Oliver Sacks’ Fabrications
Oliver Sacks’ Fabrications
I have just come across an article by Rachel Aviv in the December 15 edition of the New Yorker about Oliver Sacks’ dubious case histories, especially in Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Apparently, Sacks acknowledged that he made things up in his private journals, to which Aviv had access; I refer you to her article for details. As it happens, I reviewed Hat in the London Review of Books in 1986, explicitly raising the question of fabrication—exaggeration, embellishment, gilding the lily. You can read a section from my review below. At the time I wrote the review (I was 36) I had not met Sacks, but later in New York we became friends and stayed friends, despite some initial friction over my critical review. Now I see my well-founded suspicions amply confirmed. He never admitted to me that my strictures were justified, though he didn’t deny them either. He did, in later work, avoid this kind of inaccuracy, as well as the rather gushing nature of his prose. I subsequently reviewed both Musicophilia (New York Review of Books) and On the Move (Wall Street Journal) and found nothing similar to complain about. But this is not the main point of the present piece, which concerns the author of the article in question. No mention is made of my review in her long article, though others are cited as having comparable concerns. Why? It’s not as if my review appeared in an obscure place, or was not clear, or was by someone without credentials (I was an Oxford professor at the time). I find it hard to believe Aviv knew nothing of my review; if so, she didn’t dig very deep journalistically. Shouldn’t she have cited me, since I raised these concerns long ago, and independently of other people? And why didn’t she? Another suspicion recommends itself: it’s because of you-know-what—the disrepute cast upon my name in the last twelve years. I would like to believe this isn’t so, but my suspicions were well-founded before. So, Rachel, did you know about my review or not? If not, I suggest you read it and make the appropriate citation; if you did, why the lack of citation?
Book Reviewer Released
Book Reviewer Released
I am a recovering book reviewer. I used to do it all the time; now not so much, if at all. It started when I was twenty-two in Manchester, England, when I wrote a couple of reviews for the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology at the request of Wolfe Mays, the editor, who was my teacher (one on Sartre, the other on materialism). It then went on for forty years non-stop. I wouldn’t say I was an addict, but I found it hard to decline an invitation, for a variety of reasons. I don’t know exactly how many book reviews I have written; I estimate about eighty. I have a whole book devoted to a subset of my reviews (forty of them), Minds and Bodies. I can’t think of another philosopher who has written as many, except perhaps Tom Nagel. Here is a list of the publications I have written for: Philosophical Review, Journal of Philosophy, Mind, Nous, Philosophia, Nature, New Scientist, New Republic, New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Times Higher Education Supplement, New York Times, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Slate, Guardian. It felt like a full-time job; imagine all the original philosophy I could have produced had I not frittered my life away book reviewing! It made me a lot of enemies and not many friends (people hate being criticized—I could tell you stories).
But it all came to an end twelve years ago save for a couple of reviews I did for the WSJ (on the octopus and Oliver Sacks) and a few for the NY Review of Books (under Robert Silvers). I don’t lament it. It was a liberation. Also, a transformation: no longer was I preoccupied with the torture of reviewing philosophy books—the reading and re-reading, the deadlines, the imperative to be fair, the need to be critical, the inevitable backlash, the necessity to enter into another person’s intellectual space (this was the worst). I spent so much time inside other people’s heads! Now I dwell contentedly in my own head, think my own thoughts, criticize only myself (what a relief). It is as if I never lived that previous life. The thing is, I know it had value, or else I would never have done it; I contributed more this way than in other ways simply because of the breadth of readership. It also honed my skills. But I am glad to be out of it, at least for part of my life. I recommend reading my reviews, but I don’t miss writing them—not at all. I kind of hated it. It is just so difficult. As to the reasons for my liberation, perhaps the less said the better; it doesn’t reflect well on my liberators. I am glad I put in that work because some of my best writing comes in the shape of reviews, and it’s a valuable form in its own right; but it wasn’t fun (except sometimes). Not many people can do it well, though many would benefit from trying. I did what had to be done.
