Bounds of Sense

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Bounds of Sense

Quine once described Strawson as applying his “limpid vernacular” to the technicalities of logic (in a review of Strawson’s Introduction to Logical Theory). One might hope that he would do the same in exegesis of Kant in The Bounds of Sense. However, in that work we are treated to such tortuous locutions as “necessary conditions of the possibility of any experience of objective reality such as we can render intelligible to ourselves” (119): why not simply “necessary conditions of experience” and “intelligible”? We seek the necessary conditions of experience (adding “the possibility of” is redundant) and we want to know what kinds of experience are intelligible (whether we can “render” them “intelligible to ourselves” is another question, depending on our powers of self-directed persuasion). Further, what is meant by “experience” here? Strawson regularly alternates this word with “empirical knowledge”, including scientific knowledge; but these are different things, one perceptual, the other conceptual-propositional-cognitive (as in knowledge of scientific theories). It seems clear that he is mainly thinking of visual experience as delivered by adult human eyes, but is generalizing beyond that domain. Does he wish to include emotional experience, or olfactory, or ethical, or imaginative, or experience of pain and pleasure? The doctrine of the necessity of spatiotemporal content is clearly more convincing for the visual sense than these other types of experience (especially the spatial component), so we shouldn’t be lulled into accepting a perfectly general thesis based on one instance of it. And what kind of spatial content is deemed essential to experience as such—extension, ordering, continuity, dimensionality, unity, objectivity, infinity? Some experience might be weakly spatial (smell and taste) while other experience is more strongly spatial (looking into the distance on a bright clear day). Imaginative experience prescinds from space considerably, dispensing with spatial relations to other objects. Emotions have little to do with space compared to normal binocular vision. And some forms of vision are more spatially rich than other forms—think of the etiolated visual experience of closed eyes in the dark. The question is a lot messier than Strawson allows, much less clearly defined. Could we ask the same question equally of sensation, perception, sentience, appearance, seeming, consciousness? Might we not get different answers depending on what term we choose? The term “experience” is vague and general, so we don’t know quite what Strawson (channeling Kant) is considering. Is memory included—and what kind of memory? Is mathematical reasoning included? What about logical “experience”? We need more limpid vernacular to tie the question down, more ordinary language philosophy.

About one thing Strawson is crystal clear: Kant thinks that reality itself is not spatiotemporal and Strawson himself rejects that claim. The phenomenal world is deemed spatiotemporal in its essence, but the noumenal world is non-spatiotemporal in its essence, according to Kant. This doctrine is hard to take seriously, as Strawson indicates. How could Kant know this given that (as he thinks) we have no access to the nature of the reality that exists outside our minds? How can we use our sense experience to navigate the objective world if their essences are so different—doesn’t there have to be at least some kind of correlation? Why would we be designed (by God or nature) to represent reality so faultily? What possible reason could be given for removing things in themselves from space and time? The idea that space and time are “in us” but only in us is unmotivated, bizarre, and preposterous; and certainly not required by the Kantian apparatus of phenomenal space and time (intuitions, sensibility, the understanding, the categories, etc.). It may be that phenomenal space and noumenal space are not the same (Euclidian and non-Euclidian, say), but there has to be someveridical relation between them; denying this is gratuitous and disastrous. I would say that concrete, causal, law-governed reality is clearly spatiotemporal, necessarily so—we can make nothing else “intelligible to ourselves”. That is indeed why sense experience is spatiotemporally imbued (to the extent that it is): this is just a scientific fact, a fact of biology and evolution, of the body and brain. Animals experience the world spatiotemporally because that is the real nature of the world in which they have to survive.

So, we can say, lamely but limpidly, that objective reality is necessarily spatiotemporal and that sense experience is variously and to some degree spatiotemporal. There is no simple binary opposition here: animal sentience is spatiotemporal in many ways and to different degrees (possibly going down to zero). But what about language—meaning, linguistic sense? Curiously, Strawson says little about this in The Bounds of Sense(despite the pre-existence of Individuals). The answer again is mixed and unsystematic, even more so than in the case of sentience. True, we often speak of extended objects in space standing in spatial relations within a unified and ordered spatial manifold (what we call Space). But we also speak of things that are ambiguously and problematically related to space: states of consciousness, numbers, values. Reference is not a purely spatial act. Nor is syntax or grammar best defined in spatial terms. Sounds are not, in themselves and essentially, extended things. Senses are not laid out in space. Language has one foot in space, so to speak, but it also dallies with the non-spatial. Spatial reductionism is a misguided metaphysics. The real is not co-terminus with the extended. It is certainly not a necessary conceptual truth. Language is not, then, subject to Kantian requirements regarding space, even phenomenally. The Kantian project, pushed to extremes, is really an exercise in hyperbole, in which Strawson colludes (as befits an interpreter) but to which he does not wholly succumb. The idea that space is the general form of all our representations is a philosophical exaggeration, like many philosophical theories.[1]

[1] As to time, from the fact that all mental acts occur in time it doesn’t follow that they are of time—that time is an aspect of their content. All events occur in time, but it would be strange to say that they all represent time. It is also misleading to employ the term “spatiotemporal” uncritically: time and space are really very different things, and what holds of time might well not hold of space. Roughly speaking, time is more all-embracing than space. Not everything is space-like and not all mental representation is as of space. Certainly, we cannot derive the necessity of spatial content from the mere existence of the particular-general distinction, as Kant hoped.

