Proving the Self

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Proving the Self

 

 

Is it possible to prove that the self exists? First let’s consider the existence of material objects, particularly the relationship between property instantiation and object-hood. An ordinary material object, such as a table or a bee, does not instantiate a single property but a collection of properties—a cluster of properties. Search the world high and low and you will not find a material object that confines its attentions to a single property; there is always co-instantiation as well as instantiation. There is always a type of fullness to the cast of properties that any material object instantiates. Without that the alleged object is too thin to count as a genuine object; it is nothing but a property attached to a location. If the property were to cease to be instantiated, the object would cease to exist, so that identity through change is ruled out. That is not our notion of a material object: an object can lose some of its properties and still exist, simply because it has other properties to anchor its existence. Co-instantiation of properties is constitutive of the existence of an object: an object is a unification of properties, a co-presence, an integrated cluster. Nothing is a genuine object if it restricts itself to a single property: a flying object, say, is never just a flying object; it will also have such properties as weight, size, shape, color, wings, and bristles. If someone were to claim that there could be a flying object that has no further properties, we would doubt that the word “object” was the appropriate word. The object-hood of a flying thing (such as a bee) requires the presence of attributes other than flying (and whatever attributes logically follow from this). Always and everywhere material objects, properly so-called, come attached to a cluster of properties, typically quite rich; they are not merely instances of a single property (trait, attribute). We could say they have a multi-dimensional nature.

            Now consider the Cogito: “I think, therefore I am”. We are being asked to accept that if something has a certain trait, viz. thinking, then it exists as a thinking thing. We can move from the instantiation of a property to the existence of a thing that does the instantiating: if there is the property of thinking, then there is a thing that thinks. Or again, if there is the activity of thinking, there is a thing (object, substance) in which the activity occurs. This move has always been found problematic: why does the process of thinking entail a thing that underlies the process?  [1] Mere thinking is too exiguous a basis to ground the ontology of selves. The point could be put as follows: why should we interpret “I think” as entailing predication of an object rather than being merely a feature-placing sentence? If the sentence “It’s raining” is true, then a certain feature is present at a certain place, but it doesn’t follow that there is a raining thing: there is no object that instantiates raining, just a certain meteorological activity occurring at a certain location. Similarly, it may be said, the Cogito is only entitled to the claim that there is thinking going on at a certain location (“It’s thinking here”) not the claim that there is a thinking thing, i.e. a self. Feature placing does not entail object-predication. Activity does not entail an agent. Process does not entail a substance. You can’t derive a something from a doing. Thus the traditional Cogito is invalid: the premise is too weak to support the conclusion. It takes an ontological leap across a logical chasm.

            I suggest that the problem here stems from the attempt to derive the existence of a thing from the instantiation of a single property (trait, activity, dimension). This is simply not rich enough to ground the notion of a thing; as with material objects, we need to add a range of properties co-instantiated with the given property. If that were not possible—if all we did was think—then indeed we would not be entitled to talk of a thinking thing; feature placing would be the preferred interpretation of the “I think” of the Cogito. The inference “It rains, therefore there is a thing that rains” is clearly not valid; and the skeptic would be well within his rights to insist that the “I think” of the Cogito should be regarded similarly. But actually we have resources beyond the usual thin interpretation of the Cogito: for not only do I think, I also feel, sense, imagine, and will—among other things. That is, I instantiate many psychological traits that are not entailed by thinking as such: I am a bundle of traits not just a single trait. But this kind of clustering is exactly what grounds talk of thing-hood. Thus I exist as a thing because I manifest a cluster of mental traits. Co-instantiation is what justifies the move to thing-hood, not instantiation singly considered.

I propose, then, what may be called the “expanded Cogito”: “I think and I feel and I sense and I imagine and I will, therefore I am (a conscious thing)”. My status as a conscious thing, not merely a congeries of free-floating mental activities, turns on the fact that I (a single entity) instantiate all of them. The mental properties are instantiated by the same thing, and that thing is precisely a thing. What is doing the work here is the clustering not the constituents of the cluster: you can’t derive the substantial self from the properties in the cluster considered singly, but you can derive that self from the fact that they form a cluster. Talk of things is precisely a way to register such clustering; without it all we have is the distribution of features at locations. The Cogito needs beefing up from the latter to the former, and we have the resources with which to accomplish that. I am a thing because I am many things. The traditional Cogito imputes too little structure to psychological self-attribution, regarding it as essentially one-dimensional (“thinking”), and as a result fails to sustain the assertion of thing-hood (and hence of the self). The cure is to recognize that multiple simultaneous attributions are true, and hence we have the ontological basis necessary for a claim of thing-hood—just as in the case of material objects.

            And it isn’t merely that multiple attributions are true; we also know them to be true. Not only do I know that I think and know that I feel (etc); I also know that I am all these things simultaneously. Thus I know the psychological fact that grounds my claim to thing-hood: I am presented to myself as a combination, a clustering, a bundle. This means that I can use that fact in proving the existence of my self: I know that I think and I know that I feel, but I also know that I think and feel—I know that I have many psychological traits at the same time. So I know what is necessary to infer the conclusion of the Cogito. Perhaps this is why we tend to go along with the Cogito on first hearing without analyzing it too closely: we have the resources to make it come out valid, so we don’t notice that the usual formulation leaves it vulnerable. I know myself to be a unitary thing because I am aware that I combine a number of separate psychological traits—that I am center of instantiation. I am aware of myself as a centered cluster of attributes and that’s why I assent to the thesis that I am a thing—not simply because I am aware of my thoughts in isolation from other psychological traits. Thus we read the traditional Cogito in the light of the expanded Cogito. In any case, I know of my simultaneous instantiation of distinct psychological properties as well as I know of my instantiation of those distinct properties, so I know what is necessary in order to provide the desired proof.

            This account of the epistemology of the self differs from other accounts. It differs from the traditional Cartesian account because it locates the operative premise in the clustering not in the items clustered, but it agrees that knowledge of the existence of the self is inferential: there is a definite move from “these properties are clustered together” to “there is a thing that underlies the cluster”. So the account does not postulate direct knowledge of the existence of the self: that is, we can provide a discursive proof of the self, as it is understood in the Cogito. Nor does the account ground knowledge of the existence of the self on some kind of immediate impressionof the self; the only impressions here are of specific mental traits (and possibly of the fact that they come in clusters). The correct way to reconstruct the epistemology of the self in the Cartesian style is via the expanded Cogito, and that has the form of an inference. My knowledge that I exist is therefore not like my knowledge that I think: my knowledge of the latter admits of no proof, being immediate, while my knowledge of the former does admit of discursive proof—even if I never explicitly go through such proof in my daily life. This seems intuitively correct: the self really isn’t a given in the way the contents of the mind are. There are intelligible forms of skepticism about the self, and thus we need a proof to combat them. The traditional Cogito came close but foundered on the objection from thinness; the expanded Cogito gets over that objection. We can thus reasonably argue that we exist.

 

Colin McGinn  

           

  [1] This is usually called “the Lichtenberg objection”: how do we move from events of thinking to a substantial thing that thinks? But the objection had already been made by Gassendi and others. The question may be put as follows: how do we justify the Cogito without presupposing a scholastic metaphysics of substance and accident?

