I Am Not a Person

 

 

There is no person with whom I am identical, though there are persons. I am not Colin McGinn (if “Colin McGinn” names a person). Why do I say that about myself? Why do I say that no one referred to by “I” is identical to a person, though persons exist? Consider a device I shall call “The Person Transformation Machine” (PTM for short). This machine can effect great changes in a person by the mere flick of a switch: it can erase memories, create new memories, alter emotional make-up, intelligence, and preferences, change moral character, generate belief systems—any fact about a person can be changed by PTM. If you step into it (or it steps into you—it might just be a chip inserted into the brain), you come out a different person, literally. People emerge from PTM with completely new personalities, memories, acculturation, emotions, and so on. The whole idea of the machine is to change the person you are, and indeed those who know people who have used it all agree that PTM lives up to its advertising—it really transforms human subjects into new persons. It zaps the old person and installs a fresh one. There is no psychological continuity between the person who goes in and the person who comes out—no preservation of personality traits and other psychological atributes. It is the psychological equivalent of being given a completely new body while disposing of the old one. The original person does not survive the ministrations of PTM.

            But the machine also has an interesting conservative element built in: it keeps the subject awake and conscious throughout the personal transformation. The subject can experience the transformation she is undergoing, marveling at what is happening. She can think, “I am feeling queasy” or “I am really enjoying this”. It seems clear that something vital is preserved as PTM does its transformative work: something survives; something stays constant.  [1] The word “I” retains its reference over time. But it is not the person, because that changes. Someone in the machine, awake and conscious, will not feel himself to die as a new person takes root: the prospect of entering the machine is not like the prospect of death. But if something survives and it is not a person, then I am not a person—specifically, I am not that person. I survive the destruction of that person, so I am not identical to any particular person. There are persons, but none of them is me. Then what am I if I am not a person? Here our concepts fail us: what is the concept that specifies the kind of thing I am? The only concepts we can come up with are philosophers’ inventions: ego, self, conscious subject, bare I. Thus we find ourselves saying that the ego or the self or the conscious subject or the bare I is not (identical to) a person. I am an ego or self or subject or bare I and not a person, since I can survive the replacement of the person. But these portentous terms are really just labels for something that remains elusive—the referent of “I”. Evidently something survives transformation in PTM and it is not a person; so we resort to speaking of egos or selves or conscious subjects or the bare I. It is not that this is false or wrong exactly, just unhelpful. We lack a satisfactory sortal for the thing that continues in existence, though something evidently does.

            And there is another problem: what exactly is the relationship between the person in question and me? We speak of having a body and brain, but we can’t say that we have a person: my relationship to Colin McGinn (assuming he is a person) is not that I “have” him, whatever that might mean. Nor does he constitute me, since I can survive his disappearance qua conscious subject. The locution that suggests itself is “occupy”: I am occupied by a particular person, and I might later become occupied by a distinct person. I share lodgings with a person, so to speak. But we are not the same thing: Colin and I are numerically distinct. I transcend that person: I stand apart from him, not sharing his fate. It is a familiar thought that a single human life contains a succession of distinct persons, as deep psychological changes occur, but we must not forget that this succession takes place against a background of constancy. The PTM thought experiment dramatizes these kinds of person-altering changes while drawing attention to the invariance of “I”. The thing we call a conscious subject can remain in existence while the thing we call a person perishes—the two have different persistence conditions. I can survive the cessation of the person that now inhabits me, so I cannot be that person.

            I may care about the fate of both entities: I don’t want that person to die and I don’t want to die, but these are distinct cares. The same is true of my cares about others. Prudence and altruism thus have a double target: what is good for the person and what is good for the I. We probably care more about the I than the person: I care about Colin McGinn persisting into the future, but I care more about myself persisting into the future. So long as I stay around I can tolerate the extinction of the person who crashes with me. If I were a regular visitor to the PTM, frequently transforming into a new person, I might start to care less about the persons who successively share space with me; but I wouldn’t lose my attachment to the continuing self that oversees all of this replacement. I might relish the variety that comes with personal plurality, while remaining deeply unhappy about the prospect of me being annihilated.

