Skeptical Solutions to the Mind Problem

Skeptical Solutions to the Mind Problem

Early thinkers had a body problem: what is body? What is the stuff we call “matter”? The pre-Socratics had a go at answering this question: matter is water, or variations on the four elements (earth, fire, water, and air). More advanced thinkers proposed invisible atoms, or spatial extension, or energy, or elemental mind. These are straight answers to the initial question—no funny business. None of them involves questioning the very existence of body, or explaining it away, or finding some sort of surrogate for it that is less mystifying. They are not skeptical about the existence of matter. They take it for granted that matter exists and try to say what it is—eminently sensible, perfectly rational. In parallel with this, people have asked what mind is: what is the thing we call “mind”? What constitutes it, what is it made of? We know it exists—we feel it at every moment—but what the devil is it? It doesn’t seem like body, so we can’t just apply our theories of matter to it; it requires separate treatment. But it strikes us as a tough nut to crack, a bit of an enigma, not the work of a couple of spare minutes. Let’s go back to thinking about matter—it’s less perplexing! We wanted a straight answer to our question: mind is real, but what exactly is it? We wanted a constitutive informative answer—certainly not one that questions the existence of mind. We don’t want to be told that mind doesn’t really exist and therefore has no nature. We want a straight solution to the problem of mind not a skeptical solution (that’s no solution).[1]

Over the years various solutions have been ventured: dualism, materialism, behaviorism, functionalism, representationalism. These all accept the existence of the mind (but see below) and offer to say what it is. But they have not been met with general acceptance; all sorts of objections have been raised. Some are too reductive, others not reductive enough, others not clear enough. Qualia-consciousness theories seem too narrow and raise the same question about themselves (what is consciousness?); materialist theories are just hard to believe on their face (compare “All is water”); immaterialist theories are plain baffling and ignore the role of the brain; behaviorist theories are simply looking in the wrong place; computational-representational theories are too speculative and suspiciously circular. In any case, no one thinks any of these are obviously correct or evidentially well-established. Frankly, they are all clearly inadequate, though not without containing some elements of truth. We haven’t been able to say convincingly what mind is. But if we can’t say what it is (we don’t know what it is), why should we say it is? Why not just go eliminative? That will get rid of the headache—and who says folk psychology is sacrosanct? Thus, we have a skeptical attitude prompted by what looks like a skeptical paradox: the mind simply has no definition, no nature, no correct theory. It’s like the gods or phlogiston or the elan vital—non-existent. So, let’s not talk about it anymore—let’s treat it with the disrespect it deserves. We already have matter, so why do we need mind? Matter is enough for any universe to be going on with. It might even be thought that mind, as normally conceived, is intrinsically impossible: a logically incoherent mental theater, a den of mysterious intentionality, a museum myth (you know the anti-mind rhetoric). Let’s admit it, mind is a baffling business. That would be one response to the difficulty of the mind problem. Junk it, bin it, commit it to the flames. Succumb to ontological skepticism.

But it is not the only possible response: we might try for a skeptical solution, i.e., a proposal that accepts that the mind itself is unreal but offers to preserve our talk of mind. The discourse can be saved while its putative subject matter is “eschewed”. Mental talk has a use but it has no reputable ontology (like religious language). It serves a pragmatic purpose but without any existential commitments. It has assertion conditions but no truth conditions—no corresponding facts. It serves the community’s interests but has no real-world counterpart (again, you know the rhetorical patter). This line is not difficult to conjure: mental discourse is instrumentally useful—a device for making predictions, summing up data, having something to say to your spouse after a long day. Maybe we can’t live without it, or retain our sanity. Still, it is pure mythology (again, like religious discourse). As an extra flourish, we might add that mental language serves an expressive function—we use it to get things off our chest, or to impress a potential mate, or to wind down at night. We do like to chatter about psychological matters, don’t we. This approach resembles the case of ethics: no ethical facts, but it doesn’t all go up in smoke, because ethical talk is emotive or expressive or psychologically healthy (blah-blah-blah). This is a skeptical solution to a felt ontological problem. There is a similar approach in philosophy of mathematics: numbers are useful fictions—non-existent but linguistically practical.

So far, I haven’t said anything particularly new or upsetting to orthodoxy, but that is about to change—radically. For I wish to suggest that all the standard theories of mind are really skeptical solutions in disguise. None of them is really a straight solution, not when you dig a bit deeper. This is fundamentally because they simply cannot be taken seriously as straight solutions; they are all tacit denials of the reality of mind as we know it. They are all ways of replacing the mind with something else and then claiming that mental discourse is really about that. Immaterialist dualism claims that talk of the mind is talk of a curious invisible gaseous substance tenuously linked to the body and brain. This is obviously pure myth, scarcely more credible than postulating immortal gods to explain natural phenomena. The brain obviously has an awful lot to do with the mind and it is not immaterial (whatever that means). The intellectual function of the immaterial substance idea is to provide a prop for mental discourse to hang onto—a sort of impalpable peg. The thought is that we can talk as if this is true and comfort ourselves that we are not talking about nothing. Okay, that may be a worthy goal—it would be hard to give up all psychological talk—but it is hardly sound ontology. This is a skeptical solution masquerading as a straight solution. It clearly beggars belief as the literal truth about the nature of mind, as people subconsciously realize (one thing it does is allow religion to peddle its myth of immortality). It is an imaginative crutch adopted for a pragmatic purpose. If a philosopher or scientist had actually proposed it as a skeptical solution, it would be regarded as such—a myth to allow us to carry on using mental language in the face of the skeptical challenge and its accompanying paradox. No one thinks that the mind looks like a cloud, or has a cloudy composition. This is just what we resort to when we have given up hope of a straight solution. It is a useful fiction.

