Bounds of Space

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Bounds of Space

The Kant-Strawson thesis is that all possible experience is spatial in character (Strawson calls it the “spatiality thesis”). That is, all appearances are spatial appearances—of extended things existing in an ordered unified Euclidian space separate from the mind. This is how experience makes things seem, even if they are not objectively (noumenally) that way. Then the claim is that we can make nothing else “intelligible to ourselves”—these are the bounds of sense (as opposed to nonsense). Nothing else is even meaningful (to us). This is a bad way to put the point: we can’t make the bat’s sonar experience “intelligible to ourselves” but that doesn’t mean that it (bat experience) is intrinsically unintelligible. It is merely a point about the limits of our imagination and hence knowledge, not about what is logically or conceptually or metaphysically possible. Given that ourexperience is always spatial, we might well not be able to understand any other form of experience, but it doesn’t follow that any such alien experience is impossible. And that is the philosophically interesting Kantian thesis, not the thesis that we are imaginatively limited in certain ways. The latter is a thesis about our cognitive powers not about the metaphysics of experience. So, let’s drop the offending formulation and speak simply of what is really possible, whether we can comprehend it or not. Is the spatiality thesis then true? There are two basic questions: (a) whether every instance of sense experience involves spatial representation, and (b) whether every aspect of an instance of experience is spatial in character. That is: does every experience have some spatial content, and is every aspect of experiential content spatial? The strongest Kant-Strawson thesis would be that every logically possible experience has spatial content and that every aspect of experiential representation is spatial. A weaker thesis would be that all experiences are spatial in some respect but that in other respects they are not spatial: for example, visual experience has spatial content (lines, volumes, shapes) but it also represents color, which is not itself a spatial attribute (I will come back to this).

It seems hard to deny that ordinary human visual experience has spatial content (surely the sense that Kant and Strawson were focussing on). There are, however, marginal cases that might provoke doubt, as with sudden flashes of light generated by the brain from within its own depths, or the kind of sensation we have when our eyes are closed in the dark. Could alien perceivers experience such visual sensations more systematically—a non-spatial world of formless color? Might the first color experiences in the womb represent color non-spatially? Certainly, they might not contain the full range of spatial attributes common to adult visual experience. The question seems debatable; our visual imagination of color seems relatively free of spatial ingredients, so maybe it would be possible to have a form of visual sense experience that proceeds without spatial representations, or has very attenuated ones. Anyway, the real challenge arises from the other human senses, not to mention animal senses that we don’t possess—particularly, smell, taste, and hearing (or electrical and magnetic senses in certain animals). Consider perception of pitch and sound intervals, of sweet and sour tastes, of fragrant and noxious smells: where is the space in all this? It may be that spatial concepts intrude on these sense modalities from elsewhere, but it is hard to deny that they are not intrinsically spatial. Couldn’t there be a being that experienced sounds, tastes, and smells but had no perception as of things extended in space—a space-blind perceiver? Even if the external stimulus was a spatial object, it wouldn’t follow that it was perceived as such. This kind of perception is really nothing like the seeing of extended objects with shapes and sizes. Vision and touch are space-oriented senses, but not so hearing, taste, and smell. Spatial ingredients are here contingent and adventitious. So, the Kant-Strawson thesis looks implausible as applied to all (actual and conceivable) senses. It is quite easy to “make intelligible to ourselves” the possibility of non-spatial experience; we have such experiences all the time, if not in unadulterated form. The core of the experience is space-neutral, space-oblivious. Size and shape are irrelevant, unrepresented.

