More on Skateboarding

Yesterday’s New York Times carried an article about skateboarding, in the business section of all places. I read it with interest. It was all about skateboarding in middle age. The author passionately described his sessions in a Costco parking lot. The emphasis was on bonding with his middle-aged buddies, learning tricks and filming it. These wild and free heroes of the concrete and tarmac had learned to skateboard as teenagers and were still doing it! Imagine that: in your forties and fifties (and in rare cases your sixties) and still able to skateboard, even quite competently! I thought: I started skateboarding when I was 74 (no exclamation point). It wasn’t that hard—hardly heroic at all. I was doing it (sans buddies) yesterday afternoon on my prized Magneto long-board, with helmet and wrist guards, gliding along the local byways (the next street over). Looking dashing, no doubt. No tricks, no fancy stuff, just solid no-nonsense cruising. What is it with the tricks? Not if you want to avoid body-road collisions. Let’s not get all American-macho about it, with age-group rivalry and what-not. I like to glide and cruise, gaze at the scenery, feel the air rushing past. I did it after my usual Sunday afternoon tennis practice and motorcycle riding. None of this is in the slightest bit miraculous (though I suppose my medical history makes it statistically improbable). Remember, I started playing the guitar at 60, singing at 70, knife throwing at 75. It doesn’t really warrant an article in the business section of the New York Times. If I can do it, you can. The thing is you don’t really want to: you are afraid you will look foolish, do it incompetently, fail to do it at all. Be honest now. You think you are past all that and prefer the comfort of the sofa. Think again, I say.

Fodor on Concept Possession

Jerry Fodor holds that to possess a concept is to be able to think about its referent—and that’s all. He asks, rhetorically, “So what’s wrong with identifying having a concept C with being able to think about Cs as such?” (21: italics all his, for some reason.) Later we read: “To have the concept TABLE is to be able to think about tables as such; to have the concept PRIME NUMBER is to be able to think about prime numbers as such; and so on, with perfect generality, for predicative concepts at large.” (75)[1] He opposes this theory to what he calls pragmatist theories that identify concept possession with dispositions to accept conceptual entailments and suchlike matters. He calls his theory a Cartesian theory of concept possession. He regards it as minimalist and intuitively correct—a piece of non-theoretical common sense. He thinks it is anti-pragmatist. I am going to argue that it is not correct at all, and, in fact, another form of pragmatism (and not Cartesian). Concepts are not abilities and not abilities to think. They are more primitive and neutral than that. The objections are really quite obvious and widely rehearsed.

Are Fodor’s conditions necessary and sufficient for concept possession? Must anyone who has the concept Cbe able to think about its referent, and must everyone with the ability to think about the referent of C have the concept C? As to necessity: must anyone with legs be able to walk? No, because they may be paralyzed. So, it would be wrong to analyze leg possession as having the ability to walk. Having a trait does not always entail being able to act on it. Is pain analyzable as an ability to avoid the painful stimulus? No—paralysis again. Is having a memory the same as being able to remember? No, because the memory, though present, may not be retrievable—now or ever. Is having a concept the same as being able to think about its referent? No, because you might have a splitting headache, or are being tortured with loud noises, or have brain damage to your thinking area (but not your concept-storing area). What about innate concepts (which Fodor believes in)—can’t they exist without the ability to think, now or ever? Being able to think of X goes beyond merely having the concept X. The former is not a necessary condition of the latter. And how much is built into thinking—does it require reasoning? But surely you can have a concept and not be able to reason with it for any number of reasons (drugs, head trauma, etc.). Does Fodor mean able think like a normal human or will an animal do; the former may not be a necessary condition for concept possession. The ability to think of X is a typical consequence of having the concept X not its very essence. What then is its essence? Simple: a concept is a mental representation of something (with certain combinatorial properties)[2]—not the ability to employ this representation in thought. That is an additional fact. Knowing the meaning of a word is not an ability to use it, since you may be unable to speak, or even engage in inner vocal acts. Concepts are not actions. That’s a pragmatist prejudice, as Fodor would be the first to insist. Descartes doesn’t hold that ideas are practical abilities to think any more than perceptions are practical abilities to act. They may be the basis of such abilities, but they don’t reduce to them. Thinking is an action, an intentional action, but concepts aren’t actions—any more than eyes and ears are. Anatomy isn’t ability but structure. Would Fodor say that concepts are dispositions to think about their referents? Presumably not, given that a person may not be disposed to think in that way, even though in possession of the relevant concepts—he may not feel like thinking and be disposed rather to go to sleep. Or he may find thinking of X painful and prefer to avoid thinking of X—he is disposed notto think of X. And is a very circumscribed thinker (he thinks only about football), with a minimal ability to think complex thoughts, less in possession of his concepts than a brilliant polymathic thinker? There are degrees of the ability to think, but not degrees of concept possession correlated with this. Possessing a concept is not a skill (more like a state). You can get better at thinking but not at concept possessing.