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Principles of Radical Interpretation

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Principles of Radical Interpretation

 

 

How should we set about interpreting an alien language and the people who speak it? Specifically, how should we ascribe beliefs to others? One idea is that we should use a principle of charity: ascribe to others the beliefs that we have, so that interpreter and interpreted converge in their belief systems. This principle will apply both to logical beliefs and beliefs about ordinary matters of fact. Much has been written about the principle, and I won’t repeat any of that here. Instead, I will give a simple but instructive counterexample. Suppose I encounter an alien tribe in the deepest jungle and present members of the tribe with a cell phone, and suppose they have never seen a cell phone or any other electronic device. They will clearly not form the belief that the object in front of them is a cell phone—they have no such concept. They have no beliefs about cell phones or any similar technology. It would be absurd to appeal to the principle of charity in ascribing such a belief to our natives (perhaps what they believe is that the thing they are holding is a piece of a star fallen from the sky). Sometimes it is suggested that the principle of charity should be amended to a principle of humanity, which prescribes that we should ascribe the beliefs we would form if we were in the epistemological position of the native. Thus if the native is presented with a visual illusion, not known by them to be such, we should ascribe the false belief appropriate to that illusion, not the true belief that we have in knowing about the illusion. But this won’t help with the cell phone case, because presenting the native with a fake cell phone will not warrant assigning to them the belief that the object is a cell phone (as opposed to a fake cell phone); for again, they have no such concept.

            What if they are presented with a familiar object, say a rabbit—should we say they believe it is a rabbit, thus sharing our belief? Not necessarily, since they may have beliefs about the animal in front of them that excludes them from having the zoological concept rabbit: they may believe of rabbits that they are gods not animals. They do not share our beliefs about rabbits. The problem is that they believe that this thing is a god, not an animal, and hence they don’t apply the concept rabbit to the thing in question. Maybe they have the concept rabbit and apply it to certain kinds of rabbit only; when it comes to white rabbits, say, they withhold the concept, since these creatures they take to be gods, not animals, and hence withhold the rabbit concept. So we can’t ascribe a belief to them based on what we believe. We can’t use ourselves as the yardstick of their beliefs, since they differ radically from us about what the world contains. What if they are convinced skeptics who never believe that anything they experience is real? They don’t even share our belief that a square object is in front of them, let alone our general beliefs about nature, the weather, world history, the good, and the beautiful. Charity will get us nowhere with these independent thinkers, just as it will get them nowhere with us.

            So how can we interpret them? The difficulty applies even to logical beliefs: what if they subscribe to a deviant logic? We obviously can’t interpret them as holding to our logic—they may be convinced intuitionists or even adherents of para-consistent logic. We surely don’t want to say that no one can believe in a deviant logic, or that a deviant logician cannot be interpreted as holding the logical beliefs they in fact hold. We need a way to ascribe divergent logical beliefs, as we do divergent factual beliefs. No theory of interpretation that requires belief convergence between the interpreter and the interpreted can be correct. We need another principle entirely. I propose what I shall call “the principle of culturality”, for want of a better label. The general idea is that we need to take account of the material and cognitive culture of the people we are trying to interpret. Thus there are no cell phones in the material culture of our earlier tribe and their religious culture decrees rabbits to be gods. In order to interpret a people we need to look at their technology, life-style, interpersonal relations, and so on: do they have agriculture, maps, idols, money, advanced tools, animal sacrifice, and so on? This is all observable and accessible before we have made any belief attributions. We must also take note of their ecological niche, the acuity of their sense organs, possibly their genetic make-up, as well as their general level of sanity (interpreting a schizophrenic will require special methods). We will then ascribe to them the beliefs that all these factors suggest—and these beliefs may diverge dramatically from ours. They may be constantly hallucinating on drugs, possessed of only the most rudimentary tools, incurably superstitious, logical nihilists, and completely un-self-critical. In other words, we need to do serious empirical anthropology. Merely recording the stimuli that trigger their assent behavior isn’t going to cut it.

            Someone might object that the principle of culturality is not a rule like the principle of charity. That is quite true: it just tells us to take everything observable into account, particular the totality of the people’s culture. The principle of charity, by contrast, can be applied without any knowledge of the particularities of the natives’ culture—we simply ascribe what we ourselves believe, knowing already exactly what that is. This will work for any subject of interpretation, no matter their culture. But that is totally unrealistic, since people can differ enormously in their beliefs: beliefs are inherently protean in nature. Instead, we should adopt a far more context-sensitive and multi-dimensional approach, recognizing the extreme flexibility of belief: people can believe just about anything if they put their mind to it. We cannot sidestep the complexity of interpretation by adopting a simple rule like the principle of charity; and we may have to accept considerable uncertainty as to what the other believes. There may be para-consistent idealist creationists out there who don’t even believe in rabbits and square objects. They are no doubt mistaken, but they are not conceptually impossible.

            There are also children, animals, and Neanderthals—all of whom need interpretation. The principle of charity will not be of much help with them, since they will not necessarily agree with normal human adults in the beliefs they form. What about the denizens of Plato’s cave or intelligent underground worms? The case should be compared with ascertaining the chemical composition of a distant planet. It’s no use assuming that a distant planet will necessarily resemble the earth in its chemical composition, on the principle that we have no alternative than to use our local environment as a model of any environment (as if all planets must converge geologically with earth). Instead we must observe the environment local to the planet being investigated, by spectral analysis and whatever other data we can glean—we look at the peculiarities of the planet itself. If we followed a principle of “charity” in astronomy, assuming similarity between every celestial body and our own planet, we would end up with a hopelessly uniform account of astronomical reality. Not every object out there is the size and mass of the earth, with the same quantities of basic elements and geological structure. Not all planets have the same “planetary scheme”.

            And the same point applies to radical interpretation directed inwards. We also seek to discover what goes on in our unconscious—we need a way to figure out what beliefs and desires exist there. For the sake of concreteness, let’s accept a Freudian account of the unconscious: how shall we find out what we unconsciously think and feel? One view would be that we should use a principle of charity: we unconsciously think and feel what we consciously think and feel. But what is striking about Freud’s unconscious is how much it is supposed to differ from our conscious life; so charity would get things quite wrong. Instead, we need to adopt a more circumspect and holistic approach, appealing to free association, dreams, neuroses, jokes, slips of the tongue, and the early family dynamic. We need to look at how the unconscious manifests itself in our lives—as we need to look at the way other people’s minds manifest themselves in their lives (particularly in culture). Using a principle of charity will not do justice to the variety of minds. The basic assumption of that principle is that there is uniformity of the mental across all peoples and all types of mind: we all believe and desire pretty much the same things. So we could generalize the principle of charity into a “principle of uniformity”: all minds are pretty much the same—the same as ours, that is. And this is not an empirical discovery (as with linguistic universals) but a methodological requirement: we can’t interpret unless we assume uniformity.  [1]

This is like a principle of uniformity for planets: all planets resemble the earth. Granted, there may be some similarities between the various minds and the various planets, but they won’t be as great as the principle of uniformity supposes. We can’t sidestep empirical anthropology and astronomy by announcing an a priori principle that guarantees that everything resembles the local conditions. Just as there can be different “astronomical schemes”, so there can be different conceptual schemes. Surely no one would advocate a principle of uniformity in biology, according to which every species must have the same basic anatomy and physiology as humans—there is clearly great variety in animal bodies. We don’t do zoology by consulting our own bodies and then assuming every body is built like ours; we have a look at other bodies and find out their individual structure. Radical interpretation is no more conducted from the first-person standpoint than radical zoology is. And it is perfectly conceivable that a group of believers disputes every opinion we hold, from what is in their immediate environment to the general nature of the universe. Things differ from place to place and any method for discovering how things are needs to respect this variety. Projecting our own mind into the mind of the alien other is not the way to further human understanding.