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Anticipations

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Anticipations

Perusing a recent book on the cognitive psychology of number (Number Concepts by Richard Samuels and Eric Snyder), I was put in mind of my psychology M.A. thesis, entitled Empiricism and Nativism in Language and Mathematics, submitted in 1972 to Manchester University (when I was 22). In that thesis I brought together psychology, linguistics, and philosophy, arguing for a nativist position on the acquisition of mathematical knowledge. In particular, I applied Chomsky’s methodology and theoretical framework to the problem of mathematical knowledge acquisition. At the time there was nothing like this in the psychological literature, and I was quite conscious of the fact that I was doing something new and controversial, especially in adopting an interdisciplinary perspective. Indeed, I encountered some resistance to undertaking the project from the more orthodox members of the psychology department (nearly all of them)—what was I doing importing philosophy into psychology? I argued that it was necessary, in order to account for the acquisition of mathematical knowledge, to begin with an adequate analysis of the nature of mathematical truth, as Chomsky had argued that the same procedure was necessary in accounting for the acquisition of language. In effect, we need a metaphysics of number before we can frame theories of how number concepts are acquired—as we need an adequate theory of grammar before we can frame realistic theories of the child’s acquisition of language. We need a theory of the objects of knowledge before developing a theory of knowledge of those objects. Thus, an interdisciplinary perspective was required instead of the application of some general “learning theory”. Anyway, as I say, I was reminded of my thesis by reading a contemporary work in this area of psychology. And then it hit me: I invented cognitive science! I didn’t know it at the time—the term did not even exist back then—but the general outlines of the research program were clearly contained in my thesis. Specifically, the integration of psychology with other disciplines—not just brain science but philosophy of mathematics (along with linguistics). Nothing of my thesis was ever published, though my supervisor Professor John Cohen, made some efforts to interest a publisher (no dice). So, I missed my chance to be hailed as the originator of cognitive science (of course, there were other straws in the wind). My thesis really was a combination of psychology and philosophy, with Chomsky-style linguistics taken as model.

I also read recently Michael Dummett’s book Origins of Analytical Philosophy (1993), which undertakes to compare Frege and Husserl as founders of twentieth century philosophy. Dummett is interested in the fact that these two philosophers had convergent concerns and yet gave rise to divergent schools of thought. This put me in mind of my first published article, entitled “Mach and Husserl”, in the British Journal of Phenomenology(1972). The article was based on my undergraduate dissertation while a psychology student; the editor of the journal, Wolfe Mays, was my teacher and suggested publishing it. In it I compared the two philosophers, noting their clear similarities but divergent offspring. Mach was an early positivist and devotee of “sensations”, while Husserl founded phenomenology and was a devotee of consciousness and its intentional acts. Yet the former gave rise to positivist eliminative behaviorism while the latter spawned existentialism and the centrality of the conscious subject. Dummett says nothing at all about Mach in his book, though Husserl refers to him approvingly. So, it seems that we were both interested in the early days of twentieth century philosophy and Husserl’s role in forming it, and in the divergence that ensued from similar beginnings. I wrote my article over twenty years before Dummett wrote his book and with a very similar aim in mind (except my focus was more on the history of psychology). In a certain sense, then, I anticipated him, though we discussed different personnel. I think, in fact, that Mach was a good deal closer to Husserl than Frege, and arguably had a bigger impact on the course of twentieth century philosophy than Frege (he led to logical positivism). We find no analogue of Husserl’s preoccupation with consciousness in Frege, while Mach was clearly heavily into consciousness. I would say myself that the three of them were the principal architects of twentieth century philosophy, with a little help from Russell and Wittgenstein down the road.

Let me observe that when I applied to Oxford to study philosophy (in 1972), having already written my M.A. thesis and published my Husserl article, it was held against me (by R.M. Hare) that I had done so, these being deemed not fit subjects for a philosophy graduate student at Oxford to be interested in. This was a somewhat narrow and shortsighted decision, if I may be forgiven for saying so—and I was interested in more conventional Oxford-type topics too. After all, I had invented cognitive science and anticipated one of Oxford’s most celebrated philosophers before being admitted to the B.Phil.! Oh well. I did win the John Locke Prize a year or so later, though, so it all worked out in the end I suppose.[1]         

[1] In retrospect it all seems to me pretty hilarious now, though scary. At present I can’t even find my M.A. thesis and I don’t think I have a copy of my 1972 article.