A more difficult question concerns whether visual and tactile experience is wholly spatial. I will focus on the case of color. Color is certainly experienced as extended: it comes in patches and volumes. But is it a spatial attribute like shape and size? Nothing can be inferred about the space an object takes up from knowledge of its color. If an object is spherical, we can infer that it takes up a spherical quantity of space; but if it is red, we thereby know nothing about its spatial configuration—it doesn’t occupy a “red amount” of space. To be red is not to have a specific spatial attribute, unlike being spherical; it is not itself a spatial determination (to use Kant’s term). This is why it is not studied in geometry: it isn’t a type of figure or form; there are circles and rectangles but not “reds” and “greens” (how many sides do they have?). The concept of angle does not apply to colors. Colors are not modes of extension though they are distributed over extended objects. Perhaps this is not surprising given that colors are projected by the mind: for the mind is not itself an extended geometrical object. Somehow the mind spreads color on objects, but what it spreads is not a mode of space; it’s a bit like sensing a smell from every point of an object’s surface. There is no color already in objective things along with their spatial attributes; it is an imposition from outside. So, the complete spatiality of the objective physical world does not apply to color, which is a subjective contribution. Much the same point could be made about touch and warmth: warmth isn’t an objective spatial attribute but an imposed subjective projection. If this is right, then color and warmth are not themselves spatial features of things that enter into our perceptions of them; so, not every aspect of visual and tactile experience is spatial in nature (also consider brightness). The appearances are not exhausted by their spatial content; they have a different kind of content in addition to the spatial.

It might be said that this does not contradict the spatiality thesis, and that is perfectly correct. The thesis never maintained that only spatial content constitutes the appearances, just that it occurs in every experience. Also, color doesn’t crop up universally in sense experience, unlike space (allegedly). But it does allow us to formulate a new thesis that complicates the picture: we can say that visual experience necessarily incorporates both spatial and non-spatial content, given that color is essential to visual experience. It is true that color doesn’t occur in all sense experience, as space is alleged to, but it does occur in all visual experience, so it is a necessary visual universal. Accordingly, space is not as exceptional as Kant and Strawson make it sound, especially given that it doesn’t apply to all the senses. There isn’t a sharp opposition between space and other attributes of the kind alleged by the spatiality thesis; there is just what is more common and less common. It isn’t that space is the very “form of sensibility” while color is mere local variation with no necessity of its own. Space has no especially unique status among perceived qualities. Different aspects of experiential content are useful to the perceiver as ways of representing the world for various biological reasons, space being one of them; but space is not the real metaphysical essence of experience, the sovereign sine qua non. For some creatures, smell and sound might be the chief engines of survival, with space a distant second (living in the dark will not favor vision).

Strawson sometimes weakens the spatiality thesis to say only that an analogue of space is a necessary feature of all experience. This is very vague and open to accusations of vacuity, but it is a wise move on his part. It is too intellectualist to accommodate simple perceivers, and the emphasis on spatial concepts as constitutive of sensory content adds to that fault. Even when the thesis is restricted to human perceivers it gets things wrong because of statistically unusual humans—infants, the congenitally blind, those with certain sorts of brain damage. Perception is a lot more flexible and multifarious than some philosophers have allowed—a lot more independent of Euclid, Newton, and the Kantian Categories. How we think of the world in our abstract scientific theories is not the best guide to the way animals perceive it in their daily lives. To be sure, it is useful to perceive spatial relations, but many other things are also useful to perceive; and we don’t perceive space in the manner of a metaphysician. Perception is not Newtonian.[1]

[1] Was Kant so enamored of Newton’s physics that he wanted absolute Newtonian space to inhabit the human soul? Wouldn’t this bring the soul closer to God (infinite, absolute, immaculate)? Smell and taste don’t seem this elevated. We might think of infinite absolute space as God in nature, infiltrating the soul of man. So Kant may have dreamed. Here theology, physics, and metaphysics meet.