 

  [1] It would be different if it were a natural law that everyone shares the same beliefs, but that is not the reasoning behind the principle of charity (and is very implausible); the idea, rather, is that charity is the only viable method of belief attribution.

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Parables in Philosophy

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Parables in Philosophy

 

 

Parables have their uses and merits in philosophy, even in these desiccated days. They can impart vivid life to elusive abstractions. Plato’s parable of the cave is the most famous philosophical parable, and it is powerfully memorable. It has its defects: notably, the cave wall and the shadows cast on it are just parts of the same empirical world that may be encountered outside the cave—so the cave dwellers are in touch with Reality even while stuck inside the cave. What the lone escapee encounters is just more of the same—perceptible material objects (and there are shadows outside the cave too). There is supposed to be a stark contrast between the world of the cave (empirical reality) and the world beyond the cave (the world of forms), but in the parable the two worlds are made of the same materials. In both places light falls on objects and we see them. Still, one gets the point. The idea is to dramatize the difference between the world of the forms and the world of perceived particulars—the former being more real than the latter. Part of the thought here is that the cave world is more limited than reality as a whole—the cave dwellers are mistaking part of reality for the whole of reality. There is more to reality than they imagine, given the limitations of their experience.

            Plato has his parable, his illustrative myth, but where is Aristotle’s countervailing myth? What would be a suitable parable to explain Aristotle’s non-Platonic conception of reality? He rejects Plato’s world of forms, holding that reality belongs to the world of perceived particulars. Without going into elaborate exegesis, Aristotle represents the world of the nominalist or conceptualist—universals are at best reifications of words or concepts. What parable might capture this anti-Platonic position?  [1] The best I have been able to come up with I call “the parable of the tank”, as opposed to the parable of the cave. Here we are to imagine humanlike creatures floating in a tank, a very large tank. Their senses have been shut off, or perhaps they have never had senses (we can tell two versions of the story): they never perceive the empirical world of concrete particulars. However, they hear a voice that is piped into their brains day and night: it is the voice of Socrates speaking to them. They hear nothing else but this disembodied voice; and it is a dulcet and persuasive voice. It speaks lovingly of geometry, of the abstract world, of permanence and perfection, of the Good. It elicits in them knowledge of these things, as with Socrates and the slave boy, and it conveys a reverence for the world of which it purports to speak. The people suspended in the tank fully absorb this discourse—they believe in what the voice of Socrates tells them. They think that the world described by Socrates is the real world; they know nothing of the world of empirical perception, not even suspecting that they are concrete particulars floating in a tank (we can suppose that they can communicate among themselves, and perhaps also with Socrates). In their minds the real is co-terminus with the world described by the voice—basically, the world of Platonic forms. After all, they have experienced nothing else, and the voice has assured them that nothing else is real, even if it might occur to them in a dream.  [2]

            But one day one of the tank dwellers escapes: he manages to climb out of his tank and swim to dry land. By some natural magic he is also provided with senses, particularly sight. He sees his first physical objects, he touches them too; he even tastes them. No doubt this is all a great revelation, catapulting him into a brave new world of experience and knowledge. The world is not just the voice of Socrates and those abstract forms; it consists also of concrete solid particulars! At first he is overwhelmed, stunned, even maddened; but he quickly adjusts, concluding that his earlier life in the tank was severely limited—a condition of extreme ignorance. There is clearly much more to reality than he ever suspected. He even entertains the suspicion that this new world is more real than the etiolated world described by Socrates: those vaunted forms were mere shadows compared to these bright and shiny particulars, these solid chunks of matter. He resolves to re-enter the tank and report his findings to the other tank dwellers, wishing to enlighten them. But when he does so he is met with incredulity and derision: the others just don’t believe him, regarding him as unhinged or a con man. And indeed, he can see their point: the world out there has to be seen to be believed—he would not believe it unless he had witnessed it with his own eyes. He finds himself shunned and distrusted, even though he alone is in possession of the truth.

            Suppose Plato had taken the teaching of his philosophy to an extreme, equipping his Academy with a special Socratic tank. Since the senses are so misleading, he would abolish them—for they are sources of error and confusion. In the ideal Platonic state education would proceed by installing newborns in the tank, removing their senses, and hooking them up to recordings of the voice of Socrates (don’t ask me how he obtained all this technology). Thus he could inculcate sound philosophy in the minds of the young, later to become the Guardians, without the distractions of the senses: he could educate the polis in the subtleties of Platonism. Let’s imagine he has done this for several centuries, so that Platonism is simply orthodox among the educated Athenian. From Aristotle’s point of view, these tank dwellers are in the same condition of ignorance that Plato diagnosed in his cave dwellers. If one of them were to escape and experience the real world of particulars, he would be treated as a dangerous subversive, or as mad. The parable of the tank, like that of the cave, illustrates the condition of those who cannot recognize the reality of anything beyond their limited experience. And the rhetorical force of the parable is that we can all see that there really is much more to reality than those in the tank suspect—just as we can all see that there is much more to reality than Plato’s cave dwellers suspect.

            Aristotle could also appropriate Plato’s parable and turn it against him, by suggesting that the shadows cast on the cave wall might suffice for learning abstract geometry, but that they would not inform the cave dwellers of the world of concrete things that exist beyond the cave. The shadows act as geometrical shapes—circles, rectangles, triangles—and can therefore provide a basis for knowledge of abstract geometrical forms (Euclid would have thrived in this learning environment). But an escapee from this impoverished geometrical world would discover that there is much more to reality than geometrical forms: there is color, weight, hardness, smell, and taste. Plato has described a world in which a single type of form takes up the entire mental space of its inhabitants, but this world is just a small part of all there is in reality—though they, with their limited experience, cannot appreciate that fact. Plato is thus hoist by his own parable.

