Extraordinary Language Philosophy

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Extraordinary Language Philosophy

The legacy of commonsense philosophy and ordinary language philosophy is not dead.[1] It still haunts the precincts of academic philosophy. I wish to put on record my opposition to it (not that I hate everything about it, correctly understood). Taken literally, the idea of common sense is the idea of common sense—widespread, shared beliefs and presuppositions. It is a statistical notion—what most or all people think. It is opposed to what specialists think, or intellectual elites, or experts, or professionals. It is what amateurs or the unschooled think. We are told to defer to these folks—to folk philosophy. This is terrible advice: the general populace is often ill-informed, ignorant, prone to groupthink, and unreflective. To hell with them. If the learned disagree with the ignorant, go with the learned. If the average bloke believes in substance dualism or naïve realism or total freedom from causality, he is just plain wrong, as can be quickly demonstrated; you do need some expertise to think well about these issues. We want good sense not common sense. No one thinks that commonsense physics or astronomy is the way to go, or commonsense medicine. Maybe we can accept that refined or sophisticated common sense is a sound basis for philosophy, but not raw uninformed common sense. Is Russell’s theory of descriptions common sense? Hardly—you do have to grasp a bit of logic to get it. It is pure luck if common sense and good sense converge—that is, rigorous, peer-reviewed, expert knowledge. This is surely uncontroversial to the point of tedium. If common sense were the royal road to philosophical excellence, every Tom, Dick and Harry would get an A on a philosophy exam without taking any philosophy courses. Philosophy requires a lot more (and a lot less) than common sense.

A more interesting question concerns the language of philosophy: should it be ordinary language or some other kind of language? There are two questions here: should philosophy be about ordinary language, and should it be conducted in ordinary language? And what is ordinary language anyway? The idea is supposed to be that ordinary language is non-technical language, whatever that is exactly. But isn’t language “technical” only if people don’t use it much? What is technical language for you and me might not be so for a theoretical physicist. Doesn’t technical language sometimes get absorbed into the mainstream, as with “gene” and “galaxy”? I think it is clear enough that philosophy should not be confined to studying the language most people speak; we can also talk about the technical languages of the sciences as well. We do have philosophy of physics and biology, after all. The interesting issue concerns the kind of language we use in doing philosophy, whether it is about language or not, technical or non-technical. This would usually be taken to be a question about the use of technical language in philosophy—is it good or bad? I think it is unavoidable to some degree, though it should not be indulged in for its own sake (to seem impressive, say). But I want to introduce a third option: the use of extraordinary (non-technical) language—ordinary language used extraordinarily. What does this mean?

I can best explain what I have in mind by switching to literature. What is the best way to write fiction—in plain English or jazzed-up English (or any other language)? Should novelists write like Kingsley Amis or Vladimir Nabokov? Should James Joyce have given us Finnegan’s Wake as well as Ulysses (or Dubliners)? I won’t expatiate on this issue; I use it to make a distinction in linguistic styles. The answer I prefer is that the prosaic style is just that—it verges on the dull and pedestrian. It can be plodding and boring. The souped-up style is more evocative and stimulating—more poetic, in a word. To put it baldly, I favor the Nabokovian style of writing philosophy, with the emphasis placed on the language used and its resonances. I think philosophy should be written in a more literary style (not in the social sciences style). Thus, I advocate extraordinary language philosophy—what some prosaic types like to call “flowery”. I would like to found a school: Extraordinary Language Philosophy (ELP). We read literary texts and try to emulate them; but we also read scientific texts written a certain style, often old-fashioned (Darwin and Dawkins provide good examples). I won’t mention any actual philosophers, but old hands will know who I mean (there are many[2]); they are in short supply today. The point I am making is that ordinary language philosophy is misguided if it prefers the literal and stolid; we need extraordinary ordinary language, with some technical terms thrown in. Not Finnegan’s Wake level extraordinary, or even Lolita level, but above the level of the science report or textbook of botany. Philosophy is (or should be) an essentially literary subject, even when dry as dust.[3]