A Brief History of Knowledge
A Brief History of Knowledge
I will continue here what I started earlier, dwelling on the later stages of the growth of human knowledge.[1]The overall sequence is as follows. First, we have bodily sensations such as pain, pleasure, hot and cold: these may be construed as themselves instances of knowledge of the body, or we can suppose the sensation to be known in some higher-order way. This is self-knowledge, not extending beyond the body’s boundaries. Next, we have knowledge of the world outside the body—material objects in space. This is where the senses come in, i.e., perception proper. Such knowledge is pre-propositional knowledge and has nothing to do with true justified belief. This stage in the evolution of knowledge is complex and multifaceted and evolved over millions of years: sight, touch, hearing, smell, and taste. It might be called distal knowledge, as opposed to the proximal knowledge provided by bodily sensation. Then we reach a quite new stage of knowledge: knowledge of other minds—what is called “theory of mind”. This includes applying the knowledge to one’s own mind. It goes well beyond the knowledge of the previous two stages. What comes next?
Here we reach a watershed, roughly coincident with the rise of humankind. We could aptly describe this phase as “new knowledge” as opposed to the “old knowledge” obtaining heretofore. I am torn between ethical knowledge and linguistic knowledge: which came first? Initially, I thought ethical knowledge came first, but now I lean towards linguistic knowledge, probably with a strong dose of co-evolution. Maybe the rudiments of ethical knowledge were present before language came along (about 200,000 years ago), but language added to that primitive stock of knowledge (e.g., not stepping of other people’s toes). In fact, I have a nice jazzy hypothesis about the crucial transition: with language came the possibility of lying, and on a grand scale; with it a censorious sentiment reared up in the human heart. Not lying was the first true moral edict. And we do find it very deplorable, almost as a reflex—“Liar!” we exclaim, red in the face. Murder, we could tolerate—we do that all the time, to animals and in wartime—but lying we really can’t stomach. Language made lying an ever-present temptation and a common occurrence; it had to be stamped down upon. So, a streak of moralism entered our cognitive nature, which was extended to other no-no’s like stealing and adultery and (yes) murder (especially when lying is involved). And there is an overlap of a constitutive nature: both are “normative”. Both concern what ought to be done and ought not to done; both are evaluative. So, language ushered in a normative type of knowledge, extendable to morality. There are rules, and rules must not be broken. Both are learned from our elders and mark out our distinctive culture. In any case, language and ethics belong together in this middle stage of the long history of knowledge. I count this stage as the major break with the epistemic past, and it corresponds to the man-animal divide. Animals have the old kind of knowledge, but this new kind is alien to them, except in the most rudimentary form. It marks the onset of civilization, which might indeed be defined in terms of the knowledge available. The speaking evaluating animal: he that has the knowledge in question (if you have no ethics and no language, you are a savage). I would add politics at this stage, a type of social cognition—knowledge of how to run societies. Hence, rhetoric and exhortation—the language and tenor of the political animal.
What arrived next? I am going to say aesthetics—natural beauty and works of art. We come to know about what looks good, sounds good, tastes good: that is, we discover painting, music, and the culinary arts. Language and ethics are infused into this new type of knowledge: human culture is formed. This is a massive step forwards (religion is part of it). It builds on what came before, but expands substantially on it. This period goes on for quite a while until the next phase of the march of knowledge: science and philosophy. Now other animals are left far behind, those poor ignoramuses. This scholarly period has its ups and downs, recorded in those bricks we call books: mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology, logic, epistemology, metaphysics. The next phase, taking us up to the present day, is the rise of knowledge technology: writing, books, computers, the internet. Now knowledge is no longer stored only in the head; it exists in our artifacts. It has been farmed out.