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Message from Rebecca Goldstein

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Rebecca gave me permission to publish this.

 
One of the bright spots in these bleak days gets delivered to me regularly in Colin McGinn’s blog: brief and beautifully composed philosophical pieces on an astonishingly wide number of topics, many of which, I’m pretty sure, have never before been considered from a philosophical point of view. From the most technically analytic to the most expansively existential, he has something original to say. Colin McGinn is roaming freely in philosophical terrain, and it’s really something to watch.  
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The Making of a Philosopher (Part Two)

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The Making of a Philosopher (Part Two)

The following is a sequel of sorts to my The Making of a Philosopher (2002). Like that work, this is to be an intellectual memoir, not a marital, medical, musical, or muscular one—a memoir of the mind. It’s about what has gone on in my head.

I originally applied to university to study economics. This seemed like a practical subject, destined to provide employment, and I was already taking an A-level in it (for which I subsequently obtained an A). My strong subjects in school were mathematics and English (not too much memorization), and economics combined the two nicely. I might easily have become a professional economist (I still take an interest in the subject). But I happened to read some Freud and found it fascinating, so I switched to psychology in my applications. This subject too would lead to gainful employment, possibly in the educational field (I had no thoughts of an academic career). I was trying to be sensible, but not bored; after all, it is your whole life we are talking about. This occurred around 1968, a momentous year on the world stage. I therefore studied psychology at Manchester University, obtaining my degree in 1971 (B.A., First Class), followed by an M.A. in psychology in 1972. Philosophy formed a small part of my undergraduate degree: an introductory course on Plato and Sartre and a history and philosophy of science course. I also did some independent reading in philosophy, but nothing like what a student of philosophy might undertake; I was woefully undereducated in that regard. Nevertheless, I ended up studying philosophy at Oxford on the B.Phil. in 1972 (long story, recounted in my aforementioned book). That was a considerable challenge, because everyone else on the course had a substantial (and exceptional) undergraduate education in philosophy, of a kind alien to my own undergraduate acquaintance with the subject (Husserl and Adolph Grunbaum mainly). I had a lot of catching up to do, to put it mildly. I am surprised I came out the other end in one piece.

In 1974 I began my first philosophy job at University College London, after a mere two years of studying philosophy (four years of psychology before that). I didn’t teach philosophy of mind and made no use of my two degrees in psychology (including a good deal of experimental psychology). I mainly taught philosophical logic and philosophy of language (my first lecture course was on truth). I was very conscious of the fact that my philosophical education was patchy, embarrassingly so, and that I had never had the chance to do any serious research in philosophy; I could really have used a couple of years on a JRF or something similar. From then on, I was on the academic treadmill: tutorials, lectures, committees, writing for the journals, book reviewing—the usual routine. I never had much time to immerse myself more widely and deeply in philosophy, though I tried as best I could. And so it continued for the next 38 years! I got through my career, but always going from pillar to post, always rushed, pressured, tired, anxious, barely managing to keep my head above water. I never had the opportunity to just let my mind go where it wanted to go, read whatever I wanted to read, write whatever I felt like writing, think about whatever I liked. I never had that kind of philosophical leisure. I suppose I could say that I had no philosophical freedom. I never had that couple of years to develop my philosophical mind under conditions of unimpeded reflection. I got used to it, but it always grated, rankled, irritated. I imagine it must be much the same for many people: not enough time, not enough energy, too many obligations.

Then I retired (2013). Everything suddenly changed. The pressure was off. The treadmill had been discarded. No more teaching, no more department work, precious few invitations. Each day was a free day. The year ahead was not mapped out by the demands of a university schedule. No more breaking off a train of thought because a lecture had to be delivered the next day. The immediate result was an uptick of energy and concentration: no more teaching fatigue, no more interruptions, no more having to show up for meetings of one kind or another (supervisions, office hours, department meetings, etc.). My time was my own. Let me repeat that, because it’s important: My time was my own. I could do with it whatever my heart desired; I was subject to no temporal demands (Do this! Do that!). I was thus able to immerse myself in philosophical thinking, reading, and writing without external impositions—for the first time in my life (I’m not counting childhood). This produced a qualitative change in my state of mind, my philosophical consciousness, my very existence. I could read all the things I never had time to read, think without distraction for days on end, weeks, months, years. It has been a kind of bliss, foreign to my previous existence, a rebirth of sorts. And not only philosophy: I could read all the literature and science I ever wanted to read, which also contributes to one’s philosophical development. Writing becomes a pleasure not a torment, because there isn’t that nagging feeling that you will have to break off soon in order to fulfill your professional duties. You don’t have to quit in mid-sentence, mid-thought. Can you imagine? Being a professor uses up a lot of energy—have you noticed that?—and this energy could be deployed in other pursuits. To retire is to be reborn (but don’t leave it too late). I also don’t feel that I have to sacrifice other aspects of my life to the academic treadmill, including personal relationships (not to mention sport, music, etc.). Apart from anything else, life becomes a lot more enjoyable.