            Here is another parable, inspired by Plato, but designed to make a different philosophical point. We are to imagine a race of beings that live in a black and white world but who have a color projector installed on the front of their head. When they direct their gaze forward the projector sends out a pattern of light that makes the objects around them appear to be colored. There are no colored objects there, but the projector projects colored light onto things (we can suppose that there is no sunlight to interfere). Thus these beings arrive at the belief that they live in a world of richly colored objects, though in fact they do not. The world is less than they suppose, not more; theycontribute the qualities they appear to see in things, not objective reality itself. If they knew about the projector installed on their head, they might question their naïve belief, but we can suppose that they do not. Now one day one of these individuals has a malfunction in his projector (it has never happened before), the result of which is that his world becomes abruptly black and white. Has he become color blind, unable to see what is in front of him? No, he has for the first time seen reality for what it is—colorless. He might investigate the matter and discover the existence of the projector; he correctly concludes that he has been projecting the color all along and mistaking it for reality. He resolves to inform his fellows of his discovery, in the interests of objective truth; but he encounters resistance and hostility—people are reluctant to accept that their familiar world is chromatically impoverished. When he points out the projectors fixed to their heads they insist that these are just ornaments of nature having nothing to do with how they see things. He decides to leave his own projector disabled, in the interests of keeping his perceptions in line with objective reality, leaving others to their fond delusions.

            The point of this parable is to dramatize the doctrine of projectivism—about color, clearly, but also about other allegedly projected features of the world (smell, taste, moral and aesthetic qualities, and so on). The mind is our natural projector, tricking us into believing that things that originate with us belong to reality independently of the mind. If the mental projector were to cease to function, we would be confronted by a reality devoid of projections—a thinner and lesser reality. Those who reject projectivism, it will be said, are like the folks in the parable who refuse to accept that they have a projector stuck to their head. Just as Plato’s cave dwellers are by hypothesis ignorant about the true state of things, so these projective beings are by hypothesis ignorant about the true state of things. The parable makes vivid and memorable a philosophical doctrine, contributing to the doctrine’s rhetorical force. They are like those parables in the Bible that dramatize some moral predicament or precept: stories with lessons attached. They aid teaching and comprehension.

 

Colin McGinn

  [1] It is true that people, with very few exceptions, are not natural Platonists, so Aristotle is not opposing a natural human tendency, as Plato takes himself to be. But we can imagine a tribe that accepts Platonism from childhood on, as a matter of course: empirical particulars are not real, there are eternal universals existing in a transcendent realm, and so on. Such a tribe might be jolted by a parable that compares them to woefully ignorant people.

  [2] A variant parable might tell of godlike beings dwelling among the forms, contemplating and revering them, but never suspecting that there are such things as particulars that might instantiate them—that concept is alien to their experience. They might be surprised to discover that their pure and beautiful forms compromise themselves by mixing with the tawdry world of transient particulars. Here Platonic heaven functions as the cave: it is a place that limits knowledge.

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Our Knowledge of Other Minds

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Our Knowledge of Other Minds

 

 

 

How do we know the contents of other people’s minds? By what method do we know about other minds? The options are the following: by sense perception, by inference, by introspection, and by a priori reasoning (I exclude telepathy, at least as the standard method). We can rule out the last two: I do not introspect your state of mind, only my own; and I do not know your mental state as I know mathematical truths, i.e. without recourse to experience. So there appear to be two possible theories: by direct perception and by indirect inference. Both views have been maintained. The perceptual view assimilates knowledge of other minds to our knowledge of the world of material things: just as I know by looking that there is a tree in front of me, so I know by looking that you are in pain or are deep in thought. I simply see that you are in pain, as I see that there is a tree yonder. My eyes are directed towards your body and your body expresses your pain—makes it manifest to my senses. Such a view goes naturally with philosophical behaviorism, since states of mind are identified with episodes of behavior (or dispositions to behavior). By contrast, the inferential view denies that we can perceive other people’s mental states, supposing instead that they are to be conceived as theoretical entities, posited to explain observed behavior, rather like atoms and fields of force. Then our knowledge of other minds is like our knowledge of the unobservable things that we postulate to make sense of what we observe. We know other minds by means of something like inference to the best explanation. This view goes naturally with a causal conception of mental states: they are unobservable causes of observable effects (episodes of behavior). Again, there is nothing special or distinctive about our knowledge of other minds—we know about them as we know about unobservable material entities. I see your behavior and I infer that it is caused by mental states of specific kinds, as I see meter readings and infer that atoms are the cause. Thus, if there is a skeptical problem concerning other minds, it is not peculiar to the case of other minds. It is just a special case of a more general skeptical problem—the problem of perceptual error and the problem of knowledge of unobservable entities, respectively. The other person might give a misleading perceptual impression of being in pain and not be in pain, or he might not in fact harbor the theoretical entity I posit to explain his behavior. This kind of assimilation doesn’t solve the skeptical problem, but it does give it a name: it tells us what kind of problem we are up against. The problem of our knowledge of other minds is essentially the same as the problem of our knowledge of the external world.

            Neither of these familiar views is satisfactory: we don’t see pains in people as we see colors and shapes in objects, and we don’t we infer pains as we infer atoms or fields. But I won’t go into why; instead I will offer an alternative. We should not attempt to reduce our knowledge of other minds to some other paradigm of knowledge. We need, rather, to identify what is distinctive of knowledge of other minds—what sets it apart. And what sets such knowledge apart is the role of self-knowledge in generating knowledge of others. Neither perceptual knowledge nor inferential knowledge (of the standard scientific sort) rests upon a basis of self-knowledge, but knowledge of other minds does. I know other minds by knowing my own mind. So I will contend.

            Self-knowledge includes a number of different things. Suppose that I am now thinking about playing tennis: what kind of knowledge do I have about that mental state? I know (a) that I am now thinking about playing tennis, (b) what this thought consists in, and (c) what kinds of things this thought inclines me to do. The first kind of knowledge is episodic (what is happening in my mind now); the second is constitutive (what it is that I am undergoing); and the third is dispositional (what dispositions to action I have in virtue of having the thought in question). Focusing on (c), we can say that for any mental state M that I know I have I also know the dispositions associated with M—I know what I might do in virtue of having M. If I know that I am in pain, say, then I know that I might complain about the pain or wince or cry out. How I arrive at this first-person dispositional knowledge is an interesting question: do I know it by observing correlations between my inner mental states and my outer bodily behavior, or do I know it innately by having the knowledge programmed into my genes, or is it in some sense a type of conceptual knowledge? I won’t go into the question; I will just assume that we have such knowledge in our own case. So we have knowledge, not just of what occurs inside of us mentally, but also knowledge of how this inner thing might be expressed publicly—we know our dispositions to behavior. I know that I’m in pain now, I know what pain is, and I know what pain makes me do–I know the bodily expression of pain. This dispositional knowledge is part of my self-knowledge. I could have it whether or not I knew anything about other minds.

            Then the thesis is that we use such self-knowledge in acquiring knowledge of other minds. The way we obtain knowledge of other minds is quite straightforward (which is not to say simple): we first observe another person behaving in a certain way; then we note that when we behave that way we are in a particular mental state; we then attribute that mental state to the other. So we put together two premises: (1) that the other person is behaving thus and so, and (2) that in our own case dispositions to that kind of behavior go with our having a certain mental state. We then conclude that the person has the mental state in question. That is, we generalize from our own case. Our only basis for the attribution we make is that in our own case a certain association obtains. We know it in our own case and we assume it for the case of others. If we did not have this kind of self-knowledge, then we would not be able to have knowledge of other minds. We rely on our self-knowledge to generate other-knowledge. This is not how it works according to the other two theories, in which self-knowledge plays no essential role in our knowledge of other minds—as it doesn’t in perceptual knowledge and knowledge by scientific inference.

