Chapter Two

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Chapter Two

That business with the cards was only the beginning of Amber’s illness. She had it bad. Her illness was wicked. It could strike at any moment: in the car, in the playground, watching TV. It could even happen while she slept. She might wake up with a soiled pillow if she had a bad dream. She didn’t always disgorge, though, which was a mercy for all concerned, and the amount could vary. Sometimes it took the form of a queasy feeling in the stomach with no danger of ejection, but sometimes it was a fiercer feeling. Sometimes it was more like a burp. She developed the ability to hold it back—but this didn’t always work. Nausea was always lying in wait for her.

It had nothing to do with what she ate or whether she was sick with anything like measles or chicken pox. She was a healthy little girl generally, much given to running and jumping and playing with balls. She experienced no headache or fatigue. It was something of the mystery. She could be happily talking to a friend and it would start up, sometimes requiring a trip to the bathroom. It seemed like an allergy of some sort, but no one could put their finger on what it was an allergy to. Some people thought she was faking it to get attention, but this only made the condition worse. She tried her best not to do it in public so as not to upset people.

Even more curious was the stuff itself, which actually wasn’t that bad, as vomit goes. It had a funny color, sky blue, and it glowed in the dark. It had no odor. It had the consistency of porridge. It didn’t produce nausea in others, though you wouldn’t want to carry it around in a plastic bag. Animals were puzzled by it, wrinkling their noses in perplexity. Amber’s cat hardly noticed it. Yet it seemed to be triggered by something nasty, and Amber herself wasn’t happy about the whole thing.

Naturally her parents were worried, so they took her to the family doctor, a pink man with silvery nostril hairs. The doctor examined her in all the ways he knew how, but declared himself baffled. Were they giving her the wrong type of food? Was she getting enough exercise? Did she suffer from indigestion? All negative. He summed up thus: “If there’s anything medically wrong with her, I’m a Dutchman, and I’ve never even been to Holland.” This made Amber smile, though she felt a twinge of unease. It was no common-or-garden eating disorder. When he examined the material itself, he was utterly baffled—what subtle substance could be responsible for that bluish glow? This wasn’t some kind of practical joke, was it? He was a busy man, you know. Amber stifled a burp at this point. A thorough chemical analysis must be undertaken, top scientists consulted. It could cost a pretty penny. The doctor didn’t like his expertise to be doubted but he admitted defeat.

The specialist who was called in, a Dr. Daniloff, a lady doctor, had a big office with many certificates on the wall. She was famous! She had a swivel chair that could zoom around the office and she wore prominent spectacles. You had to respect Dr. Daniloff, MD, BS, PhD. The doctor declared herself intrigued by the case, very intrigued indeed, and wondered aloud whether it might be christened Daniloff’s Syndrome. Or course, she was concerned by Amber’s suffering—who wouldn’t be—but also medically stimulated. It was unique. She could go down in the annals of medical history—her and Amber. There might even be a Knobble prize in it. This was no routine virus or genetic disorder; this was clearly a new disease entirely. Could it be contagious? Tests were necessary, scans were indicated. She was determined to get to the bottom of it. We must first isolate the cause of the problem, eliminating every possibility. Experiments must be performed, substances injected, brain waves recorded. Her reputation depended on it. Meanwhile Amber was feeling a touch queasy. The cause of the problem appeared to be Dr. Daniloff herself, despite all her good intentions. She was now exploring the possibility that the condition (she called it that) was purely psychological, perhaps reflecting parental failings. She asked the parents if there was any sign of what she called “domestic stress”. At this suggestion Amber felt a surge inside her and promptly ejected a pint of blue porridge. It fell at the doctor’s feet, whereupon she examined her shoes. She paused in silent thought, then said: “I think I have it—the girl is allergic to moral badness!” Not for nothing was she top of her class in medical school. “She reacts to the unethical”. She smiled broadly, anticipating headlines, TV appearances. “The little girl is a badness barometer, a litmus test of evil if you like. She can sense it and then respond appropriately. It’s like a sixth sense. She has ETS—Evil Toxicity Syndrome. Bad people make her sick”.

The family left Dr. Daniloff’s office feeling puzzled but satisfied. They always knew she was special. Now they knew what to say to people who inquired about their daughter’s condition.

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THE LITTLE SICK GIRL

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                                      THE LITTLE SICK GIRL[1]

Chapter One

Not very long ago, under a bright quarter moon, a little girl was born. The moon blinked as her round bald head popped out from inside her mother, and a purplish pale light came over the night sky. The wind stopped its gossiping for a moment. Even space and time eavesdropped. She was slow to take her first breath, as if unsure what the air might contain—tiny feathers maybe. But she gulped it down before the doctor had a chance to smack her bottom to make her cry. She wasn’t stupid.

The little sick girl was here, down among us.

