as a barrier in relation to the external world (hence the sense datum theory); perhaps it also acts as a barrier to the world of the brain. We can picture consciousness in one of two ways: it is either like a thin translucent film clinging to the brain, or it is like a think opaque fabric cloaking the brain. If the former, then it should provide glimpses of what lies beneath—fissures, furrows, axon-nucleus-dendrite structures. If the latter, then it is simply too thick to afford any such glimpses: more like a brick wall than a wispy veil. I think there is something to this thickness intuition, though it is hard to articulate it clearly: one has the image of layers of consciousness forming a dense membrane that shrouds the brain in darkness. But then why is it that the barrier only exists where the brain is concerned and not in relation to the external world or the body? The question quickly becomes hopelessly obscure. Yet it seems true that consciousness is not like a diaphanous veil in relation to the brain but more like a dense and opaque shield or mask. This is the ontological counterpart to the epistemic point that consciousness doesn’t reveal the brain even slightly. Perhaps we should be struck anew by the miraculous ability of consciousness to reveal the external world, it being in here and the external world being out there: how does this preternatural reaching-out work?  [2] It does feel somehow natural to suppose that consciousness is a self-enclosed reality (which is why Brentano’s thesis of intentionality is so striking): it has often been supposed that it can only ever contain information about itself as a self-enclosed reality. In any case, the matter is obscure and difficult, though worth thinking about. At present, I conclude, the explanation of brain-blindness must remain mysterious: it is evidently a fact, and a deep fact, but it is hard to see what accounts for it. It seems like an inexplicable contingency, yet deeply rooted—one of many mysteries of nature.

            What I think I can do is provide an account of what this selective blindness consists in—what kind of phenomenon it is. And this will lead us to a property of consciousness that has not heretofore been recorded. I spoke earlier of a blind spot: the literal meaning of this phrase concerns the physical eye and its physiology. Each eye has a spot on the retina that contains no photoreceptors, where the optic nerve joins the retina: nothing can be seen at this spot, though we don’t normally notice it. The eye is thus selectively blind for hard anatomical reasons. It is easy to see that if the retina suffered damage to any region a similar blind spot would result, and indeed this occurs in certain circumstances. In cases of macular degeneration (and in other conditions) just such a blind spot results—it is called a scotoma by neurologists. From a phenomenological point of view this localized blindness does not appear as a gap in the visual field—a blank space with perceived boundaries—but rather simply as an absence of vision. It is as if a certain part of the visual field disappears, but without any awareness of an empty patch. The blind spot itself is thus conceived as a kind of natural scotoma, though one that is harmless enough. This concept has proved sufficiently useful that it has been extended to refer to other sorts of selective blindness–in particular, personality scotomas, in which a person is unaware of facets of his or her personality that are evident to others. It is a form of ignorance (“neglect”) that stems from a perceptual lack—a type of blindness. The word “scotoma” comes from a Greek word for darkness, and the concept is apt: the neglected aspect of reality lies in darkness for the would-be perceiver. We are familiar with the phenomenon of degraded vision at the periphery of the visual field (“semi-scotoma”, as we might call it); in full scotoma we have a complete absence of vision at a specific locus of the visual field, more or less extensive. Scotomas are generally acquired, but they could be genetic: we can imagine someone born with a rather large scotoma at a particular place in the visual field. Unlike total blindness, the person with a scotoma experiences undiminished awareness surrounding the affected area—so they can have normal visual acuity except in a certain location.

