Psychology of Philosophy

Probably every field of study has its own distinctive type of psychology. A certain type of mind will be drawn to a particular subject. It is not difficult to see how this pairing proceeds. If you are interested in people, you will naturally be drawn to psychology; not so if you are fascinated by numbers. If words fascinate you, linguistics will attract you. It is safe to say that historians are interested in the past, but not so much in general theories. A fondness for animals may lead you into zoology. A desire to travel may bring you to geography. If the stars grab your attention, astronomy may be your calling. If money excites you, economics may be your chosen area of study. Certain talents and abilities will figure into this: what you were good at in school. Extraversion or introversion may take you in one direction or another (e.g., politics). But what psychology orients people towards philosophy? That is not so obvious, given that philosophy has no well-defined subject-matter. Would anybody say they had a childhood fascination with concepts? Is it a love of paradoxes and puzzles? Is it a desire to argue? None of that sounds very plausible. Is it simply masochism? My best explanation is that it is a liking for certain sorts of language—philosophical language. The words resonate in your head; they feel good on the tongue. They seem impressive, profound. The philosophical personality is linguistically primed, smitten with the jargon, enamored of the sound of the sentences. It isn’t that philosophy is about a certain range of objects; it’s the way it talks that engages the passions. The philosophical personality above all wants to speak like a philosopher—to be master of the vocabulary. He or she may also have a weakness for depth and difficulty, and the language of the subject is thought to help with overcoming this weakness; the philosopher is a deep speaker as well as a deep thinker. A philosophical education is largely acquiring a certain kind of verbal skill—in speech and writing. You learn how to talk the talk.

This connects with a certain characteristic of philosophy: the tendency to be enamored of certain words and phrases. These may come and go; they seldom persist forever. Here is a selective list: form, substance, idea, fact, experience, reason, a priori, a posteriori, analytic, synthetic, necessary, contingent, analysis, logical form, truth condition, criterion, identity, family resemblance, speech act, sense-datum, rigid designation, possible world, noncognitive, normative, what it’s like, reductionist, anti-realist. Where would we be without these words? They roll so deliciously off the tongue. They sound so imposing, grand, profound, scholarly. It is a pleasure just to be around them. And yet they can be slippery, poorly defined, and misleading. The go in and out of fashion, one day greeted with an approving smile, the next with a condescending sneer (“Oh, you still believe in that rubbish”). They are, let’s face it, disturbingly meme-like: buzz words, catch-phrases, verbal tics. They are more substitutes for thought than real thought. You must have heard people (typically graduate students) who half-know how to use them or use them obsessively (“epistemological” in every sentence). They aren’t a way to think clearly but to obfuscate and bamboozle. They tend to go unexamined, trotted out not scrutinized. They lend themselves to obscure verbal altercation. This is their psychology (psychopathology)—the psychology of philosophy.

It is hard to know what to do about this situation. We can’t ban them; they perform a useful service (as memes often do). They are not all bad. The best I can suggest is that they should be handled with care, responsibly, and used in moderation. Don’t litter your speech and writing with them. Don’t rely on them to do your thinking for you. Don’t let them dominate your philosophical consciousness. Keep them at arm’s length. Be suspicious of them. I am as guilty as the next man—I use them all the time. But I feel guilty about it, as if they are shaky crutches rather than sturdy limbs. I would like to do without them, I really would; and one day I will (I tell myself). They have grown up (sprouted) over time, at certain periods, for certain purposes, and they have stuck, for good or ill; they are not the result of strict screening and rigorous peer review. So, don’t use them too easily or heavily, and only when you need to. It is not a virtue to use them but a vice (or ingrained habit). The philosopher needs to clean up his psychology: he went into the subject because of his love of the jargon (to put it unkindly) and now he needs to clean house, tidy the place up. He needs to root out the termites of thought—those insidious little memes that eat away at the foundations of reason. Or rid his mind of verbal junk, however superficially appealing (the fast food of philosophical thought). You can keep it in some form, but don’t live or die by it. Don’t let it call the shots.[1]

[1] It was a virtue of ordinary language philosophy to discourage technical jargon (though it may have gone overboard). Some people are certainly worse than others.

The Part Problem

People talk about the mind-brain problem, but that is strictly inaccurate. The problem isn’t about how the brain as a whole produces consciousness; it’s about how some of it does. It isn’t about how the brain differs from other bodily organs; it’s about how certain parts of it do. The various parts of the brain look very similar and function similarly, but only a subset of brain parts have the magic touch. What makes them so special? What ingredient do they possess that other parts don’t possess? This is what I am calling the part problem. It refocuses the so-called mind-body problem: how do you convert a bit of the brain that doesn’t produce consciousness into a bit that does? It can hardly be a change of location, as if transplanting neurons from the brain stem into the frontal cortex will magically transform them into agents of consciousness (or if it does, we would want to know how). Nor are the consciousness neurons bigger or brighter than the non-conscious neurons. Nor do they fire more rapidly. There seems to be no chemical or anatomical difference. And it can hardly be supposed that God arbitrarily chose these neurons to be consciousness-bearing ones (“I anoint thee guardians of the soul”). The part problem looks like a hard problem—as hard as the mind-body problem, or even harder. For it introduces an element of arbitrariness into the picture: all neurons seem the same yet only some have the power to produce consciousness. Then, in virtue of what do they have this power? Is there just no answer to this—is it just a freak of nature, or evidence of a hidden world? But why this portal instead of that one? It’s like supposing that a given chemical can explode or not explode without changing. Is it the environment of the neuron that makes the difference? But why? The puzzle is almost violently difficult. We might call it the infuriating problem.