            So we must recognize an ontological doubling up, perplexing as it may be: I am something other than a person. I have the attribute of being a person because of my close connection to a particular person, but I am not identical to that person. When I use the word “I” I don’t strictly refer to a person, but to an entity intimately associated with a person—its host, as it were. The person that cohabits with me is like a benign parasite: we are distinct entities with distinct lifecycles, but we occupy the same patch of biological real estate. I play host to that person for the duration (feeding him, etc), and I can pick and choose if I have a PTM handy, but I am not identical to him—any more than I am identical to other parasites that live in my body. The person known as Colin McGinn is a separate being from me, though one with whom I am on intimate terms: he gives me my identity, in the colloquial sense. Without him I would amount to little ontologically, a kind of featureless blob of consciousness persisting over time. Still, we are not to be conflated, he and I. I cannot be reduced to the person Colin McGinn any more than I can be reduced to my body or brain. I am something over and above that person, something of a different order. I am what remains constant in the PTM as different persons come and go—whatever that is exactly.  [2]

 

Colin McGinn      

  [1] One thing that survives is the brain—it is the same brain before and after the personal transformation. But it would be wrong to assume that the brain is the referent of “I” as opposed to something more psychological. Still, the continued existence of the brain is surely relevant to the question of the continued existence of the referent of “I”.

  [2] For expository purposes I have spoken as if “Colin McGinn” and “I” have different referents, and I think this is intuitively plausible; but there is room for the idea that they refer to the same thing, viz. the transcendent I. If you incline to that position, by all means substitute “the person associated with the name ‘Colin McGinn’”, where this person is not strictly identical to Colin McGinn, i.e. the referent of “I” as I use it.

                                   

 

 

 

 

Food and Philosophy

 

 

Are there any hitherto undiscovered branches of philosophy? There must have been a time when no branches of philosophy had been discovered, back in prehistory, and then gradually the field formed and spread itself. Now we have numerous fields and sub-fields of philosophical enquiry, from the basic curriculum to philosophy of physics, philosophy of biology, philosophy of art (painting, music, architecture, literature), philosophy of religion, philosophy of sport, philosophy of sex and love, philosophy of film, philosophy of society, philosophy of logic and mathematics, philosophy of history, feminist philosophy, and many others. Is there anything that there is no philosophy of? There is not (yet anyway) a philosophy of geography or geology or botany or bottle washing or haberdashery. But for there to be an undiscovered branch of philosophy three conditions would need to be met: (a) it must be undiscovered, (b) it must be genuinely philosophical, and (c) it must not be already subsumed by an existing branch. Condition (c) is the important one: there must be new and distinctive issues raised by the field in question—not just the same old issues restricted to some specific subject matter. Thus it is hard to see how geology and botany could give rise to a new branch of philosophy, since they are already subsumed by philosophy of physics and biology. Some overlap with existing fields is to be expected, but there has to be something new and exciting about the candidate field. It must also, presumably, be important or central in some way (so not like stamp collecting or orchid raising—though these can be important to particular individuals).

            It is extremely difficult to identify any such neglected field of philosophical enquiry. The ground seems remarkably well covered. Of course, each area may contain many undiscovered truths or arguments or issues, but there don’t seem to be any obvious candidates for an undiscovered branch of philosophy. The tree of philosophical investigation seems to have a complete set of branches. This itself is an interesting meta-philosophical fact: we have achieved full philosophical coverage of reality, after a steady expansion of the philosophical mandate. We have completed the map. But wait: there is one area hitherto undiscovered: the philosophy of food.  [1] This subject is sufficiently important, distinctive, and unexplored that it may reasonably be added to the list of branches of philosophy. In what follows I will explain why the philosophy of food deserves our attention and outline the kinds of issues that are raised by this nascent field.

            Let us begin with some semantic and definitional matters. Semantically, “food” is a mass noun, as are many words for the different varieties of food: “sugar”, “meat”, “flour”, “bread”, “gravy”, “curry”, “butter”, etc. These words denote types of stuff, like “coal” or “snow”. The word “meal”, however, is a count noun, which is why we can say we have three meals a day (but not “three foods a day”); similarly for “breakfast”, “lunch”, and “dinner”. The word “eat” is a verb of action and so can be adverbially modified (“eat slowly, at midnight, etc”). Much eating is intentional but some may be sub-intentional (like absentmindedly sucking on a sweet); and some may be involuntary, as in forced feeding. One eats (action) a meal (entity) that is made of food (stuff) of various types: so far, so straightforward.