You can see where I am headed with this: brain blindness is a type of scotoma. That is, our inability to know about the brain via consciousness is an example of a scotoma at a higher level of cognitive function (it doesn’t concern the anatomy of the eye). It is a natural scotoma that we are born with not the result of injury or disease, but it functions just like other sorts of scotoma. We can imagine someone born with awareness of his own brain that then suffers an injury that removes this area of awareness: that would be the analogue of macular degeneration. As it is our brain blindness is like our genetically determined blind spot—just the way we are hooked up and hardwired. We are born with a kind of partial blindness. In both cases the blindness is surrounded by normal vision, indeed by excellent information reception, but it just so happens that there is a confined area of total blankness. We suffer from a scotoma with respect to the brain, which we take for granted. Beings naturally equipped with brain awareness might pity us for our selective blindness, but we have known nothing else so we take it in stride (compare a land of the exclusively color blind). Presumably this is true of all terrestrial animals, so we can say that all life on earth suffers from brain blindness: terrestrial sentience is scotoma-prone sentience. Consciousness contains a big gap where the brain ought to be.  [3] And ironically this gap is precisely where the very origins of consciousness lie: consciousness thus has a blind spot for what makes it possible. We have no awareness of what makes awareness exist in the first place. The relative in the attic is actually our own nature as sentient physical beings. We are systematically blind to what enables us to see. A fine conceit, to be sure: our maker must be tickled pink. Consciousness is constitutionally blind to its conditions of possibility.  [4]

            It is inviting to postulate that consciousness has a characteristic not usually remarked upon: it is scotoma-prone. It is certainly rich in information content, acutely receptive to large sections of reality, but it is also selectively blind to certain parts of reality, for reasons not easy to fathom. Consciousness has intentionality, subjectivity, privacy, unity, a subject, and blind spots. It is, we might say, scotomic: gappy, holey, dark in places. In particular, it is blind to its own enabling conditions in the brain. The brain exists in close proximity to the conscious mind, closer than any other bodily organ, but for some reason consciousness refuses to disclose any information about the brain: it is studiedly vacant on the question. Its epistemic field contains a gaping hole where the brain ought to be. We can try to direct our consciousness to this area of neglect, or even attempt to train ourselves to be more receptive, but we come up empty handed. It really is as if we have an area of unalterable blindness where the brain is concerned. The only way we can know anything about the brain is by observing it from a third-person point of view. Of course, if the mind is really just an aspect of the brain, then we know about this aspect of the brain by introspection; but what we don’t know are the other aspects—those that involve neurons and their electrochemical processes. We don’t even know these aspects partially from the first-person point of view, as is the case for other bodily organs; our ignorance of the brain is far more principled. And this is particularly puzzling given that the brain is the closest thing to the mind in the entire universe. Shouldn’t we be aware of it at every moment? Why isn’t it constantly on our mind? It is as if the mind were intentionally keeping the brain a secret from us.  [5]

  [1] It might be thought that the brain just happens to be one of those organs of the body that keeps itself to itself, like the spleen or kidneys, so that there is nothing remarkable about its invisibility to consciousness. But (a) even those organs sometimes reveal themselves in abnormal circumstances (often in the form of pain) and (b) the brain is in its nature right next to consciousness, so that its doings could hardly be missed—yet it remains unrevealed.

  [2] This might be the central question in the philosophy of perception, which is a lot harder than people generally realize.

  [3] Another possible scotoma might be the unconscious: we have no inner eye capable of revealing the unconscious, even under special conditions. We have to infer the unconscious not know it by direct introspection. If we think of conscious awareness as a scanning device, then we can say that it is unable to scan the unconscious or the brain—though it can scan the external world, itself, and the body. It suffers from scanning gaps.

  [4] To repeat, I am not including using our actual eyes to look at the brain from the outside, a highly unusual form of knowledge as things normally stand.

  [5] Could it be that the conscious mind also keeps the self a secret? That is, do we have a scotoma with respect to the self? Hume famously found nothing when he searched within himself for himself, concluding (on one interpretation anyway) that there is no such self to find. But an alternative view would be that we have a blind spot with respect to the self: the self exists all right, but it doesn’t disclose itself to our spotty introspective powers. Selective blindness is thus wrongly interpreted as non-existence. One can imagine the same conclusion being drawn about the brain if we lacked the ability to observe the brain perceptually: we simply don’t encounter it in introspection. That is true enough, but it is false that the brain doesn’t exist. Likewise the self exists but at an introspective blind spot. So that makes three scotomas of consciousness: the brain, the unconscious, and the self. Any more? 