That is the general shape of the story, but I now want to draw some general lessons. What does history tell us about the dynamics of knowledge and our propensity to acquire it? We can first observe that knowledge moves from the self to the non-self: from me to other beings. It does not confine itself to my inner landscape—my body and its sensations. In this respect it is like life and the universe itself: it gets bigger all the time (the proliferation of species, the expanding universe). Animals tend to get bigger (except under exceptional circumstances). Minds also get bigger as more knowledge is stuffed into them. Correlatively, acquired knowledge tends to be retained: we know what our ancestors knew and then some. Knowledge started small (like a seed) and now it is enormous. It obeys a law of inertia and a law of expansion (like a slow explosion). It is passed on and multiplied. It grows, like a mighty tree. This is not to say that human knowledge inevitably grows; it might even diminish, because offloaded elsewhere. Our technology is the reason: it will contain the knowledge hitherto gathered and might generate more, but we will no longer harbor it. We will become more ignorant as our technology takes over from our brains; we might become ignorant sybarites while our technology takes care of our needs and desires. But the knowledge itself continues to expand even as we dwindle epistemically. Our brains get smaller, not being called upon to contain so much space-filling information (so energy consuming). It might even be that we will go extinct, perhaps wiped out by our machines, while our knowledge continues its ascent. The planet will be brimming with knowledge but with no living organisms to enjoy it (or resent having to acquire it). Knowledge will have taken on a life of its own. Or again, it too may be wiped out by some super-cataclysm, leaving the universe as it was before knowledge ever came into existence—a blank unknowing slate.
The general point is that knowledge is a living evolving thing, a chapter of biology, subject to the same laws; it had a biological beginning, a subsequent growth period, possibly a plateau, and then probably a demise. It might eventually go extinct. It underwent much transformation, happenstance, and vigorous natural selection. It began with self-centered sensation, but evolved into a mighty cognitive beast taking in the whole universe. A lot of animal physiology is designed to enable knowledge; it is a prized evolutionary adaptation. This isn’t to say knowledge is only that; it also has value, intrinsic and instrumental. It is one of evolution’s most impressive achievements. It had humble beginnings, like life itself, but it grew to be so much more—forever expanding into new territories. It is now all over the planet and penetrates every nook and cranny of reality. It seems driven by a powerful force that propels it ever onward and upward. Its history seems preordained. Could it have evolved once in some suitable slimy creature and then disappeared from the face of the earth never to return? That seems unlikely: it was inevitable and no doubt evolved in several locations (convergent evolution). Still, ancient remnants remain, tucked into the brain somewhere, telling tales of things once known and not forgotten. Itches and pains from eons ago are nestled among the most sublime products of human reason. Whenever you know something, you are bringing back traces of the distant past, when cognition breathed its first tentative breaths.[2]
[1] See my “A (Really) Brief History of Knowledge”. This investigation could be advertised as biological history or cultural history or both; I am not much concerned with the question of what is encoded in the genes or part of “culture”. However, it is surely clear that much of it evolved by mutation and natural selection, and hence is innate and instinctual. In fact, I believe that all of the historical divisions I talk about have biological roots and are not merely learned. They are no more learned than the organs of the body are learned.
[2] This kind of biological epistemology strikes me as a healthy addition to the usual epistemological menu. It is a form of Darwinian genealogical epistemology, to be set beside conceptual analysis and the study of particular branches of knowledge. Just as linguistics is really a branch of biology, so epistemology also is. We are born knowers, as we are born speakers (and born moralists). We are genetically programmed to know. Of course, particular items of knowledge are acquired by experience, but the general capacity is inborn (as are certain specific domains). It’s not all a matter of bombardment by stimuli or impressions received. Much the same story could be told about the history of knowing-how (ability knowledge).
Are Space and Time Identical?
Are Space and Time Identical?
I wish someone would get to the bottom of space and time, because for the life of me I can’t. They reduce me to tears, intellectually (personally, I find them congenial companions). But I think I can ask some intelligible questions about them (at least I think I can). On the face of it, they are separate and distinct aspects of reality—elements, constituents, components (whatever the right word is). You could have one without the other; they have very different properties. That’s how it seems; and yet a dualist ontology creates conundrums. Is it possible to be an identity theorist about them? Is one reducible to the other? Which is basic? Descartes might say the essence of space is extension while the essence of time is duration—and one can exist without the other. God could have created space on a Tuesday and time on a Thursday (he took a break between creating them). But on reflection this is not so obvious. If time stopped, would space continue to exist? If space disappeared, would time march on regardless? Neither of these seems self-evident: how could space continue in a world without time, and how could time continue to pass in the absence of anything in time? Space needs time in order to exist, and time is pointless without anything in it. Space needs some sort of temporal career, and time needs space with which to occupy itself. These counterfactuals suggest a necessary connection between the two, though not an identity. But whence the connection? Space and time have quite different natures and are “distinct existences”, as Hume would say. Yet time seems like an essential property of space, and space seems like an essential property of time—but these things are not identical, apparently. If they were identical, then we would have an explanation of their necessary connection; so, we might wish to think again about an identity theory.
