Basic Particulars and the Mind

Basic Particulars and the Mind

In Individuals (1959) Peter Strawson argued that material bodies are the basic particulars from the point of view of reference. Space (or our conception of it) plays a crucial role in making determinate reference possible. Other, non-basic particulars can only be referred to derivatively upon basic particulars: for example, actions can only be referred to via reference to the agents (objects) engaging in them. I want to consider this doctrine in relation to reference to the mind—what does it tell us about mental reference? On the face of it, reference to the mind should not be possible, given that the mind is not located in space—it isn’t a type of material body. But we may relax the doctrine to allow that reference to mind is parasitic on reference to body: we can, for example, refer to someone’s pain as “the pain occurring in this body (or body part)”. Or we could bite the bullet and declare that no such reference is possible, because the doctrine is so compelling. Or we could aim for an intermediate position: reference to bodies is primary, but there can also be secondary reference. The picture is that basic or primary reference is made to material objects in space (“substances”) and any other reference is dependent on, or reducible to, this primary mode of reference—to actions, events, processes, sensations, beliefs, numbers, ethical values, theoretical posits, fictional entities, etc. If the dependence can’t be articulated, the secondary modes of reference are in peril of disappearance. That would mean that we don’t refer to mental particulars at all; some other account of mental language would be required, say expressivism. Of course, the underlying doctrine might be questioned by contending that mental reference is basic and physical reference derivative or impossible, as with idealism or complete skepticism about the whole notion of reference (Quine etc.) I will not be concerned with such debates; I want to explore the relevance of the Strawsonian (Kantian) doctrine to materialism and the identity theory. I will also make some remarks about the semantics of proper names.

Does the doctrine refute the identity theory? The argument goes as follows: brain states are basic particulars, but mental states are non-basic particulars, so they can’t be identical. More fully, reference to brains and brain states is a type of primary reference (spatially guided), but reference to minds and mental states is (at best) a type of secondary reference; therefore, minds can’t be brains and mental states can’t be brain states, by Leibniz’s law. The two have different referential properties or profiles. We refer to brain states via physical brains in space, but we don’t refer to mental states that way, so they can’t be identical. Pain can’t be C-fiber firing because C-fiber firing is directly connected to our spatial conceptual scheme in our modes of reference, while pain is not so connected; it is referred to in some other mode or not referred to at all (but rather expressed, say). You have heard of the modal argument and the knowledge argument; well, this is the reference argument. It uses the Strawsonian apparatus of basic particulars and reference to them to refute the identity theory. We can reformulate it using the apparatus of the knowledge argument: Mary is in her isolated room, knowing nothing of the brain, but referring to her mental states, say the sensation of red; then she is released from this room and introduced to the brain, which she learns to refer to in the standard way. Wouldn’t we say that she acquired a new ability not possessed before her release? But then, the sensation and the brain state can’t be identical; she didn’t already possess the ability to refer to brain states while stuck in her room. She lacked the primary space-based ability to refer to her brain, though she had the ability to refer to her sensations, so the latter can’t be the former. These are distinct abilities, so by Leibniz’s law sensations are not identical to brain states. We could run the argument the other way too, though we would have to suppose that she could have sensations with no ability to refer to them, so that she could acquire that ability subsequently to having the ability to refer to her brain states. But this is messy. We can mount the argument simply by noting that Mary has one kind of referential ability but not the other and then apply Leibniz’s law. The basic point of both styles of argument is that accomplishing reference via direct use of the spatial conceptual scheme is not the same as reference not so accomplished; primary reference and secondary reference are not the same. There is a dualism in our methods of reference, and this dualism trickles down to the level of ontology. We are not talking about the same thing, because the aboutness of language (or thought) works differently in the two cases. We could similarly argue that actions can’t be body parts because actions are referred to derivatively on reference to body parts, whereas reference to body parts is not—they are referred to non-derivatively. And this is just what we would expect, given that actions of bodies are clearly not parts of bodies. Likewise, pains are intuitively not brain states, and the reference argument serves to reinforce that intuition (as do the modal argument and the knowledge argument). To put it simply, you can see and point to brain states (they exist in space), but you can’t see and point to pains, so reference to pains cannot be grounded in seeing and pointing—but then they can’t be identical to brain states.