But how is “food” to be defined? The OED says: “any nutritious substance that people eat or drink or that plants absorb in order to maintain life and growth”. This is not circular because it is possible to eat things other than food: one might eat sand or cement. It sounds a bit iffy to say that people can drink food, but one sees the point of talking that way. An objection may be raised from intravenous feeding: here food may be ingested, but it is not eaten (the OED defines “eat” as “put (food) into the mouth and chew and swallow it”). What if there were a species that only ingested food in intravenously, never by orally eating? The addition of plant absorption indicates the need for a broader definition than just oral consumption: sunlight and water can be plant food because plants absorb these “nutritious substances”. If animals did the same, not using their mouths at all, they would still be ingesting food. The key idea is that food is a nutritious substance that is taken into the body in order to sustain growth and life. One might also quibble about the dictionary’s use of “nutritious”, objecting that people often eat food that is not nutritious (“junk food”); but here the meaning is not that the alleged food is not nutritious at all—it certainly contains calories—but rather that it is not good for you if eaten to excess. To count as food a substance has to be in some measure nutritious.

            The word “meal” is not so easy to define. The OED has “any of the regular daily occasions when food is eaten”. But can’t you have a meal at an irregular time during the day, or in the middle of the night? Does this definition imply that the only meals there can be are breakfast, lunch, and dinner? What about a person who works the night shift? What about someone who eats nuts and raisins at hourly intervals and nothing else? Do animals have meals according to this definition? A meal is best understood as a portion of food that is consumed at a particular time—so you have no meals if you graze continuously all day (unless this is viewed as one long meal had before going to sleep). And how do we define “breakfast”? Not by the type of food consumed, nor by the time at which it is consumed (a person on the night shift may have breakfast at 7pm). Rather, as the word suggests, breakfast is best defined in terms of proximity to sleep, during which one is effectively fasting. Lunch is then defined as the meal one has following breakfast, when hunger has built up again, and similarly for dinner. We could just as well speak of “meal 1, meal 2, and meal 3”. Nothing is to stop you from eating roast turkey for breakfast at 11pm and cereal for dinner at 10am, semantically speaking.

            What about the metaphysics of food? Here one can envisage two schools of thought—the objectivists and the subjectivists. The objectivist holds that food is an objective mind-independent category—the stuff consumed considered in its intrinsic nature. The subjectivist, by contrast, holds that food is constituted by its relation to the organisms that consume it—food is what is consumed as food. The latter school insists that nothing counts as food unless it is eaten by some organism, so the flesh of a deer is not food if there are no predators around that eat deer. Other food metaphysicians might maintain that a kind of stuff is food if and only if it is potentially edible: but they run into problems specifying what kind of potentiality they have in mind—isn’t everything potentially a constituent of food for some conceivable organism? Then there may be those who think the whole notion of food is confused or unscientific, so they propose to eliminate it from their conceptual scheme. There might also be food projectivists who subscribe to the slogan, “food is in the eye of the beholder”. Thus disputes in food ontology will rage as elsewhere in philosophy.

There are also metaphysical conundrums such as whether any proper part of a meal is itself a meal, or whether the elementary particles that compose food are themselves food, or whether the Sorites paradox can be applied to the concept of a meal (a crumb isn’t a meal, and the addition of one crumb to something that is not a meal will not produce a meal, so there are no meals). What should we say about Martians who eat only rocks and acid, finding what we call food quite indigestible and vile? Are they eating food or not? Should we say that what counts as food is entirely species-relative? That sounds reasonable enough, but then what do we say about a species that eats rocks with gravy on, where the gravy has no nutritional value for them (but rocks do) and serves only to enhance taste—is the gravy food for that species? Also: is the color and shape of the food part of the meal, or the plate the food is on, or the way the food is arranged, or the waiter who serves it? These are certainly aspects of the gustatory experience. If you re-heat a meal, is it the same meal you had yesterday? What if you combine it with some new ingredients? What are the criteria of identity for meals? Are different courses really separate meals eaten in quick succession?  When does a meal cease to exist—once it is inside your stomach or when you start chewing it or when you excrete it? Is a meal an artifact, like a table, or a natural object, like a tree? Those fascinated by such conceptual questions could have a good time discussing them and arguing vigorously with their metaphysical opponents. I envisage symposia and special journal issues. Debates could be punctuated with actual eating.