The things existing in space and time encourage such a project: material objects and minds. For these things inextricably involve both elements; they have space and time woven into them. The spatial thing is a temporal thing and the temporal thing is a spatial thing. The material thing in space changes over time, and the mental thing in time is embodied in a spatial object (the body). Extension and duration belong to the same thing, necessarily so: what changes in time is extended in space. There is not an extended thing and a changeable thing—as if there is a spatial chair and a separate temporal chair. Material objects and minds are where space and time come together, inextricably. Might not space and time also come together in some underlying unity? And not because time is just another spatial dimension, but because its essence is bound up with space—as the essence of space is bound up with time. But I have no idea how this could be. It seems that it has to be, but I can’t imagine how. The idea seems preposterous on its face. It would require a complete rethinking of the nature of space and time, as if common sense must be wide of the mark. What if both space and time had a fine structure way beyond anything conceived in physics (and mathematics), and that this structure formed a bridge between them? What if our senses distorted the objective realities to an undreamt-of degree? What if time were a wobble in the fine structure of space, and space were a geometrization of the fine structure of time? Yes, I know this is hopelessly metaphorical and wildly speculative, but we are trying to see how the universe as we know it is so much as possible. Space and time strike us as deeply connected but resolutely disjoined—a difficult combination to pull off (compare electrons as both particles and waves).
Here is a mind-bending thought experiment: suppose you existed outside space and time (a type of god) and that you were about to enter a spatial and temporal world—what would you notice first, space or time? Would you see space first or time first or both together? Answer: I don’t know. I rather think it would be time by a small margin, but space would loom into view very quickly. According to an identity theory, it would be a simultaneous perception of the two things (really one thing)—the Hesperus of space and the Phosphorus of time. Or try to imagine a fetus having its first experience of the world: I picture it as a kind of undifferentiated perception of what we might, from the outside, describe as space-in-time. We never perceive space without an impression of time, or time without an intimation of space. Maybe our concepts of space and time are a kind of grid we lay over the world that disguises its essential unity—spacey time and timey space (noumenal space-time). But, as I say, space and time leave me baffled and lachrymose, speechless and bereft. They badly need to be got to the bottom of.[1]
[1] Would other things fall into place if space and time were rendered transparent? Would consciousness become limpidly intelligible? Would the origin of the universe become plain for all to see? Would the jigsaw puzzle of the world resolve itself into a simple pattern? Who the hell knows. Space and time are the original mind-fuck (in the technical sense of my little treatise Mindfucking, 2008).
Coyne on McGinn
Coyne on McGinn
I will reply to Jerry Coyne’s comments (January 23rd, 2026) on my blog post “A (Really) Brief History of Knowledge”. I will keep this as brief and factual as possible without restating his criticisms.
1.I am not just a philosopher of mind but have written on many philosophical subjects. I was also trained as a scientist and have two degrees in psychology.
2.I don’t “conflate” consciousness and knowledge, as a perusal of my writings will confirm. There is no mutual entailment between them, though there are complex relations.
3.I don’t define consciousness in terms of qualia.
4.Instances of knowledge are commonly acquired not innate, but I was discussing types of knowledge (cognitive capacities) not instances of it: knowledge-how, acquaintance knowledge, propositional knowledge, and knowledge of different types of subject matter, e.g., states of mind and external objects. These do evolve unlike learned items of knowledge.
5.Consciousness evolves but not its passing contents, obviously, just like knowledge.
6.I am not “dead certain” of the pain theory—see my other articles on pain and evolution, cited in the paper we are discussing. Coyne is mistaking expository convenience with (misguided) certainty. Do I ever say that the pain theory is known to be true? I just think it is a good hypothesis.
