Dear Professor McGinn,

Thank you very much for your kind reply. It truly means a great deal to me.

I also want to express how honored I am that you shared both of my letters on your blog. It is a privilege to be featured in a space that reflects your thinking and writing. I very much hope that the long-form interview I am preparing with you will become a work that you, too, will take pride in—and that perhaps it may be something you will want to share with your readers just as generously.

As you mentioned in your message, I was especially struck by the timing: today, quite coincidentally, I began reading your book Sport. So yes, I would very much like to speak with you about your sporting and musical interests. In fact, I would like to speak with you about everything. You are one of the rare philosophers with whom one feels that everything can be talked about freely. I feel deeply honored to have this opportunity, and I owe you a great debt of gratitude for making it possible.

Thank you again for everything. I very much look forward to speaking with you soon.

Warmest regards,

Uğur Polat

Dear Dr Polat,

It is shaping up very well, I see. I have put both your letters on my blog for readers’ information. I hope we get a chance to talk about my sporting and musical interests as well. I’m not sure what collaborative work you have in mind.

All my best,

Colin

Trauma

For “trauma” the OED gives us “a deeply distressing experience; emotional shock following a stressful event”. The word comes from the Greek for “wound”; in medicine it means “physical injury”. These words are all on the button. Not just distressing but deeply distressing; a certain type of experience not just an external event (there is something it is like to be traumatized); an emotional shock, sudden and surprising, not just an episode; causing a wound akin to physical injury (like losing a limb) not just a bruise. When subject to trauma the person is traumatized—changed, internally altered, sometimes extremely. I experienced three traumas in a row: professional, personal, and medical. I don’t want to go over the gory details; I want to draw some general conclusions. What is the meaning of trauma? What does it do to the psyche? It is an assault on the self, but it doesn’t kill you (though it can lead to suicide); you have to live with it (it has its own life). It becomes your daily companion. You wake up with it writhing inside you and you go to sleep at night with it still there; you may dream about it constantly. It is forceful and dominating. It causes withdrawal, distrust, uncertainty—you feel that anything might happen at any time, for no reason. In particular, it alters your attitude to other people: you lose confidence in people. It is like losing confidence in your body in serious illness: you feel let down by what you took for granted. Your body becomes your enemy not your friend, as other people become enemies not friends. You seek ways to minimize it, but you know it will never go away: this is now your life, your new reality. It won’t heal (hence deep). Other distressing experiences become harder to deal with—the death of a friend or pet. You have to monitor your state of mental health and not overburden yourself. Unfortunately, this means that you have less space and time for others: you become more self-centered. This is not good. An ill person must focus on his or her own well-being, neglecting other people; so it is with an emotionally traumatized person. There isn’t much that is positive about it. The feeling is sharp and raw, and the associated behavior can be abrupt and impatient. The traumatized individual needs to be given some slack; he is not what he once was. He belongs to another world now. It is not surprising that violence can result, verbal or physical. Not only do you not suffer fools gladly; you don’t suffer them at all.

The most interesting question to me is whether trauma brings new knowledge (in general trauma is not interesting). Does the traumatized person know things the untraumatized don’t? I think the answer is a tentative yes, but not in the cliched sense that it makes you more empathetic or thankful for small things. Rather, it gives you knowledge of the precariousness of human existence: things are going along swimmingly and then suddenly, shockingly, you are wounded deeply, mortally. Your life feels under threat, literally or figuratively. Your normal equilibrium is destroyed. Someone or something is trying to kill you—mentally or physically. They are removing your life support. The world is out to get you and it will not stop. It knows no reason or compassion or human decency; it is a killing machine. The person you once were is no more, just fragments remain. It is a kind of negative metamorphosis: from strong and healthy to crippled and sick. Cancer is a good analogy: it invades you, assaults you, reduces you to a miserable state. It engulfs and cancels. It traumatizes the body and the mind. Other types of psychological trauma also ferociously assail you—they want you dead. But you aren’t dead—you are a living vessel of psychic ruin. Trauma is all about death in one way or another—grief, sorrow, loss. So, what you learn is that death is waiting its opportunity, that it is just around the corner, lurking, unsmiling. Trauma is all about personal destruction. That’s why the death of a loved one can be so traumatizing; in some cases that loved one is yourself. If you knowingly traumatize someone, you are knowingly killing them—psychologically, spiritually. It is soul murder. I think it is good that the concept now exists and is routinely employed, because the phenomenon is only too real. There should really be a whole taxonomy of trauma, ranging from minor to annihilating. People should talk about their traumas, share them, have trauma parties. Trauma therapy should be free of charge. Trauma education should be mandatory. Trauma should be respected. There should be trauma nurses. You may learn something you didn’t know before by being made subject to it, though you may wish you never acquired this piece of knowledge. Hell, there should be a trauma philosophy.[1]