In sum, then, I favor elitist, erudite, anti-democratic, extraordinary, poetic, possibly technical philosophy—not prosaic, plodding, lumpen, pseudo-scientific philosophy. Of course, clarity is always paramount, and obscurity is never a virtue, but that is no reason to applaud the pedestrian verbiage that passes for philosophy these days. You don’t need to be boring to be serious.[4]           

[1] It was designed to combat the excesses of Hegel and company, and it spawned analytical philosophy. But it went too far and became an ideology from which we are still in the process of escaping. It also had political undertones. I won’t go into this.

[2] I will mention P.F. Strawson as exemplary, and he had ambitions to be a poet. However, I think he was somewhat inhibited stylistically by the philosophical atmosphere in Oxford at the time. Individuals is pretty poetic in its way.

[3] I would say that my book Logical Properties is a virtual poem of the abstractly logical.

[4] I have not discussed the idea that language use is the arbiter of philosophical truth, which few people today would recommend. I take it Grice refuted such a view by distinguishing logical implication from conversational implicature. This has nothing to do with ordinary language, given that specialist language is also used. Nor does it coincide with common use. Ironically, these terms were not carefully analyzed by the proponents of the philosophy in which they feature.

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The Miracle of Color

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The Miracle of Color

Philosophers have spilt a lot of ink over color. It is indeed a very interesting phenomenon of nature. Since the seventeenth century it has been called a “secondary” quality, in contrast with the “primary” qualities germane to physics—a kind of second-class citizen in the grand republic of nature. But in some respects, it is primary, or at least not secondary—perceptually speaking. Its phenomenology is certainly salient and striking. I am going to suggest that it is miraculous not humdrum, unlike the so-called primary qualities. The OED gives us “a remarkable and very welcome occurrence” and “an amazing product and achievement” for “miracle” (the secular definition).[1] It is as if God had a hand in it, clothing the world in spectacular colors. This word strikes us as apt for color but not so much for size and shape. They seem par for the course, entirely predictable, bordering on the dull; but color seems improbable, amazing, and very welcome. We are glad we see color, grateful for it. For it doesn’t seem to come with the territory, like geometry; it seems like a generous add-on, surplus to requirements, designed for our pleasure and entertainment. We rejoice in color, revel in it. We can survive without color, but life wouldn’t be so much fun without it. It feels like a gift.

What kind of product or achievement is it? We certainly didn’t create it at some point in history, say the industrial revolution; we were born with it. It comes with our eyes, free of charge. It is a product of the nervous system in some way we don’t understand. We project color onto things; they are the mind externalized, and yet clearly there. There is something miraculous about how we spread color on the world (to quote Hume). I cannot resist a well-worn metaphor: our eyes convert the water of shape into the wine of color—rather as the brain converts the water of neurons into the wine of consciousness.[2] The conversion process seems miraculous, and so does the product of the conversion. The color blue, say, is a miraculous product, a sublime work of art; not boringly geometric at all. The physical world is a magnificent machine, but it is not a thing of visual beauty qua physical (mechanistic)—not part of life’s rich pageant, one might say. This is why colors have such emotional significance to us. Just gaze at a color for a while and feel its lustrous beauty. We need color in our lives, as we need art. Colors are nature’s art, as filtered through our minds and brains. Remarkable, amazing, astonishing, and very welcome—colors sing.