7.Pain is important because it is highly motivating and very widespread. There can be other theories, such as tactile knowledge, which would deliver different results for later knowledge. See the articles footnoted. I was simply presupposing earlier work in the present article instead of repeating it.
8.Pain is more than adaptive reflexes; it is a sensation.
9.Not all of morality is acquired, as many have argued; the case is like language (as Chomsky has pointed out).
10.Coyne is wrong to say that biologists (scientists generally) are more cautious than philosophers; the opposite is true. I am both.
11.It is odd that he ignores my mysterianism, presumably because he thinks I’m a dogmatist. Ironic really.
12.The person out of his lane here is Jerry Coyne. I can guarantee that I have studied a lot more science than he has studied philosophy to judge from these comments (I do have a first-class degree in the science of psychology and used to teach experimental psychology).
13.This was an opportunity for constructive dialogue between disciplines, but it came out as tetchy incomprehension. All I can suggest is to read a philosophy book on epistemology: Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy would be a good place to start. Coyne never sent me his comments to get my response.
14.I was expecting my readers to be philosophers, so I didn’t spell out everything for the non-philosophical reader. This is true of everything on my website; it is not for beginners and I keep it concise.
15.It would be perfectly possible to have a cultural history of knowledge to be set beside a biological history, charting the main developments recorded in human history. I wasn’t much concerned with this distinction in the essay, though I focused more on the biological history of knowledge, it being neglected by intellectual historians.
Spatial Logic
Spatial Logic
Does logic have a real essence, and what might it be? And what exactly is logic? These are not easy questions; they invite us to dig deep. First, what is real essence? The paradigms are material substances and animal species: gold and tigers being the favorite examples. I won’t rehash all this; I will simply observe two things: (a) space is centrally implicated in both, and (b) the real essence doesn’t look much like what it is the essence of. As to (a), real essence is conceived as an arrangement of parts—spatial parts spatially arranged. Thus, we have atomic structure conceived as a configuration of particles in space; and genetic structure consisting of molecules, combined with an anatomical structure of organs. As to (b), the appearance of gold and tigers to the naked eye is not like the real essence as specified under (a), i.e., a particulate corpuscular structure invisible to ordinary perception. So, the real essence is both spatially constituted and hidden from sight; it is not evident to the senses or anything like an ethereal Aristotelian form. It is spatial-material and a matter of theory not observation—hence surprising. It may take an elaborate and bold theory to disclose real essence, and it may not even be possible in some cases. It may not be particularly intuitive or uncontroversial; it isn’t like “bachelors are unmarried males”. Do we, in fact, know of any cases in which real essence is notboth of these things? One might cite mental natural kinds like pain: but it is not at all clear that we have any idea of the real essence of mental kinds, or whether they even have real essences. To put it simply, real essences invariably turn out to be hidden shapes, geometric invisibles—micro-anatomy.
We may therefore entertain the hypothesis that the real essence of logic consists of spatially arranged units of some sort—points or regions or configurations. That is, logical space is, or is analogous to, physical space. Physical space exhibits logical structure in its own right: for example, it is not possible, logically, to move from point a to point b without traversing the intermediate points; and it is necessary that if a point is inside a given region, it must be inside any region that contains that region. Then too, we have all the theorems of Euclidian geometry, as well as the thesis that space is necessarily three-dimensional. And so on.[1] These provide a model for logic as a system of necessary truths regarding propositions or states of affairs or facts. Might the formal properties of space constitute the real essence of the subject matter of logic? Here we run into the question of what precisely logic is: is it a human construction or is it completely independent of the human mind? I won’t adjudicate this question except to say that as a human institution—a symbolic system with an interpretation—we would expect something human to enter in. The natural view, then, is that logic in that sense is a combination of the objective and the subjective—the extra-human and the human. To cut to the chase: logic as it exists today is a combination of space and language. Predicate calculus, say, is a combination, a confluence, of mind-independent modal facts concerning space and its material occupants, themselves modifications of space (strings, knots, holes, what have you), on the one hand, and human language, on the other. Logic is the logic of space (space-matter) and grammar: hence the formulas that crowd the pages of logic texts—those squiggles and spacings. According to metaphysical spatialism, mind and language are both upshots of space as the fundamental stuff of the universe.[2] So, logic is an amalgam of two aspects of space—its own logical structure and the structure of the human mind as it has evolved under conditions of spatial life. The real essence of logic is space in its manifold guises. There would still be logical facts if there were no language and mind, though there would not be logic as we currently think of it. It is the same with geometry: there would be geometrical facts without human minds, though the subject of geometry would not exist under those circumstances. In logical reality, it would still be true that no object can both be in a place and not be in it, but the discipline of logic—what is taught in schools—would not exist (there would be no logical statement of the law of noncontradiction). However, language by itself cannot produce logical facts; it needs space to confer logic on it (and on the world). This is the killer: logic requires space in order to have any reality, because all of reality is ultimately composed of space–in particular, matter and mind are so composed. Logic makes claims about reality, and reality is basically spatial; it turns out that its truths reflect that reality. The logic of space is logic; there is no other logic. Conceptually, it is like this claim: H2O is water; there is no other water. The logic of the world is logic—there is no other logic. Reality’s logic is logic’s reality.