Take a part of the brain that has no consciousness associated with it. Now consider a neighboring part that does have a conscious correlate. How does one part grade into the other? Is there some intermediate state of semi-consciousness? Can there be consciousness migration or consciousness spread? Could they change places consciousness-wise? Is the difference exceedingly subtle or quite manifest? Could a tiny variation of shape make all the difference? Neurophysiologists have looked at both types of cells under the microscope and detected no physical difference, and yet the difference could not be more marked. What proportion of brain cells are mentally employed? I have never heard an estimate. Is it mainly unconscious? Is this ratio the same for all animals with a brain? If so, why? When the brain dies consciousness disappears from its precincts, the light goes out, but what physiological difference between the two types of cells accompanies this, if any? If you were trying to build a conscious machine, would you install two types of components, corresponding to the two types of neurons? Is one a necessary condition of the other? When brains evolved did the unconscious neurons appear first and the conscious ones build on this foundation, or were there always the two types? How are the two developmentally scheduled in embryogenesis? Is one more active than the other? There is surely some physical difference, but we are damned if we can see what it is. The whole set-up seems contrary to reason, and yet these are the facts. This division of labor within the brain is a complete mystery. Why are some neurons not conscious? They ought to be if others are. This conundrum appears to favor some sort of substance dualism: are we then to take that possibility more seriously than we have? Materialism seems defeated in the face of it. But then we will be confronted by the problem of how and why the mental substance selects certain neurons as its locus of influence and not others. We thought that neurons contained some special mental ingredient that sets them apart from other cells in the body, but it turns out they don’t, since some neurons have nothing to do with consciousness. So, are neurons really beside the point? Some are correlated with consciousness, but this may not be because they produce consciousness, since some don’t. But then, we are completely in the dark about the basis of consciousness. Maybe we are looking in the wrong place altogether. The part problem makes the mind-brain problem even harder, even more maddening.

Here is a comparison to make the point vivid. Suppose you are investigating water and are interested in explaining its liquid state. You arrive at the theory that liquidity is the loose arrangement of the constituent H2O molecules. Well and good, you think, we have that problem under control. But then you discover, to your surprise, that not all H2O molecules loosely bonded are liquid! How can that be? The molecules are exactly the same as in the liquid water but the water is not liquid! Obviously, your theory of liquidity is wrong, but you can discern no difference between the two cases: here liquidity, there no liquidity—but exactly the same chemical make-up. It seems impossible, but it is an observable fact. Nature has gone mad, or you have (are you hallucinating?). In the one case, the micro properties produce liquidity; in the other, they do not. How can this be? Is there some other source of liquidity that you are somehow missing—a sort of immaterial liquidity?

Animal Induction

Hume argued that induction is based on custom not reason. We believe in induction because we are psychologically built that way by nature not by ratiocination. He could have cited the case of animals: they act according to induction by instinct; they were not taught to do so or employ a priori reflection. We could say they have an inductive gene; it’s an adaptation brought about by natural selection. Induction is like a thick coat in the Arctic. The environment calls it forth. We evolved from animals, so our inductive dispositions have the same roots. This is why the skeptical argument makes so little impact on us. We are natural-born inductivists. Popper can’t budge us on this. Even if the uniformity of nature breaks down, we are genetically inclined to induction. In this sense we have an innate inductive philosophy. People talk about commonsense philosophy; we also have an instinctive philosophy installed by the genes under natural selection. Our instinctive philosophy is inherited from our animal ancestors going back a long way. We are not a blank philosophical state. Induction is an “innate idea”. It is like our philosophy of substances—a natural innate cognitive-behavioral scheme. We go by laws instinctively. We have an inductive brain(-stem). Our DNA is inductive.

This doesn’t prove that induction is a valid mode of inference. We cannot use it to prove that the future will be like the past; we might even stop behaving inductively! Just because we have always been inductive in the past doesn’t prove we will continue to be inductive in the future. Nature might also stop being uniform while leaving us still committed to induction. You never know. But we can infer that nature was uniform in the past, i.e., that our ancestors evolved in conditions of uniformity. For there would have been no induction in a world lacking in uniformity, because it would not have been adaptive. Adaptations evolve to suit the world surrounding the organisms in question, so we know our ancestors lived in a predictable uniform world. The inductive gene only gets installed if it is adaptive in the given environment. Hume would have enjoyed the post-Darwinian world of genes and evolution from earlier species.