Fodor’s RTM

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Fodor’s RTM

Here is a telling passage in Hume Variations written by my old friend and fellow mysterian Jerry Fodor: “For a number of interlocking reasons, it remains fully plausible that cognitive processes are constituted by causal interactions among mental representations, that is, among semantically evaluable particulars. Either that, or we really are entirely in the dark” (35: my italics). He seems to be vividly aware that mystery is lying in wait for us if RTM doesn’t pan out—as if we are saved from the darkness only by the skin of our teeth, because nothing else even comes close. This is a somber thought: it might turn out that what he calls “the cognitive mind” is a complete dead-end mystery (for us anyway). This strikes me as a reasonable assessment, because RTM is the only thing we have going for us (not behaviorism or connectionism or eliminativism). Fortunately, the theory has a lot to be said in its favor and not much against it. The point I want to make is that the mind is still a mystery even if we know RTM to be true, because all of its central claims involve mysteries—though it is perfectly true (and known to be so), as far as it goes. It’s not just that either RTM is true or the mind is shrouded in darkness, but that RTM is true and it is shrouded in darkness; or better, such light as the theory throws exists against a background of impenetrable darkness. Indeed, the truth of RTM entails that the mind is mysterious, precisely because of its essential tenets. And this fact is embarrassingly obvious. I don’t think Jerry would disagree.[1]

What are the central tenets of RTM? Fodor summarizes them in chapter 6 of HV and I will summarize his summary. According to RTM, perceptions, images, concepts, thoughts, and words are mental particulars (tokens not types); they are events not dispositions; they stand in causal relations to each other and to the external world and behavior; and they are compositional, semantically evaluable, and atomistic (they divide into the simple and complex). As Fodor sees it, Hume was basically right: the mind consists of “ideas” that satisfy this list of properties—event-like particulars, standing in causal relations, with compositional structure (“syntax”), semantic properties (especially reference), and consisting of mental atoms arranged into mental molecules (“mental chemistry”). The mind represents things by means of a structured system of combinable elements, some of which are simple and atomic. The mind is thus real and active, like the physical world, and it is structured analogously to the physical world. It is a kind of complicated semantic machine—a meaningful mechanism. It combines the concretely causal and the literally representational. Thoughts, in particular, are both causally efficacious and intentional (in the Brentano sense).

All right, there you have it, clear as a bell and intuitively appealing to a fault. What more could you ask of a theory? Where’s the trouble? The trouble (if “trouble” is the right word) is that we don’t know what any of it means; we don’t know what we are talking about. Not that this is any refutation of the theory; it is merely to point out its limitations as an explanatory scheme (I use the word advisedly). For, first: what are these “mental representations”? They are “ideas” or “concepts”: but what are these? They are not sense impressions, phenomenal constituents of consciousness, and they are not brain states (for all the anti-reductive reasons Fodor and others have given). So, what is their ontology, their metaphysics, and their epistemology? What the Dickens are they? Not mental pictures, to be sure, not sounds in your head, not scribbles on mental paper. We have no idea what they are, frankly. The OED unhelpfully volunteers the following definition of “concept”: “an abstract idea”, “an idea or mental picture of a group or class of objects, formed by combining all their aspects”. None of this is right, as the word is used in philosophy and psychology. We generally just get the hang of the way the word is used and then follow the crowd. This is why concepts are so variously understood by theorists. We can just about understand the idea of a mental particular (token event), but its ontological category remans obscure. There is even controversy about whether concepts are best understood as dispositions (abilities) or occurrent events (parts of processes). We are unclear as to whether there is anything it is like to have them. They are mysterious entities (certainly not images, which themselves are not devoid of mystery). And if we decided to go brain-reductive, we would run the risk of losing their essential characteristics (neurons as such don’t do what concepts do).