Her parents were happy she was born, because they had always wanted a little girl.  Amber, she was christened, one day in their small kitchen (the microwave humming in the background as if it was excited). An older brother, Timmy, was already in the world, waiting for her to arrive. The moon and the wind had not disturbed themselves when he plopped into the world five years earlier. He was a strong healthy boy, with dark tufts of hair shooting from his scalp. They all lived in a small town, somewhere near Somewhere. There was nothing out of the ordinary about it, except it was where Amber came to Earth. It was like any other somewhere.

To all appearances, Amber looked like a perfectly normal child. Her straight blonde hair grew like any child’s, a bit more quickly than the rest of her. She cried and kicked and wet herself, and slept when it suited her, like any baby. Perhaps her light blue eyes (those miniature ponds of trapped light) opened rather wider and shut rather tighter than the average infant’s eyes, but not so as you would notice. She began to walk when her legs told her to, amazed she could stay upright on those tapering lengths of wax. She giggled when she took a few steps. Words soon began to jump from her mouth, like little acrobats of sound, twirling and somehow landing on their feet. She felt the preciousness and power of her words, as if each word carried a part of her into the outside world. And meanwhile her understanding grew: of people, animals, the sky, the dirt. Her mind formed itself, secretly, cleverly, until she was filled with it, until it was her.

That was when the first strange thing happened. Amber and Timmy were playing cards, fanning out hearts and diamonds, clubs and spades, slapping them down and yelling “I’ve won!”. She wasn’t very good at cards—she was only three years old—but sometimes she got lucky with the cards she was dealt. Then she felt that thrill of unearned good fortune: the world was being kind to her. She wanted to tell her brother about her good luck, but knew that wasn’t done. She kept quiet. She laid down her cards slowly and carefully. “Look,”’ she said, “a royal blush”. Timmy glared at her cards and angrily hit them with the flat of his hand. “You cheated!” he shouted. He scattered them across the carpet. “But I didn’t,” she protested. “I won”. Sullenly he replied, “Well, I’m not playing with you anymore. This is boring.” She gazed at him with a look of wonder and confusion in her eyes. Then she felt a peculiar welling up in her stomach. It was a sensation she had never felt before: a sharp nausea inside her, as if something nasty had slunk in there and badly wanted to get out. Normally her stomach was calm and quiet, but now it felt like erupting, like a volcano. She vomited onto the carpet. This created some new patterns and bright colors, but it wasn’t a work of art. She had made a picture—but of what?

Her mother sent her straight to bed, saying she must have eaten something she shouldn’t. Did she feel ill? Had she been eating too many sweets? These questions only made her feel worse and she felt the nausea well up again. In bed she wondered what had happened, but couldn’t make sense of it. Now the nauseous feeling had gone away, leaving only an unpleasant aftertaste and a premonition of what might be to come. All she knew was that she didn’t want it to happen again. Was she to blame for winning at cards? Did she enjoy the feeling too much? It seemed like some kind of message, but what was it?

[1] This is a children’s story I wrote nearly thirty years ago. I came across it by accident the other day and decided to convert it to electronic form and send it out. I intend to post it here a chapter at a time.

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Human Morality

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Human Morality

Humans have an elaborate moral system, but animals don’t. We have all sorts of moral rules and think about right and wrong constantly, but animals hardly give it a moment’s thought. We are the moral (naked) ape. This fact is commonly taken to show that we are superior to animals, morally superior. They do all sorts of bad things and don’t give a damn, but we have a finely developed moral sense; we have a conscience, they just act any way they feel like. This is somehow connected to the fact that we have a soul while they are soulless. Perhaps God has given us morality, while letting animals wallow in a cesspool of unethical behavior. I think this point of view is complete baloney; if anything, the opposite is true. We have morality because we are so bad. This point is not difficult to appreciate: we are constantly lying, cheating, breaking promises, acting selfishly, being ungrateful, being cruel, being nasty, discriminating, betraying, bad-mouthing, committing adultery, and generally mistreating other people and animals. So it has always been, and so it is everywhere. Animals kill, fight, even rape and pillage, but they can’t match us for range of bad behavior; we are immorally superior. Original sin, bad seed, bad to the bone, rotten to the core—that kind of thing. Morally, we suck. We are experts in the art of unethical behavior. It is one of our native competences; we are really good at being bad. Animals are rank amateurs compared to us—scarcely immoral at all. There are no career criminals or miscreants or moral deviants among animals. Have you ever heard of an evil animal—a mass murderer, an abuser of children? Are there any baboon psychopaths and cold-hearted koala serial killers? Are there any feline Dorian Greys? Hitlers and Stalins? Envious plotters and lying con-men? Animals seem relatively innocent of these vices and moral shortcomings.