But the main point I want to make, reporting on my own case (I am still a psychologist, remember), is that in this phase of my life I have achieved a degree of breadth and depth in philosophy that I would never otherwise have achieved. I would even say that I have become over the last ten years a different kind of philosopher. I wish I could characterize this exactly; it has to do with gaining a larger perspective, an ease of thought, a facility of expression (writing philosophy well takes years, decades, of effort). I can just see further.  So, I think of this phase of my mental life as a new philosophical life; I am not the same person philosophically. There was a time when I was a philosophical novice, a time I was an apprentice philosopher, then a time of professional maturity, and now a time not of advanced age or twinkly wisdom but of fresh growth, of new beginnings, of excitement and exhilaration. I could call it creative, but that doesn’t quite hit the nail on the head: it is more a matter of discovery, mastery, arrival. I could almost call a sequel to my old book The Making of a New Philosopher. It isn’t something I ever anticipated.

Of course, there is an irony in all this, a bitter irony one might say, over which I have no desire to dwell. I will put it as abstractly as possible. I am concerned with inner psychology not external circumstances. First, and obviously, there is this blog, the fruit of innumerable hours of quietly intense lucubration. It must be a couple of thousand pages by now. This has been my preferred mode of philosophical expression during this period of personal renaissance—short, to the point, uncluttered, unbound. It is to be noticed that this material has not found its way into print, for several reasons I won’t go into. I feel fortunate that such a method of publication now exists, or else my inner world might not have made it into the outer world. I like what I have written, more so than before. But my inner world has been removed from the outer world of academic philosophy, producing a strange schism in my self-consciousness. It’s not exactly Socrates or Galileo or Russell; it is more a kind of intramural etiolation (here goes the abstraction). We might call it blank-slating, oblique erasure, identity removal. Of course, I still have good friends at the highest levels of philosophical (and other) achievement, whose names I will not mention (you can guess the reasons), so I am by no means cut off from professional contacts; and it’s true that my geographical location increases the degree of professional estrangement. Still, I feel as if nothing I say will ever be received as it once was. And, oddly enough, I don’t much care: my inner world has eclipsed my outer world—that academic carapace the professional professor carries around with him or her has been shed. My inner world has so expanded that it reaches to my subjective horizon. There has been a metamorphosis: I have become a different kind of being, curiously aloof, weirdly autonomous. It is a kind of brimming isolation, supercharged solitude. The banal life of the professional academic has been abolished, to be replaced by a peculiar kind of originality—the reborn corpse, the retired youth, the liberated prisoner. I have a paradoxical duality, the flourishing failure. And I kind of like it. My intellectual world is a world of my own creation with little extraneous intrusion.[1]

[1] I do seek out, and receive, regular feedback from my philosophical friends, so it isn’t that I rely solely on my own judgment. I am not some quivering recluse stewing in his own juices, not a bit of it.

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Empiricism, Memory, and Knowledge

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Empiricism, Memory, and Knowledge

In pre-Socratic times there was a school of thought known as “memorism” (or so I once dreamt). The principal doctrine of this school was that all knowledge is stored in memory: whenever you know something there was a past event that laid it down in memory, and knowledge is the recall of that something. Past event, storage, recall: these are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge. The memorists opposed the orthodox school of thought (the “revelationists”) which held that all knowledge arises from direct communication with the gods: whenever you know something the gods are conveying it into your mind by speaking directly to you. The revelationists found the memorists impious in their reliance on memory, a human attribute, instead of the divine action of the gods, to whom we owe everything. There is no invocation of the past, no mysterious storing of information, no ecstatic recall experience, just good old-fashioned godly beneficence. Let the gods be praised! The two schools debated the matter at length, never coming to any firm resolution. The revelationists brought forward counterexamples: what about knowledge of the present and future—surely, we don’t know these things by memory? The memorists responded either by denying the existence of such knowledge (eliminative memorism) or by explaining present and future knowledge as special cases of memory knowledge (reductive memorism). Ingeniously, they contended that by the time knowledge is acquired the thing known is past and retained in memory, and that we only know the future by remembering the past (induction etc.). So, it was either memory naturalism or revelation supernaturalism. The memorists were gaining adherents as their anti-supernaturalism spread and flourished; the revelationists seemed mired in superstition and pseudo-explanation. The gods surely had other things to occupy their time, and anyway were not deemed “empirically verifiable”. Memorism seemed to cover the ground nicely, was rooted in everyday experience, and dispensed with ad hoc appeals to divinity. And indisputably, a vast amount of human knowledge simply is stored in memory—knowledge of history, geography, animal husbandry, who your friends and enemies are. The theory looked warranted by the plain facts of human psychology.