Imagine if a holy man turns up in a country of the color-blind: all the inhabitants have ever seen is black and white and shades of grey. They know nothing of color. He claims divine origin and, in truth, is a very handsome and charismatic man (think Charlton Heston). He claims the ability to perform miracles. One day he promises to perform a real humdinger and indeed he does: he gives everyone color vision (don’t ask me how). I venture to suggest that everyone would be mightily impressed and instantly believe he was the Son of God; a whole new religion would be formed, Chromaticity. He might even come to the attention of the political authorities and be crucified or at least whipped publicly. Because colors are a sight to see, especially if you have never seen one before. We color-sighted people are only too accustomed to them—we take them for granted—but really, they are miraculous visions (and so realistic!). Artists love them and so do some writers, but even we philistines would miss them if there were gone (“Oh, I will never see blue again—woe is me!). We need reminding how wonderful colors are. Also, how mysterious: what are they, what creates them? They are like consciousness in this respect: so familiar and yet so fantastic. Indeed, much of the wonder of consciousness stems from its hospitability to color—the way it parades color before the mind. The two phenomena seem made for each other—like aspects of each other. They seem to constitute each other in episodes of visual perception. Some people of mystical persuasion even suggest that colors are “mirrors of the soul” and propose “color therapy”—and one can see why. Colors run deep in our psyche (they have a depth psychology). It is the same with many animals: color is part of their life, a big part. We live in a world of color (if we have vision) and feel lucky that we do. We love color. If I were to pick the most miraculous of colors, I would choose blue (or blues). Blue, I love you.

One ingredient in the concept of a miracle is that such events violate natural law. This is not an ingredient I wish to preserve, but I do think that no known law governs them. We don’t know what causes colors to exist—what the causal laws of color formation are. There is no book called The Origin of Colors like Darwin’s great book.  Colors are not like rocks in this respect. So far as we know, colors just pop into our minds from nowhere and proceed to spread themselves on the outside world. You just open your eyes and there they are, calmly laid out for all to see (if they have eyes). The product is remarkable and the process is shrouded in mystery. The miracle of color bears all the earmarks of more celebrated (alleged) miracles, and it takes a moment for it to sink in. To explain it fully would require a great leap of human thought, which may or may not ever occur. In this, too, it is very like consciousness. Of course, we know many things about color and the perception of color, as we do about consciousness; but these tend to be correlations, not accounts of essence. And the evolutionary history of color is not well understood, to put it mildly. What I want to emphasize is a basic bafflement, namely what color actually is. What are you seeing when you look at a blue patch—what is the quality we call “blue”? We are not seeing (de dicto) a minutely textured physical surface, or a disposition to appear a certain way, but a certain primitive quality, somehow imposed by the mind—which is what it is and not some other thing. It is a miracle that it is there at all, but also a mystery what it is that is there. You are acquainted with the color blue, but what is it you are acquainted with? Here we cannot rightly say, so we remain silent (though suitably awestruck). Color seems ineffable.

You might wonder whether color is unique in this respect. I surmise not, though I think it is the clearest example of something more general: the miraculous nature of secondary qualities generally. Sounds, tastes, smells, tactile qualities—they all partake of the miraculous. Take the quality of being sweet: what a remarkable and amazing and welcome thing that is! It isn’t a feature of the chemical world as such; it is projected from the tasting mind. But how, by what mechanism, according to what laws? We don’t know, and we generally don’t care, but it is really a remarkable fact of nature; and similarly for sounds, smells, and tactile feels. These are all miracles in our secular sense; and not minor miracles, but substantial ones. Nature is doing something very remarkable in manufacturing these things. If people had no sense of taste, a miracle worker who produced that sense would be hailed as the Son of God (the Gustatorian religion). Try losing your sense of taste for a while (as I have) to appreciate how miraculous it really is—how amazing and welcome. Because vision is so dominant in us, we easily focus on color, but the other senses also harbor their own mini miracles. We are all (including animals) Leonardo da Vinci’s of the sensory world.[3]

[1] See also my “The Concept of Miracle”. The present paper belongs with my “Color and Consciousness”.

[2] See my “Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?” for the water-wine metaphor.

[3] I think sensory qualities have not been given their due since the days of mechanism, when they were demoted to secondary status. They are actually more amazing than primary qualities, despite their absence from physics. They illustrate the interactive nature of terrestrial organisms, as primary qualities do not, these latter being more objective. Animals perceptually impose on the world as well as being imposed upon by it; they are not mere mirrors of external reality or blank slates. Colors are one of their more magnificent creations, not some sort of gratuitous afterthought or perceptual blinkers. They are miracles of nature.