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Bounds of Sense

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Bounds of Sense

Quine once described Strawson as applying his “limpid vernacular” to the technicalities of logic (in a review of Strawson’s Introduction to Logical Theory). One might hope that he would do the same in exegesis of Kant in The Bounds of Sense. However, in that work we are treated to such tortuous locutions as “necessary conditions of the possibility of any experience of objective reality such as we can render intelligible to ourselves” (119): why not simply “necessary conditions of experience” and “intelligible”? We seek the necessary conditions of experience (adding “the possibility of” is redundant) and we want to know what kinds of experience are intelligible (whether we can “render” them “intelligible to ourselves” is another question, depending on our powers of self-directed persuasion). Further, what is meant by “experience” here? Strawson regularly alternates this word with “empirical knowledge”, including scientific knowledge; but these are different things, one perceptual, the other conceptual-propositional-cognitive (as in knowledge of scientific theories). It seems clear that he is mainly thinking of visual experience as delivered by adult human eyes, but is generalizing beyond that domain. Does he wish to include emotional experience, or olfactory, or ethical, or imaginative, or experience of pain and pleasure? The doctrine of the necessity of spatiotemporal content is clearly more convincing for the visual sense than these other types of experience (especially the spatial component), so we shouldn’t be lulled into accepting a perfectly general thesis based on one instance of it. And what kind of spatial content is deemed essential to experience as such—extension, ordering, continuity, dimensionality, unity, objectivity, infinity? Some experience might be weakly spatial (smell and taste) while other experience is more strongly spatial (looking into the distance on a bright clear day). Imaginative experience prescinds from space considerably, dispensing with spatial relations to other objects. Emotions have little to do with space compared to normal binocular vision. And some forms of vision are more spatially rich than other forms—think of the etiolated visual experience of closed eyes in the dark. The question is a lot messier than Strawson allows, much less clearly defined. Could we ask the same question equally of sensation, perception, sentience, appearance, seeming, consciousness? Might we not get different answers depending on what term we choose? The term “experience” is vague and general, so we don’t know quite what Strawson (channeling Kant) is considering. Is memory included—and what kind of memory? Is mathematical reasoning included? What about logical “experience”? We need more limpid vernacular to tie the question down, more ordinary language philosophy.

About one thing Strawson is crystal clear: Kant thinks that reality itself is not spatiotemporal and Strawson himself rejects that claim. The phenomenal world is deemed spatiotemporal in its essence, but the noumenal world is non-spatiotemporal in its essence, according to Kant. This doctrine is hard to take seriously, as Strawson indicates. How could Kant know this given that (as he thinks) we have no access to the nature of the reality that exists outside our minds? How can we use our sense experience to navigate the objective world if their essences are so different—doesn’t there have to be at least some kind of correlation? Why would we be designed (by God or nature) to represent reality so faultily? What possible reason could be given for removing things in themselves from space and time? The idea that space and time are “in us” but only in us is unmotivated, bizarre, and preposterous; and certainly not required by the Kantian apparatus of phenomenal space and time (intuitions, sensibility, the understanding, the categories, etc.). It may be that phenomenal space and noumenal space are not the same (Euclidian and non-Euclidian, say), but there has to be someveridical relation between them; denying this is gratuitous and disastrous. I would say that concrete, causal, law-governed reality is clearly spatiotemporal, necessarily so—we can make nothing else “intelligible to ourselves”. That is indeed why sense experience is spatiotemporally imbued (to the extent that it is): this is just a scientific fact, a fact of biology and evolution, of the body and brain. Animals experience the world spatiotemporally because that is the real nature of the world in which they have to survive.

So, we can say, lamely but limpidly, that objective reality is necessarily spatiotemporal and that sense experience is variously and to some degree spatiotemporal. There is no simple binary opposition here: animal sentience is spatiotemporal in many ways and to different degrees (possibly going down to zero). But what about language—meaning, linguistic sense? Curiously, Strawson says little about this in The Bounds of Sense(despite the pre-existence of Individuals). The answer again is mixed and unsystematic, even more so than in the case of sentience. True, we often speak of extended objects in space standing in spatial relations within a unified and ordered spatial manifold (what we call Space). But we also speak of things that are ambiguously and problematically related to space: states of consciousness, numbers, values. Reference is not a purely spatial act. Nor is syntax or grammar best defined in spatial terms. Sounds are not, in themselves and essentially, extended things. Senses are not laid out in space. Language has one foot in space, so to speak, but it also dallies with the non-spatial. Spatial reductionism is a misguided metaphysics. The real is not co-terminus with the extended. It is certainly not a necessary conceptual truth. Language is not, then, subject to Kantian requirements regarding space, even phenomenally. The Kantian project, pushed to extremes, is really an exercise in hyperbole, in which Strawson colludes (as befits an interpreter) but to which he does not wholly succumb. The idea that space is the general form of all our representations is a philosophical exaggeration, like many philosophical theories.[1]

[1] As to time, from the fact that all mental acts occur in time it doesn’t follow that they are of time—that time is an aspect of their content. All events occur in time, but it would be strange to say that they all represent time. It is also misleading to employ the term “spatiotemporal” uncritically: time and space are really very different things, and what holds of time might well not hold of space. Roughly speaking, time is more all-embracing than space. Not everything is space-like and not all mental representation is as of space. Certainly, we cannot derive the necessity of spatial content from the mere existence of the particular-general distinction, as Kant hoped.