None of this is to deny that a concept may be defined as a way of thinking (a mode of presentation, a Fregean sense), but that is not the same as an ability to think; ways aren’t abilities. A way of walking isn’t an ability to walk. It is interesting that Fodor never says that having a concept is the same as an ability to form beliefsabout its referent, and one can see why: a person may possess concepts and yet have no ability (or inclination) to form beliefs involving those concepts. He may be a convinced skeptic who never forms beliefs about anything and is quite unable to (though he thinks about things), or he may suffer from brain damage to his belief-forming areas. Conceptualizing is not believing, and it’s not thinking either. These are different capacities, faculties, mental systems. Having a concept is not the same as being able to describe its referent either; that requires a different piece of mental apparatus. What if someone claimed that having a concept is definable as being able to dream about its referent? Wouldn’t that be a clear case of confusing the intrinsic with the extrinsic? Dreaming isn’t internal to concept possession; it is just one thing you might do with a concept. Isn’t it just a dogma of pragmatism to suppose that all facts are really reducible to corollaries of those facts, or consequences of them? Pragmatists think that being always consists in acting, but it doesn’t. Thinking is no doubt correlated with concept possession, though not invariably and analytically, but the latter doesn’t reduce to the former. Fodor is more of a pragmatist than he realizes; he thinks that in the beginning concepts are deeds—deeds of thinking. He thinks you can construct concepts out of episodes of thinking (expressions of a thinking ability). But no, concepts come first in generating abilities to think; he has put the pragmatic cart before the ontological horse, ironically. He is not really a realist about concepts. Concepts are not definable by their more visible effects.

What about sufficiency? Here I detect two problems. The first is one of those clever counterexamples that infuriate the true believer but which are difficult to rebut. What if you lacked a given concept but had the ability to buy a medical procedure to install that concept in your head—wouldn’t you have the ability (the wherewithal) to think about the referent of the concept (you can afford to buy it)? You don’t have the ability to think actively about X this instant—you would have to press a button to get the concept installed in a second or less. But you are able to think about X in the sense that you are able to bring this condition about—though not by virtue of having the concept in question. You now have the ability to think about X in the immediate future. If so, the ability is not sufficient for possessing the concept. Or what if God kept giving you the ability to think about X, but declined to give you the concept? The ability is caused by God’s intervention not by the concept that normally gives rise to it. There is conceptual daylight here. And you had better not stipulate that a person must think of X by possessing the concept X, as in “ability to think of X by having the concept X”, because that is blatantly circular as a definition. Secondly, how much are we packing into the word “think” in Fodor’s definition? What about an animal that possesses only non-conceptual content but can cognize a certain X—is it thinkingof X? It has X in mind, but only non-conceptually. If it is non-conceptually “thinking of” (cognizing) X, then the definition is not sufficient for concept possession, by hypothesis. But if we have to add “conceptually” to “think of”, then circularity again rears its ugly head: “to have a concept is to think of its referent conceptually”. The word “think” is carrying too much weight in this attempt at definition. The plain fact is that “John has the concept X” and “John has the ability to think of the referent of X” report different facts—indeed, facts of a different kind. Fodor’s theory is a kind of category mistake. The truth is that concepts are the de factocategorical basis of abilities to think about things, but are not strictly identical to such abilities; for the two can be pulled apart.[3]

[1] These quotations are from Fodor’s Hume Variations (2003).