This is the reason we have morality—because we are otherwise so bad. We need morality, but other animals don’t. We need morality in order to curb our immoral enthusiasm. Every child has to be taught morality, because every child is naughty, sometimes grievously so. We have to be civilized out of it. We are good because we are bad—naturally bad, culturally good. The superego has to be added to the id; the Mr. Hyde in us must be subjected to the Dr. Jekyll. It is because we are morally inferior to animals that we need to inject some morality into our behavior. But this raises an interesting question: why do we bother? Why not just go around being bad all the time? Why not let it all hang out? In what way would this jeopardize our survival? Wouldn’t it be an advantage reckoned by the probability of gene propagation? Wouldn’t we expect a (selfish) gene for selfishness? Actually, no: for we are a social species essentially, and society requires regulation. You won’t do well at maximizing your gene replication if no one will be your friend, or work with you, or mate with you. You will be shunned and shamed, excluded from polite society, even exiled and thrown in prison. It’s prudent to be moral (also moral to be moral). So, we need a gene for unselfishness—a selfish gene for unselfishness (all genes are selfish). We need a morality gene to combat our genes for immorality. True, we are bad to the bone, but we have a veneer of goodness—a real veneer. We are naturally (natively) moral, because we are also naturally (natively) immoral. We have a morality instinct to counter our immorality instincts. We thus have a split nature, a division within the self (animals have a single unified self). That’s why we are constantly oscillating between the good and the bad: now acting selfishly and wickedly, now regretting it and paying penance. We are a wild bunch policed by a civilized sheriff. These two motivations exist side by side in the human psyche. Thus, we humans are a confused and divided lot. Both traits are natural to us, genetically encoded, part of human nature. But the good part only exists because the bad part exists. If we weren’t bad, we wouldn’t need to be good.[1] It is as if the genes said to themselves, “We had better get our act together morally, because all this bad behavior isn’t going down well with the social group”. They gave up hope of eliminating all the bad stuff (it served a purpose) and settled for an uneasy combination. Hence all those stern commandments about not doing what you feel like doing. It even became clear that being very good had its genetic advantages in terms of group affection and acceptance. Self-control, concern for others—it pays (and it pays not to know that it pays).

But why are we so bloody awful to start with? It doesn’t seem like a smart strategy. Other animals are not this nasty so it is not necessary for success in the gene wars. Why make a species as criminally inclined as the human species? Why are we so immoral as to need morality? It seems excessive, gratuitous. There is no Devil tempting us, so why do we succumb to the call of the immoral? Now that’s a tough one: we seem perversely unethical, stupidly so. Several suggestions suggest themselves, and they each might have some truth in them. The obvious theory is language, because we have it and animals don’t. Language and immorality are coextensive in the animal world. After all, you can’t lie and break promises unless you can speak, and many forms of misconduct are language-dependent (particularly plotting). Speechless criminals are apt to be not very good criminals. But language is a means not an end, and it doesn’t cover the full range of human iniquity. How about money and wealth? Animals don’t have that and we do, so is that the source of our immorality? You can see how this might lead to envy and acquisitiveness, but it seems too recent and parochial to explain the extent of our badness. Is it simple greed? By why so greedy—other animals aren’t. Is it social inequality, rank, status? But these apply to animals too and yet animals don’t seize immorality with open arms. Is it intelligence? This seems more on the right track: we have the brains to see how bad behavior might help us in life, but animals are too dim-witted to see the possibilities. We can plot and connive, anticipate the future, figure things out, rob banks. We are immoral because we are intelligent—and intelligence has its dark side. Capitalism. Family feuds. Master criminals. Sex: is it all about sex? Getting as much of it as possible. Some immoral conduct no doubt stems from this source, but not all: how does girl-on-girl bullying advance one’s sexual prospects? Maybe it’s an unholy alliance of all of the above—a speaking, envious, competitive, clever, sexually voracious, naked ape. This all leads us down the garden path of evil from which we need to be delivered by morality, in our own self-interest. If humans had no moral sense, their lives would be hell, given their propensity to unethical behavior. They would be unable to live together and their lives would be nasty, brutish and short. We are bad by nature and good by necessity. If we had never developed the morality trait, we would have gone extinct long ago. Indeed, all our pre-historic hominid relatives did go extinct—we are the only ones left standing—and this may be because they never discovered morality (or their genes didn’t). We need to cooperate and cohere as a group and immorality is not conducive to that; it gets you ejected from the group on which your life depends. Maybe we were once on the brink of extinction due to our wicked ways and morality came along to save us from ourselves. A meteor caused dinosaur extinction; our rotten souls nearly caused our extinction (and still might). We exist now because we became moral (to some degree), but it’s a battle we might lose as time goes by. Once society begins to fragment as a result human badness, the foundation of our existence is threatened; and morality as it exists now is a frail reed to prevent this from happening. Animals don’t have this problem because their bad behavior, such as it is, is not too extreme and widespread. No species ever went extinct because it was bad to the bone, just a really nasty piece of work. Apart from us, nature is fundamentally virtuous (or at least not vicious). To put it differently, animals don’t hate each other, despise each other, discriminate against each other, persecute each other, seek to annihilate each other. We do, so we need morality to keep us in check (or else it’s curtains). We are ethical because we are unethical. Animals are not ethical because they are not unethical. We should not be proud of our ethics, but ashamed that we need it.[2]

[1] I don’t mean to imply that animals never do any good, or that humans would lack altruism if they were not also morally bad. But the system of morality we have, which forms a kind of organic whole, is largely concerned with prohibitions, and that system would not exist if we never did anything worth prohibiting.