[1] Isn’t hell a place of endless trauma as well as endless torment? Torture causes pain now and trauma later. Battle trauma is the most obvious case, with a visible cause, but trauma comes in many forms, many not visible. Memory is integral to it—the vivid recollection of particularly awful experiences. If trauma could be weaponized, it would be (and has been in some cases).

Ontological Rationalism

Ontological rationalism is the view that the world is intrinsically intelligible.[1] Roughly, the world is intelligible if and only if it obeys laws with some kind of necessity; it is unintelligible if it is completely random, contingent, chaotic. An unintelligible world is one in which anything can happen at any time, e.g., night falling if you blink on a particular Wednesday but an explosion occurring if you blink the next day. Geometry is intelligible; astrology is not (or pick your favorite pseudoscience or fantasy world). Philosophers and scientists of the seventeenth century came to feel that Aristotelian metaphysics was not intelligible; by contrast, mechanism was intelligible. Machines are intelligible, but not substantial forms. Thus, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Boyle, Newton, Hume, and many others advocated mechanism as a theory of the physical world: they were all ontological rationalists. The world works according to laws concerning extended corpuscular objects in motion. Locke and Hume were epistemological empiricists but ontological rationalists (they didn’t think that physical reality consisted of impressions and ideas). They thought that mechanism was the best theory available as a description of the physical universe, rendering it intelligible and rationally organized. The question I want to ask is whether these philosophers were ontological rationalists about the mind: were they, and did they intend to be, ontological rationalists about knowledge in particular? Did they think their epistemological empiricism was a form of ontological rationalism? If so, were they right so to think?

Presumably, they did think the mind is intelligible—a place of rational order. It would be strange to insist on the intelligibility of the physical world but admit that the mental part of reality is intrinsically unintelligible. They thought that knowledge is subject to a rational theory of some sort—indeed, they thought they possessed such a theory (as did Descartes). But they didn’t think that the mind is subject to the same theory as body—the mechanistic theory of composite extended objects in motion. They didn’t think you could apply Newton’s laws of motion to the mind (Hobbes is the exception, being a materialist). Their ontology consisted of impressions and ideas, not chunks of matter; they spoke of deriving ideas from impressions, not of motion through space. They didn’t announce that ideas move through space in a straight line unless deflected by a countervailing force. The question, then, is whether their actual theory provides an alternative kind of rationalist ontology: is it perhaps mechanistic if not mechanical? Is it like physical mechanism? This is not an easy question to answer, but I think the answer is no, despite the way the theory is presented: empiricism is not a rationalistic theory of the mind—of the way knowledge is acquired and what it is. But it will turn out that in this respect it isn’t really all that different from the mechanistic theory of matter: both are at best approximations to a fully rationalist ontology.