[2] I don’t intend this as a formal definition of concepts, still less a theory of their nature; it merely sketches the general shape of a theory distinct from Fodor’s. What I am arguing is consistent with an avowed mysterianism about concepts, wholly or partially (shared by Fodor, as it happens).

[3] Why did Fodor subscribe to this theory, given its pragmatic flavor? He was always a staunch anti-pragmatist. I don’t know. Perhaps he was more steeped in Ryle-Wittgenstein philosophy of mind than he realized, though his rhetoric always repudiated such a philosophy. I suspect it was because of the need to say something about the nature of concepts; it was an abreaction to a felt mystery. He didn’t want to have nothing to say as an alternative to the theories of those detested pragmatists, so he came up with his cheeky formula. It is noticeable how little he had positively to say about concepts, openly admitting that they are a hard problem. My own stab at a definition is scarcely watertight and illuminating; it is indeed difficult to say what a concept is. But that shouldn’t drive us to accept wacky theories about what concepts are. We can at least say what they are not. It’s like rejecting behaviorism about consciousness while having no positive theory to offer.

Philosophy and AI

I think AI will be good for philosophy (if the philosophers don’t ruin it first, a big if). The reason is obvious: AI is no good at philosophy, at least as AI now exists. But it is good at many other things: white-collar jobs, routine teaching, performing calculations, storing information, providing quick answers. It is good at math and science, but not good at philosophy. So, jobs in fields where AI is good will disappear, but philosophers won’t. This is all commonly accepted, more or less. But I think it goes further—into news and entertainment. I think animated newscasters are a distinct possibility, along with robot cameramen and computerized news writers. I’m not sure about comedians (see “The Comeback” on HBO), but I predict that actors are going to be in trouble, especially action stars and leading men and women. For the powers of animation are going to take over their roles (literally). We already see it happening in sci-fi and fantasy films, also pornography. Nature documentaries are on the brink of extinction. AI is just less expensive and more flexible. You won’t even need scriptwriters for the commercial stuff (are there any real writers in Hollywood anymore?). A dumbed-down culture like ours is an AI culture.

But philosophers are not expendable in this way, except for routine teaching. The only question is whether the demand will exist. If universities as we know them succumb to AI, partially or wholly, philosophers will go elsewhere and form companies—so long as there is a demand for them. This is the big question: in an age of AI will people become stupider or will they aspire to something more elevated—difficult, challenging, profound? My suspicion is that they will do the latter: their minds will be less taken up with routine mechanical tasks and freer to roam more widely and deeply. Philosophers will be in demand, treated as valuable commodities. Movie stars will fade away, and TV celebrity pundits, to be replaced by philosophy stars. AI will come to them. I use AI to do my grunt work, but I don’t use it to make progress on philosophical issues, and I never will (not in this lifetime). I envisage a society in the not-too-distant future in which philosophers (good ones anyway—there are plenty of hacks) will be regarded as superstars. Even the architects of AI will lose out to AI, as AI figures out how to manage and create AI. Even in a society dominated by AI, not always benignly, philosophers will still be necessary—and I am really not so sure about scientists, historians, and even athletes. Armies won’t need flesh-and-blood troops (we will have robotic boots-on-the-ground and drones in the air). In an AI world actual organic philosophers will be kings, or at least “Hollywood royalty”. And the underlying reason, in my book, is that we philosophers deal with insoluble problems, while AI deals in soluble problems (problems not mysteries). It will be good for us that our problems can’t be solved.

Entanglement Epistemology

Is there any alternative to empiricism and rationalism—experience and reason, impressions and innate ideas?[1] In particular, do we need to have experiences of everything we know? Can empirical knowledge (as opposed to the a priori kind) be constituted by anything other than sense impressions of the thing known? One might hope so, because many things in the world are not directly experienced. Can we just know a thing without needing to experience it? What else could provide knowledge apart from experience? I am going to suggest that the empiricist conception of empirical knowledge is fundamentally mistaken; such knowledge has a quite different nature or essence. The concept of experience is not the right concept to capture it. I will build up to this slowly.