[2] It would be hard to maintain that animals are ever evil, depraved, cruel, and sadistic. I doubt they ever revel in the suffering of others. They don’t experience schadenfreude. Of course, they can be brutal and self-interested, but they are not corrupt, mean, duplicitous, prejudiced. Were any of our extinct hominid cousins as nasty as we are? Are there planets with worse people on them? What would they be like? We can just about imagine a worse species, but it isn’t easy. Even our greatest heroes have their weaknesses and peccadillos. But you can spend your life around animals and never witness a single unethical act—no false accusations, no back-biting, no mean-spiritedness, no viciousness. I wonder if animals ever intentionally produce pain (torture) as an end in itself; I rather doubt it. If not, you don’t need a moral law telling you not to cause pain unnecessarily. The gulf between man and beast is not so much that we are moral and they are not as that we are immoral and they are not. Our lives are thus governed by moral prohibitions, but theirs aren’t. They have no moral consciousness to speak of.

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Categories of Intentionality

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Categories of Intentionality

It’s time to get serious about intentionality. I mean we need to develop a systematic taxonomy of it—a classificatory scheme. And we need to include the whole it, not just this or that type. We also need to clean up and systematize the terminology, because the word “intentionality” hinders comprehension: it has no verb form (except “intend”, which is misleading) and it suggests intention too forcefully. I propose recruiting “reference” as our theoretical term, so that we can use “refer” as the verbal form. So, we need to construct a taxonomy of linguistic and mental reference—everything that can be said to refer in the sense intended by “intentionality”. We need a taxonomy of reference in general; and we need to establish priorities.

I will start with language—not because it is the most basic but because it is the most familiar and well-trodden. And I will distinguish four types of linguistic reference: nominal, descriptive, indexical, and general. There are different terms for these categories in the literature, but I think we can all agree if I say that these correspond to proper names, definite descriptions, demonstrative pronouns, and general terms (or predicates). These are all ways in which utterances can refer, and each has received its fair share of logical and linguistic treatment. In this connection we encounter such concepts as acquaintance knowledge and descriptive knowledge, sense and reference, context and causality, character and content, direct reference, rigid designation, intension and extension, predicate reference. It is generally agreed (though not universally) that we have here four distinct types of reference—four varieties of linguistic intentionality. The concept of reference is divisible into these four types.

Now we must ask if there are other bearers of reference apart from language. It is no great stretch to include cognitive states: thoughts, beliefs, and knowledge. Thoughts can be name-involving, descriptive, indexical, and general—and so can belief and knowledge. Thoughts can refer in these four ways. Some may say this is because there is a language of thought; others may take the cognitive case to be sui generis. We are certainly not speaking of the same thing when we say that thoughts (etc.) have intentionality or make reference. But it doesn’t stop there: we also have perception to consider. Again, it seems reasonable to attribute reference to perceptual states: I can see John, see the man in the corner, see that woman over there, and see the color red. Each of these is a different kind of perceptual intentionality requiring separate treatment. Different things are going on in my mind when I have the perceptual states in question—different mental acts are being performed, often simultaneously. Similarly for conative states: I can desire to go to France, desire to climb the highest mountain in the world, desire that piece of cake, desire to spread good will everywhere. Desire has the same four-way division of types of intentionality. And emotion lines up in turn: I can be angry at John, angry at the man (whoever he is) that spilt the milk, angry at that guy with the megaphone, and angry at fascism. All in all, then, we have twenty types of intentionality: four times five. There are five different types of mental state (including language) and four different types of referential device. They crowd together in the mental landscape as we perceive, think, desire, feel, and speak. The intentional zoo has many species in it.

So far, so smooth; not much to get worked up about here. But things become murkier when we inquire into priorities: which, if any, of these categories is basic? I certainly don’t think language is; in fact, I think it is the least basic. I am inclined to think that desire and emotion are basic, because more primitive evolutionarily. Perceptual reference exists in service to conation and emotion—desire for food and shelter and emotions of fear and aggression. The organism must secure food and shelter and it must avoid predators and seek mates. It senses what it needs to sense in order to survive. Reference derives ultimately from the conative and the affective—the desire-emotion complex. No doubt this primitive intentionality is modified when uploaded into other faculties, but the rudiments pre-exist these faculties. The question is difficult, but presumably it has an answer. Reference is not exactly clear and uncontroversial. What we can say is that a properly inclusive theory of intentionality will have to take in a lot more than is conventionally recognized. The varieties of reference are more extensive than the literature would suggest.  At any rate, we now have a taxonomy to work with.[1]

[1] I have referred (linguistically, mentally) to a vast literature in this short essay, as old hands will recognize: Brentano, Pierce, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Quine, Strawson, Kripke, Kaplan, Evans, Burge, Donnellan, and others. These estimable thinkers have tended to focus on reference in language and left the other kinds to fend for themselves; I am trying to rectify this tremendous oversight, not to say injustice. Where is desire in all this? Where is anger? Such linguistic chauvinism! I am preaching inclusiveness.