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Color and Consciousness

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Color and Consciousness

What is the relationship between the problem of color and the problem of consciousness? Could they be fundamentally the same problem? It isn’t that consciousness is color, but that the problem of consciousness could be solved by solving the problem of color. Is the mystery basically the same? Consciousness of color is a paradigm of the mind-body problem, so perhaps the problems are at root identical, or at least overlapping: if you could explain color, you would have nailed consciousness too. This seems like an attractive idea, given that color seems a wee bit easier to understand. Certainly, the two problems are analogous; they have a similar shape. In the case of color, the problem divides into several subproblems: the emergence problem, the projection problem, the efficacy problem, the phenomenology problem, and the irreducibility problem. Where does color come from, how is it projected onto objects, what causal properties does it have (if any), what explains its phenomenology, and is it reducible to anything else? Does it emerge from the external objective world or the inner subjective mind? If the latter, how does the mind project it onto external objects? Do colors cause anything or are they epiphenomenal? What constitutes their phenomenal appearance? Can they be reduced to physical properties? If not, how can they fit into reality as a whole? The problem is that they seem mysterious, not part of physics, ontologically queer. Yet they indubitably exist. They pose a problem for materialism. How can a physical object be blue—in virtue of what? What is a color?

Does that sound like anything? Consciousness, of course. Consciousness has a problem of emergence, a causal efficacy problem, a phenomenology problem, and an irreducibility problem; it too doesn’t fit into a materialist framework. A projective account can seem tempting, though problematic (is the mind really in the eye of the beholder?). Color is a mystery, and so is consciousness. Both are physically irreducible yet physically grounded. It thus seems that if we could solve one, we would have solved the other, give or take a bit. At least it would put us on the right track. We might even hold out for an identity theory of the two problems: they are fundamentally the same problem, differently expressed. If we knew what makes an object blue, we would also know what makes an organism see blue, because these are problems of the same type. If color is projected from the mind, then objects are made blue by minds projecting color; and minds see colors in virtue of brains—so, brains make objects blue. Now we just need to know what makes brains see blue! The two problems are intertwined. Presumably, if we could solve the color problem, we could also solve the other sensory quality problems (sounds, tastes, etc.). So, a promising approach would be to start with the color problem and move on from there. This might come down to the problem of how the brain produces colors, these being constituted by sensations of colors; but at least we would have tied the problem down a bit, instead of working with the nebulous concept of consciousness. If the brain brought colors into the world, how did it do that (the color-brain problem)? In fact, all we need to know is how the brain gave rise to the particular color blue; then we would have essentially solved the problem of consciousness—or at least replaced a big mystery by a smaller one.[1] Blue can’t be so hard! A theory of blue would give us a theory of the conscious mind. What if all elementary particles had a touch of blue in them (“pan-blueism”)? It won’t make the mind-body problem an easy problem, but at least it locates the problem more precisely. No need to rattle on about “what-it’s like” and “qualia”; we are dealing with our old friend the color blue—and we know what that is (don’t we?). This might turn out to be a mystery on the same scale as the problem of consciousness (I suspect it would), but we have still made a discovery—it all comes down to blue (or red or yellow). If we knew what makes the sky blue, we would know what makes us conscious! For the problem of blue is the problem of consciousness writ small. They are problems of the same type. If it turned out (per impossibile) that blue is just a microphysical property of surfaces, then the odds are that pain would just be C-fiber firing—as many have contended. We would have a physicalist reduction in both cases. But if, on the contrary, blue is really a disposition to have experiences, and experiences are not physically reducible, then consciousness in general will not be so reducible. As it goes with color, so also it will go with consciousness. The two problems are not separable. I therefore recommend that consciousness researchers turn their attention to the color blue in hopes of a more tractable problem. Can we solve the color-object problem?[2]

[1] Compare: if we could solve the problem of geometrical knowledge, we would be in a position to solve the problem of arithmetical knowledge, given that the two problems are essentially the same. The geometry problem might be slightly easier.