            It is important to see what this account is meant to achieve and what it is not meant to achieve. It is meant to explain what is special about our knowledge of other minds—how such knowledge differs from other types of knowledge. We don’t reason in this way when forming beliefs about the external world: we don’t use our self-knowledge as a premise, assuming that what is true in our case must be true more generally. The reason is simply that in other cases we are not trying to gain knowledge of other minds, so we don’t use any premises comparing our mind with other minds. In perceptual and inferential knowledge (of the scientific kind) we don’t make any comparison between the object of such knowledge and ourselves. We don’t presume that ordinary material objects have a mind like ours! (Nor do we assume that other bodies resemble our own—we just have a look at those bodies.) We only do this kind of thing when aiming to acquire knowledge of other minds. So the present account sets knowledge of other minds apart from the run of empirical knowledge. What the theory is not intended to do is provide a reply to skepticism. In fact, it underscores skepticism about other minds, because this method of knowing is vulnerable to skepticism on several fronts. First, we are generalizing wildly from our own case, which is just one case among many, and there is a question whether we are entitled to draw such far-reaching conclusions from so slender a basis (it looks like a rash type of induction). Second, it may be that the association that holds in our case between mental state and behavior does not hold in the case of others—maybe the same disposition is associated with a different mental state (as in inverted spectrum cases). Third, how do we know that there is an association even in our own case? Maybe we have no body at all or make mistakes about how behavior and mental states match up. There is plenty of room here for the skeptic to stick her oar in. But replying to the skeptic was not the intention; indeed, I might even say that doing justice to skepticism about our knowledge of other minds is part of the point of the theory. According to the perceptual and inferential theories, we just get a version of the usual kinds of skepticism that afflict perceptual judgments and inference to the best explanation: but there is surely something special—and especially troubling—about other minds skepticism. We really are on shaky epistemic ground here—which is why mistakes about other minds are so frequently made. And other minds are surely hiddenin a unique way, not merely as atoms are hidden. We are compelled to reason from what is true in our own case to what is true for others—a risky move. We have only one mind to go on, our own, and we are forced to rely on it to provide knowledge of indefinitely many other minds. This is not an epistemologically happy situation; but it is the way things are and the way they must be. The world, after all, does not owe us an epistemological living. We are lucky we have the self-centered method I have sketched—we might have had no method at all.

            It is possible to imagine a being with no self-knowledge who nevertheless has both perceptual and inferential knowledge of the external world, but we cannot (if I am right) imagine a being that has knowledge of other minds but does not have knowledge of its own mind. Given that some minds are not self-aware in the manner sketched, such minds cannot attribute minds to others (this will be true of many animals). But if a creature can form the idea of other minds, then that creature must have self-knowledge: cats and dogs (not to mention apes) would seem to qualify as mind-readers, so they must know their own minds in some way—they must be projecting their knowledge of their own minds into the minds of others. Thoughts of other minds require thoughts of one’s own mind—and many animals give every sign of knowledge of other minds. Animals know how their own minds link to their behavior: a dog knows what growling means in its own case, and it extrapolates this knowledge to other dogs.

            It might be said that the self-knowledge theory is itself an inferential theory, because it involves inferring that others are like myself. That is a perfectly correct observation, but it is a special kind of inferential theory, quite unlike normal scientific inference, as noted above. Nor is it a case of inference to the best explanation: it is inference based on observed similarity of behavior, combined with self-knowledge of certain mental-behavioral links. It would not be wrong to describe it as a version of the “argument from analogy”, because it proceeds by noting a similarity between oneself and others and then attributing a further similarity: the other is similar to me behaviorally, so she must be similar to me mentally. The point I am adding is just that self-knowledge plays an indispensable role: first I must know how my own mental states are connected with my behavior; only then can I attribute mental states to others. This is what is characteristic of knowledge of other minds: knowledge of other minds depends on prior knowledge of one’s own mind, i.e. knowledge of how one’s own mental states are expressed bodily. In a certain sense, knowledge of other minds is more “self-centered” than other kinds of knowledge. Whenever I am thinking of the minds of others I am implicitly thinking of my own mind, because I have no other basis for such knowledge than knowledge of my own mind. Introspection is essential to knowledge of other people’s minds, though not because I introspect their minds. There is no escaping my own mind in my thinking about other minds. My mind is the model I use to build a picture of other minds. (If this sounds like a truism to some, or as naively pre-Wittgenstein to others, then I am encouraged.)

            There is a strange ambiguity or ambivalence in our knowledge of other minds: at one moment it can seem like the most immediate knowledge in the world, but at the next moment it can seem impossibly remote. Sometimes we think we know just what is on the other person’s mind, but then we reflect that this is really quite hidden from us. Perhaps this oscillation stems from the dual basis of this kind of knowledge: on the one hand, I do know immediately what my mental states are and what they incline me to do; on the other hand, it seems rash to suppose that others are the same way. If I focus on the self-knowledge premise, I seem to be on solid ground (for Iam certainly inclined to yelp when feeling a sharp pain); but if I focus on the analogy-with-others premise, then I seem to be overreaching (maybe others don’t yelp when they are in pain). The fact is that I am partly thinking of other minds as my mind in another body and partly recognizing that other people are genuinely alien subjects. I am torn in this way because the very nature of my knowledge of other minds reflects both (infallible) self-knowledge and (fallible) other-extrapolation. Our entire conception of other minds is frankly a kind of confused amalgam, caused by the epistemological necessity to combine facts about one’s own mind with facts about other minds. I observe the bodily expressions of others, then I reflect on my own mind and its relation to my body, and then I go back and attribute a mental state to the other. Nothing like that happens in other areas of knowledge. Our knowledge of other minds rests on a roundabout method of trying to overcome the fundamental fact that our own mind is the only one we can introspect. It would be so much easier if we could just peer directly into the minds of others, but the metaphysics of mind rules that out; so we have to do the best we can with our self-knowledge combined with some risky extrapolation. We have to work with the epistemic materials we have, feeble and fallible as they may be. That is just the way it is with our knowledge of other minds—we are condemned to play epistemological catch-up. We are trying to overcome a structural problem written deep into the nature of things. On the positive side, we necessarily unite ourselves with others in a common psychological family—we have no choice. Alien minds are unknowable minds, given the way we obtain knowledge of minds other than our own. If another mind broke all the rules of mental-behavioral association that hold in our own case, we could not know its contents. We are trapped in an epistemic corner created by our own psychophysical nature. We seek to resolve the mystery of other minds by reducing them to our own mind.  [1]

 

  [1] Surely our primordial attitude towards other minds is that they are a complete mystery, an arena of inextinguishable ignorance. Yet we must make inroads into this darkness because we are a social species; so we make stabs in the dark using knowledge of our own mind as our weapon. The result is hardly complete illumination, more like forlorn speculation. We hope we get things right, but we can never be sure.