But a new school of thought was taking shape at around this time: this school sympathized with the memorist’s anti-supernaturalism but were troubled by apparent counterexamples to the central doctrine. What about our knowledge that everything is self-identical? Is that based on memory? Was there some past event that laid this information down in memory—say, seeing a bunch of self-identical things and making an inductive leap, or hearing it from a trusted teacher? We never seemed to have learned this truth—never made an observation of it or were taught it in school. Yet we knew it. And there is a lot more knowledge like this, as they quickly pointed out: all of geometry and arithmetic, logic, conceptual truths, ethical propositions, maybe even philosophical theories. No past event triggered and justified this type of knowledge; there was no experience of recall in entertaining it; and people never suffered from difficulties of recollection over it (“I know the answer to this, but I can’t quite bring it to mind”). Such knowledge simply doesn’t bear the marks of memory.[1] Has anyone ever said “I just can’t remember whether everything is self-identical or not”? It thus appears that our knowledge exists in two places in our mind: in memory and in some other faculty not itself a type of memory. When asked what this faculty consists in, the anti-memorists grew dark and pensive: for no name suggested itself and the question was obscure. Some declared it an irresoluble mystery, while others (the “eternalists”) boldly asserted that such knowledge exists in the mind eternally (there was no moment of acquisition) and is a primitive fact of human nature. If we want a name for it, we can call it “un-memory” or “pre-memory”—in any case, it isn’t a form of memory in any normal sense. We just have this knowledge; it exists in the deepest recesses of our soul. It was never put there by anyone, divine or mortal, nor was it the result of an interaction with external reality. Remember, these were ancient times and evolution and genetic inheritance were unknown concepts. What this third school (they had no generally accepted name) was sure of was just that not all knowledge is memory knowledge. They opposed the idea that memory knowledge exhausts the whole of human knowledge; their positive theory, however, was still a work in progress. To be sure, much human knowledge is represented in memory, but there remains a substantial core of knowledge that is not so represented. Thus, there are really two types of knowledge; knowledge is not a homogeneous phenomenon. It has two species, two fundamental forms. They resisted the epistemological monism of the memorists.

Does all this ancient intellectual history remind you of anything? Is my dream a reflection of any actual history? Empiricism versus rationalism, of course: memorism is another version of empiricism and anti-memorism is the analogue of rationalism (or nativism). The memorist substitutes memory for experience: instead of saying that all knowledge derives from experience, he says that it is all dependent on memory. He thus sidesteps the standard problems with the concept of experience—whether it is conceptual or non-conceptual, given or interpreted, justificatory or epistemically idle, opaque or transparent—and replaces it with the concept of memory. Interactions with the environment lay down memories, which are later recalled; this is the source of all knowledge worthy of the name. Surely, something like this picture was implicit in traditional empiricism, since experiences had to be retained in memory in order to provide the basis of subsequent knowledge: you see something, remember it, and later recall it in an exercise of knowledge. In short, knowledge is sensory memory, according to empiricism. And rationalism is the denial of that: some knowledge (mathematics, etc.) is not memory knowledge of past interactions with the observable world; it has a different origin and modus operandi (which is hard to specify). Both empiricism and rationalism were opposed to the revelationists of their day; knowledge is not a gift from the gods (or God) but a fact of human natural psychology—an achievement of memory or a product of instinct. My pre-Socratic dream narrative thus mirrors the actual narrative of later philosophy (as Plato’s belief in innate knowledge anticipates Descartes and Leibniz). For some reason, the empiricists didn’t make memory salient, but it was hovering in the background: knowledge is experience remembered. The rationalists, by contrast, thought that not all knowledge consists in experience remembered—remembering past sensory interactions is not a part of knowledge arrived at by pure reason. The question being debated concerns the role of memory in knowledge, not so much the role of experience—whatever that might be exactly. We can even imagine a form of empiricism that eschews the concept of experience altogether, but still insists on the vital role of memory: perhaps there are just physical excitations of the sensory receptors (conscious experiences having been eliminated from the picture), and anyway we want to make room for subliminally acquired empirical knowledge that involves no conscious experience at all. Memory empiricism thus takes precedence over experience empiricism, theoretically speaking.