            Other philosophers might wish to focus on normative questions relating to food. Here there is a rich field of enquiry that I can only gesture at. Are there any foods it is morally wrong to eat (e.g. animal products)? Is the eating of humans always wrong? Is gluttony really a sin? Are some foods inherently more virtuous than others? Is natural food always better than artificial food? Should one use food as a source of comfort? Is obesity a moral failing? Is bulimia necessarily unwise? When is dieting excessive? Is it OK to love food? Is it a good thing to be a foodie? What is more important, taste or nutrition? Is cookery an art or a science or a practical skill? Is it possible to describe a meal as beautiful? How often should one indulge oneself when eating? Do some foods have an intrinsically superior taste that everyone should try to cultivate (oysters, asparagus, truffles)? Is it better to eat alone or in company? What constitutes the perfect meal? What is the role of disgust in eating? How much should we be concerned about the hunger of others? Is fasting morally uplifting? Is it good to have food taboos? Should the good life center on food? Is the value of food like the value of sex? Is there anything spiritual about food? Should food be spicy or bland? What is the right way to appreciate food? What should we expect from food–health, happiness, or just absence of hunger? How much of our income should we spend on food?

            These questions are specific to food, so they meet one of our conditions for being a bona fide branch of philosophy. They are also not easy to answer, which is another desirable feature in a philosophical question. They are about the role of food in living a good human life, both morally and prudentially. Given that people often have a problematic relationship to food, it would be useful to be able to think more clearly and articulately about it. Rational reflection is power. Food can make people feel conflicted and confused, and philosophy might help with that. One needs to eat with a clean conscience, but the pleasure of eating should not be compromised by doubt. We obviously care about food, for all sorts of reasons, but food is difficult territory. So this is a branch of philosophy that can be expected to have clear practical applications.

            Lastly, what about the language of food? What are our food-related speech acts about? We say things like, “You should try this” or “This tastes good” or “Mm, delicious!” These are clearly evaluative utterances, and hence invite the usual types of philosophical interpretation. Are they fact stating or expressive or prescriptive or something else entirely? They resemble moral utterances with respect to the theoretical options. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the words have a solid basis in the objects in question: foods have certain objective features that determine them as good or bad. It is not that we merely imagine them as objectively good or bad, or project goodness or badness onto them. Foods are good for us or they are not. So this is a type of evaluative discourse that seems firmly anchored in hard fact. It would be difficult to be a relativist about the value of food, since food either nourishes or it doesn’t: if for some reason you arrive at the belief that coal is good food, you will soon learn the error of your ways. So “This food is good” has a strong claim to objective truth (at least once we specify an eater); it is not a matter of debate or disputation. It can be verified by straightforward experiment.

            Food is clearly central to human (and animal) life, it is conceptually intricate, and it raises challenging philosophical questions. It overlaps with other areas of philosophy, but it has a sufficiently distinctive identity to lay claim to being a branch of philosophy in its own right. One can see how a university course on the philosophy of food could be constructed, and it might be more engaging than the standard fare offered to students. It supplies ample “food for thought”—and that phrase too raises interesting philosophical questions. Is philosophy itself a type of food for the intellect, to be absorbed and digested by the mind? Does it nourish thought and give it life? If so, philosophy itself is a sub-field of the general philosophy of food. There is food for the body and food for the mind, and philosophy is a type of mental food. Thus there can be philosophical feasts as well as thin philosophical gruel, and a hunger for philosophical knowledge, indigestible philosophical arguments, and philosophical theories that are hard to swallow. A question in the philosophy of food is therefore whether we can conceive of philosophy as food. If we can, is it a different type of food from that associated with other fields of learning? I look forward to some interesting dining experiences.

 

Coli

  [1] Since writing this, I have learned that I have been scooped, by David M. Kaplan in The Philosophy of Food (2012), and possibly by others. I take this as confirmation of my thesis that the philosophy of food is a bona fide branch of philosophy, to be recognized as such. Of course, philosophers have written about food over the centuries in one connection or another, but the philosophy of food is not generally recognized by mainstream philosophy as a genuine branch of the subject. One can write a book entitled The Philosophy of X without that amounting to a serious branch of the subject, to be set beside the branches already recognized. I contend that the philosophy of food is such a branch, not merely a subject matter to which philosophical reflection can be applied (as in the philosophy of wine or the philosophy of fashion or the philosophy of flowers). No doubt those who write about the philosophy of food seriously would agree (and would chide me for being late to the party, or dinner). In any case, the field already exists, if only in marginal and fledgling form. My question then would be whether we have now exhausted the subject of philosophy: are there any undiscovered branches left? I rather doubt it.