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Philosophers and Novelists

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Philosophers and Novelists

Some professional novelists are amateur philosophers (too numerous to list). There are many philosophical novels. The same goes for poets, playwrights, and short story writers (also song writers). Fiction has room for philosophy. But there are very few professional philosophers who are amateur novelists (or professional ones). Philosophers seldom write fiction on the side. Why? Is it because they don’t read fiction and don’t like it? That may be true of some but certainly not all. Are they just too busy? Hardly. I think the answer is that they don’t have the talent or inclination or skill set. They are just no good at it. The way they normally write doesn’t equip them with the skills of a fiction writer. Their prose is too dry, abstract, and inhuman. Their minds are not cut out for it. There are exceptions, but they prove the rule. Sartre’s fiction is in service to his philosophy (Nausea is an existentialist novel), and anyway he is not a typical academic philosopher (he never published in Mind). He only published one novel. Iris Murdoch is the great counterexample: she is a fine much-published novelist and she taught philosophy at Oxford. But she is better described as a novelist who also writes philosophy—she gave up teaching philosophy after a few years (and also never published in Mind). I happen to think she is an excellent philosopher, as well as novelist, but she is hardly an orthodox analytical philosopher—her philosophical books are not classic Oxford philosophy, and no one ever offered her a job in a philosophy department. What we don’t find is a typically accredited academic philosopher who is also adept at writing novels. We don’t find anyone good at both. No one who publishes in Mind also publishes comic novels or romances are even adventure stories. It is as if one ability excludes the other.

The only exception I know of is me—in the whole history of philosophy. Kant wrote no comic fiction or lyrical poetry. Hume was a fine writer but didn’t venture into the horror story. Descartes never tried his hand at song writing. Russell, it is true, penned a couple of short stories, but they were sorely lacking in novelistic qualities (yet he was close friends with Joseph Conrad). All these people could write up a storm, but fiction eluded them. There is no one of whom it could be said that they were genuinely able philosophers, writing about mainstream philosophy, and also accomplished writers of non-philosophical fiction—who possess bothabilities. Except me. I have published two full-length novels, Bad Patches and The Space Trap, as well as a couple of short stories (and written many more), and even composed song lyrics (as well as some poetry). To me there is nothing strange or strained about this; it comes naturally. Nor do I just recycle my philosophy in my novels; they aren’t about philosophy at all. They are comic novels about sex, money, and art, and marriage, boredom, and emigration. I keep philosophy out of it. I write dialogue and descriptive passages, describe feelings and actions. I don’t go all intellectual in my novels. I aim to shock and amuse. I write down-the-line people-centered literary fiction. I dip into the demotic. I go for the jugular. You couldn’t tell from reading my fictional stuff that I am a philosopher by profession. Why only me? I don’t know. I could have written a lot more fiction, but I decided against it for practical reasons; I have the chops, as they say. I would say I am better at philosophy, but then I have put a lot more time into it. I am genuinely puzzled about my uniqueness in this respect.

However, the main point I want to get across is this: philosophy would look very different if the two talents went together. Philosophical prose is generally heavy lifting, short on humor, reader-unfriendly, and often mind-numbing. It would be a lot easier to get through if the writer had some literary talent. Imagine an introduction to philosophy by Kingsley Amis! Imagine Flaubert on philosophical logic! Imagine Nabokov on the analysis of knowledge! Oscar Wilde on aesthetics! Jane Austen on skepticism! The list goes deliciously on. Why do I write philosophy the way I do and no one else does? Because I’m a novelist. I don’t go over the top with the lyrical and lascivious, the sex and violence; but the traces of it are there—I give the reader literary treats to keep him or her humming along. I venture to suggest that this possible world is better than our drab and dreary actual philosophical world: philosophy would be more enjoyable, engaging, accessible, popular. We philosophers might even make some money! We might get on TV, go on philosophy world tours, headline with rock bands, have a good time (I’m exaggerating for effect). Large sections of the population would read us and idolize us. The world would be a better and more intelligent place—if only we could write more appealing prose! If only we had a better sense of poetry and pizazz; if only a philosophy text read like Lolita. Okay, that’s asking a lot—maybe John Grisham would do, or Elmore Leonard. Really, a philosophical training in philosophy should include a creative writing component. There should be a prize for the best written philosophy book of the year. Wooden coma-inducing lumpen prose should be called out for what it is. Above all, we must stop thinking that good philosophy must be written like a medical report or a government paper. At the very least, philosophers should read some great prose stylists and try to absorb their methods, starting with Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm, and P.G. Wodehouse (later you can tackle Nabokov and George Eliot).[1]

[1] It’s not enough to think like a laser, you also have to write like a dream—as someone once said about someone.