We already have ideas floating around that imply a non-experiential conception of knowledge. One idea is correspondence or correlation: to know a fact is to have a mental state (possibly a belief) that corresponds to a fact or correlates with a fact; here is the belief and there is the fact, and the two are in a relation of correspondence or correlation. There is a mental bit and a worldly bit, and one bit fits the other: my belief that snow is white corresponds to, or is correlated with, the fact that snow is white—so I know that fact. But this simple theory runs into trouble because the two need to be connected not just correlated: it has to be becauseof the fact that snow is white that I believe that snow is white. Notice that this theory says nothing about experience; it is more abstract than that. The natural next step is to introduce the concept of causation: to know a fact is to be in a state that is caused by that fact (or a related one). Thus, we obtain a causal theory of knowledge: all empirical knowledge is caused by external facts; there is no non-causal knowledge of the world. Instead of saying that all knowledge depends on experience, we say that all knowledge depends on causation (then we go on to specify what kind of causation). This is a non-empiricist theory of knowledge (also non-rationalist). It may not be much good as a theory, but it isn’t empiricist in the classic sense; experience doesn’t come into it and may not even be present in the knowing subject. It can handle knowledge acquired unconsciously, as in subliminal perception and blindsight, and it doesn’t require that all knowledge be based on direct experience of the thing known. It allows for knowledge in beings that lack sensory experience (“zombies”) but are still hooked up to reality causally. It makes room for the possibility that conscious experience is epiphenomenal and so never the cause of empirical beliefs (brains states are). It puts experience in its place epistemically.

We can sophisticate this simple causal theory, keeping its anti-empiricist flavor. Thus, we get reliability theories: to know a fact is to be reliably connected to facts in general. This ensures that the truth of one’s belief is not just a fluke; the subject is reliably right about relevant things (remember the red barn example). He is reliably connected to the facts. All knowledge is based on reliable connections between beliefs and facts, possibly backed by causal connections. Knowledge is reliable (causal) connection. Nothing experiential has been mentioned here. In the same vein we might bring the concept of impingement into the picture: knowledge arises from, and depends upon, the impingement of the world on the mind.[2] This is the essence of knowledge, its conceptual heart. And it is suitably general and capacious: we can allow for unconscious knowledge and knowledge of things we can’t directly experience (as well as blindsight knowledge). We thus improve upon classic experience-based empiricism; this is a kind of non-experiential empiricism (denial of rationalism). All knowledge is acquired post-natally by means of worldly impingement, but experience (a certain kind of mental state) need play no role. If you don’t believe in experiences, you can still be a kind of empiricist—you can still believe that all knowledge comes from interactions with things outside the mind. You may admit that the theory is rather crude and oversimplified (and promise to work on improving it), and you may also accept that knowledge is somewhat mysterious as so conceived; but you are certainly not a classic experience-obsessed empiricist, like Locke and Hume. You reject the notion of phenomenal experiential foundations (the “given”) and inferences therefrom. Yet you hold that knowledge is all about being impinged upon by the world outside. Experience comes into it, if it comes in at all, only per accidens; it is just one way of being impinged upon. You are what might be called a connectionist about knowledge not a phenomenalist: knowledge is all about objectively connecting to external reality, not about subjectively experiencing from within. Inner feeling (sensation) is strictly irrelevant to knowledge per se. What your mind can connect to determines what you can know, not what can come before it phenomenally.