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Anticipations

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Anticipations

Perusing a recent book on the cognitive psychology of number (Number Concepts by Richard Samuels and Eric Snyder), I was put in mind of my psychology M.A. thesis, entitled Empiricism and Nativism in Language and Mathematics, submitted in 1972 to Manchester University (when I was 22). In that thesis I brought together psychology, linguistics, and philosophy, arguing for a nativist position on the acquisition of mathematical knowledge. In particular, I applied Chomsky’s methodology and theoretical framework to the problem of mathematical knowledge acquisition. At the time there was nothing like this in the psychological literature, and I was quite conscious of the fact that I was doing something new and controversial, especially in adopting an interdisciplinary perspective. Indeed, I encountered some resistance to undertaking the project from the more orthodox members of the psychology department (nearly all of them)—what was I doing importing philosophy into psychology? I argued that it was necessary, in order to account for the acquisition of mathematical knowledge, to begin with an adequate analysis of the nature of mathematical truth, as Chomsky had argued that the same procedure was necessary in accounting for the acquisition of language. In effect, we need a metaphysics of number before we can frame theories of how number concepts are acquired—as we need an adequate theory of grammar before we can frame realistic theories of the child’s acquisition of language. We need a theory of the objects of knowledge before developing a theory of knowledge of those objects. Thus, an interdisciplinary perspective was required instead of the application of some general “learning theory”. Anyway, as I say, I was reminded of my thesis by reading a contemporary work in this area of psychology. And then it hit me: I invented cognitive science! I didn’t know it at the time—the term did not even exist back then—but the general outlines of the research program were clearly contained in my thesis. Specifically, the integration of psychology with other disciplines—not just brain science but philosophy of mathematics (along with linguistics). Nothing of my thesis was ever published, though my supervisor Professor John Cohen, made some efforts to interest a publisher (no dice). So, I missed my chance to be hailed as the originator of cognitive science (of course, there were other straws in the wind). My thesis really was a combination of psychology and philosophy, with Chomsky-style linguistics taken as model.

I also read recently Michael Dummett’s book Origins of Analytical Philosophy (1993), which undertakes to compare Frege and Husserl as founders of twentieth century philosophy. Dummett is interested in the fact that these two philosophers had convergent concerns and yet gave rise to divergent schools of thought. This put me in mind of my first published article, entitled “Mach and Husserl”, in the British Journal of Phenomenology(1972). The article was based on my undergraduate dissertation while a psychology student; the editor of the journal, Wolfe Mays, was my teacher and suggested publishing it. In it I compared the two philosophers, noting their clear similarities but divergent offspring. Mach was an early positivist and devotee of “sensations”, while Husserl founded phenomenology and was a devotee of consciousness and its intentional acts. Yet the former gave rise to positivist eliminative behaviorism while the latter spawned existentialism and the centrality of the conscious subject. Dummett says nothing at all about Mach in his book, though Husserl refers to him approvingly. So, it seems that we were both interested in the early days of twentieth century philosophy and Husserl’s role in forming it, and in the divergence that ensued from similar beginnings. I wrote my article over twenty years before Dummett wrote his book and with a very similar aim in mind (except my focus was more on the history of psychology). In a certain sense, then, I anticipated him, though we discussed different personnel. I think, in fact, that Mach was a good deal closer to Husserl than Frege, and arguably had a bigger impact on the course of twentieth century philosophy than Frege (he led to logical positivism). We find no analogue of Husserl’s preoccupation with consciousness in Frege, while Mach was clearly heavily into consciousness. I would say myself that the three of them were the principal architects of twentieth century philosophy, with a little help from Russell and Wittgenstein down the road.