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Nothing

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Do we really have a concept of nothing? It may appear obvious that we do, but I am not so sure. We have the concept of non-existence, but it doesn’t follow that we have the concept of nothing—that is, the concept of nothing at all. When an object goes out of existence it doesn’t dissolve into pure nothingness; it assumes another form. An animal that dies and disintegrates goes out of existence, but what happens is that its material parts lose their erstwhile organization. It is not that the animal vanishes into thin air, leaving no residue. When we get to the basic parts of things the story is the same: either the parts (e.g. electrons) cannot be destroyed, or if they are they simply assume another form (maybe even just pure energy). There is always something left, and conservation ensures that something is never replaced with nothing. In these familiar examples of ceasing to exist we do not employ any concept of nothingness in the strict sense. So we cannot ground the concept of absolute nothingness in the ordinary notion of non-existence.

            There is then a question as to what we mean by “nothing” in this very strong sense. What do we mean when we ask why there is something rather than nothing, or try to contemplate the universe before anything existed, or imagine the total annihilation of reality? Have we extended our ordinary concept of non-existence in a direction it cannot tolerate? Have we descended into disguised nonsense? All ordinary attributions of non-existence occur against a background of existence, so what can it mean to speak of absolute nothingness?  [1] Perhaps there is nothing we mean by “nothing” when we use it in the strong metaphysical sense.

            Here is an argument for that conclusion. Consider ordinary denials of existence like “No dodos exist” or “No fictional characters exist”: these involve the use of a sortal predicate, which specifies what kind of thing is said not to exist (it is the same with affirmations of existence). However, no such statement could imply that nothing exists, since the only thing whose existence is denied is of a specific kind. Take every sortally qualified denial of existence—the conjunction of these will not imply that nothing whatever exists. In order to reach the concept of pure nothingness we need to use a word like “thing” or “entity” or “being”—no thing or entity or being exists. These words are what are known as “dummy sortals”: they provide no criterion of identity and so cannot be used in statements of number (how many things are there on my desk?). But just as we cannot meaningfully say how many things there are in the world, neither can we say that there is nothing in the world. All that could mean is that nothing falls under the various sortal concepts that can apply to the world; but that doesn’t entail that there is absolutely nothing. Even units of energy, volumes of space, and moments of time are sortally described objects. The concept of there being nothing at all—as distinct from there being no F’s or no G’s—has not yet been given a sense. What is it whose existence is being denied? Anything comes the reply: but what does that mean independently of some sortal to tie it down? The metaphysician who wants to talk about pure unadulterated nothingness must be using some other notion of non-existence—not the notion of specific kinds of object not existing. In order to speak meaningfully of non-existence we need to have a sortal concept in mind, but the bare idea of nothing supplies no such concept—it is simply a placeholder for a sortal concept. We can use the word “nothing” in contexts where a sortal term is presupposed, but in its extended metaphysical use it is a pseudo-sortal: no clear meaning can be attached to it.

            When we try to frame the idea of pure nothingness—the absence of all existence—we fail to come up with a genuine concept. But we fail to realize this because we employ a concept of non-existence that applies in contexts that do not envisage complete nothingness, as with the ceasing to exist of an animal or city or mountain. Fictional objects don’t exist, but the minds of their creators do; dodos don’t exist, but their atoms do; persons cease to exist, but their bodies go on: none of these varieties of non-existence add up to the complete absence of everything. We really don’t know what such a state of affairs would consist in. We don’t have a clear and distinct idea of absolute nothingness (no space, no time, no logic, no truth, no empty set). It is not clear that there is a possible state of affairs in which nothing exists—what would it even look like?  [2] It may be true that there is nothing such that itnecessarily exists, but it might yet be true that necessarily something exists—some sortal or other is exemplified. At the least the onus is on the believer in the concept of nothingness to demonstrate how such a concept is possible—that metaphysical uses of “nothing” are more than empty words. Why is there something rather than nothing? Maybe it’s because there is no coherent notion of nothing for the existence of something to negate.

 

Colin McGinn

 

  [1] Sartre’s use of the concept of nothingness in Being and Nothingness is instructive: he holds that the essence of consciousness (the for-itself) is nothingness, but all consciousness is conceived by him as directed to being (the in-itself)—so nothingness can only exist against a background of being. Sartre is not using the concept of absolute nothingness, i.e. the complete absence of all existence; for him, nothingness presuppose being.

  [2] Is there a possible world in which nothing at all exists? But wouldn’t that world itself exist? There is a world in which there is nothing. It is harder to expunge all existence than we suppose. Don’t possibilities exist? In a non-existent universe wouldn’t there exist various possibilities? If they are real possibilities, mustn’t they have being?

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Mysticism and Matter

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                                                Mysticism and Matter

 

 

Consider a community of disembodied minds cut off from material reality. Not only are they immaterial themselves, they have no contact with matter, not even space. Their perceptions are purely abstract and psychological. They communicate with each other about things that interest them, but there is no talk about matter. We can suppose that they do occasionally speculate about a world beyond their common experience—they wonder if their immaterial world is all there is. Perhaps this is a matter of scientific and philosophical controversy, with some declaring themselves open to the possibility of such a world, some opting for agnosticism, and some rejecting the idea outright. But this is all speculation, since no one has ever seen or touched a material object; indeed, they have very little conception of what such a thing might be. They characterize the conjectured reality in purely negative terms—what is “not-spiritual”—and form fuzzy images of it. There are those who doubt that such talk is meaningful. They don’t doubt their own existence and feel clear about their own nature, but as for anything different and beyond—they regard the possibility as fascinating but fantastic.

            But suppose that one day a prophet arises—a seer, in the most literal sense. This individual, Marie, undergoes a strange and unexplained alteration whereby she gains the sense of sight: she sees the first material object ever beheld by anyone in our disembodied community. What does she see? She sees a tomato, red and plump, splendid in its materiality. She is much amazed by this object, so different from anything encountered in her experience hitherto. At first she is afraid, so alien is the tomato, so brimming with alternative being—as if it might pounce on her. But it just sits there, not moving, reveling in its volume and solidity. Marie immediately grasps the concept of extension (she is among the most brilliant of her people), and she is suitably astonished—nothing in her life has prepared her for such a thing. She becomes a believer, given the evidence of her eyes: she now knows that there is an extended reality beyond the wispy immaterial world of spirits and thoughts—matter really exists!

            Marie feels she must spread the news—her revelation must be made public. But she is shrewd enough to realize that this isn’t going to be easy: there will be understandable skepticism. Still, she has a solid (!) reputation for honesty and acuity, so some people will credit her report. She begins to tell of her strange experience. As predicted, some people reject her story outright, but many are convinced by her vivid description of the tomato, though they only dimly grasp its content. Thus there emerges a new creed—the creed of “Materialism”. Marie is accorded great reverence, and her vision of the tomato goes down in history. The world is much stranger and more magnificent than they ever thought. And maybe there is more where that came from—maybe the material world consists of many tomato-like objects! Doctrines arise and sects are founded, surrounding questions of the composition of the material world, which Mary has but partially glimpsed. An anthropologist would say that a religion of the material world has taken hold (though there may still be dissenters). And indeed Marie really did witness something remarkable, given her habitual mode of experience—something anomalous and unprecedented. She was right to be impressed. In due course others mysteriously acquire the gift bestowed on her and are also astounded by their visions: not just tomatoes, but apples and oranges, bits of coal, mud. There is a whole world of matter out there! It is so various, so pulsing with reality, so marvelously concrete. What is its nature, where does it come from, what does it mean? Is there perhaps a super-material god, large and heavy, that created it in his own image?