Epistemic Nihilism

When we speak of nihilism we are apt to think of moral nihilism, the kind of thing discussed in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons or by Nietzsche or the existentialists. This is the idea that moral values are fictitious, spurious, and non-existent. But the term itself is broader than that, deriving from the Latin “nihil” meaning “nothing”. The OED gives us two definitions: “the rejection of all religious and moral principles, often in the belief that life is meaningless”, and “Philosophy the belief that nothing has a real existence”. The latter is striking suggesting as it does the radical metaphysical position that nothing at all exists. Quite what the scope of the quantifier may be is left up to us, but we may suppose that ontological nihilism is intended, i.e. that no mind-independent entities exist. It would not be denied that thoughts exist. The position I want to consider here is both more and less modest than that: it is the thesis that knowledge does not exist. There is no such thing as knowing: all talk of knowledge is so much fiction, reification, and false objectification. Knowledge is like the unicorn: a mythical entity. Epistemic nihilism is to be distinguished from skepticism, which concerns what is known not the alleged state of knowing itself. Maybe nothing is known, or very little, but the concept of knowledge is a concept in good standing—we know what knowledge would be. There is such a state, but we are seldom if ever in it. By contrast, the epistemic nihilist holds that the state of knowing is a non-existent state—possibly an incoherent one. We should therefore eliminate the concept from our conceptual scheme, or keep it only under strict instructions about how it is to be understood (see below). The epistemic nihilist is like the moral nihilist: both think that the things in question simply lack real existence. There is no such thing as right and wrong, and there is no such thing as knowledge. This is consistent with allowing for the existence of many other things (actions, beliefs); it is specifically moral values and states of knowledge that are declared to be nothing.            [1]

