Amorphous Minds

Amorphous Minds

Our world is divided into different objects and kinds of objects—separate objects, distinct kinds. But who or what does the dividing?[1] According to conceptualists, it is minds that divide things up as they see fit, depending on their preferences, needs, conventions, decisions, innate quality space, and sense of similarity; there is no mind-independent carving knife. No minds, no distinguishable objects or kinds of objects. Ontologically, classes result from classification—from mental and linguistic acts. The objective world itself is a blank slate, an amorphous lump, a featureless continuum. Identity depends on identification. According to realists, by contrast, the world is divided up all by itself: it comes to us in segmented form, ready-made, mind-independent. The kinds of nature exist whether minds exist or not. Ontologically, classes result from natural pre-existing divisions, owing nothing to the classifying mind; language, in particular, has nothing to do with it. Which of these two views is correct? Does the ontology derive from the epistemology or does the epistemology derive from the ontology? The naïve answer, and the correct one in my view, is that kind-realism is true: the world autonomously divides into natural kinds that owe nothing to human (or animal) classification—though some kinds are mind-dependent (subjective, human-centered, conventional, pragmatic, etc.). The kinds we recognize are partly reflections of an objective reality and partly a matter of subjective impositions. I think this is completely obvious, embarrassingly so, but a surprising number of philosophers and others adopt the conceptualist position; they are taken in (mesmerized) by the “amorphous lump” conception. Here I intend to refute that position once and for all. Conceptual schemes don’t determine world-orders.

Mind and language are parts of the world: are they then parts of the amorphous lump? Are their internal divisions inherent in them or derived from acts of classification? If the divisions are inherent, then some of reality is subject to taxonomic realism; but if so, why stop there? If concepts and words are divided up by nature, what is to prevent non-mental things from being similarly divided up? On the other hand, if they are not divided in themselves, but inherently amorphous, how can they confer classificatory structure on the rest of the world? How can non-mush arise from mush? How can an unstructured mind create a structured external reality? Suppose there were such a mind, akin to William James’s babyish “blooming, buzzing confusion”: how is that going to give us the world of neatly divided objects and kinds of objects? It can’t. Unarticulated minds can’t give us articulated objects; it would be mush all the way down. So, conceptualism is either inconsistent or impossible. It only stands a chance of working if the mind itself is not brought within its scope. The mind must be conceived as finely tuned, clearly and cleanly articulated, if it is to serve as the foundation of classification.

Very well, it might be said, let us draw in our horns—the conceptualist thesis applies only to the physical world and not to the mental world. But what about the brain? Minds need brains, and brains are physical objects subject to conceptualism—so they too must be part of the amorphous lump. They have no structure save that conferred on them by our (or God’s) classificatory acts. The idea is self-evidently absurd, but let’s allow the conceptualist this much rope—then we have the problem that the articulated mind depends on a formless blob of brain. Or is it that brains only shape minds once they have been suitably conceptualized, so that you don’t get to have a mind until someone has conceptualized your brain for you? An amorphous brainy substance or stuff can hardly give rise to a highly structured mind—from mush we get only more mush. There were neurons in the brain long before anyone had the idea of neurons; neurons are not “mental constructions” that confer structured reality on formless goo. Your brain is not a different object from mine because someone decided to treat it so: it is an objectively discrete object. It is like the body—also a structured object in its own right. It isn’t a mere blob awaiting an infusion of structure. What does this even mean? It’s just rampant metaphor. Things have borders, boundaries, internal components, whether anyone recognizes it or not. The idea that objects are the same or different according to our conceptual practices is pure fantasy—absolute rubbish.[2] Identity and difference are primitive ontological facts.