            What is the point of this parable? Not to prove that immaterial beings are possible or that matter is supernatural, but to suggest that perhaps we take matter too much for granted. We find it familiar and boring, as common as dirt, nothing to get worked up about. But that attitude is the result of the force of custom, which dulls us to the miracle of matter. Matter is ontologically remarkable, an object of wonder. Extension in space is itself an amazing fact of nature. Like my immaterial beings, we are conditioned by what confronts us every day—to what constitutes our very bodies—but that is just a psychological fact, not reflecting ontological triteness. Matter is not intrinsically boring; it is gorgeous and fantastical. We need to develop, or recover, our sense of its ontological singularity. We need to see it with Marie’s fresh eyes, difficult as that may be for us.  [1] It is what our universe is made of, after all, and so deserves our attention and appreciation, even our reverence. Maybe we should become Materialists—not in the sense that we think everything as is boring as matter but in the sense that we recognize how special matter is. Matter has its own charm and fascination, its own majesty.

 

  [1] I can report occasionally feeling a sense of how remarkable matter is (and not because of discoveries in physics), by patiently gazing at a chunk of the stuff. Drugs might aid in the process. Mystics might sense it naturally.

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Metaphysics and Philosophy

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In the Epilogue to my book The Character of Mind (1982), entitled “The Place of the Philosophy of Mind”, I wrote: “It would be misguided to infer from the points we have been making that the philosophy of mind is the most basic area of philosophy: probably no part of philosophy can claim that title (except, though trivially, metaphysics).” I will reflect on that parenthesis: Why did I say that metaphysics is trivially (obviously, undeniably) the most basic area of philosophy?

            The word “metaphysics” can mean several things, but the meaning that best captures its use in mainstream academic philosophy is “the study of the main kinds of things that there are, and of their interrelations”. If the world is the totality of facts, then metaphysics aims to provide an inventory of these facts, or of the main types of these facts, and to describe or explain how they are related to each other. Thus “metaphysics” is more or less synonymous with “ontology”—the study of being. Slightly more ambitiously, we could say that metaphysics attempts to analyze the various types of facts—to delve into their essential nature—and to provide a theory of how the facts are related. It is thus very broad and all encompassing, unlike special branches of philosophy like philosophy of language or ethics. It covers not just this or that part of reality but the whole of it.

            It is difficult to see how there could be any objection to metaphysics as so characterized. The various branches of knowledge all seek to identify what exists and to describe its nature (atoms, molecules, organisms, persons, societies, etc); metaphysics just proceeds at a more general and abstract level. Don’t facts come in different types with systematic interrelations between them? If so, can’t we try to say what these are? Of course, there may be bad metaphysics, but how can there not be metaphysics of some sort? The correct metaphysics might be irreducibly pluralist and non-explanatory—there are hugely many kinds of fact and there are no general principles linking them—but that is still metaphysics (to be contrasted with various kinds of monism or dualism). If there is such a thing as what there is (and how could there not be?), there must be truths about what there is, and these truths might be knowable.

            Yet metaphysics has been questioned, and is often regarded as an optional part of philosophy—as if we could stop doing it and leave most of the subject intact. On the contrary, metaphysics is indispensable and pervasive—it is the air that philosophy breathes. It is philosophy. Even the most vehemently anti-metaphysical philosophy is really metaphysics, though just of a different type from other kinds of metaphysics. Consider logical positivism: it declares itself to be against metaphysics—but is it? It subscribes to two central metaphysical theses: (a) that necessity is the same as analyticity, and (b) that meaningfulness consists in verifiability. These are metaphysical theses about the nature of necessity and meaning: they are not pieces of empirical science, verifiable by experiment and experience, and they are rivals to other metaphysical theses about necessity and meaning (truth in all possible worlds, truth conditional theories of meaning). Similarly with such positivist doctrines as emotivism in ethics or instrumentalism in the sciences: these are ontological doctrines, on a par with other ontological doctrines. In the same way a general scientism is a species of metaphysics: the only kinds of facts there are, and the only acceptable theories of those facts, are those discoverable by the empirical sciences. Such a doctrine is not the result of scientific investigation, to be justified by observation and experiment; it is a metaphysical claim about the general content and structure of reality. It is as much a metaphysical doctrine as theistic idealism (though it may be a superior metaphysical doctrine—or not, as the case may be). Positivism and scientism purport to be against alltypes of metaphysics, but in fact they are opposing one type to others (rightly or wrongly). They thus contradict themselves, revealing the unavoidability of metaphysics. Even to say that reality is not susceptible to a metaphysical theory is to say something metaphysical—though of a negative nature.

            Nearly all of traditional philosophy is overtly metaphysical in one way or another: from Plato and Aristotle onwards (Spinoza, Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, Locke, Berkeley, Kant, the German idealists and materialists, Hegel, Moore, Russell, early Wittgenstein, Ryle, Quine, Kripke, Strawson, Lewis, Husserl, Sartre, et al). It might be thought there is one clear exception: ordinary language philosophy and the later Wittgenstein—surely they were both against metaphysics and also not guilty of engaging in it covertly. But this is wrong: they were doing metaphysics too, though in their own style. They were doing it by paying special attention to ordinary language, not by logic or science or pure metaphysical intuition. They had views about persons, knowledge, intention, sensation, causation, truth, free will, mathematics, ethics, and so on. It is just that they derived these views (or purported to) from an examination ordinary language. Moreover, they held metaphysical views about meaning: that meaning is use; that not all speech acts are assertions; that the meaning of an utterance can be split into an illocutionary force and a locutionary meaning. None of this is empirical science or history or art criticism: it is theorizing about what is at a very general level. They also held various negative metaphysical opinions: that logical atomism is erroneous, that perception does not involve sense-data, that physical objects are not constructions from experience, that necessity is not in the world, and so on. They didn’t reject metaphysics as such; they just rejected older metaphysical views they didn’t like. Their overall metaphysical position, broadly speaking, was to endorse common sense (not merely describe it, as with “descriptive metaphysics”), and they tended towards ontological pluralism. They distrusted grand unifying systems such as materialism and idealism; their metaphysics emphasized distinctions and variety. Perhaps we could say that they preferred metaphysical modesty–but a modest metaphysician is still a metaphysician. Indeed, their overarching metaphysical position—itself quite ambitious–was that reality does not conform to simple categories and dichotomies. Theirs was a metaphysics of the Many not the One (or even the Two): they held to “multiplicity metaphysics”.