[2] I don’t doubt that colors are perfectly natural features of nature, with not a whiff of the supernatural about them (no immortal color spirits etc.); the problem about colors arises from our intellectual limitations. It is a very old problem for which scientists have provided no solution beyond color-physical correlations. So, we need not opt for the supernatural or the implausibly reductive or the intrinsically irreducible. If color is a mystery, it is a natural mystery. There are easy problems of color and very difficult problems (how do colors come to exist in the first place?).

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Disappointment

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Disappointment

The Beatles were never disappointing. That’s why they are still with us and always will be. Each record was at least as good as the last and sometimes markedly superior. They couldn’t fail. John, Paul, George, and Ringo: they never disappointed. They dis-disappointed. They didn’t know the meaning of the word. But what about the rest of the world—did it (the rest of the world) disappoint? Oh yeah, it sure did (yeah yeah yeah). It’s been on a disappointment roll (over Beethoven). It’s been a disappointing day’s night. Help! The Sixties disappointed in the end. England did too. So did America. Imagine! In My Life. Politically, culturally, spiritually. One huge effing disappointment. The Stones disappointed, though it pains me to say so (not so England). The Who petered out into the What. Maybe the Beatles would have, but they broke up just in time (they had helpful friends). What would have happened to the Beatles if they kept on rolling (like the Stones)? Would they have devolved into hack mediocrity? It doesn’t bear thinking about. It seems inconceivable. In any case, they didn’t; they are still with us fifty-six years later–indelibly, permanently. We live in a post-Beatles world—no, in a Beatles world, no “post” about it. What would the world be like if they had never existed? Not the same, not as good.

How did they influence me (now we’re talking)? Not much, you might say, what with becoming an academic philosopher and everything. I left music behind and pop culture generally; I didn’t even listen to the Beatles much. But the influence was more insidious, acting at the cellular level. Articles were my singles, books my LPs. They were my new releases. I wanted each one to be better than the last; I dreaded decline. I can map my early publications onto Beatles songs. The journals and university presses were my record labels. The Character of Mind = Please Please Me. My editors were my George Martin. I released some thirty albums, some compilations of greatest hits, and many singles, some forgotten now. That’s how I thought of them (I now realize), because the Beatles were in my blood. I never wanted to repeat myself. People call me a mysterian after an obscure pop group (Question Mark and the Mysterians) and that is not far from the mark, but the Beatles were my model and inspiration. “Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?” was my “Strawberry Fields” (“Let me take you down…”). I went solo in 2013 and put out a lot of late-period stuff.

Has anything not been a disappointment? Certainly, America has been enormously disappointing to me—politically, professionally, intellectually, morally. People have been painfully disappointing, sometimes surprisingly so. Popular music is a desert of disappointment. Philosophy itself has proved disappointing compared to earlier decades. Humor is not what it was either. Films disappoint regularly. The ordinary voter is a walking disappointment. Politics is a complete shit-show of disappointment. Are we headed towards Total Disappointment–nuclear disappointment, fascist disappointment? But there is one area in which I have felt no disappointment—tennis. The game itself never disappoints (playing it), but professional tennis has proved itself almost Beatles-level un-disappointing. First, we had the Big Three and then the Brilliant Two (Alcaraz and Sinner): the tennis world is alive with Beatlemania for this pair. No decline, no disillusionment. Pure luck, of course—tennis could easily have slid into disappointment territory after the demise of Rafa, Roger, and Novak. Not so! True, the fear lurks—injury, lack of focus. So far, though, the signs are good. No one can ever match the Beatles, but these two come close. If only they could sing! I always look forward to seeing them play and experience the bliss of tennis perfection. You see, I am not a cynic or pessimist after all.

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