                                               

Degrees of Knowledge

 

 

Belief comes in degrees—one can believe something more or less strongly. But knowledge does not come in degrees—one cannot know something more or less strongly. We have all sorts of words for degrees of belief (“certain”, “confident”, “convinced”, “of the opinion that”, “suspect”, “surmise”), but we have no such words indicating degrees of knowledge: you either know or you don’t know. In this respect “know” is like “refer”: we don’t have degrees of reference either. How then can knowledge be a type of belief—the true justified kind? If that were so, wouldn’t it have to be capable of degrees, just like belief? If knowledge were meritorious belief, it would have to possess degrees just like belief and merit, but we can’t say that someone strongly or weakly knows that p. Thus the traditional analysis has to be mistaken.

            It might be replied that truth doesn’t come in degrees and that’s why knowledge doesn’t; the all-or-nothing character of knowledge reflects the all-or-nothing character of truth. But (a) that is not obviously true of truth, since we do sometimes talk of sentences (or propositions) being more or less true; and (b) the all-or-nothing character of truth doesn’t prevent belief from having degrees—so why should it have that effect on knowledge? If one can weakly believe a proposition that is definitely true, why can’t one weakly know a proposition that is definitely true? Nor can justification be the source of the difference between knowledge and belief, since it too admits of degrees. The all-or-nothing character of the concept of knowledge comes from the concept itself not from anything extraneous to it.

            Yet meritorious belief appears to have something to do with knowledge; it is not irrelevant to the concept of knowledge. It is just that it can’t analyze knowledge: we can’t paraphrase a knowledge claim by using the concept of belief in the traditional way. But knowledge does somehow depend on the state of a person’s beliefs: what you know is a function of what you believe and how you believe it. Generally, if a person has a true justified belief that p, then he knows that p (putting aside Gettier cases). We thus seem to be heading for a paradox: knowledge can’t be a type of belief because it doesn’t come in degrees, but it must be a type of belief because that is what it depends upon. Here is a possible way out: knowledge supervenes on true justified belief, but it is not identical to true justified belief. The property of knowing is not identical to the property of having a true justified belief, but the former property depends (exclusively) on the latter property. We have dependence without reduction, as in other instances of supervenience. The traditional definition (sic) of knowledge confuses analysis with supervenience; the former does not follow from the latter.  [1]

            This diagnosis fits the account of knowledge I have suggested elsewhere, namely that knowledge is a relation to a fact and belief is a relation to a proposition.  [2] The two states take different objects, which is why we can say, “John believes the proposition that p” but not “John knows the proposition that p”, and why we can say, “John knows the fact that p” but not “John believes the fact that p”. The state of knowledge refers to a fact but the state of belief refers to a proposition: the thing known is a fact but the thing believed is a proposition (the two states have different “intentional objects”). This theory fits the present diagnosis because it regards knowledge as conceptually separate from belief, involving a quite different relation (to a fact not a proposition), but it allows that there is a dependency between knowledge and belief. The state of being in the knowing relation to a fact supervenes on the state of being in the belief relation to a proposition (a true and justified belief), but the states are not identical or analytically equivalent. You get into the knowing relation to a fact by getting into the appropriate belief relation to a proposition (compare the mental and the physical), but we can’t reduce the former to the latter. Knowledge is thus not a species of belief, which is why it doesn’t come in degrees; but it does supervene on belief in the way articulated by the traditional definition. And intuitively, we have no wish to say that one can know a fact to one degree or another (just as we have no wish to say that one can refer to a thing to one degree or another), while we are more than happy to allow that propositions can be believed to this or that degree. Thus the factive theory of knowledge is consonant with the point that knowledge doesn’t come in degrees, while the doxastic theory of knowledge is inconsistent with that point. Still, there is a systematic dependence of knowledge on belief; it is just that the dependence is a matter of supervenience not analytic equivalence.  [3]

 

Colin McGinn   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  [1] This means that the concept of knowledge is left primitive by the traditional theory: we have not yet said what knowledge is (intrinsically, essentially).

  [2] See my paper, “Knowledge and Belief”.

  [3] Supervenience specifies sufficient conditions not necessary conditions, so it is consistent with it to suppose that there can be knowledge without belief. This is desirable, since there are convincing examples of knowledge without belief (some animal knowledge, some unconscious human knowledge). A mongoose might know (the fact) that a snake is nearby without having any belief to that effect, belief being a matter of reasons and rational deliberation not instinct or direct perception.