Look at it this way: what else could logic consist in? If we insist on space-logic dualism, we run into the following conundrum: how can logic and space (including matter and mind) be so well suited to each other? How come the logical world and the spatial-material-mental world fit so snugly together? If logic had an entirely separate source, we would expect a lack of fit: space over here, logic over there (each with its own creating deity). It would be a giant coincidence that logic describes concrete reality. But logic seems tailor-made for the spatial universe, as if created for it—by it. The spatial world suggests logic to the mind, if it is properly receptive; space isn’t logically neutral. Space is logical; once it is combined with language we get logical systems, construed as human creations. Space was also material and mental even before these realities showed themselves; the seeds were there before the big bang hit. According to metaphysical spatialism, space is the ultimate reality, the foundation of everything—everything. How could anything not be in space and made of spatial stuff? The only alternative is a non-spatial divine being (whatever that may be) as a source of being. But once we drop this fantasy and embrace cosmological naturalism, we reach the conclusion that space is the engine that brings it all about. That is why Platonism always ends up locating things in a quasi-space; for this is how we imagine universals and numbers to exist. Space is God, to put it bluntly. In any event, space-logic dualism faces a problem of interaction: how do the spatial world and the logical world mesh so tightly together? Does space have a pineal gland of some sort? Metaphysical monism is always superior from this point of view, and spatial monism looks like the way to go. Why has it not been thought of before? Because to the human eye space is an absence, an emptiness, a passive receptacle. But this is to overestimate the physical and metaphysical powers of the human visual system; better to go with the modern view and accept that space is an active medium, the root of all being. Space-matter dualism is a myth, a visual illusion. We need to unify matter and space—matter as knots in space anyone?—and when we do we get a brand new metaphysics. Even logic comes out as a spatial phenomenon (consciousness already went spatial). But this space is not the phenomenal space we see with our eyes; it may not even be fully intelligible to us. Nor is it identical with, or reducible to, the material universe as it emerged after the big bang, since that universe did not even exist at that explosive moment; but it is closely related to the matter that congealed in those early seconds, and to the form it took post-big bang. No doubt the space that now exists owes its nature to the primal space that preceded the big bang, so we have not left that reality completely behind. Perhaps when the universe cools down to absolute zero (or heats up tremendously) the original form of space will re-appear and look more capable of its remarkable feats. In any case, the present point is that space (plus language) constitutes the real essence of logic, appearances notwithstanding.
I have tried to keep this discussion at the ontological level without venturing an opinion about our knowledge of logic, though that inevitably creeps in. Now let me make some remarks about the epistemological question: how do we know logic? We know it by perceiving space and knowing our language. We see that certain things are necessarily true of the spatial world, particularly regarding motion, such as that solid objects cannot pass through other solid objects, and then we use our language (itself a product of space) to state certain logical truths. This introduces the subject-predicate grammatical form into logical cognition, which then influences the form of the formulas familiar from logic texts. That is, perception, particularly vision, makes certain possibilities and impossibilities evident to us, and we express the resulting knowledge in the grammatical forms of our language; thus, we concoct the formulas of standard logic. We combine spatial perceptual knowledge with grammatical knowledge to produce symbolic logical systems. For example, we see that every part of space is necessarily adjoined to another part of space, and this gives us the idea of entailment, when conjoined with a grasp of grammatical structure. Likewise, we understand moving from one place to another, and we then form the idea of moving from one proposition or sentence to another, by relying on our grasp of language. Thus, we construct a conception of logical space modeled on physical space. Space plays an indispensable role in the formation of logical concepts. Epistemology recapitulates ontology.[3]
[1] See my “Logic and Space”.