The first law of empiricism is that all ideas are copies of impressions: ideas derive from impressions by a process of (imperfect) duplication—faint copies, but still recognizably the same. Bodies tend to retain their motion (at rest or moving); impressions tend to retain their qualitative character as they morph into ideas (blue impressions don’t produce red ideas). Just as all motion comes from other motion or an impelling force, so all ideas come from antecedent impressions. There are necessary laws at work in both cases—hence true generalizations. Similarly, just as bodies are made up of parts, down to minute corpuscles, so ideas are made up of parts, down to their simplest components (mental corpuscles). The entities and processes are analogous but not identical. But—and this is crucial—there is no geometry to back up the laws and processes alleged. There is thus no logical deduction; instead, there is mere plausible assertion. How do impressions produce ideas—by what mechanism? We are not told; not by contact, to be sure. The idea is magically created from the impression (we are inclined to think of colors fading in sunlight over time). But isn’t the impression intrinsically inert—why should it spawn ideas (images) at all? Dabs of paint don’t spontaneously generate faint copies of themselves! Couldn’t there be impressions that lazily refuse to copy themselves in attenuated form? Impressions can come and go and leave no residue behind. Isn’t this all rather rabbit from a hat? Do we need to resort to God to explain how impressions lead to ideas, given that they lack the power to do it themselves in a quasi-mechanical way? And how exactly do ideas combine to form complex ideas—by what force or mechanism do they achieve this feat? Are they adhesive in some way? Is this a weird form of gravitational attraction? Can they break apart? It is really nothing like material composition. What kind of machine is made up of idea parts? Also, what is this notion of a tabula rasa? We are told the mind is like a blank slate or empty cabinet, but this is just metaphor—what is the actual nature of this mental vacuity? How are ideas inscribed on it? Is there some kind of mental ink? We are swimming (drowning) in physical metaphors, producing illusions of intelligibility. We really have no idea what is going on in the mind, intelligibly, when knowledge is acquired, according to the empiricist theory—nothing analogous to physical mechanics anyway. There is no Principia Epistemologica analogous to Newton’s Principia Mathematica. The empiricists may have intended to produce a theory of mind like the mechanical theory of matter, but they failed in that laudable endeavor; so, they failed to make good on their ontological rationalism in relation to the mind and knowledge. It’s all metaphor and hand-waving, no better than the old Aristotelianism. If this were all there is to it, the mind would not be an intelligible part of reality; it would be nothing like the (supposed) transparent machine envisaged by the new mechanists. The empiricist mind is not a geometric mechanism, or even a simulacrum of one.

Now, Locke did not believe that the mechanism of his day provided the complete and final answer to the mystery of nature. He thought cohesion and solidity were left unexplained. What he believed is that it provided the best available model for what a science of nature should look like—faint glimmerings of the truth perhaps. I don’t doubt that Hume thought the same, given his views on Newton (“mysteries of nature” etc.). Thus, Locke was deep down a skeptical agnostic about the nature of matter: mechanism was on the right lines but not the final story. Of course, he was right about this, as the future of physical science showed (electromagnetism etc.). Mechanism was not in fact the sought-for scientific vindication of philosophical ontological rationalism. But he didn’t take the same skeptical view of his own theory of the mind. That is, he didn’t see that his official theory of knowledge had serious gaps and weaknesses, being at best part of the truth—glimmerings but not a final theory. He should have been a cautious and modest empiricist, not the confident and rash empiricist he comes across as. He was so anxious to defend his empiricist principles that he forgot his ontological rationalism: he should have been a double mysterian. Matter is a mystery, but so is mind. Motion is a mystery, but so is knowledge. Empiricism should have been offered as a first approximation, a stab in the dark, just like mechanism—the best we have managed to come up with so far. He should have said, “My hunch is that all knowledge, or nearly all, comes from experience; but I don’t have much idea how, and I certainly don’t have a worked-out intelligible theory of how it happens.” He could then have gone on to attack the rival theory of epistemological rationalism. But he was an over-confident skeptic, an agnostic true believer, when it came to his own theory of the knowing mind (same for Hume and later empiricists). You can’t really be an ontological rationalist and a committed dogmatic empiricist in the classic mold.