Second, what is this causality we speak of so casually? Is it anything like physical causality of the billiard ball stripe? Since we don’t know what concepts are, we are in the dark about the causal relations involved: one thought causes another, but how? Does it involve propinquity, contact, energy transfer, instantaneity, mass, electro-magnetism? The word “cause” is here being used in a completely hand-waving manner. Are there strict laws that back singular causal relations concerning thoughts? We are relying on a completely schematic conception of causality here, not something whose naturalistic credentials can be taken for granted. We can’t just assume the causation is identical to neural causation. This is another mystery to be added to the growing pile. And is “event” sufficiently clear as not to raise mysterian hackles? Even this is not without its conundrums: for events require things (substances) to act as their host, but what mental thing (or substance) is there to perform this role?[2] The brain, the self, the soul? None of the above. In fact, the whole ontology of events and their underlying substances has dubious application to the mind—what thing does a mental event occur in? We call thoughts events by analogy with physical events, but the analogy is loose at best, misleading at worst. Do we want our best theory of the mind to be dependent on an idea so poorly defined? What would Hume say about such a cavalier announcement? Thinking is event causation—really? Tell me more, if you have more to tell.

All this is before we get to the real meat and potatoes of RTM. Concepts are supposed to have intentionality, compositionality, and atomicity: do we know what these things are? Do we know what implements them, analyzes them, naturalizes them? Aren’t they complete mysteries, mere figures of speech? We have theories of intentionality—pictorial, descriptive, causal, teleological—but none of these commands universal assent, or even grudging respect. The puzzles of sense and reference apply in full force (identity statements, existential statements, etc.), and the whole idea of reference is anathema to some. Reference may not be as mysterious as consciousness, but it comes pretty close (Fodor would not disagree). This is an old story. Reference is like dark matter: we know it exists, but we have no idea what it is. Compositionality is less often noted for its puzzling nature; it is lazily supposed to be just the familiar part-whole relation. But (as Fodor himself points out) it isn’t just mereological composition; we need the idea of what the linguists call “constituent structure”. We need the analogue for thought of grammar in language—phrase-structure, in a word. We need an account of the compositionality of sentences like “John and Mary like Jack and Susan just fine”, parsed in the natural way. We need to naturalize syntax, propositional form, generative grammar. Good luck with that! Do we even know what predication is? Is it in any way physical (whatever that means)? Is it a type of qualia? Is it like things sticking together to form wholes? It is none of these. Compositional structure, in this sense, is an unexplained fact of nature, a kind of weird mental attraction. Chomsky has been trying for years to provide even an adequate description of it for English. Thoughts evidently have it, but we don’t know how (not by psychological laws of association, for sure). How is one concept “tied” to another? It isn’t just next to it in space and time. And then there is atomicity: here we have a physical model, but our understanding doesn’t go any deeper. What are these atomic conceptual simples and how do they add up to conceptual complexes? They are not elements of sense impressions, points in visual space; then what are they? They are postulated on theoretical grounds, not encountered in introspection, but no one knows what they are exactly. Their very existence remains debatable. You can’t see them under a microscope, like little wriggling organisms. The concept of atom here is more metaphor than solid science (or received philosophy). What are the constitutive primitives of thought, and how do they join together to form whole thoughts? We have no idea; and yet thoughts exist in close proximity to our epistemic faculties—and we still don’t know what they are. Nor do we have any idea about their creation (their etiology, as Fodor likes to say): where do the mental atoms come from—presented scenes or inherited genes? Do we pick them up perceptually from the passing scene, or are they borne by the genes in our DNA? How could they arise from either? More mystery.

So, RTM looks nice descriptively, a lot nicer than a lot of other theories; and it gives every appearance of being true. But it doesn’t provide much relief from the surrounding darkness. Everything it tells us is subject to mysterian critique; not in the sense that it is thereby falsified, but in the sense that it is not a fully intelligible theory (in Chomsky’s sense). It doesn’t make the mental world an intelligible place (compare gravity). Other theories at least purport to do that—materialism, behaviorism, classical empiricist psychology—but RTM by itself merely sets up a series of difficult questions. Fine, but let’s not fool ourselves (I’m not sure Fodor appreciated how deep the questions go, though he was an avowed mysterian). Cognitive science, as we have it, may not rest on a mistake, but it does rest on a mystery, or cluster of mysteries. The true theory of mind, according to Fodor, is actually the most mysterious theory. That shouldn’t deter us from accepting it, but it should give us pause about how much we have achieved. The more plausible it gets the more mysterious it appears (isn’t that always the way?).[3]           

[1] See my “Fodor on Mystery”. He remarks that the problems of concepts, intentionality, and thought “really are deeply mysterious”.