[2] See my “Space, Time, and Logic”.
[3] I keep thinking of Kant: he sensed the absolutely central role of space in the construction of reality, ontologically and epistemologically. Human sensibility is deeply spatial, but so is objective reality; indeed, the former is true because of the latter. It is strange that we ever stray from strict spatiality—why do we even seem to conceive of non-spatial things? Do other animals entertain such fantasies—aren’t they strict Kantians? Told of non-spatial entities, they respond, “Humbug, away with such nonsense!”—or words to that effect. Is it language that creates such strange ideas is us? Do we have a misguided propensity towards abstraction, suggested by words? I have the feeling that Mr. Spock is a strict spatialist; perhaps he instinctively thinks of the mind as a spatial thing, paceDescartes (but then he does have a very sophisticated conception of space). As to logic, he sees the link between logic and space quite clearly; only human emotion could obstruct such perception. In his mind, logic has reality just because space does: both are staring us in the face. He is not sentimental about logic. Here he sides with terrestrial beasts (and Immanuel Kant, the original Space Man).
Logic and Space
Logic and Space
There is a gleam in the eye of this metaphysician, or a glimmer of a gleam. Might logic be derivable from space? Then we would have a metaphysics based solely on space (assuming time can be regarded as a dimension of space).[1] By “logic” I don’t just mean the logical systems studied in university philosophy departments and elsewhere—propositional and predicate calculus (or even modal logic, tense logic, and the like). I mean the entire realm of what we call logical necessity (aka metaphysical necessity): anything consisting of necessary structure or necessary relations. So, I mean to be including, especially, geometry: and not just the academic subject but the actual form of space—its structure. Logic as it is typically studied today is really the logic of quantifiers and truth-functional connectives; I am talking about the logic of space (as we can speak of the logic of time, i.e., tense logic, or the logic of obligation, i.e., deontic logic)—necessary a prioritruths of space. So, my question is whether logic in this broad sense can be derived from the nature of space. Is space the ultimate cradle of necessity? More ambitiously: is space everything?
What are the basic formal properties of space? They are not difficult to discern: finite parts, infinite extension, inclusion, adjacency, impalpability, aggregation. Space is made up of regions that aggregate into adjacent spaces and form inclusive spaces; it is infinite as to extent and fine structure. We can view space as what is studied in geometry in the manner of Euclid: necessary or logical truths about spatial figures. This logical study is one of the earliest forms of logic as a human intellectual discipline—axioms, theorems, universal generalizations. The logic of reasoning is another form of logic in the broad sense, as is arithmetic (the logic of numbers), as is metaphysics and philosophy generally (the logic of reality as a whole). The current proposal, then, is that the logic of space is prior to all other forms of logic. How does this work? As follows: space is a logical structure; it consists of parts necessarily linked—fixed, unchangeable, discoverable a priori. You can infer that other regions exist from the existence of a given region, because one region entails others—and so on ad infinitum. Nothing can be (wholly) in one place and also in another; nothing can both be in a place and not be in it; everything is either in a place or not in that place. We speak naturally of logical space; possible worlds are laid out in logical space; propositions are conceived quasi-spatially. We think of necessity spatially—as existing everywhere, of one thing being included in another, of one thing following from another (as if tracking it through space). We implicitly recognize the affinity. Moreover, both space and logic are abstract not concrete, a matter of the intellect. When the child begins to grasp the structure of space, particularly its extent, this is mirrored in his grasp of the infinite power of logic—its ability to generate infinities. Every proposition entails and is entailed by an infinity of propositions, as every part of space entails an infinity of other parts of space. Logic, like space, is vast: there is the endless successor relation in mathematics and the endless adjacency relation in space. The necessities of space are hard necessities, like the necessities of logic. Logic is implicit in space; we don’t first have a logically neutral space to which we add necessities. Logic is already present in space. Space has a logical (necessary) nature—parts