Let me observe that when I applied to Oxford to study philosophy (in 1972), having already written my M.A. thesis and published my Husserl article, it was held against me (by R.M. Hare) that I had done so, these being deemed not fit subjects for a philosophy graduate student at Oxford to be interested in. This was a somewhat narrow and shortsighted decision, if I may be forgiven for saying so—and I was interested in more conventional Oxford-type topics too. After all, I had invented cognitive science and anticipated one of Oxford’s most celebrated philosophers before being admitted to the B.Phil.! Oh well. I did win the John Locke Prize a year or so later, though, so it all worked out in the end I suppose.[1]         

[1] In retrospect it all seems to me pretty hilarious now, though scary. At present I can’t even find my M.A. thesis and I don’t think I have a copy of my 1972 article.

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Message from Rebecca Goldstein

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Rebecca gave me permission to publish this.

 
One of the bright spots in these bleak days gets delivered to me regularly in Colin McGinn’s blog: brief and beautifully composed philosophical pieces on an astonishingly wide number of topics, many of which, I’m pretty sure, have never before been considered from a philosophical point of view. From the most technically analytic to the most expansively existential, he has something original to say. Colin McGinn is roaming freely in philosophical terrain, and it’s really something to watch.  
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The Making of a Philosopher (Part Two)

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The Making of a Philosopher (Part Two)

The following is a sequel of sorts to my The Making of a Philosopher (2002). Like that work, this is to be an intellectual memoir, not a marital, medical, musical, or muscular one—a memoir of the mind. It’s about what has gone on in my head.

I originally applied to university to study economics. This seemed like a practical subject, destined to provide employment, and I was already taking an A-level in it (for which I subsequently obtained an A). My strong subjects in school were mathematics and English (not too much memorization), and economics combined the two nicely. I might easily have become a professional economist (I still take an interest in the subject). But I happened to read some Freud and found it fascinating, so I switched to psychology in my applications. This subject too would lead to gainful employment, possibly in the educational field (I had no thoughts of an academic career). I was trying to be sensible, but not bored; after all, it is your whole life we are talking about. This occurred around 1968, a momentous year on the world stage. I therefore studied psychology at Manchester University, obtaining my degree in 1971 (B.A., First Class), followed by an M.A. in psychology in 1972. Philosophy formed a small part of my undergraduate degree: an introductory course on Plato and Sartre and a history and philosophy of science course. I also did some independent reading in philosophy, but nothing like what a student of philosophy might undertake; I was woefully undereducated in that regard. Nevertheless, I ended up studying philosophy at Oxford on the B.Phil. in 1972 (long story, recounted in my aforementioned book). That was a considerable challenge, because everyone else on the course had a substantial (and exceptional) undergraduate education in philosophy, of a kind alien to my own undergraduate acquaintance with the subject (Husserl and Adolph Grunbaum mainly). I had a lot of catching up to do, to put it mildly. I am surprised I came out the other end in one piece.

In 1974 I began my first philosophy job at University College London, after a mere two years of studying philosophy (four years of psychology before that). I didn’t teach philosophy of mind and made no use of my two degrees in psychology (including a good deal of experimental psychology). I mainly taught philosophical logic and philosophy of language (my first lecture course was on truth). I was very conscious of the fact that my philosophical education was patchy, embarrassingly so, and that I had never had the chance to do any serious research in philosophy; I could really have used a couple of years on a JRF or something similar. From then on, I was on the academic treadmill: tutorials, lectures, committees, writing for the journals, book reviewing—the usual routine. I never had much time to immerse myself more widely and deeply in philosophy, though I tried as best I could. And so it continued for the next 38 years! I got through my career, but always going from pillar to post, always rushed, pressured, tired, anxious, barely managing to keep my head above water. I never had the opportunity to just let my mind go where it wanted to go, read whatever I wanted to read, write whatever I felt like writing, think about whatever I liked. I never had that kind of philosophical leisure. I suppose I could say that I had no philosophical freedom. I never had that couple of years to develop my philosophical mind under conditions of unimpeded reflection. I got used to it, but it always grated, rankled, irritated. I imagine it must be much the same for many people: not enough time, not enough energy, too many obligations.