[2] See my “Ontology of Mind”, “Mind and Substance”, and “Language, Self, and Substance”.

[3] Oversimplification, or sheer blind ignorance, will always make our theories of the world look more intelligible than they deserve to be; the more realistic they become, the harder they are to understand. RTM is quite a sophisticated theory (or theory-sketch), so it advertises its lacunas more visibly. It is really a sign of theoretical advance when a theory starts to reveal its hidden mysteries—as in quantum theory, and even gravitation theory (as every student of Newton knows). We are beginning to see how complex the cognitive mind is (not to mention the non-cognitive mind); the underlying mysteries are thus more apt to pop out. I think that Fodor really saw his own theory as so much whistling in the dark—though whistling the right tune at least. We might really have absolutely no idea what is going on in the mind when a person, as we say, thinks. Just ask yourself what a thought is exactly.

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Do Bats Know What it is Like to be Human?

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Do Bats Know What it is Like to be Human?

One answer would be that we don’t know whether they do or can know what it’s like to be human, because of the problem of bat other minds. That is a boring answer and, I think, incorrect; in any case, I will ignore it. We know enough about bat minds to know whether or not they know what it’s like to be human. And I believe the simple answer is that they do know. This is because we don’t have any senses they don’t have. They have one sense we don’t have (echolocation), but we don’t have a sense they don’t have. Their senses may not be as acute as ours (e.g., sight), but they have the basic phenomenology associated with our five senses; they are not totally in the dark about what it’s like to be human from a sensory point of view. Someone might say bats can’t have such knowledge, because their cognitive abilities are too limited to know anything of the kind. They don’t even know what it’s like to be a mouse. Again, this answer is boring and, I think, incorrect: they know what’s it’s like to be them, and other animals share that subjectivity to a sufficient degree to ground knowledge of other animal minds. Bats know what it is like to see and hear (etc.) generally. Basically, all mammals know what it is like to be a mammal, so long as their sense modalities overlap. They know each other’s mode of sensory consciousness. Indeed, the same point applies to reptiles and birds, fish and octopuses. So, perhaps surprisingly, animals have good knowledge of what it’s like to be most other animals, including humans. Even mice know what it’s like to be human!

But that point only applies to sensory consciousness, and it is not the only kind. What about what may be called a priori consciousness—logical, mathematical, ethical, philosophical? Assuming that bats don’t have that kind of consciousness, do they know what it’s like to be human? I think not. In fact, I am doubtful that any animal knows what human a priori consciousness is like, even our closest relatives. Of course, if they have a kind of closeted a priori mental life, then they can know what it’s like to be us; but there is no evidence for this and it seems clearly false. So, there is a large part of what it’s like to be human that bats and other animals don’t and can’t know.  Nor can humans who lack rational faculties, say because of brain abnormality. Human intelligence (of an advanced kind) is not knowable by animals in general; they don’t know what it’s like to have the kind of intelligence we have. We can know what it’s like to have bat intelligence, but they can’t know what it’s like to have human intelligence—though they do know what it’s like to have human sensations. If a bat were to write a paper called “What is it Like to be Human?”, the answer would have to be “We don’t know”, or “We know some but not all”. The topic of animal knowledge of other minds is a neglected area, but part of psychological zoology. I am just laying the groundwork here.[1]

[1] I think we know exactly what it’s like to be a dinosaur, sensorily and intellectually, and I think they know what it’s like to be a human sensorily—but not intellectually. We humans are distinctive in having a developed a priori form of consciousness. It is like having another sense.

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A Fortiori

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A Fortiori

I noticed with mounting irritation that Jerry Fodor keeps using the Latin phrase “a fortiori” to mean “it follows that” in Hume Variations. It doesn’t mean that; it means “with stronger reason” (look it up). The correct construction is “it follows a fortiori that p”. You can’t say “a fortiori a fortiori”—as if that meant “it follows with stronger reason”. Moreover, no one ever corrected him, including copy-editors. Does no one know what “a fortiori” means? It reminds me of people who use the phrase “craven cowards”: “craven” means “cowardly”. These are not difficult points. We all make mistakes, but really come on.