standing in logical relations to each other. Since material objects are themselves products of space, any logical features they possess derive from those of space. This isn’t to say that logic is reducible to physics; rather, physics (the theory of material objects) is up to its neck in logic—in natural necessities. Space and logic are intertwined; thus, space has the resources from which what we call logic can be derived. Predicate calculus is an offshoot of space, de re and originally. Logic and space are coevals. Space is pregnant with logic. Therefore, we don’t need to supplement it with anything extraneous in order for logical necessity to exist. We might say: the world is the totality of spatial facts. All reality is preceded by and based upon an antecedent spatial reality (compare “all ideas derive from antecedent impressions”). This doctrine deserves to be called spatialism. It is intended as a metaphysical or ontological doctrine not an epistemological one, but there are obvious epistemological consequences of it; we may therefore speak of epistemological spatialism. It contrasts with both materialism and idealism, though it is closer to materialism (material objects are not fundamental in spatialism). All you need is space. Pan-spatialism. To be is to be spatial. Logical space is a by-product of physical space. Cue the gleam.
How do we get from spatialism about logic to standard metaphysical necessities and analytic necessities? Quite easily: the former concern necessities of material objects (progeny of space) and the latter arise from meaning and language that depend on human beings and their brains (minds). For example, the necessity of “bachelors are unmarried males” has its origins in necessities of space; indeed, we speak of inclusion in both cases (the meaning of “bachelor” contains the meaning of “male”). Meaning takes its rise ultimately from space, like everything else, and its necessities reflect the necessities of space—the most basic necessities of all. Space is woven into everything, because space is the foundation of everything. No space, no nothing; with space everything. All is vacuum, as a pre-Socratic might put it. Because space is not pure nothingness; space is an existent thing with real potential—a living thing, we might say. It has a nature, a real essence, a mode of being. It preceded the big bang, cosmologically, and underwent a transformation (this is the cosmology of metaphysical spatialism). It may not have looked much like the space we see around us every day (it had no matter in it to start with—no particles, no solid objects). But we can designate it now without knowing anything much about it then (“that stuff”). It had the seeds of everything built into it—matter, mind, and logic. The religious-minded might well identify this amazing stuff with God; the secular-minded will see just a mysterious natural substance of unknown origin. The important point is that it has the potential to generate all that we see today, according to the spatialist creed. Can that creed be verified? Probably not. Can it be falsified? Not in any obvious way. But it can be a gleam in the metaphysician’s eye, or the glimmer of a gleam. On purely aesthetic grounds, it scores highly.[2]
[1] See my “Space, Time, and Logic”. The present paper goes for an even more exiguous foundation. The view might be called “non-reductive spatialism”.
[2] Like all paradigm shifts, this one is hard to take in, to comprehend. The intuition behind it, Kantian in spirit, is that space is the form of everything intelligible (and unintelligible): material objects, minds, and logical necessities. In the beginning was the place. What other kind of being could there be? Even the abstract partakes of a spatial flavor—numbers, propositions, platonic forms. This is the form of all intentionality, and all reality. Not matter, not mind: these are but aspects of the spatial. If it helps, think of it in evolutionary terms: all life has its origins in a single life-form, modified and yet preserved. Well, space was the original life-form of the cosmos, modified yet preserved. Logic itself is an expression of this basic reality. The Force, as invoked in Star Wars, is really space in its most primitive and elusive form—what lies behind everything, the source of all potency (and poetry). It is what mysticism is gesturing at, however ineptly. Consciousness itself is an expression of space (the real essence thereof). The metaphysical spatialist is simply trying to put the pieces together into one big picture, a unifying reality. If he speaks somewhat in riddles and paradoxes, we must forgive him; he is only trying to make sense of it all. Atomism once sounded speculative and bizarre but is now a commonplace; maybe the same will one day be true of spatialism. Sober truth can arrive mysteriously clothed.