 

 

 

What the Mind Does: Internalization and Externalization

 

 

The concepts of internalization and externalization are found with some frequency in psychology. It is said that the child internalizes the surrounding culture, including moral and social norms (the same can be said of an adult transplanted into a hitherto alien culture). It is also said that the child internalizes the rules of grammar of the language he or she grows up to speak. In clinical psychology we hear that a person has internalized family conflicts or role models or patterns of response. On the other hand, psychoanalysts have suggested that people externalize their own psychological traits, as with classic projection; and it can be added that animism and anthropomorphism are instances of the same phenomenon. Linguists speak of public communicative language as the externalization of an (innate) internal language system.  [1] Art and technology are sometimes held to be externalizations of the mind. These are certainly suggestive ways of talking, but what do they really mean? How literally should they be taken? Can they be elevated into a general theory of the mind?

            As always the dictionary provides a useful starting point. The OED gives us this for “internalize”: “make (attitudes or behavior) part of one’s nature by learning or unconscious assimilation; acquire knowledge of (the rules of language)”. For “externalize” we have: “give external existence or form to; project (a mental image or process) onto a figure outside oneself”.  Merriam-Webster has: “to make external or externally manifest”. The idea of internalization is that something originally external to the mind is rendered part of the nature of what is internal to the mind: it was “out there” and now it is “in here”, shaping it, forming its inner architecture. Thus what was once merely the code of one’s society becomes one’s own inner code—a sort of cultural invasion has occurred (often unconsciously).  The language spoken by others is incorporated into one’s own symbolic faculty, made internal. The mind is evidently capable of this internalization operation, converting what is perceived externally into a feature of one’s interior landscape. In the case of externalization the governing idea is that what is originally inner is expressed outwardly: the external comes to have the form of the internal—it is the internal made manifest. The nature of the external thus reflects the nature of the internal. Evidently the mind is capable of this feat of externalization, converting mind into world, inner into outer. The internal is made external, as the external can be made internal. The mind pushes outward as it also pulls inward. Notice that this is not the same concept as the concept of causation: it is not merely that the external can cause the internal and the internal can cause the external; rather, the external can determine the nature of the internal and the internal can leave its imprint on the external. We might say that there is in both cases an “internal relation” between the inner and the outer: each side reflects the other. A sort of isomorphism obtains, as well as a kind of dependence. This is a strong relation, in which the mind is said to literally internalize what lies outside its boundaries, as well as literally to externalize what is within it. Clearly an exceptionally tight and intimate relationship is envisaged, a kind of overlapping of internal and external.

            It might be wondered whether others parts of nature can be said to internalize and externalize. The idea is not preposterous; indeed, the term “internalize” is used in biology to describe the cell pulling external material across its membrane and into its interior (“endocytosis”). The justification for using this term is obviously that a boundary exists across which certain items flow, so changing the nature of the entity they flow into. There is the internal landscape of the cell and there is its external environment, and the latter can penetrate the former, molding it in the process. I suppose we could extend the use of the term to feeding: the external in the form of food is taken in and converted into tissues of the body, shaping them—though here the idea of changing the nature of the body seems strained. But the abstract notion of an entity with boundaries being shaped by and shaping its environment, by dint of a transfer of elements, seems generally applicable. Even in physics and chemistry we could justify talking this way, though to my knowledge physicists and chemists don’t: the atom absorbs and expels energy, internalizing and externalizing a transferable ingredient; heat is absorbed into a system altering its behavior, also seeping out to alter the surrounding world; osmosis is the passage of molecules from inside a physical system to outside it (and vice versa). There is what is internal to an entity and what is external to it; and the activity of the entity, in conjunction with its environment, involves various kinds of internalization and externalization. We might, indeed, contrive a metaphysical system from this basic structure: The world is the totality of internalizations and externalizations. There are these entities called “monads” and they operate by internalizing what is around them and externalizing what is within them. They are not isolated atoms but essentially interacting entities whose nature is fixed by acts of internalization and externalization. There is a dialectic between internalization and externalization that defines the ontological structure of reality. We might even conjoin this metaphysical picture with panpsychism: the psychic units that constitute so-called physical reality internalize what exists around them and they also externalize themselves in the form of perceptible matter. The metaphysical possibilities are endless: history is the externalization of the internalized; God internalizes everything and his creation is the externalization of his nature; mind is matter internalized and matter is mind externalized…