            What reasons might be given in support of epistemic nihilism? They are for the most part familiar, but not usually considered as leading to such a radical conclusion. I will merely list them, with the aim of giving the flavor of the position. First, the concept (and therefore the thing) has resisted adequate definition for over 2,000 years, ever since Plato raised the question. We all know that true justified belief fails to add up to knowledge proper (Russell, Gettier). Even now we cannot say what knowledge is, despite our best efforts. The nihilist takes this to show that knowledge is nothing definable: the reason it can’t be defined is that it has no reality to be defined. No one is ever in such a state (even when the skeptic has been silenced). Second, there are deep puzzles about knowledge, also ancient: we can’t say how a priori knowledge is possible, and there are problems about the nature of empirical knowledge.            [2] How can we come to know things by pure reason—what kind of process is this? What explains it? And why is it that the world can only be known by sense experience? Thus some have supposed that so-called a priori knowledge is not really knowledge at all, since it concerns only tautologies or human conventions (there are no real propositions to be known in this way). And others have doubted that experience can ever add up to genuine knowledge: knowledge must be more than experience alone, but what is that more? Does knowledge have a foundation in experience, and how does that work exactly? Is knowledge simply coherence of belief? But how does mere coherence suffice for truth (a requirement of knowledge)? We thus cannot secure a prioriknowledge or a posteriori knowledge. Both are profoundly problematic. The epistemic nihilist sees in these failures a reason to doubt that the concept of knowledge is a workable concept—that it denotes anything real with which we have to come to terms. We may as well just get rid of it. Third, skepticism shows that the concept has no actual application—and what is the point of a concept that never applies to anything? Even when it does apply (e.g. knowledge of our own subjective experience) it has only limited application: in most of its uses it is falsely applied. There is clearly something amiss with a concept like this. Surely it must have been introduced in error, before its consequences were thought through. It is just a hopelessly shambolic concept, containing the seeds of its own destruction. Why bother keeping a concept that leads to such outlandish results? Why not declare it a would-be concept sorely in need of a real-world correlate? It simply doesn’t stand for anything real. Fifth, there are serious problems about what the state of knowledge could be. Here we may compare knowledge with meaning: is there any fact of meaning something by our words—what could constitute meaning?            [3] Similarly, is there any fact of knowing—what could constitute such a fact? Meaning is not an introspectable state of consciousness, nor is it a disposition, nor a brain state: so what is it? What determines whether we mean one thing or another by our words? Similarly, knowledge is not an introspectable state of consciousness, nor is it a disposition (there are always performance errors), nor a brain state: so what is it? What determines whether we know one thing rather than another? It seems to be an infuriatingly elusive kind of fact, like meaning. Hence we get indeterminacy claims and suggestions of non-factuality. Maybe we can salvage talk of knowledge by invoking non-standard semantic theories—as with criteria-based assertibility conditions theories—but then we have already conceded that the world contains no actual state of knowledge. The word “know” has a use, but it denotes nothing real. This is the analogue of anti-realist assertibility conditions theories of meaning. The epistemic nihilist may grudgingly accept such a diluted picture of knowledge for the sake of giving the word “know” a role in our language games, but still insist that nothing real is being designated. The word “know” is like the word “trustworthy”—expressing an attitude we can have towards certain individuals, not denoting an objective property of them. We thus give a pragmatic or expressive account of such talk without supposing that anything objectively real is going on. Or we might simply abolish the whole knowledge language game as so much error and myth. In either case we need not worry that we are failing to grasp the nature of something real—for there is nothing real there to grasp. Knowledge has no nature, no real essence, and no objective constitution—any more than unicorns do (or phlogiston or fairies). It is not as if we discovered the state of knowledge by means of diligent scientific observation. We just find ourselves with the concept, justifiably or not. Perhaps concepts like belief, truth, and justification can function as criteria of assertion for knowledge sentences, but they are not to be construed as denoting real constituents of a language-independent fact of knowing. We thus adopt an “error theory” of knowledge talk, like error theories of talk of meaning or moral value. We thereby extend nihilism into new territory.

            The advantage of taking this route is that it dissolves problems, as pragmatic and expressive theories are intended to do. We find ourselves burdened with a concept that is riddled with conundrums, mysteries and puzzles, and we summarily dismiss them by declaring outright non-existence. All the classic problems of theology disappear once God is declared dead. Similarly for the problems of ethics, given that there is no such thing as right and wrong; same for meaning, if meaning proves intractable; same for consciousness, if consciousness remains mysterious; and same for knowledge, if knowledge presents irresoluble difficulties. Come to think of it, isn’t the concept of knowledge tied suspiciously closely to religious ideas? God is defined as an all-knowing being, but according to religious nihilism there is no such being. Popes and priests are traditionally supposed to be epistemic authorities (revelation etc.), but that is a preposterous presumption. Is the concept of knowledge really an insidious way to reinforce social hierarchies and foster superstitions? Who possesses real knowledge and who doesn’t?            [4] Much the same has been said of moral value, which is similarly divisive. So the concept of knowledge might be thought to have dubious historical roots as well as being internally defective. The epistemic nihilist proposes to do away with knowledge as part of serious ontology, perhaps allowing such talk a limited pragmatic role (there certainly can’t be any science of it). Belief, yes, perhaps even justification, but not knowledge—not that old shibboleth. We needn’t keep trying desperately to find a definition for it, or figure out how it is possible, or what justifies it, or how it is related to experience, or what varieties of knowledge there might be, or whether there is any knowledge at all, or whether ethics (say) is an example of knowledge. Epistemology gets reconfigured, with knowledge losing its central place, or any place. True, the new type of knowledge-free epistemology is radically different from the old, but so was post-Copernican astronomy radically different from what went before, or Darwinian biology, or Einsteinian physics, or secular morality, or democratic politics. In order to make these great advances we often need to reject the existence of things hitherto taken for granted (divine design, vital spirits, the ether, the immortal soul, God-given commandments), but this can lead to exciting new vistas. What will epistemology look like without the obsession with knowledge? The epistemic nihilist boldly goes where no epistemologist has gone before. She points out the theoretical advantages, and the removal of troublesome questions, and the easing of our abiding sense of futility. We will still have good thinkers and bad, reliable informants and unreliable ones, real science and pseudo-science; we just stop characterizing all this with the archaic concept knowledge. The epistemological landscape will not be rendered depressingly deserted; it might even be fuller and healthier, with the air easier to breathe. The nihilist with respect to Hell, the Devil, and demons is a welcome presence, bequeathing to us a far healthier spiritual world; the nihilist with respect to knowledge hopes to achieve a similar result. She sees herself in a positive light, not as a spoiler and naysayer, but as a bringer of good news not bad. Just think: you will never have to berate yourself again for not knowing something! We will still have perception and memory, belief and inference, good reasons and bad, but we won’t need to aspire to something called “knowledge”—whatever that might be exactly. For the human cognitive system is never in a state that can be so characterized. The word “know” is the analogue in psychology and philosophy of “vital spirits” in biology. Knowledge has no place in science, and no place in common sense either.            [5]