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Asleep and Awake

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Asleep and Awake

Listen, do you want to know a secret? The government has been withholding it from us. When we are asleep, we are awake, and when we are awake, we are asleep. We have been bamboozled into thinking that in sleep we are not awake and when awake not asleep. Sheer propaganda and lazy ordinary language (ordinary language propaganda). The best way to describe our mental state when in the condition we call “sleep” is that we are partially asleep and partially awake (very awake actually); and similarly, for being awake (we are partially asleep). This is not hard to demonstrate and requires no sleep science or fanciful hypotheses; it is common knowledge. We are always both asleep and awake. The OED defines “sleep” thus: “a regularly occurring condition of body and mind in which the nervous system is inactive, the eyes closed, the postural muscles relaxed, and consciousness practically suspended”. This definition leaves a lot to be desired: people don’t always have the luxury of sleeping regularly, the nervous system is not inactive in sleep, the eyes are not invariably closed (you might not even have eyelids), the postural muscles are no more relaxed than they are when lying down awake, and what does it mean to say that consciousness is “practically suspended”? Clearly, the editors are having trouble defining the word (and the state itself). The basic idea is that the sleeping person (or animal) is (largely) unaware of his surroundings: he is not awake to his immediate environment. He is not tuned into what is going on around him, not conscious of it, oblivious to it. His mind is blank relative to his environment; his senses are cut from their usual perceptual function. He is selectively “blind”.

But let’s notice two things about this state of oblivion: it is not complete, and the sleeper is normally conscious of other things. Outside stimuli are still getting in to some degree, as experiments have shown; and, of course, he is often dreaming. He is quite well aware of his dreams—they are occurring in his sleeping consciousness. In dreaming we are aware of our dream objects—the intentional objects of our dreams (people and things). We are awake to these. We are not detached from our dreams; we know about them perfectly well, as our subsequent memory shows. We are not awake (much) to our environment, but we are awake to our dream world. We are not perceptually awake, but we are introspectively awake. Our perceptual consciousness is blank, but our dream consciousness is brimming with content—just as our day-dreaming consciousness is. We are not asleep relative to this, i.e., unresponsive to it, inactive with respect to it. Psychologically, we are very much awake: aware, conscious, affected, emotionally moved. We are not in an unconscious coma. Our nervous system is firing on all cylinders. Thus, we are partially awake during sleep (unless sleeping dreamlessly).

And there is a further point: we are also aware of the condition of our body—our posture, temperature, the state of our bladder, etc. We are awake where they are concerned. To be asleep is really best understood as being unaware perceptually (though even this is not total). Our senses are asleep, but not the rest of us. But we lazily describe this as if the whole conscious mind has shut down, which is far from the truth. Our normal concept of sleep disguises the psychological facts from us. Ordinary language misleads us. It was never designed to be pedantically correct psychologically. It isn’t meant to be scientific psychology. We can imagine speakers who say things like, “I was wide awake all night, dreaming of my mother-in-law”.  Might it not also turn out that our so-called dreams are really reality, so we never had them while asleep? It is epistemically possible that you are really awake when you think you are asleep dreaming. Qualitatively, dreams are like waking experience. The OED gives the phrase “awake to” the definition “aware of”, and we are certainly aware of our dreams (not to mention the state of our bladder). In short, you are awake when you are asleep—awake to.

The next claim is less obvious: that we are asleep when awake. But the reasoning is much the same: we are unaware of certain things that we are aware of during sleep. Here it is convenient to invoke Freud, at least as a thought experiment: in Freud’s psychology we are closed off in waking life to our unconscious, but we are aware of it in dreams—for example, you might dream of having sex with your mother. Suppose there exists some sorry species that actually has a mind as Freud described our mind: they dream at night of acting on their repressed sexual desires, but during waking hours no such content enters their heads. Then they are not aware of (awake to) the facts of their own mind, as revealed in their dreams; they are asleep relative to those facts. They are unconscious of their inner (psychological) environment when awake. They are awake to it at night, but not awake to it during the day—it’s as if they are asleep where that is concerned. They are in a detached sleep-like state when it comes to their unconscious desires. They have no consciousness of these while awake. They know them by night, but not in the light of day. Sometimes people are described as sleep-walking through life, meaning that they are oblivious to obvious facts, closed off to reality. It’s as they are asleep cognitively. The question then becomes whether we partake of any of this: are we at least somewhat Freudian? I think this is not an unreasonable conjecture: our dreams are tuned into facts about ourselves that never reach the surface in our waking life, except perhaps in a crisis situation. We gleefully go through life thinking we are decent intelligent human beings, say, while all along we are stupid bastards. We are asleep relative to the truth about ourselves, while awake relative to other things—unaware, incognizant. We are in a state like that of not seeing or hearing what is going on around us when asleep. The same natural psychological kind occurs in both cases.