Putting traditional empiricism aside, the memory formulation affects our view of the distinction between a prioriand a posteriori knowledge. We can now reformulate this distinction in the obvious way: a posteriori knowledge is knowledge based on memory, while a priori knowledge is knowledge not based on memory. This works pretty well: the role of individual and collective memory in the formation of scientific and commonsense knowledge is acknowledged, while its irrelevance to typical instances of a priori knowledge is highlighted (it is not a type of historical knowledge in the broad sense). If anything, this puts a priori knowledge in a better light, because it sounds like pure dogma to insist that all knowledge proceeds from memory—memory is just one way of storing information. The genes store information, in animals and humans, which is then transmitted to offspring (we call the result “instinct”), but such storage is not the faculty normally labeled “memory”. Memory is just one way of possessing information (as well as skills and pre-dispositions); and there is little prima facieplausibility in the thesis that all knowledge (etc.) is contained in acquired memories. Memory is just one method of being informed, equipped, internally configured. And it sounds completely wrong to claim that logical and mathematical knowledge is arrived at by consulting one’s memory, as if it has a basis in historical records; logical and mathematical reasons are not time-bound in that way (“I remember seeing the law of non-contradiction for the first time when I was ten years old, and I have never forgotten it”). You don’t have to ransack your memory to decide if modus ponens is a sound logical rule, nor is there any danger of forgetting it. This kind of knowledge is completely different from knowledge of historical dates, or the route home, or the results of an experiment. Thus, the distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge has a firm and clear foundation, which helps establish the sui generis character of the a priori. Strangely enough, the place of memory in relation to the traditional distinction has not been much recognized (if at all).

The empiricist, whether experiential or memorial, puts space and time at the center of knowledge: you can only make pertinent sensory observations at certain times and in certain places. The doctrine might, indeed, be so defined: all knowledge rests on suitable spatiotemporal proximity to the thing known. But the rationalist points to types of knowledge not restricted in this way: we don’t need to be near numbers at a certain time of day in order to know about them (or logical truths or meanings). This type of knowledge is not dependent on spatiotemporal proximity to the thing known—hence the adequacy of the armchair in arriving at such knowledge. Nor is the subject matter naturally conceived as existing in space and time (what is a number such that we could be near it?). Here we find a marked contrast between the two types of knowledge. We really should not expect that a priori knowledge could be subsumed under the a posteriori umbrella. The empiricist is guilty of overgeneralizing from properties of knowledge characteristic of only certain types of knowledge—those dependent on sensory experience or memory. Such knowledge is only so good as the experiences that (allegedly) ground it, or the memory capacities that make it possible; but rational knowledge is free of these kinds of limitations, being neither experiential nor memorial. How it does work, however, is far from clear. All we can say is that considerations of space and time make no difference to the availability of a prioriknowledge.[2]

[1] I discuss this in Inborn Knowledge (2015), 44-46.

[2] I realize that I have been writing and thinking about a priori knowledge for over fifty years, and I never tire of it, difficult though it is. It’s one of the things that got me into philosophy in the first place. I think most discussions of it over the last century have been pretty feeble—exercises in problem avoidance and tendentious stipulation. The nature of a priori knowledge is one of the Big Mysteries of philosophy.

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Affective Empiricism

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Affective Empiricism

The classic debate between empiricism and rationalism concerning the origins of the human mind focused on the cognitive aspects of the mind.[1] Descartes and Leibniz believed that some knowledge is innate, while Locke thought that all knowledge is acquired through the senses. But there is little to nothing on the affective aspects of the mind: Locke did not insist that emotions are acquired via the senses, and Descartes and Leibniz did not cite the emotions as instances of the rationalist thesis. I think I know why: it was common ground that affective nativism is true and affective empiricism is false. Not nativism about ideas of emotions but nativism about emotions themselves: we are born with these propensities, abilities, traits, dispositions. We may not feel emotions in the womb but our genes contain them in potential form, as they contain our anatomy, physiology, and other characteristics. We don’t learn to feel emotions—by observation of others, imitation, or instruction. In this respect we are like other animals: they too are not an affective tabula rasa. And there are good biological reasons for that: these are traits it is important to have for the sake of survival, so best not left to chance. How, indeed, could such traits be acquired by means of the senses—what might the mechanism be? How could they be “abstracted” from perceived objects? Maybe you could get the idea of the emotion from observing others, but could you get the emotion itself? That would be like acquiring four legs by gazing at quadrupeds. So, there is no real dispute about the origins of emotions: we are born to feel them; we don’t learn from experience to feel them (whatever that might mean). They are written into the DNA. But if that is so, isn’t it a black mark against empiricist thinking about the mind? For, if emotions are agreed to be innate, why shouldn’t “ideas” be—beliefs, knowledge, concepts, perceptual capacities? Why would the mind be hospitable to innate emotions but not to innate cognitions? Why would nativism be half-true? Why must empiricism be true of part of the mind but not of other parts? Whence the dogmatism? Granted, the environment can play a role in shaping and developing the emotions, but the preponderance must be owed to the native constitution of the organism. On this everyone seems to be agreed.[2]