Colin

            [1] In fact the two issues are not unconnected, since knowledge is commonly regarded as a normative concept—it is what belief aspires to be. Knowledge is often included on lists of things that are good intrinsically. The moral nihilist may thus have knowledge in his sights too, as dubiously value-laden.

            [2] See my “The Puzzle of Empiricism” and “How is A Priori Knowledge Possible?”

            [3] I am alluding to Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. We could, in fact, rephrase Kripke’s discussion of the “skeptical paradox” of meaning in terms of knowledge of meaning: is there a fact of the matter about whether I know that “+” means addition? Does John know that emeralds are green or is it that he knows that emeralds are grue?

            [4] The hero (victim) in Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading is scheduled to be executed for the crime of “gnostical turpitude”. What is heresy but claiming to know that what the church authorities say is knowledge isn’t knowledge? Religion is an epistemic battleground.

            [5] The case of knowledge of language is interesting: do we know the grammar of our language? That has always seemed problematic if we are working with the concept of knowledge that is regularly analyzed as true justified belief (plus some). Mastery of language certainly involves ability, competence, and internal representational structure: but does it involve knowledge? We can simply dispense with that question once the concept of knowledge has been banished from serious discourse; and doesn’t this seem particularly appropriate where linguistic mastery is concerned? We can also retain such notions as knowing-how and knowing-whom: it is knowledge of facts (knowledge-that) that has caused all the trouble. Have we illicitly extended the concept of knowledge from its unproblematic uses (“he knows how to play piano”) to create a concept that is obscure at best (“he knows that there is a table there”)? Not to mention “he knows that 2+2=4” and “he knows that genocide is wrong” and “he knows that he is in pain”. These all raise red flags, and the epistemic nihilist has an explanation of why: we are throwing the word “know” around recklessly and don’t really know what we mean. We do better to keep the word “know” under strict supervision and not let it spread to places where it doesn’t belong. 

Difficulties with Indeterminacy

What is the doctrine of the indeterminacy of meaning? It isn’t easy to get a firm handle on it: are we limited to saying, uninformatively, that it is the doctrine that meaning is indeterminate? But what kind of indeterminacy is at issue? Three analogies may be cited: the quantum world, fictional entities, and vagueness. In the quantum case (itself obscure) we are told that particles don’t have definite properties such as position and momentum—there is no fact of the matter about where they are and how fast they are moving. Everything is blurry, multiple, unfixed, merely potential. In the case of fictional entities we must accept that there is no answer to every question we can ask about what their properties are: does Hamlet have a mole on his back? Nothing in the text settles the matter, and Hamlet has no being independently of the text. Fictional characters are gappy, sketchy, only partially formed. In vagueness we have the phenomenon of borderline cases in which no definite classification can be made: no fact of the matter about whether a certain color is red or not, say. These all warrant the adjective “indeterminate”, but it is unclear that they fit the intended import of the indeterminacy of meaning thesis. It isn’t a matter of one determination of meaning rendering another determination impossible, or of ontological incompleteness in meanings, or of the borders between meanings being blurred. The idea seems rather to be that meanings have no fixed identity: they are neither one thing nor the other—they are inherently mushy, a kind of fluid nothingness. They can’t make up their mind about what they are, like ghostly shape shifters, a kind of undifferentiated mass. That, at least, seems to the general idea. The underlying thought is that meanings are inherently formless—considered in themselves they have no determinate being.