We need a word for what we do typically at night when we close our eyes and don’t want to be disturbed, and we call that “sleep”. We also need a word that signifies that we are up and about and ready to face the day, and we call this being “awake”. We then think these are mutually exclusive, so it sounds funny to speak of sleeping wakefulness and waking sleep. But the psychological facts underlying these phases of human (and animal) existence are more complex than the simple binary distinction recognizes; the two states are more intertwined than we suppose. The fact is that we are in both states nearly all the time—blind to this but not to that, awake to this but not to that. A sleeping man might be extremely awake to certain things, and a waking man might be fast asleep with respect to his own self. Your dreaming life may be more awake than your waking life, and your waking life may be sleepier than your dreaming life, strange as it sounds. So much for the ordinary language of sleep and wakefulness.[1]

[1] Is it a matter of conversational implicature? If I say of a sleeping man “He is awake”, do I speak the literal truth, though the implicature that he is in perceptual touch with his surroundings is clearly false? If so, that would be a striking example of Grice’s invaluable distinction. Try it with “He is conscious” said of a sleeping (but dreaming) man; surely that statement is quite true, given that dreaming is a state of consciousness—implicatures notwithstanding. Is sleep, in reality, one kind of wakefulness and wakefulness one kind of sleep, though we don’t talk that way for implicature reasons? The human mind is asleep-awake all the time.

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Two-Handed Tennis

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Two-handed Tennis

There I was on the court, as usual. Nothing out of the ordinary. Then I noticed that the guy on the next court was playing two-handed, as I do. It turned out that the guy I was playing with, Robert, knew the guy and introduced me. We belonged to a rare breed, on the brink of extinction and never populous—the two-handers. I started playing with two hands only a couple of years ago because of an injury; he, Matthew, had been doing it since he was a kid. He said it just came naturally to him; he had tried with one hand but just didn’t like it. I sat and watched him play. He was clearly an excellent player, forehand and backhand. The forehand was solid as a rock and highly effective. We then had a talk about why more people don’t used that technique, expressing bafflement. It’s easier for kids for whom a single arm is often not strong enough; you get a lot of control; almost everyone accepts that a two-handed backhand is preferable. I myself don’t think it should be a binary choice; here I seem to be in a minority of one. Why not play both ways depending on the situation? I can play one-handed and two-handed on both sides—it’s not that hard. But no one ever does. No one. Professional or amateur. You get the best of both worlds and it startles the opponent. I intend to play with Matthew one day and do a scientific study of his stroke, comparing notes. Maybe we can spread the gospel of two hands.

Monica Seles used to play with both hands, and then there is the great Fabrice Santoro of France, now retired (aged 53). I revisited some old videos of him on YouTube (I did see him play once in Miami about eighteen years ago). They called him The Magician. He seems almost superhuman technically, with an enormous variety of shots, some of them trick shots. He had a long successful career, though never reached the top ten. I don’t think anyone supposes that he would have done better if he had played one-handed; indeed, he would have done worse. I feel like I play better two-handed than I used to one-handed, though I did the latter for many more years (and had a healthy right arm then). Two-handed players like playing two-handed; they don’t do it for the novelty effect or because they can’t swing a racket with one hand. I do both depending on how I want to hit the ball and its distance from my body. This raises an obvious question: why don’t more players adopt the two-handed lifestyle? Why are there so few of us? No one ever claims that it has been scientifically proven that one hand is better than two—and the two-handed backhand is clearly the dominant stroke these days. Why don’t people, players and coaches, at least give it a try? Maybe it’s not for everyone, but surely many more players would prefer it if given the chance. I find it makes the game more fun, and I win more points that way.