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Ideal Languages

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Ideal Languages

Logic-minded philosophers have lamented the logical ineptitude of natural languages like English. They have recommended improvements based on formal systems. They have tried to approximate to an ideal language—one free of all logical defect. Others have decried these revisions and declared natural languages fine as they are; they have preferred descriptive philosophy of language to revisionary philosophy of language. It is less often noted that the would-be improvements are all stateable from within ordinary language, so that kind of language is quite capable of logical perfection, by the standards of the revisionists. But I am not going to be concerned with questions of logical perfection here but with other kinds of lapses from the ideal—less esoteric ones. For I wish to say that language as we have it is imperfect in certain other important respects: it is actually quite bad at certain things it purports to be at least competent in. Indeed, language distorts and misrepresents certain facts; moreover, this cannot be rectified from within language—the imperfection is endemic to language as such. In point of fact, ordinary language is very good at logic, which is why it can fix its own (alleged) logical problems; but it is not good at everything—quite the opposite. Good with logical reality, but bad with this other kind of reality (to be named shortly; I am keeping you guessing).

Let’s warm up with a relatively mundane aspect of language (and I mainly mean vocal speech): its volume. It’s not loud enough. Speech has to cope with background noise and sheer distance, and it often loses the battle. It is by no means sonically ideal. The human voice in its native state is not a great volume generator; shouting is frustratingly limited. There are low-talkers and loud restaurants. The human voice is poor at compensating for hearing loss in the elderly. Suppose you want to inform someone that a car is heading straight for them, so you shout a warning, but alas you just don’t have the necessary vocal volume. We know what happens next. It would be nice if you had an inbuilt loudspeaker to which you could resort when necessary, because your voice is just not loud enough sometimes; it is sonically deficient. It is also bad with accents: unless you are a native speaker of a given language, your foreign accent will always bedevil you. The English language is notoriously terrible at the pairing of spelling and sound; far from ideal. It does the non-native speaker no favors. Human speech is imperfect in its ability to conjure the right accent in a foreign tongue; the articulatory system thus leaves a lot to be desired. Then too, some words are just hard to pronounce (e.g., “anemone”) and many are far too long.

But the point I am leading up to hits us in a deeper place: our emotions (I’m sure you guessed it, because it’s all too familiar). Isn’t it a truism that our language falls grievously short in the emotion department? What is that quote from Flaubert? “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars”. Love, fear, anger—they receive short shrift from our cramped turns of speech. We can express our thoughts well enough, but our emotions are difficult to put into words, and we know it. We resort to gestures and grimaces, kisses and hugs. We shout and scream, murmur and coo. Saying the words “I love you” doesn’t seem to cut it—to show our love, put it on display for the beloved to savor. Just three little nondescript words, no different from other words, for such a Big Thing (cf. “I like figs”). Hence the talk of “shouting it from the rooftops”. Emotion and language just don’t match up that well; the latter is not designed for the former. What does match up? Music, song, dance, weeping, screaming, hitting, stroking. You can’t tell your pet dog or cat that you love them, so you stroke them or cuddle them or make funny noises. I think that song is the main symbolic medium of emotion in human beings, its ideal expression (insofar as it has one). But the words of the song don’t matter that much; it’s the way they are sung, particularly pitch and rhythm.[1] What is a human language? A finite system of syntactic rules and discrete lexical items, capable of infinite combination—an abstract computational object; it isn’t intrinsically expressive in the way other actions are. Emotions belong to a much older part of the human mind and brain, originating in animals; the language faculty was grafted on rather late in the day. There is no guarantee that it will express or convey the nature of feeling. It can name emotions, but it can’t embody them. We therefore sink into hyperbole and theatricals. We look the other person in the eye and adopt a particular bodily posture in a non-verbal effort to communicate our feelings. Darwin wrote a whole book on the expression of emotion in man and animals and language hardly came into it. Language is poor even at describing emotions let alone expressing them. We easily become tongue-tied. But I am stating the obvious, am I not? Language is good at logic because language and logic are structurally analogous, but language and emotion are not structurally analogous; emotion doesn’t have a digital discrete structure but a dynamic continuous structure (if “structure” is even the right word). Language does not picture emotion as it pictures thought (hence the “language of thought”); at best it alludes to it. We don’t speak an emotionally perfect language, or even an emotionally adequate one.

Thus, the emotional imperfection of language is not remediable from within language; it is inherent in language. Language is necessarily inept when it comes to emotion; not just not ideal, but the wrong kind of beast. It is bad at the representation of emotion. It is faulty in the way logicians have thought ordinary language is logically faulty. But there is no perfect or ideal language of emotion; the two are just not cut out for each other. We are stuck with this situation, unable to escape from it. We might therefore expect that our emotions have become stilted and distorted by their alliance (such as it is) with language; they have become linguisticized, if I may coin a phrase. And not just some humans but all humans, insofar as they are language users. Not animals, though—their emotions are pure and unadulterated. Dare I suggest that this infiltration of the emotional by the linguistic has resulted in a degree of emotional inauthenticity? And dare I further suggest that this inauthenticity is the root cause of many of our problems as a species? (Just wondering.) To put it simply, there is a distinct danger that our emotions will get reduced to mere words. Emotional desiccation results from a top-heavy language faculty.[2]