            But that is not the only way to understand the doctrine, or even the standard way: instead it can be understood as concerning the relation between words and meanings. The meanings in themselves are perfectly determinate, no less so than other things, but what is indeterminate is which meaning a given word expresses. Does “gavagai” express the meaning rabbit or does it express the meaning undetached rabbit part? It is assumed that these two meanings are discrete entities, that each is a well-defined and determinate semantic unit, but what is not determinate is the expression relation. This type of position fits the indeterminacy of reference thesis quite naturally: references, construed as objects, are not inherently indeterminate—they are just ordinary objects—but it is indeterminate what objects words refer to. It is the reference relation that is said to be indeterminate not references themselves. Ditto for meanings, under this interpretation of the doctrine: the realm of meanings (propositions, concepts) is determinate, but it is indeterminate which of these determinate entities a given word expresses (connotes, signifies). Without discussing individual authors, it may be remarked that these two doctrines are not always clearly distinguished. One feels that there is sometimes an unannounced transition from the latter doctrine to the former. In any case, we should clearly distinguish them, and give them different names. We could call the first doctrine “strong indeterminacy” and the second “weak indeterminacy”, but that understates the logical difference between the two doctrines—they are not just on a scale of strength. It would be better to call the first “meaning indeterminacy” and the second “expression indeterminacy”, though these labels are not very descriptive either. The important point is that neither entails the other: expression indeterminacy certainly doesn’t entail meaning indeterminacy, but neither is it true that meaning indeterminacy entails expression indeterminacy (words might determinately express indeterminate meanings—as is the case for vague predicates like “bald”).

            The main point I want to make is that expression indeterminacy actually entails meaning determinacy, as standard presentations of it demonstrate. For we need to have clearly defined discrete meanings in order to set up a case in which it is indeterminate which meaning is expressed. For example, we need to assume that we have two meanings in play in order to ask whether it is determinate whether “gavagai” expresses one or the other—as it might be, the meanings associated with “rabbit” and “undetached rabbit part”. If we use italics to indicate reference to meanings, the question at issue is whether “gavagai” expresses the meaning rabbit or the meaning undetached rabbit part. This only makes sense if we have two well-defined determinate meanings to work with; if we don’t, we can’t even raise the question. So the question of the indeterminacy of word meaning can only be discussed by presupposing that meanings themselves have a determinate nature.  [1] The same goes for indeterminacy of reference: in order to ask whether words determinately refer we have to assume a totality of references with well-defined identity conditions—the usual objects that we deal with. If not, the question becomes moot. Thus no drastic ontological thesis about the nature of meanings (or references) can follow from considerations about the semantic relations linking words and things. In other words, meanings are determinate if expressing them is indeterminate. The actual argument for indeterminacy assumes that meanings are determinate entities—which one would never guess from standard expositions. In order to argue for the indeterminacy of meanings as such one would need a quite different line of attack, whose nature I cannot even conjecture. Meanings certainly don’t resemble any of the three areas I mentioned earlier: no Uncertainty Principle, as in physics; no gappiness, as in fictional characters; no blurry borderline cases, as in vagueness. Meaning seems about on a par with the rest of reality as far as intrinsic determinacy is concerned. The meaning of “rabbit”—the thing itself, whatever it may be–is no more indeterminate than rabbits, which is perhaps not surprising. One might even venture to say that meanings are paradigms of clearly defined entities. This is why they are so useful in acts of communication.  [2]

C

  [1] To put it another way, synonymy relations can’t be indeterminate or else there would be no fact of the matter about whether “rabbit” means the same as “undetached rabbit part”. And they can’t be synonymous as used in the argument for the indeterminacy of “gavagai”: the meanings here have to be distinct in order to constitute alternative assignments of meaning.