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John Lennon and Me

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John Lennon and Me

John Lennon was assassinated near where I used to live. I used to live at West End Avenue and 73rd Street in Manhattan. The Dakota is on 72nd Street and Central Park West. I would walk by it all the time and always thought of him. The memorial to him is right there. I always felt that America had done that to him not just an isolated lunatic. And there is another close connection: when I won the English prize at my school (I came top) I chose two books by John Lennon as my reward, A Spaniard in the Works and In His Own Write. I well remember the look on the English teacher’s face as he handed me the books at the prize-giving ceremony (“You cheeky bugger”). I had won the prize in the English language and I chose two books by a pop star—written in gibberish! All true, but I loved those books; they are hilarious and very clever. Of course, Lennon was part of my life from 13 on: I know all his music and have read a lot about him. I never met the man and set eyes on him only once, at an airport in the distance. I sing a lot of John Lennon songs and think about him almost every day (I just learned to sing “Mother”).

But there is a deeper, though tenuous, connection, which I find hard to put into words: his death and my destruction. He was murdered by a madman in a mob, and before that had death threats for his comment about the Beatles and Jesus Christ. American hysteria, American violence. I had my career and reputation destroyed by a similar mob. Believe me, I felt the violence, the lust to destroy. I can’t name individuals, though every crowd is made of them. The reality of the evil was somehow ignored by its practitioners (I am thinking of ex-colleagues and so-called friends). Of course, John was physically killed and I wasn’t. But you fool yourself if you don’t see an analogy. I think the other Beatles are lucky not to have been killed by some other American lunatic (there are plenty of them). Somehow adulation turns to homicide, success breeds annihilation. There are many forms of murder and America is good at all of them.

We are lucky that we still have his music and spirit (and books)—killing him couldn’t destroy that. I still have my books and other writings. You tried to destroy that too, with your self-righteous attempts at academic cancelation, but it is harder to destroy than a life. If only John had survived that bullet. We could have had an interesting conversation.

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Truth as Consistency

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Truth as Consistency

I will present a new theory of truth. It can be stated thus: for a proposition to be true is for it to be consistent with reality.[1] For “snow is white” to be true is for it to be consistent with the fact that snow is white; “snow is black” is not consistent with snow being white, so it is false. It can’t be that “snow is black” is true and yet snow is white; but “snow is white” being true is eminently consistent with snow being white. The part of reality referred to by “snow is white” is the state of affairs of snow actually being white, but “snow is black” refers to no actual state of affairs. The latter sentence is not consistent with reality, but the former is. If someone asserted that snow is black, we could reply that that statement is not consistent with reality, thereby stating that the proposition in question is not true. It will be noticed that this relation of consistency holds between propositions and parts of reality; so, it isn’t the same as consistency between propositions. Some may find this objectionable, but it really isn’t. It is a perfectly natural way to talk. States of affairs can be consistent or inconsistent with each other, as well as propositions; we are simply extending the concept to a relation between propositions and facts (constituents of reality). There is consistency between propositions, consistency between states of affairs, and consistency between propositions and states of affairs. There is nothing incoherent about any of this; logic straddles these domains.  The theory is thus intuitively appealing and logically kosher.

What is nice about this theory is that it dispenses with the old notion of correspondence, which was never terribly clear. Doesn’t “snow is black” correspond with the fact that snow is white in the sense that it maps onto that fact via the falsehood relation? To rule this out we have to say, “truth-making correspondence”, but that is circular. The word “correspondence” merely gestures at a relation we haven’t yet articulated; it trades on reading truth into it. It doesn’t provide a concept that has an independent use—a prior meaning. But the word “consistency” does just that; it uses a concept we are familiar with from logic, not some ill-defined newfangled word. We know what consistency is already; we just have to extend its use to a new domain, viz. proposition-reality consistency. Thus, we can say that the sentence “’snow is white’ is true and snow is not white” expresses a logical contradiction, since the first conjunct entails that snow is white—it entails that reality is a certain way. Truth is simply consistency with the fact a sentence states: the proposition that snow is white is consistent with the fact that snow is white.