How does the distinction between basic and non-basic reference apply to personal proper names? As follows: bodies are referentially basic particulars and persons are referentially non-basic particulars. We refer to persons via prior reference to their bodies, i.e., spatially. So, names of persons are secondary referring terms, if they refer at all. What precisely is their semantics? Is a name short for “the person with body B”? Then the person would be referred to via a description of his or her body’s position in space. Or is it that the body is the object directly referred to by the name? Or is the reference that person—whatever a person is—associated with a particular body? These all seem like unattractive options, so a more radical theory suggests itself: the person is never actually referred to, only the body is. We can’t refer to the person because of the constraints imposed by the Strawsonian doctrine, so we don’t so refer; we only really refer to the body, it being easily singled out. We talk as if we refer to persons (selves, transcendental egos, immortal souls—take your pick), but we really don’t; proper names are actually labels for bodies—either by description or directly. These are close enough to persons proper to serve our pragmatic purposes, but strictly we never make referential contact with the self itself (whatever it may be). Maybe the self is a myth, as it is commonsensically conceived, but we still have a use for reference to bodies. Personal names are thus like names of mountains and cities, which simply name physical bodies. That way they have determinate intelligible reference; but if not, they inherit all the obscurities of the self, when viewed as separate from the body. For what is the relation between body and self, such that we refer to the self with proper names and not the body? A pragmatic eliminationist about selves will want to preserve the practice of using proper names, and bodies provide the natural surrogate; the whole linguistic institution revolves around bodies, and persons be hanged. Maybe I refer to my true self when say “I”, but when I speak of other people it is their bodies I primarily have before my mind. A community of zombies might be indistinguishable from us in their use of names. This is all by way of saying that if Strawson is right, material bodies are really the referential foundation—the rest is as-if reference or not really reference at all. At most we can say that personal proper names refer to persons only in a secondary or metaphorical sense, while reference to their bodies is the primary form that reference takes. This would be analogous to restricting the term “know” to direct observation of objects, while allowing a secondary use of the term for anything unobservable: true knowledge and true reference versus extended (so-called) knowledge and extended (so-called) reference. At the very least we would want to know whether proper names refer to persons in the basic sense or the non-basic sense. It is much the same with demonstratives: is “that person” a primary referential device or a secondary one, and what exactly does it refer to? The strong Strawsonian thesis (not held by Strawson himself) would be that it refers to a body or to nothing. For how is such reference supposed to work if all reference is necessarily grounded in bodily facts that are far removed from the entity allegedly referred to—like an immortal immaterial soul? Such a thing cannot be successfully picked out, granted the spatial foundations of our referential scheme. Personal names (grammatical) cannot really refer to persons (ontological) in the primary sense, given that all real reference is rooted in spatial individuation—rather as persons are not, strictly speaking, things seen. In our perceptual scheme we see only material objects in space, not hidden selves; so, we had better not have a theory of seeing that allows for (genuine) seeing of non-bodily persons.[1]

[1] Let me observe that at the time of writing Individuals (the 1950s) these were very live issues, following as they did on logical positivism and its scruples. Philosophers were not lax in their admission of key theoretical concepts, like the concept of reference. Maybe the promiscuous use of the term “reference” was just meaningless metaphysics; for what could verify its use in connection with imperceptible entities? Selves were under suspicion of not existing, so we don’t want to saddle our language with reference to such things. Strawson was trying to save common sense while acknowledging the force of the positivist critique. But the wholesale rejection of persons and reference to them was lurking in the shadows. Even the title to his book was a poke in the eye of adherents of sense-data as basic and persons as persona non grata. Even bodies were held in contempt! The idea that personal proper names name persons was regarded as anathema; names had to be analyzed in terms of the sensory and verifiable. And surely reference had to be subject to some restrictions, just like meaning and truth. The view that personal names don’t refer to (an ontology of) persons was not some wild unmotivated paradox, but a respectable philosophical position (if positivism was respectable). Oh, how things have changed!