What are the emotions we inherit along with our genes? It is customary to list six basic emotions: anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, surprise. We might want to add lust and sexual passion to this list (also love), but let’s leave it at that. These are the emotions that lurk in our genes just waiting to see the light of day; they are the primitive elements of the periodic affective table. They may be combined into compounds such as despair or helplessness or envy or joy. They are no more learned than pain is: we don’t acquire the ability to feel pain by observing pain in others and somehow internalizing it by abstraction. Emotions are not taught but inherited–universal, spontaneous, part of human nature. But they are not cognition-independent: they have intentionality. We are afraid of things, angry at people, sad about situations; and these objects of emotion are specific—we are not afraid (say) of just anything but of a limited class of things. Prey animals are born being afraid of big cats not butterflies; they don’t learn to be afraid of being eaten by tigers (that would be too late for the learning to have any utility). So, emotions have representational content; and that means that such contents are also innate—antelopes are born knowing what tigers are, as well as being afraid of them. They have, in the old terminology, ideas of tigers that are bound up with their fear of tigers. This means that some ideas have to be innate if emotions are, which contradicts empiricism about ideas; nativism about emotions leads to nativism about emotion-relevant ideas. Not only that; emotions are correlated with a set of expectations about the world—about what kinds of things it contains. It contains things that are scary, angering, disgusting, desirable, happy, sad, or surprising: emotions thus carry with them a “world-view”. And this world-view is innate not acquired by experience, contrary to the empiricist theory of the cognitive mind. If so, what is to prevent other ideas from being innate? To put it simply, animals are born knowing a good deal about the external world just by virtue of being born with feelings about the external world: they come into the world cognitively prepared for it, not mentally blank, not blissfully ignorant. Emotion thus paves the way for a general nativism, and affective nativism is common ground between empiricists and rationalists. Of course, there are many other arguments for the nativist position, but it is instructive that emotions provide yet another argument, and not one easily avoided by the determined empiricist. A sentimentalist in ethics would be committed to nativism about ethical attitudes, since emotions are always fundamentally innate (emotivism thus implies ethical nativism). Emotions can, it is true, be shaped and modified by experience, but the basic repertoire of emotions is original to human psychology. They are instincts not cultural acquisitions. Language is an instinct too, as is perception, and also thought, but emotions are the primal instincts; they have been coded into animal genes for millions of years. Affective nativism is the basic form of nativism.

Some psychologists have claimed that all behavior is learned no matter what might be the case for aspects of the mind. But this position is obviously unstable: if emotions are innate, so must their associated behavioral expression be innate. The prey animal must have an innate predisposition to flee at the sight of a big cat, since fear elicits the flight response (that is the point of the emotion). Flight is like salivation—a reflexive inborn response to a stimulus. So, whole behavior patterns have an innate basis: anti-nativism about behavior is another false dogma of empiricism. The correct position is that nearly all of the mind (including behavior) is innate: emotions, desires, perception, concepts, many beliefs, anything a priori, the psychological faculties (memory, reason, mathematics, ethics, etc.).[3] This is really just biological common sense. All learning, properly so-called, is based on an innate unlearned system; we learn some things only because we don’t learn everything. The tool shed model is more psychologically realistic than the empty cabinet model.

[1] I discuss this debate in Inborn Knowledge (2015). The present paper furthers that discussion.

[2] See Hume’s note 2.9 in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in which he asserts, as against Locke, that self-love, resentment, and sexual passion are all innate, adding that “all impressions are innate”.

[3] I am stating the nativist position very strongly so as to rectify previous empiricist bias; of course, we must allow for some contribution from the environment. The point is that the foundation is innately fixed. What is true of the body is true of the mind: the mind is not originally a blank slate, as the body is not originally a piece of formless stuff. True, the mind has memory which stores acquired information, but the body too bears the marks of experience as it interacts with the world outside of it. The mind is not empty at birth, as the body is not shapeless at birth.

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On Substitutivity

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On Substitutivity

The idea of substituting one expression for another has played a key role in logical and semantic studies. In particular, the idea of substituting terms with the same reference has featured prominently: can this always be done without changing the truth-value of the sentence in which the terms occur? Is such substitution ever truth-value disruptive? The consensus has been that it can be, for example when substituting into belief contexts. Thus, the convention has arisen of calling some contexts “referentially transparent” and some “referentially opaque”. The distinction has been thought to be binary, not divisible into finer distinctions. I think this is a mistake; it misses important differences. There are at least four kinds of case to consider, each with distinctive properties and varying explanations. Specifically, there are three types of opacity, which deserve different names; at least two of them exhibit their own kind of transparency—they are not fully opaque. Let’s accept, for the moment, that there are no other kinds of transparency wider than the usual kind; we can then ask whether there are degrees or grades of opacity, i.e., departures from full transparency.