Where does entanglement come in? Perhaps it will surprise (and alarm) the reader if I say that the idea of quantum entanglement is being invoked. For I wish to suggest that knowledge is a form of entanglement in roughly the sense that particles can be entangled in quantum physics. That is, particles can be inextricably linked to other particles in ways that defy easy comprehension—yet they are so linked. Similarly, minds can be inextricably linked to other things in a curious and sometimes baffling manner—yet they are so linked. For example, your mind can be connected (entangled) with dispositions, possibilities, space, time, the self, other minds, and moral values, in ways that defy ordinary conceptions (mainly mechanical conceptions). The entanglement is mysterious relative to our intuitive commonsense ideas about how things work in nature (like gravity). But it happens; it’s real. The OED gives us “to make tangled” for “entangle” and for “tangle” we have “twist together into a confused mass”. But things can be twisted together otherwise than into a confused mass, e.g., braiding and rope. The word “entanglement” in physics does not connote confusion or chaos (it is perfectly lawlike), but it does signify a kind of spooky joining together or union. Just so, mind and world get yoked together in instances of knowledge, improbably and weirdly. Your thoughts get linked to dispositions (say), even though it is hard to see how you can properly conceive of their existence (because of their imperceptible counterfactual implications). The mind ought not to be able to form such thoughts (and hence knowledge), but evidently it does. You can think about space and time, even though you are baffled about what they are. You can know other minds, but by rights you ought not to be able to (you have no direct experience of other minds). Somehow you can know about numbers, but have never seen one. There is epistemic entanglement of a puzzling (indeed uncanny) nature. It’s not like balls of string, where you expect them to get entangled. There is a strange kind of connection that contravenes empiricist principles (“no knowledge without direct experience”). Knowledge is a kind of mystifying connection (compare intentionality).

This knowledge just happens, even if we don’t know how or why. In effect, we have mysterious epistemic connectivity. Classic empiricism purported to give us a clear, intelligible, almost mechanical, picture of how knowledge is formed and constituted; but in reality, it is more mysterious and mind-stretching than the empiricists thought. It is a puzzling entanglement, but real enough. As a consolation, knowledge is more easily obtained than empiricist principles allow: there is an awful lot we don’t know according to these principles, which we patently do know. It is fair to report that empiricism has been regarded as a bad theory inasmuch as it fails to account for a good deal of human knowledge—but it has been reluctantly accepted largely because no other theory suggests itself. But now we see that there is another theory that is more empirically adequate, though less pellucid. And how pellucid is classic empiricism anyway—what is experience, and how is belief based on it? How exactly does the alleged “inference” work? We have to rethink human (and animal) knowledge from the ground up, recognizing its peculiarities. Epistemology is as perplexing as quantum physics (well, maybe not quite as perplexing). We need an entanglement theory combined with a dose of mysterianism. Mind and brain are connected, despite the puzzling nature of their connection; mind and world are also connected in the phenomenon of knowledge, despite the puzzling nature of the connection. We should be connectionists about both, though perplexed connectionists.

But we shouldn’t feel totally defeated in the case of knowledge, since it is quite evident that we know various things that our traditional theories say we can’t know, e.g., that we have specific sensory faculties. Knowledge is eminently possible, despite skeptical protests. I just do know stuff that I can’t directly experience, okay. Not everything I know about gives rise to sense impressions in me (atoms, numbers, selves), that’s a fact. In cases of knowledge mind and world get spliced together in remarkable ways, get used to it. Epistemologically, we exist in an entangled state of nature. The thoroughly modern empiricist should be saying that all knowledge is a result of epistemic entanglement with nature—not derived from hallowed tradition or God or our omniscient genes. Experience might come into it at various points, but it is not the be-all and end-all. The basic concept of knowledge is not an experiential concept. My knowing mind can become epistemically entangled with color by perceiving it, but it can also become entangled with the faculty of sight by my possessing that faculty, by embodying it. Similarly, my mind can get tangled up (twisted together, intertwined) with dispositions, space, time, selves, numbers, values, etc., without perceiving them with any of my five senses. We are thus not condemned to an experiential reduction of all knowledge in the manner or classic empiricism (or its more or less faithful descendants). Knowledge is what it is and not some other thing.[3]

[1] This paper follows on from my “Faculty Knowledge”.

[2] See my “A New Definition of Knowledge”.

[3] In case you haven’t noticed, this paper is a rapid-fire survey of the history of epistemology up to the present day. The aim is to reinvent the subject by forging a new path. We are tremendously in the grip of traditional empiricism (less so rationalism) and it takes an effort of will to see through it. I intend my use of the word “entanglement” to create a new way to approach the subject, though a way not without precedents. We are always looking for the right words, and the English language will only take us so far. Knowledge is not easy to describe, or even conceptualize—like many things.