Let’s leave that grim subject and hymn our language, though in a way that might seem paradoxical. One often hears it said that ordinary language is less than ideal on account of its vagueness, imprecision, and sloppiness, leading to outright falsity. Actually, I think this allegation is baseless, though understandable: language is good because it permits these “faults”; they are integral to its working as well as it does. Again, I am saying nothing startlingly new; this is a Wittgensteinian point (see his discussion of vagueness in PI). Often, we don’t need exactitude, precision, pedantic correctness; we just need to get our point across for some practical purpose. Language allows us to do that because of its flexibility and concision. It’s like a tool: you don’t need an ideal broom or knife in order to clean the kitchen floor or slice bread—you just need instruments that get the job done up to a reasonable point. The downside of the perfect tool is that it may be too expensive or dangerous or cumbersome, and you don’t need to sweep up every last crumb or cut through bread in an instant. Similarly, you can talk loosely or impressionistically and communicate successfully. Our language is designed to be sloppy (if we are going to use this term). Imagine an ideally precise language that takes ten times as long to pronounce and defies human comprehension—it would be no use at all. So, I would not slam our language for its inaccuracies, but instead praise it. In the case of emotion language, however, I would lambast language for its lack of verisimilitude, its want of transparency, and its poverty of expression. In short: it doesn’t tell it like it emotionally is.[3]

[1] A good example is “Mother” by John Winston Lennon, which packs tremendous emotion into the simple words, “Mama don’t go, Daddy come home”. Lennon sings these words in a virtual scream of bitter anguish. He seems to be pointing out how inadequate human language is to express human emotion, elongating the word “go” and dramatically varying its pitch.

[2] See George Eliot’s Middlemarch and the character Edward Casaubon, the emotionally barren (but wordy) scholar.

[3] Isn’t it interesting that Oxford analytical philosophy was obsessed with whether ordinary language is logically defective, but it never crossed anyone’s mind that it might be emotionally defective. I wonder why. Maybe some people like language to be emotionally lifeless, or distancing and indirect. It stiffens the upper lip, dash it. In general, the philosophy of emotion is somewhat of a side subject in analytical philosophy. It bypasses the topic.

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Mysterian News

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Mysterian News

I notice in today’s NY Times (May 10, 2026) that Ross Douthat mentions the word “mysterian” in his weekly column, expressing sympathy with the doctrine so named. He doesn’t say anything worth reading (as usual), but the article is indicative of the wider intellectual culture; the inset contains the words “The nature of consciousness is still a mystery”. Remind you of anyone? A bit of history: when I published my article “Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?” in 1989 in Mind I was well aware of its likely impact and my predictions have been borne out. First, I would be regarded as an eccentric who had lost his way after a promising early career (“Have you seen that weird article by Colin McGinn?”). After five years the thesis would become a mainstream position in philosophy, though not widely accepted, but it would be forgotten that I created it (with a little help from my friends and forerunners). This also happened. Next it would seep out into the broader intellectual culture, eventually shaping the entire debate. It would be supposed that I just latched onto a cultural trend. Finally, it would become a meme, helped along by Owen Flanagan’s catchy coinage “mysterianism”. This has all come to pass, but let me remind the world that I created it. I actually re-shaped intellectual culture, not just the philosophy of mind. Everything you read on this subject today has been influenced by my contributions. In the future, I predict, it will become the dominant and orthodox position (this will take from twenty to fifty years). And this blog will be the central text of the revolution. Just wait and see. I have been right up to now.

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Natural Worlds

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Natural Worlds

Sir David Attenborough, great naturalist and celebrated TV presenter, an indisputable “national treasure”, likes to use the phrase “the natural world”.[1] I have no objection to this usage in its place (but see below), but I think the phrase deserves scrutiny (and he is not the only one who uses it). What does it mean? What does it refer to? What is the natural world? It is not the same as the actual world, construed as one among many possible worlds. It is part of the actual world—the part consisting of animals, plants (including fungi), and landscape (rocks etc.). But it’s narrower even than that: it refers to these things as they exist on planet Earth. It corresponds closely to what we call “nature”, as in “I love nature”. The idea is that the natural world is one world among many worlds existing on planet Earth—the physical world, the art world, the philosophical world. In practice, Sir David limits his interest to the natural animal world, leaving plants and rocks to one side; he is concerned mainly with animal life on Earth. His famous TV series is not about geology or ferns. In any case, the natural world is taken to be one world among many—one domain among many. There might be a series on TV in some remote galaxy called “Life on X” that deals with a quite different natural world. Natural worlds form a plurality, like possible worlds; we can quantify over them, as in “All natural worlds obey the laws of physics”. We might take this to be equivalent to “It is necessary that natural worlds obey the laws of physics”. Natural worlds are multiple, and ours is just one of them. The natural world of Mars, say, is different from the natural world of Earth; a series on the former would be pretty dull in comparison.  Sir David’s Martian counterpart might want nothing to do with it (geology has always left him cold).