Then I retired (2013). Everything suddenly changed. The pressure was off. The treadmill had been discarded. No more teaching, no more department work, precious few invitations. Each day was a free day. The year ahead was not mapped out by the demands of a university schedule. No more breaking off a train of thought because a lecture had to be delivered the next day. The immediate result was an uptick of energy and concentration: no more teaching fatigue, no more interruptions, no more having to show up for meetings of one kind or another (supervisions, office hours, department meetings, etc.). My time was my own. Let me repeat that, because it’s important: My time was my own. I could do with it whatever my heart desired; I was subject to no temporal demands (Do this! Do that!). I was thus able to immerse myself in philosophical thinking, reading, and writing without external impositions—for the first time in my life (I’m not counting childhood). This produced a qualitative change in my state of mind, my philosophical consciousness, my very existence. I could read all the things I never had time to read, think without distraction for days on end, weeks, months, years. It has been a kind of bliss, foreign to my previous existence, a rebirth of sorts. And not only philosophy: I could read all the literature and science I ever wanted to read, which also contributes to one’s philosophical development. Writing becomes a pleasure not a torment, because there isn’t that nagging feeling that you will have to break off soon in order to fulfill your professional duties. You don’t have to quit in mid-sentence, mid-thought. Can you imagine? Being a professor uses up a lot of energy—have you noticed that?—and this energy could be deployed in other pursuits. To retire is to be reborn (but don’t leave it too late). I also don’t feel that I have to sacrifice other aspects of my life to the academic treadmill, including personal relationships (not to mention sport, music, etc.). Apart from anything else, life becomes a lot more enjoyable.

But the main point I want to make, reporting on my own case (I am still a psychologist, remember), is that in this phase of my life I have achieved a degree of breadth and depth in philosophy that I would never otherwise have achieved. I would even say that I have become over the last ten years a different kind of philosopher. I wish I could characterize this exactly; it has to do with gaining a larger perspective, an ease of thought, a facility of expression (writing philosophy well takes years, decades, of effort). I can just see further.  So, I think of this phase of my mental life as a new philosophical life; I am not the same person philosophically. There was a time when I was a philosophical novice, a time I was an apprentice philosopher, then a time of professional maturity, and now a time not of advanced age or twinkly wisdom but of fresh growth, of new beginnings, of excitement and exhilaration. I could call it creative, but that doesn’t quite hit the nail on the head: it is more a matter of discovery, mastery, arrival. I could almost call a sequel to my old book The Making of a New Philosopher. It isn’t something I ever anticipated.

Of course, there is an irony in all this, a bitter irony one might say, over which I have no desire to dwell. I will put it as abstractly as possible. I am concerned with inner psychology not external circumstances. First, and obviously, there is this blog, the fruit of innumerable hours of quietly intense lucubration. It must be a couple of thousand pages by now. This has been my preferred mode of philosophical expression during this period of personal renaissance—short, to the point, uncluttered, unbound. It is to be noticed that this material has not found its way into print, for several reasons I won’t go into. I feel fortunate that such a method of publication now exists, or else my inner world might not have made it into the outer world. I like what I have written, more so than before. But my inner world has been removed from the outer world of academic philosophy, producing a strange schism in my self-consciousness. It’s not exactly Socrates or Galileo or Russell; it is more a kind of intramural etiolation (here goes the abstraction). We might call it blank-slating, oblique erasure, identity removal. Of course, I still have good friends at the highest levels of philosophical (and other) achievement, whose names I will not mention (you can guess the reasons), so I am by no means cut off from professional contacts; and it’s true that my geographical location increases the degree of professional estrangement. Still, I feel as if nothing I say will ever be received as it once was. And, oddly enough, I don’t much care: my inner world has eclipsed my outer world—that academic carapace the professional professor carries around with him or her has been shed. My inner world has so expanded that it reaches to my subjective horizon. There has been a metamorphosis: I have become a different kind of being, curiously aloof, weirdly autonomous. It is a kind of brimming isolation, supercharged solitude. The banal life of the professional academic has been abolished, to be replaced by a peculiar kind of originality—the reborn corpse, the retired youth, the liberated prisoner. I have a paradoxical duality, the flourishing failure. And I kind of like it. My intellectual world is a world of my own creation with little extraneous intrusion.[1]

[1] I do seek out, and receive, regular feedback from my philosophical friends, so it isn’t that I rely solely on my own judgment. I am not some quivering recluse stewing in his own juices, not a bit of it.

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