It might be said that the proposition that snow is white is consistent with many facts (infinitely many), but doesn’t it have just one truth-maker, viz. the fact that snow is white? Don’t we need to be more specific? All right, we can do that: we avail ourselves of the concept of entailment. Proposition and fact are not just consistent; the former entails the latter. That seems right: you can deduce, from “’snow is white’ is true”, that snow is white—but not that grass is green. We therefore obtain the entailment theory of truth: for a proposition to be true is for it to entail a (specific) fact—the fact it states. And the entailment cuts both ways: if it is a fact that snow is white, then it must be the case that “snow is white” is true. Then we have a conjunctive theory: for a proposition to be true is for it to be consistent with reality and such as to entail a specific fact of (or in) reality. The proposition that snow is white is consistent with reality and it entails the specific fact that snow is white. But the initial formulation was fine as it stands: to be true is to be consistent with the facts or with reality (compare “to be true is to correspond to the facts or to reality”). Truth, we feel, is a relation, and so it is under the consistency theory—not a correspondence relation, whatever exactly that is. Truth is a logical relation, familiar to us from logic. Thus, truth is a logical concept; indeed, the most basic of logical concepts. It needs no further enrichment. It may not be redundant, but it is extremely slender (rail-thin).[2]

[1] The idea for this paper came, improbably enough, from an Iranian comment on President Donald Trump: “His statement is not consistent with reality”. Is this a diplomatic way of saying that Trump’s statement was a lie, or at least false? Maybe in Iran the theory I am proposing is a commonplace.

[2] This is a minimalist theory of truth in that it invokes no heavy machinery in its analysis of the concept of truth; it relies solely upon the logical notion of consistency. But it is relational and is not just a redundancy theory. We do need a concept not contained in the proposition itself to capture the concept of truth, viz. consistency. By my count, this is the fifth theory of truth I have invented (see this blog), more than all the usual theories combined; it seems just a bit too easy to define truth. My theories are not incompatible but can be combined to form a composite picture of the nature of truth. Concepts don’t have just one analysis; they are more complex than that.

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Beatle Genius

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Beatle Genius

Big news: I have changed my opinion of the genius of the Beatles. I used to think that John and Paul were the true geniuses, with George and Ringo excellent but not at the same genius level. I now think that is wrong: George and Ringo were geniuses too! We need to distinguish genius from excellence or technical prowess. No one ever thought that John and Paul were genius-level musicians—either as instrumentalists or singers; what people thought was that they were creative geniuses, artistic geniuses. They had it. That indefinable magic. The look, the sound, the charisma. But so did the other two if you pay attention. George was a fantastic guitarist in his style, tone, and creativity; and he rocked. He could also sing great harmonies and stirring leads (e.g., Roll Over Beethoven, not to mention later classics). He also became a genius songwriter, as everyone now acknowledges. He looked and sounded great beside the other two. The three of them were incredible performers, in a class of their own. I don’t think anyone in the Stones or the Who were quite at George’s level, excellent as they are, let alone John and Paul. But what about Ringo—a genius? Now I speak as a drummer: I hereby assert that Ringo was also a creative genius as a drummer. He didn’t have the chops of Ginger Baker and many others, but I don’t think anyone thinks Ginger was a percussive genius—merely technically brilliant. Ringo, however, really gave a song what it needed; he hit the drums just right. His drumming in Twist and Shout is stupendous, but so it was in everything; I don’t know of a single weak drum part in a Beatles song (except those few played by Paul). Ringo was also a genius in his image: physically shorter, not as handsome, more modest and agreeable. He was the most loved Beatle. He sang With a Little Help from my Friends perfectly. So, the Beatles had four geniuses in the band, and I’m not sure any other band had any. Brian Wilson had some, so did Pete Townsend, maybe Steve Winwood—but no one shone as brightly as those four young men from Liverpool. They were incapable of junk and jointly revolutionized pop music. Their personalities alone lit up the world at a dreary time. And I say this as one who didn’t really love their middle period stuff (Rubber Soul, Revolver)—too experimental, not raw enough.

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