Now the first point I want to make is that Earth itself is home to several natural worlds: we have the geological world, the botanical world, and the zoological world, on the one hand, and the arctic, temperate, and tropical worlds, on the other. Not to mention the worlds of whales, monkeys, and bats. The phrase “the natural world” is a catch-all phrase, whose semantics is not exactly pellucid. Semantically, why doesn’t it include the physical world and the chemical world? These are both “natural”, aren’t they? Isn’t matter part of nature? The same for mind. There are many different worlds on Earth, each well-defined, but the natural world isn’t one of them; the phrase is intended to refer to the totality of them (a collective term). In fact, that phrase is pretty empty, a mere stand-in for something better that we can’t quite come up with. We fall back on the phrase because there are no preferable synonyms. It might even be said to be strictly meaningless. A tough-minded critic might insist that there is no such unified thing, only the multiple worlds I have listed. Reality is always natural, trivially so; we need a term that is more specific—a genuine sortal term. It is merely disjunctive, like “thing” or “object”—sorely in need of an individuating concept. Natural worlds don’t form a natural kind. How do we count them? What is their criterion of identity? We can talk that way if we must, having nothing better to offer, but we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that we have a genuine concept here. This is a kind of dummy sortal concept, like thing. Sir David might have simply said “natural things”, in which case the semantic lameness would have been transparent (“I have always been interested in natural things”). The phrase is highly uninformative: everything is natural and nothing is not a thing. Why not just say “I am interested in animals” or “I am interested in plants” or “I am interested in rocks”? The phrase “the natural world” is just a cobbled-together piece of semi-nonsense—indispensable practically, perhaps, but semantically ill-formed. What does it mean? Isn’t it a bit like “the spirit world” or “the astrological world”? Exactly what is meant by these phrases? Is it perhaps used because it might seem a touch vulgar or unacademic to announce that you are interested in animals? And your interests might be even more confined: worms and insects leave you cold, but you lovelions and elephants. If so, you should say so and not hide behind something nebulous called “the natural world”.[2]

And what about “Life on Earth”: is that phrase kosher? It is intended as all-encompassing, but is it? Isn’t it both too wide and too narrow? Too wide because it includes plant life (not covered in the series), and too narrow because a lot of animal life is not on the earth. Some animal life exists in the earth, some swims in the seas, some flies above the earth, and some does a combination of the above. It would be more accurate to say “Life at or near the Earth”. In fact, the series mainly covered terrestrial life—walking life, basically. Again, there is not the natural unity promised by the phrase. Life on or around Earth is a miscellany, as is the so-called natural world. What is strange is that our language is so impoverished in this respect: why don’t we have a good word for the thing we are trying to refer to? Why can’t we come up with one? It’s suspicious. I have racked my brains and I can’t come up with anything satisfactory. This is why I don’t blame Sir David for resorting to the phrase; he has dedicated his life to something he can’t name or describe. A mysterious entity—the natural world. What other kind of world is there, and can’t you be more specific, please? He clearly loves apes and is impressed by lions and admires elephants, but what is this “natural world” he keeps banging on about so enthusiastically? Do I love “nature”? No, not all of it, but I am fond of many animals and admire a pretty flower; I don’t have any general love of nature as a whole (disease, death, cockroaches). Isn’t all this talk rather pretentious and vague, like “I love humanity”? Doesn’t it lend itself to a kind of emotional inauthenticity? When Sir David recounts his famous close encounter with a family of gorillas, he comes alive and hums with emotional intensity; blather about “the natural world” seems like a way to secure funding from the bigwigs at the BBC. The phrase is best permanently scare-quoted. It has a bureaucratic ring to it.[3]

[1] I recently had the pleasure of watching a documentary on PBS about the making of young David Attenborough’s wonderful “Life on Earth” series, which prompted this essay. I remember seeing him once on the tube in London in the 1970’s. I am a great admirer of his, but the phrase stuck out like a sore thumb and gave me a twinge of unease. This is an expression of that unease.

[2] Why even call it the natural world, as if it is just a special case of natural things like mountains and valleys, atoms and molecules? Why not call it the super-natural world, meaning that it is on a higher plane than more mundane things (like Superman)? It is a cut above the usual hoi-polloi. It is something special, amazing, spiritual even (though not divine). Granted this won’t include common-or-garden rocks, but it might include landscapes and seascapes.

[3] I intend no rebuke to Mr. Attenborough in this tetchy essay; we are all under the same semantic burden. But I do recommend refraining from using the phrase so lushly and lovingly. It isn’t what it purports to be—a lucid designator. I might also remark that it somewhat dehumanizes (!) animals by treating them as a kind of abstract stuff—bits of “the natural world”. Better to stick with specific species and individual animals: we should be concerned with the fate of apes and lions (etc.) not some vague pseudo-entity called “the natural world”. Words matter in politics and ethics. In some moods, I would like to ban the word “nature” and its cognates. I don’t love my bird Eloise because she is part of the natural world (oh so natural!); I love nature, inasmuch as I do, because Eloise is part of it. Also, my lizard, Ramone, and my cat, Blackie.

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