            Putting that metaphysical flurry aside, we can focus on the mind and its capacity to engage in both sorts of operation. Clearly we must assume some sort of boundary in order to make sense of the concepts of internalization and externalization. The external must lie on the further side of this boundary in order to be capable of crossing it from elsewhere. The mind must be bounded by something or else there would be nothing external to it. This boundary could be conceived in many ways, depending on further ontological commitments: it might just be the boundary of the brain or the body, or it might be conceived immaterially. A dualist would suppose that the immaterial substance could internalize extended substance by that substance crossing an immaterial boundary—not presumably by actual spatial transfer but by some sort of extraction of form. Similarly, the mental substance could externalize itself by imparting its form to material substance: but not by itself becoming material. In the case of language the talk of externalization is motivated by the idea that both the internal language and its outer expression share their grammatical structure (and maybe lexicon), so that we can say that the internal structure is manifested in the structure of outer speech. Thus outer public language has a derivative structure determined by copying the original structure of the internal language (perhaps supplemented by other sources of structure). Likewise, if we thought that inner speech were the internalization of outer speech, we would suppose that the derivation goes the other way. On either view we have an isomorphism of grammatical structure. We don’t tend to think this way about knowledge in general, as if all knowledge is a kind of internalization of the outer—as if knowledge of the universe were the internalization of the universe. We internalize the rules of English, say, but we don’t internalize the planets (those rocky entities). But that may be a reflection of a misguided internalist view of the mind: wouldn’t an externalist say that (some) mental states are (partly) individuated by objects in the environment, so that it is acceptable to say that the mind internalizes the external world? On earth we internalize water (H2O) in our thoughts and meanings, while on twin earth we internalize retaw (XYZ). So we could in principle extend the idea of knowledge-as-internalization to the full range of knowledge, not just knowledge of language or cultural norms. We internalize objects and facts as well as rules and attitudes.  [2]

            Similarly for externalization: why should we not extend the idea of externalization further than is customary? Why not view all behavior as the externalization of the mind? An action is an intention externalized. Art and artifacts count as externalizations, so what about the actions that lead to them? The notion of expressionencourages this thought: we express our emotions in our body, and this expression is surely a form of externalization (consider facial expressions). There is a natural “fit” between inner feeling and its bodily expression, not merely a causal connection. Just as perception can be viewed as the internalization of objects, so action can be viewed as the externalization of desires (etc.). The mind takes in and it also gives out. It isn’t just that reasons cause actions; actions externalize reasons—embody them, lend them material form (consider a chess move). And it isn’t just that objects cause perceptions; perceptions internalize objects. The relation is a lot more intimate and internal than we have tended to suppose—not logical perhaps, but certainly structural.  [3] Maybe it is a general property of mind to be an internalizing externalizer. The mind absorbs things across its boundary and it extrudes things in the opposite direction. For instance, the mind internalizes the rules of grammar to achieve mastery of a particular language, but this mastery is externalized in actual speech. In the case of innate knowledge of the universal rules of grammar, there is no such internalization, since the knowledge is present ab initio; but there is still externalization as the internal language faculty hooks up with sensorimotor systems. It is natural to suppose that there exists an innate internal mental apparatus prior to any internalization of the environment, and that this apparatus interacts with the environment to lead to internalized knowledge; this composite system then interlocks with sensorimotor systems to make externalization possible—spoken language and maybe action in general (as well as art and technology). We have a transition from the internal to the internalized to the externalized. There are internal and external domains and there are operations that cross these boundaries, thus producing mixed domains of the internalized and the externalized. Not everything in the internal domain is internalized (we are not empiricists) and not everything in the external domain is externalized (we are not idealists): but there is a good deal of internalized and externalized stuff in the world—intersections of the internal and the external mediated by the operations of internalization and externalization.