I will now say a few words about another problem with empiricism that I have never seen discussed. It has a certain brutish punch in the solar plexus quality to it. Can empiricism explain the knowledge it purports to express? What I mean is this: empiricism is supposed to be a theory that we know to be true, but can the theory be known to be true according to empiricist principles? The theory employs the concepts of impression and idea, and it proposes a law of idea generation. Given that the theory consists of ideas, these need a basis in antecedent impressions. Thus, the theory needs an idea of impressions, an idea of ideas, and an idea of the relation of idea generation. This means we need an impression of impressions, an impression of ideas, and an impression of idea generation. Where do these impressions come from? Not from the senses: we have no visual impression of impressions or visual impression of ideas or visual impression of idea generation—we don’t see impressions and ideas and the relation between them. Evidently, then, we must get these ideas by reflection on our own consciousness. But are we conscious of having an impression of impressions or of ideas or of idea generation? What is an impression of an idea? We know we have ideas, but do we have impressions of ideas? That’s a funny sort of creature, is it not? Isn’t it under suspicion of not existing? But unless it exists the knowledge that empiricism is true can’t exist, according to empiricism. So, the empiricist theory of knowledge cannot explain knowledge of itself. It needs one too many impressions. And are we to think that an impression of an idea can lead to the idea of an idea? Do we extract the idea of an idea from the impression an idea creates while existing in our consciousness? Isn’t this total mythology? And what about our supposed knowledge that all ideas derive from impressions—do we have impressions of this derivation occurring in our consciousness? Have you ever felt an impression causing an idea? You know impressions can cause memories in the form of images, but do you ever have an impression of this occurring? I don’t, and neither does my cat (I asked him). So, we ought not to have knowledge of any such thing, if empiricism is true. Rationalism can explain such knowledge—it comes from innate ideas—but empiricism runs into trouble with the question. We have more ideas than empiricism can explain (e.g., the missing shade of blue, necessity, the self, etc.). It turns out that the theory itself needs more ideas that it can explain; in particular, it needs an inner sense along with associated impressions, such as impressions of ideas (images). What would a sensation of an image be (if not the image itself)? How would this sensation give me the idea (concept) of an image? Do my thoughts give me images of thoughts via some sort of impression of them? Ditto for desires, emotions, intentions, etc. Would it be possible to have impressions of ideas and yet not form an idea of ideas? None of these questions is so much as raised by empiricists, and yet they are crucial to the question of whether empiricism is knowable according to its own tenets. If empiricism is true, it is not knowably true. That is logically possible, but not anticipated by its defenders.[2]

[1] For some serious background see Michael Ayers, Locke: Epistemology and Ontology (1991), especially volume II, part II, “God, Nature and the Law of Nature”. I use some of his terminology as well as his historical scholarship. I have never read a better book on the history of philosophy.

[2] The hold of empiricism on the philosophical mind is itself something of a mystery: we readily fall for the theory, but its problems are manifold and central. Is this because the correct theory is far from our comprehension? We fall for empiricism because nothing else occurs to us as remotely cognizable. Better to believe something than nothing. And empiricism is not completely wrong. The problem of knowledge is like the mind-body problem in this respect. Empiricism is the logical analogue of dualism—both are natural (inevitable?) errors.

Kinds of Kind

Kinds are of many kinds. Sortals are of many sorts. We should not assimilate one to another. Some kinds are obscurely defined. My question concerns mental kinds—what kind of kind are they? First, consider chemical and physical kinds, such as heat, water, and light. The modern theory of these is well known: they are empirically discovered natural kinds with a hidden real essence; the terms denoting them are indexically introduced (see Kripke and Putnam). We can identify these kinds with molecular motion, H2O, and streams of photons, respectively. They are what heat, water, and light really are—objectively, essentially. They are mind-independent and naturally bounded. They are structural, compositional, and corpuscular. For short we could call them “structural kinds”. They contrast with what can be called “phenomenal kinds”: kinds that are defined entirely by appearance not hidden structure. Color kinds would be an example (or color-appearance kinds if you are partial to physicalism about colors). Sensations are clearly phenomenal kinds. Accordingly, sensations are not defined by a hidden real essence that can come apart from sensory appearance. The connection between sensations and brain states is not like the connection between heat and molecular motion; the connection is (apparently) contingent. Therefore, sensation terms are not semantically like terms for structural kinds: appearance cannot come apart from reality in their case. The principle of unity is not a hidden structure but a phenomenal appearance; there is no indexical pointing to a hidden essence. So, it is wrong to assimilate sensation kinds to chemical and physical kinds—semantically, conceptually, and ontologically. They are both natural kinds not artificial kinds, but they are unified differently; their individuation follows different rules.