Behind these reflections on object identity, we have another primitive ontological fact: causality is not mind-dependent. It is not arbitrary to classify things as we do because things don’t act causally in a way that is dependent on our will. The causal powers of an object stem from the object itself not from our manner of conceiving it; causation doesn’t wait on our classificatory predilections and decisions. The amorphous lump has no causal powers, according to conceptualism, so causality must bide its time before entering the world: but this is absurd—the universe was working causally long before conceptualizing creatures came along. If it weren’t, they would never have come along. The natural kind of an object is closely connected to its causal powers, so we go conceptualist about causality if we go conceptualist about kinds. My brain causes my mind, and to do so it must have a determinate structure corresponding to my mind’s structure, so it can’t be a featureless tabula rasa or a piece of formless plasticine. Likewise, species can only cause other species in evolutionary history if they have a determinate specific nature, as a matter of objective fact; they can’t be mere blobs awaiting individuative and causal characteristics conferred by outside observers. These points are surely obvious to the point of banality, and yet they are incompatible with conceptualism taken literally (or is it intended as mere metaphor?). It is true that being first-in-show, say, is an imposed classification on a particular dog, but the difference between dogs and cats isn’t. Would anyone suppose that the difference between rocks and thoughts is a mere matter of arbitrary classification easily altered? (Please don’t tell me that Hopi Indians reject any such distinction and regard rocks as stony spirits.) What is this mania for trying to dissolve all distinctions in nature? Is it ultimately political, as if we are unjustly imposing a class structure on reality that doesn’t belong there? Is it a desire for absolute equality (homogeneity) in all things? If everything is “social construction”, then there cannot be invidious class distinctions de re; hence, nature is not divided in itself but soothingly uniform. All is malleable, moldable. The amorphous lump idea is really an expression of political seamlessness (the unreality of race, gender, merit, etc.) Are claims of identity conceptualism rooted in identity politics? Just a thought.

Here is a more intellectually serious question: is nature necessarily articulated? Could the world have been an amorphous lump? Are any possible worlds inherently blob-like, gooey, formless, undivided? And if there are, could they be subjected to an imposed classificatory scheme? The problem here is that these descriptions are themselves tacitly classificatory; they are at best suggestive metaphors. A lump is a discrete object, bounded and limited, different from other lumps; and amorphous stuff is stuff of a certain kind—cloudlike, desert-like, blancmange-like. But these are things in the articulated world, already classified—clouds, deserts, desserts. The idea of a reality with no nature, no causality, no distinction from other things is a myth, a fantasy, a type of nonsense. True, we can envisage a world less divided and structured than ours—fewer chemical elements or species or types of celestial bodies—but it is still a world divided into objects and kinds. Even a single gas everywhere has a certain nature and divides into distinct areas; it isn’t devoid of all structure (ditto for space and time). Could such a kind-impoverished world be enriched into conceptually imposed kinds comparable in number to ours? I don’t think so: the pre-existing natural kinds of the world set limits to the kinds that can be manufactured mentally. For what use is an elaborate system of classification if reality contains no counterpart to it? There is only so much you can do with all-pervasive hydrogen: you can’t impose animal kinds on it or political systems or types of sport. The world needs to have the resources to justify such classifications, even if they are entirely subjective in origin (e.g., what is good to eat). In fact, every system of classification is rooted in natural classifications—being best-in-show is rooted in human aesthetic responses, which are objective facts. The truth is that all classification is based on natural classes and categories in one way or another—the propensity of nature to fall into kinds and varieties of its own accord: many of them, of many kinds, all distinct from each other. Why this should be so is a difficult question—why not a universe of very few natural kinds? Is it because individual objects cannot exist unless there are many kinds of objects—objects with different shapes, masses, causal properties, etc.? Or is it just a contingent fact about our universe that it contains many kinds of things? In any case, our classifications are created by non-classificatory facts, some physical, some mental. Ontology precedes taxonomy.[3]

[1] I want to acknowledge Michael Ayers’ stupendous book Locke: Epistemology and Ontology (1991) for stimulating my interest in the ontology and epistemology of classification. The position adopted here is close to, if not identical with, his position. Perhaps I go even farther than him in the end. No classification worthy of the name consists of free acts of arbitrary definition. Nature always precedes and determines its description. There is no representational difference without objective difference. Representational facts are parasitic on non-representational facts.

[2] Perhaps I should write “Absolute Rubbish” in order to dignify the rubbish in question: some of the most interesting ideas in philosophy are Absolute Rubbish in my technical sense (idealism, materialism, moral relativism, the verifiability theory of meaning). Philosophy produces Absolute Rubbish as part of its mission—wild attempts to solve intractable problems. Science is not that different.

[3] It is odd that the kind of idealism inherent in conceptualism about categories is not usually accompanied by a more general idealism, as that objects are just mental entities. The thought seems to be that the objects of the world are non-mental but their category or kind is mentally determined: the amorphous stuff is physical but the kind it assumes is mental. This is a very weird position: material substance dressed in mental robes. You would think that reality should be one way or the other.