Belief in dualism plays the role of instinct in Hume’s discussion of induction: it provides an explanation of our practices without admitting they have an objective rational basis. We are prone to imagine such things and that is why we keep talking the way we do about the mind, while accepting that we can’t say what it is, or even that it exists. Materialism also provides a basis for mental talk without being believed in as the literal truth about the mind. No one really believes it, not in their heart of hearts (except perhaps a gullible philosopher); it just provides a useful substitute for the mind as we ordinary conceive it. We know what the brain is (we think), so we can’t be made subject to a skeptical paradox about it; well, that’s what grounds our mental talk—it is as ifwe are talking about the brain. We don’t really think the mind is the brain and nothing but the brain; but if we pretend it is, then we can carry on talking as if the mind exists. The brain plays the role of the community in Kripke’s reconstruction of Wittgenstein: it is the alternative reality that can be wheeled in to ground our existing practices, given that nothing factual about the individual can ground them. Again, if a skeptical philosopher had suggested the brain as a skeptical solution, we would see the point, given that it is quite hopeless as a straight solution—the mind being clearly not the brain (as physically described). Behaviorism and functionalism are much the same: clearly not identical to the mind—located in completely the wrong place—but a viable-looking substitute for the mind proper. Behavior prompts mental assertions, so it can provide assertion conditions, but there is no account to be had of truth conditions—for there are none, what with the mind not existing and all. No one really believes that the mind we know so well from the inside is behavior, but it can play a role in explaining our mental talk; we thus eliminate the mind while hanging onto behavior—on pain of having nothing to talk about. Again, behavior plays the role of the community in Kripke’s story—it substitutes for the fact we have been unable to find. We have examined all the available facts and none measures up, so we have opted for a skeptical account of our practice with mental language. In the case of the computational-representational theory of the nature of mind, I will only say that this is a speculative and mainly metaphorical account of the mind, limited at best to only a fragment of the mental. It is best viewed as a skeptical solution not a straight solution—a useful fiction. It is as if there is a language of thought, but of course there isn’t really any such thing. In sum, all the theories offered as straight solutions turn out to be skeptical solutions in disguise. They don’t really set out to tell us what the mind literally is—they are too incredible for that—but they do offer an account of mental discourse that allows us to preserve our mental talk in a kind of diluted form, analogous to expressive accounts of ethics, fictionalist accounts of numbers, and instrumentalist accounts of physics. According to this view, then, most of the philosophy of mind consists of skeptical solutions to what-is problems—not the official story, not by a long chalk.

I have so far suppressed mention of mysterianism, but it is actually key to understanding what is going on here. For it provides an option distinct from straight solutions and skeptical solutions, namely that there is a straight solution but we can’t find it, deeply so. That blocks the move from “we can find no straight solution” to “there is no straight solution”, thereby pulling the rug out from under the skeptical solutionist. If the mind is deeply mysterious, yet has an underlying real essence, there will be no necessity to contrive a fancy (and fanciful) skeptical solution, with all of its implausibility and bullet-biting. So, the dialectic of straight and skeptical solutions does not exhaust the field. We can agree that no straight solution can be found but still insist that the mind has an intrinsic nature that preempts the need for a skeptical solution. The standard theories then lapse without needing to deny the mind or construct a skeptical surrogate for it. Skeptical solutions arise from assuming an anti-mysterian position at the outset. The point I have wanted to make in this paper is that orthodox philosophy of mind has labored under the delusion that it is giving straight solutions to (quite legitimate) problems; but the standard theories are really skeptical solutions of a familiar kind. Put very simply, philosophers have tacitly denied the existence of minds, as we ordinarily understand them, and attempted to find a way to hang onto our linguistic practices; they are like Kripke’s semantic skeptic but extended to the mind as whole.[2]

[1] For background see my “Existence, Consciousness, and Skeptical Solutions”, “Family Resemblance and Skeptical Solutions”, and “Philosophy of Popularity”.

[2] Returning to the question about body, it is fair to report that this problem has also tended to generate skeptical solutions with respect to physics, as straight solutions have come to seem more and more unsatisfactory. Hence, instrumentalism, verificationism, operationalism, structuralism, and mathematicalism. Mysterianism can block these moves; it might indeed be the prevailing state of affairs. It’s either skeptical solutions or mysterian (straight) solutions. Known straight solutions are hard to come by. This is the shape that philosophy is apt to take. We can add epistemic solutions to straight solutions and skeptical solutions.