Does this cover mental kinds, concepts, and words? Is mental individuation entirely phenomenal? That seems doubtful, but what other individuation conditions might there be? Two ideas spring to mind: function and causality. Mental states have a function in the life of the organism; they are biological. Two mental states belong to the same kind if and only if they have the same function. We determine what kind of mental state a state is by ascertaining its biological function. Connectedly, mental states have causal powers—these also help to fix the mental kind. It is the same with organ kinds: they have a function and a causal role (as well as a physiological structure). Biological species kinds operate according to their own rules: here evolutionary origin matters, as do phenotype and genotype. They don’t have phenomenal criteria of identity, though we do need to take account of gross anatomy (as well as internal physiology and genetic endowment). Interbreeding is often supposed a necessary and sufficient condition of species identity. Species don’t really have a function, but types of behavior figure in determining a species. It is clear that they are not simple structural kinds like water, heat, and light. Their classificatory principles are more complex, more varied. Thus, we can say that we have three basic kinds of kind: structural-compositional, phenomenal-functional-causal, and phenotypic-genetic-originative. I haven’t talked about mathematical or ethical or aesthetic kinds, which have their own rules; I am limiting myself to natural kinds in a narrower sense. There is obviously considerable variety even here; it would be wrong to take all kinds to obey the same individuating principles. It used to be that philosophers assimilated chemical and biological kinds to phenomenal kinds, stressing nominal essence; it would be equally wrong to assimilate mental kinds to chemical and biological kinds. Taxonomy is not a homogeneous science. Real essences come in different forms.

In the case of mental kinds, we might feel a sense of incompleteness: have we really got to the heart of the matter? First, how are the three elements related? Is there anything deeper that unifies the phenomenal, functional, and causal? Second, is there a missing ingredient? Is there something about mental kinds that we just don’t know and which helps fix their identity? A panpsychist will presumably think so, given that macro mental kinds depend on micro mental kinds: but we have no knowledge of those micro mental kinds. Also, anyone of mysterian tendencies will wonder if there is some hidden property of the mind or brain that contributes to mental individuation; it may not play the decisive role played by hidden real essence for structural kinds, but it could be a factor in the overall package of individuating conditions. It will no doubt be closely connected to the phenomenal, functional, and causal, but it will require a different conceptual articulation. Thus, we may need to recognize a mysterious element in the determination of mental kinds, possibly having to do with intentionality and logical transitions (many mental states have a logical role as well as a causal role). The main point I want to make is that kinds are of several kinds and we shouldn’t take one kind to be paradigmatic. In particular, not all natural kinds are structural kinds, like chemical and physical kinds.

This has implications for cross-kind connections, especially causal and nomological connections. Suppose a kind from one group causally interacts with a kind from another—as it might be, mind and matter. That will involve one kind of kind interacting with another kind of kind, e.g., tasting water. There might be physical laws relating water (H2O) to physical processes in the body, but it wouldn’t follow that there are (or must be) psychophysical laws, since gustatory kinds are individuated differently from chemical kinds. The same chemical kind may taste differently to different organisms, and different chemical kinds may taste the same. The different kinds are likely to be irreducible to each other, given their different conditions of individuation. How could you reduce mental kinds, individuated as described above, to physical kinds individuated as theyare? Wouldn’t you lose the whole essence? Mental kinds are fixed phenomenally, functionally, causally, and possibly mysteriously; so how can they be identical to physical kinds that are defined by corpuscular structure and composition? The kinds of nature just don’t line up this way. To put it differently, a language comprised only of terms for structural kinds is impoverished compared to a language that includes terms for mental kinds (also biological kinds). You can’t reduce kinds to kinds of different kinds.[1]

[1] This paper goes back to an old paper of mine, “Mental States, Natural Kinds, and Psychophysical Laws” (1978). The background includes Locke, Davidson, Kripke, Putnam, Fodor, Nagel, and others. I now think that talk of natural kinds as defined by a hidden real essence is misleading; rather, there are varieties of natural kinds not all of which are so definable. Biological and mental kinds are natural kinds (not man-made), but they are defined by other criteria. This is the root of irreducibility to physical facts and psychophysical irregularity (lack of “strict laws”).