            So metaphysics is pervasive, even when officially repudiated, but is it basic? Is it trivially basic? What about the idea that metaphysics is, or should be, based on philosophy of language? Doesn’t that make the study of language basic? Actually, no, it doesn’t. First, we have to know that language exists, and one can imagine metaphysical views according to which it does not (it’s all an illusion that we ever say anything). Even granting that ontological doctrine, we have to assume that language is meaningful: but according to some metaphysical views meaning is indeterminate, or a creature of darkness, or simply unreal. How could we base metaphysics on language if the whole idea of meaning is shot through with confusion and error? So we would need to combat the eliminative metaphysics of meaning with a metaphysics that finds meaning to be in good order. But now, even once we have got meaning off the ground, there are different metaphysical views about the nature of meaning: Platonism (Frege), psychologism (Grice), behaviorism (Quine), and others. We also need to have some sort of theory of meaning in place, say a truth conditions theory or a verification conditions theory: but these are substantive (and controversial) metaphysical claims about the nature of meaning. We need a metaphysics of meaning before we can use meaning to deliver metaphysical results beyond language. We can’t deduce a metaphysics of time or material reality or mind from considerations about meaning without having some prior view about the nature of meaning. We need to know what kind of thing meaning is.

It is the same with philosophy of mind: we need a metaphysics of mind before we can hope to use considerations from philosophy of mind to adjudicate metaphysical questions, say about ethics or modality. We need to know that minds exist to begin with, what their contents are, and how these contents should be analyzed: specifically, we need a theory of concepts. But this will involve us in the metaphysics of mind: what it contains, the nature of what it contains, the relations between these contents and other things (notably objects outside the mind). We can’t make a given branch of philosophy, either philosophy of mind or philosophy of language, anterior to metaphysics because that branch is itself a type of metaphysics, or essentially includes metaphysics. How could an analysis of concepts be the basis of metaphysics in general, given that there are different metaphysical theories about concepts? If someone tried to make ethics into the basis of metaphysics, they would face the question of what theory of ethics they subscribed to—which would require some sort of meta-ethics. But meta-ethics just is the metaphysics of morality, so we cannot hope to find in ethics a standpoint outside of metaphysics for pursuing metaphysics. Similarly for language and mind.     

            Metaphysics has always been with us, it has never gone away, and it will always be with us as long as philosophy exists. Even when officially shunned it operates in the background—indeed, it powers its own supposed repudiation. Different kinds of metaphysics wax and wane, and different methods are proposed (science, conceptual analysis, ordinary language, formal logic), but metaphysics is inescapable. Some views may seem more extravagant than others, metaphysically, but even the least extravagant views are still recognizably metaphysical (e.g., there are only sense data, there are only electromagnetic fields, there are only texts). Even someone who believes in nothing but his own current experience is a metaphysician, just a very abstemious one. And for such a thinker his negative metaphysical views are apt to be quite wide-ranging. So, yes, metaphysics is the most basic area of philosophy, trivially so.

 

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Knowledge of One’s Own Existence

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                                         Knowledge of One’s Own Existence

 

 

Alice dropped the fan “just in time to avoid shrinking away altogether. ‘That was a narrow escape!’ said Alice, a good deal frightened at the sudden change, but very glad to find herself still in existence”(Alice in Wonderland, p. 23). There is something conceptually peculiar in the idea of finding oneself to exist (as Lewis Carroll was surely aware), as if this could be any kind of discovery; the knowledge that one exists is not knowledge one acquires or picks up or happens upon at some particular time. It makes perfect sense to speak of being glad to find out that someone else is still in existence, but not of finding out that you yourself are still in existence. For how could you not know that you exist?

This raises the question of how I know that I exist, if not in the discovery way. Let us assume both that I exist and that I know with certainty that I exist; the question then is by what means or method I have come to have this knowledge—how do I come to know my own existence? We can begin by asking how I come to know that other things exist. The short answer is that I notice them. Things appear to me perceptually, and I form the belief that these things exist (rightly or wrongly). It looks to me as if there is a tree in front of me, and I form the belief that there is. The same is true of other people: people appear to me, and behave in certain ways, so I form the belief that they exist. I notice things in the world, as it appears to me, and I form existential beliefs with regard to these things.  But is that the way I form the belief that I exist? Do I perceptually appear to myself? Of course, I can and do perceive my own body; but that is not how I come to know that I exist, for familiar reasons (I could know that I exist without ever observing my body, or even without having a body). It is not that I notice myself among other appearing objects and then venture the opinion that I exist. Nor does anyone inform me that I exist (though they may inform me that Colin McGinn exists). I have non-observational knowledge of my existence; and I can’t be wrong. Even if I did appear to myself, or observe myself, or notice myself, that could not be the basis of my knowledge that I exist: for I can only be appeared to if I exist. Just by being a subject of appearances I exist, so it can’t be that I ground my knowledge that I exist on the fact that I appear to myself: even if I didn’t appear to myself, I would know that I exist, just by the fact that I am appeared to at all—by any kind of entity. I am unique among empirical particulars in that I know myself to exist independently of appearing to myself.

            But how then do I know that I exist? Here is where things become difficult, because nothing obvious suggests itself. The Cartesian line is that I infer my existence from the fact that I think (“I think, therefore I am”), but surely my knowing that I think presupposes that I exist—it is not the ground of that existential belief. I don’t form the belief that I exist by noticing that I think and then making an inference to a new piece of knowledge. I know that I exist before making any such inference. It does not seem that I infer my existence from anything—I just know it. Did Descartes really not know that he existed until he formulated the Cogito? Is that how children come to know they exist? Is there even a specific time at which people come to know that they exist (this is not the same as the question of when they first say they exist)? Other existential knowledge has its time and place of origin, but was there ever a moment at which you realized that you exist? Was it when you first noticed yourself thinking? Were you in the dark as to your existence beforehand, full of doubts? We don’t, to paraphrase Alice, find ourselves one fine day pleasantly surprised to discover that we exist, like a diamond buried in the garden: our existence does not occur to us or dawn on us or come to us as a revelation. By contrast, my knowledge of the existence of other people, though long possessed, did have a time of origin. But I never found myself wondering if I exist and then coming upon evidence one day that I do. I don’t need any evidence to know that I exist. I just know it.

            We might conclude from this that knowledge of one’s own existence is not a posteriori—we don’t know it “by experience”. That seems right: we know the existence of other things and people by experience but not the existence of ourselves. Is it then a priori? Well, it is not much like mathematical knowledge, and it doesn’t arise from some sort of rational deduction. It is evidently sui generis–neither a posteriori nor a priori. It belongs in a class of its own. Not all knowledge falls neatly into one of those two broad traditional categories. We don’t know it by means of the senses (including introspection), and we don’t know it by means of rational intuition. We know it, apparently, by no means at all—except by being the thing that is known. It is like one’s knowledge that one is a person: I don’t know that I am a person by sensing or inferring that I am a person, but neither do I know it by rational intuition—I know it by being a person. Once I am able to think of myself as a person, I know that I am a person, because that is what I am—a thing that knows that it is a person by being a person. Similarly, to be a conscious reflective being is to know that one exists; no further conditions need to be met, such as having evidence for one’s existence. I know that I exist, not by being presented to myself as myself, but by being something that must exist in order to be presented by anything: in being presented by a tree I must exist in order to be so presented—whether the tree itself exists or not. I don’t know that I exist by being, or becoming, acquainted with myself, as Russell would say, but by being acquainted with things other than myself—while recognizing that a precondition of this is my own existence. I therefore know that I exist in a way that I know nothing else to exist. Knowledge of my own existence is a unique kind of knowledge: it doesn’t involve detecting anything.

 

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