  [2] Wouldn’t this be Frege’s position? The realm of sense is a well-defined totality of discrete entities, just like the realm of reference. Thoughts can therefore be passed on without fear of indeterminacy in what is passed on. Human knowledge depends on such clear and distinct thoughts. Thinking is not wallowing in a formless mass of slippery semantic goo. Thought is determinate if anything is. (Of course, behaviorism might not be able to respect that fact, but so much the worse for behaviorism.)

Oliver Sacks on the Meaning of Life

“Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.” I wish to make some comments on this passage from my late friend Oliver Sacks, which I think deserves expansion. He writes these words after listing other good things in his life: love, travel, writing, and reading. But he singles out what follows “above all” for special commendation, even though it might appear banal and entirely generic. Being a sentient being is listed first, as if the most important: merely to be a sentient being is a “privilege”—so much better than not being one. This we share with other animals, which also have the privilege of sentience—the capacity to be conscious of the world and themselves. He must mean the sensuous richness and beauty of the perceived world. We are lucky enough to have this capacity—to be sentient at all. He then adds “a thinking animal”, which needs some unpacking. This is not equivalent to “sentient being” but adds two other qualities (arguably three): thinking and animality. It is a privilege to be a thinker, capable of all that thinking confers, over and above sentience; again many existent things lack this quality. We should feel gratitude for having it. But we are also animals like other animals, thinking animals or otherwise. It is a privilege to be an animal—just like other animals in our animal nature: the vigor, the struggle, the strength, the resilience, the sheer flesh-and-bloodness. An alien species might regard us as a splendid (if eccentric) beast, well worth researching and gazing at. It’s good to be an animal. But it is even better to be a thinking animal: to have these two qualities juxtaposed in us. To be both an animal and a thinker—what a marvelous conjunction of attributes! Isn’t so much of human nature the result of negotiating these colliding qualities? We have to live as both things, as a combination of opposites—or at least uneasy partners. That fascinating duality is what makes us the specific type of conscious living being that we are. Oliver then casually adds “on this beautiful planet”: suddenly we take a step back to contemplate our place in the cosmos. And what a place it is: a jewel, a paradise, and a haven, compared to the grim expanses of space. Our natural home is a thing of interest and beauty. Just think of the other planets we might have lived on—ugly, dull, inhospitable, hostile, and murderous. We are privileged to live on the most desirable piece of real estate in the known universe! And we have the sentience to appreciate it, to love it, to be able to contemplate it. He ends by saying, “that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure”. That is, these elementary facts about human life in themselves are causes for gratitude, whatever the details of your individual life may be. You are already a privileged being just by having these attributes—already blessed, already immeasurably fortunate. And then there is that final resounding tri-syllable that I have intentionally left out until now—adventure. It is an adventure to be a being with the attributes listed: “an unusual, exciting, and daring experience”, as the OED defines the word. How can it not be an adventure if you are a being with sentience, a thinking animal, living out your days on planet Earth? A life of adventure is guaranteed, part of the package. Just by being what we are, in the place we are, life is an adventure and a privilege—given to precious few (nearly everything in the universe that we know of exists without such privilege and adventure). Other animals share some of this largesse (and should be respected for it), but we alone have our special kind of complicated being, which comes to us without lifting a finger—as thinking, feeling, animal beings, existing on an isolated oasis of bounty and beauty. We can all feel grateful for that. We had it pretty good.

Colin McGinn