            People speak of stimulus-response psychology and of computational psychology to characterize a general conception of how the mind works and what it does; we can likewise speak of internalization-externalization psychology (or I-E psychology) to capture the general conception of how the mind works we are exploring. This is quite a specific conception, incorporating as it does the idea that the mind is a device for internalization and externalization—not for mediating stimulus and response or for performing computations (though these ideas need not be regarded as simply false, just incomplete). It depicts the mind in a particular way—not just as an input-output device, but as something that performs a characteristic kind of operation of conversion. Not that the conversion operations in question are well understood or free of mystery; indeed, they are quite puzzling. For how is it possible to internalize the external or to externalize the internal? Isn’t this contradictory? It seems like a peculiar form of mental alchemy—yet it is evidently what happens. Nor can we draw comfort from those non-psychological analogues I mentioned earlier, because abstract similarity is not identity of mechanism: how the mind contrives to internalize and externalize is left unexplained. It is not just a matter of absorbing molecules across a membrane or emitting energy from an atom; these are specifically psychological processes—a sort of mimicry, perhaps, whereby the outer is converted to the inner and the inner is converted to the outer. It is not like inserting a marble into a box or ejecting a marble from a box, in which the ideas of internalization and externalization have literal spatial meaning; but it is not entirely unlike that either. It is as if the external world is inserted into the mind, or extruded from it. People speak of the extended mind; well, this is the externalized mind. Similarly, we can speak of the “internalized world” to capture the power of the mind to bring the world into its domain (the world extends beyond its own natural boundaries to take up residence in minds). The mind protrudes into the world in acts of externalization, but the world also protrudes into the mind in acts of internalization. Each visits the other’s territory, leaving its distinctive mark. That is the essence of the mental—internalizing and externalizing, crossing an interface.

            Let me illustrate how this conceptual framework applies by considering two unrelated topics: music and sense. Music is closely associated with the emotions, and this gives it a unique place in the operations of internalization and externalization. On the one hand, music is easily internalized, as if it is designed to be: we hear a tune with our outer ear and instantly it enters our inner musical landscape. Its emotional resonance plays a role in this ready internalization. On the other hand, audible music expresses inner feeling perfectly, so lending itself to the externalization of emotion—in the form of dancing, singing, playing an instrument, humming, etc. We internalize tunes and we externalize what is thus internalized. And there is an especially intimate connection between the internal and the external in the case of music: we repeat the external tune silently in our head, and we externalize our inner experience in forms that precisely mirror what is going on internally (notably when singing). The psychology of music is thus steeped in internalization and externalization, and would hardly be conceivable without them. In the case of sense, Frege supposed that senses are objective external entities, but he also supposed that they shape the very nature of thoughts: we internalize senses in such a way that they enter our cognitive landscape (the same could not be said of references as Frege conceived them). At the same time grasp of sense is externalized in public symbolic systems—these systems make sense manifest. So senses are both internalized and externalized—and this is essential to their identity, what they are. If we think of senses as existing in our environment (in some extended sense), then the task of thought is to internalize them; but once internalized they are available for externalization in language, so that language becomes sense externalized. That is the psychology of sense: first internalization, then externalization—internal absorption and external expression. And that is psychology generally: internalizing the world and then externalizing what has been made internal. It isn’t just that an outer stimulus elicits an overt response via an internal process, or that information flows from the environment into the brain and then out to behavior. Rather, the mind possesses a specific set of capacities that we call “internalization” and “externalization”; and these capacities deserve the names they have been given. If we want a single word to express this general conception, analogous to “behaviorism” and “computationalism”, we might choose “conversionism” for want of anything better.  [4]

 

Colin McGinn                 

 

 

  [1] This is the position taken by Chomsky: the primary instantiation of language is as an internal system connected initially to thought; only later is language hooked up to sensorimotor systems that produce a spoken communicative language. When that happens the internal system is externalized, i.e. its properties are transferred to an outer capacity. Outer language has structure because inner language has structure—the former is derivative from the latter. See Why Only Us, Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky (MIT Press, 2016).

  [2] I don’t say we should endorse this proposal, only that it is worth considering. An alternative would be to divide all knowledge into two classes: internalized knowledge and non-internalized knowledge. Then we could have debates about where given types of knowledge fall—what about knowledge of mathematics or ethics? Similarly, there will be a division between externalized facts about the world and non-externalized facts (which are presumably much more numerous, if we keep God out of it).

  [3] One approach would be that perception involves building a mental model of the perceived object, thus replicating its structure internally. Or we might go full externalist and insert the object itself into perceptual content, expanding the mind into physical space. And there are other approaches too that could be used to justify the word “internalize”.

  [4] I suppose we could try for something catchy like “int-ext psychology” or “outside-in theory”, but it might be best to stick with the more cumbersome description.