Concepts of Mind

Concepts of Mind

We have concepts of mind, but where do they come from? According to a hallowed tradition, they come from the mind itself, or rather our perception of it. Just as we get our concepts of external objects from external objects (in both senses of “object”), so we get our concepts of internal objects from internal objects. The cause is the same as the object (in the “intentional object” sense). This view seems so obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning, but there have been dissenters: Wittgenstein for one, eliminative materialists for another (you can’t get the concepts from the objects if the objects don’t exist—non-existent objects don’t cause anything). And indeed, there is something funny about the idea: for we don’t see or otherwise sense our own minds (or the minds of others); nor can we point to them in acts of ostensive definition. They are not laid out in space, displayed for us to attend to and perform mental operations upon (comparing, abstracting). Such operations are already obscure enough, we hardly need any more obscurity. Nor is it clear what the content of such putative concepts is—states, processes, events, dispositions, etc.?[1] Animals and young children seem not to have them. They seem distinctly fishy, though hard to dispense with; they certainly have a function. We feel that they don’t really do justice to what they purport to denote—as if the mind itself lies at some distance from them. They are more labels than descriptive devices, not really vehicles of intimate knowledge. They don’t enable us to grasp what they refer to, though it certainly seems to be something. Altogether, a bit of a conundrum. Really not like beetles in a box, but then again what else might they be? There is a kind of gap between concept and object, word and thing. The suit doesn’t fit the figure; it is shapeless and the trousers are too short. Our mental language is lacking in lucidity. Its ontology is peculiar—unlike our ontology of the external world (the world of solid substances in space). If it came directly from the mind itself, surely it would be less perplexing, more apt and revealing. So, maybe it doesn’t come from the mind, real though the mind is. Our mental concepts might be about the mind but not derived from it. They might be imposed on the mind rather than extracted from it.

But where else might our mental concepts come from? God can’t help us, because he would have done a better job of constructing them (among other things). Call this “the origin problem of mental concepts”. I have a solution to this problem, but you are not going to like it—I don’t like it myself (except in a perverse way). It is this: we get our mental concepts from the external world. Locke thought that we get our concepts of the external world from the external world and that we get our concepts of the internal world from the internal world (by good old-fashioned “abstraction”); I say we get our concepts of the internal world from the external world. “Nonsense!” you reply, and I sympathize; it is a kind of nonsense—for our mental language (and its concepts) is a kind of nonsense. We think of the mind by analogy with our concepts of the external world (not a novel thought)—that is, we transfer our external concepts to the mind. But, you reply, we don’t get our concept of belief, say, by first attributing it to external reality and then directing it inward—we don’t think rocks think! True enough, though anthropomorphism is not uncommon. But don’t take me too woodenly: the idea is that we modify our raw perceptions so as to produce an analogue concept, which we then happily employ inwardly. Remember that our concepts of external things are not just a matter of copying or peeling off or attenuating; an elaborate creative act is performed to derive the concept from the percept (which is quite mysterious).[2] So, we can allow that perception of external objects serves as (indispensable) input to the creation of a kind of sub-concept applicable to the mind. Belief, say, is a state of an object that has a complex structure—like a bridge or tree or animal body. We have beliefs in the way an external object has a property—as an animal has an anatomy or a crystal a shape. We don’t gaze at the inner object and veridically read off its nature; rather, we use our prior acquaintance with external objects to furnish us with a passable representation of our inner world (notice the same move in that last phrase). A pain is like a bolt of lightning or a bloody accident or a loud noise: it has their ontological form. We conceive the inner on the model of the outer. Thus, we derive our mental concepts from our physical concepts—though we don’t reduce the mental to the physical. Our concept-generation module works hard on perceptions of physical things to produce our mental concepts, as we like to call them. These concepts are tacitly physical in origin. The concept of the self (“I”) is derived (at least in part) from our concepts of bodies, including our own, not from direct introspection of the self as an inner object. The reason for this is that we have no alternative: it can’t be done by means of some alleged inner perception-plus-abstraction procedure. What we have here is a case of conceptual transfer or transformation, akin to grammatical transformations or biological transformations. I don’t doubt that the human imagination, a highly creative faculty, plays a part in this; we imagine the mind as a kind of inner landscape—but we don’t perceive it that way. We conceive the mind imaginatively on the model of the external world (“imagining-as”).

Think of it this way: we have become used to the idea that the mind projects itself onto external things, as when we call external objects “red” based on an antecedent use of “red” for sensations; well, what I am suggesting is the inverse of this—introjecting the outer onto the inner. We can describe the external world using terms originally designed to describe the internal world, and we can also do the converse. Our mental language is a kind of transposition of our physical language, suitably processed and modified; it isn’t independently created by direct methods (the same might be said of our mathematical language). We are exploiting our conceptual derivation apparatus. This explains the ill-fitting character of our mental concepts, the sense of inadequacy or remoteness. We are playing the wrong language-game, but we have no other, and it works well enough in everyday life. Language and thought did not initially evolve so as to enable us to describe our inner life, but rather to negotiate the external world. It later enabled us to talk about our mind by building on what existed previously (like all evolutionary adaptations). Naturally, it isn’t a perfect fit, but then it doesn’t have bespoke origins; the wonder is that it works at all. Of course, we simultaneously described the external world in mentalistic terms, so our conceptual reach was never sharply confined; we freely mixed the two. Our psychological conceptual scheme is a make-do on-the-job cobbled-together construction, not an ideal language laid down by some perfection-loving deity. But we take it for granted and have learned to live with it. It is like the work of a child genius.[3]

[1] See my “Ontology of Mind” and other works.

[2] See my “Quasi-Empiricism”.

[3] It is always salutary to take an evolutionary diachronic perspective on the mind and not adopt an oversimplified synchronic perspective.  Human language and the human conceptual scheme are cumulative affairs with a history, some parts older than other parts. We adapt the old to the new.