First, consider modal, causal, and explanatory contexts: just how opaque are these? Suppose I say “The king of England is necessarily a king”, giving the modal operator wide scope: that is clearly true, analytically so. But it is not true if we substitute “Charles Windsor” for “the king of England”—hence the context is not referentially transparent. Can we substitute any other expression for the description and obtain a truth? Yes, if we restrict the substituted terms to those that make reference to kinghood: “the male monarch”, “the male head of the church of England”, “the male hereditary ruler of an independent state”, etc. The germane consideration is that the property of being a king necessarily implies being a king (or a monarch more generally); it doesn’t matter whether anyone knows or believes this to be so—it is not dependent on how kings are thought of or mentally represented. It is a modal fact that obtains independently of how anyone thinks (compare “the successor of 2 is a number”). So, this context is less transparent than other contexts (such as negation) but more transparent than belief contexts. In honor of this fact, I will say that it is a translucent context—somewhat transparent, not completely opaque. The same holds for causal contexts: they are not fully transparent, but they are not as opaque as belief contexts either. For example, it can be true to say “The batsman is unconscious because the cricket ball hit him in the head”, but not true to say “The batsman is unconscious because the red ball hit him in the head”. The reason is that a cricket ball is always of a certain hardness and weight but a red ball isn’t—even if the cricket ball is in fact red. Being a cricket ball is causally relevant but being a red ball isn’t. This is even clearer if the context is explicitly explanatory: the explanation of the batsman’s unconsciousness is his being hit by a ball of a certain density and weight not the fact that the ball was red. We can substitute any description for the original description if it preserves reference to the causally relevant properties of the missile (“the heavy hard sphere travelling at 60 mph”), even if no one has any beliefs about these descriptions. The context is somewhat transparent, but not as transparent as a negation context—yet it falls short of the opacity of a belief context. It is transparent with respect to causally relevant explanatory properties, though not with respect to objects as such.

Belief contexts, as already implied, are opaquer than modal, causal, and explanatory contexts, because they bring in mental representation—ways of conceiving things, modes of presentation, concepts, perspectives. But they are not fully opaque, because they do allow some latitude for substitution—they don’t resist all substitutions. Thus, we may substitute synonymous terms within their scope: they are transparent with respect to sense. We could describe them as “semi-opaque” (or “semi-transparent”). Their substitutivity properties fall between full transparency and translucency, on the one hand, and a yet stricter kind of opacity, on the other. This third kind of opacity belongs to quotational contexts: they won’t even allow substitution of synonyms—you can only substitute terms that refer to the same terms (words, bits of language). These contexts may be called “hyper-opaque”, though simply calling them “opaque” would not be semantically amiss given that that word connotes an absolute condition. We have already concluded that belief contexts are not maximally opaque given their openness to synonyms—hence “semi-opaque”. So, we now have a four-way distinction: transparent, translucent, semi-opaque, and opaque (or hyper-opaque). It is a not a binary business, an all-or-nothing affair. Contexts are transparent with respect to this or that class of possible substitutions, opaque to one degree or another, not rigidly either one of the other. This is because words have a range of entities associated with them: references (objects in the world), aspects of objects (mind-independent properties), senses of words (ways of representing the world), and the words themselves (marks, sounds, states of the brain). The old extensional-intensional dichotomy is too simple.

Once we have made these distinctions in the case of singular terms, we can extend the apparatus to whole sentences. Some contexts (“and”, “not”) are truth-functional; some are fact-functional (“necessarily”, “because”, “explains”); some are sense-functional (“believes” and other propositional attitude verbs); and some are inscription-functional (direct speech, quotation). Being truth-functional has no special status on this way of looking at things; it is just an extreme type of truth-value dependence, i.e., any sub-sentence with the same truth-value can be substituted for the original without changing the truth-value of the whole. Some contexts permit a broader range of substitutions salva veritate than others: that is all. It isn’t some kind of special property of truth-values, as opposed to facts or senses, that renders them more respectable or pellucid. Nor are truth-functional contexts in any way superior because of their substitutional liberality: for all contexts have their own distinctive substitutional profile. It is true that the words “transparent” and “opaque” have different connotations, evaluatively speaking: transparency is “good”, opacity is “bad”—especially when it comes to discourse (not so much for clothes). But that is just an accident of terminology; it’s all the same merit-wise. We should be substitutivity egalitarians.

I have left till last a more startlingly unorthodox suggestion (the reader needed some softening up first). What about extending the concept of transparency beyond its normal bounds? To this end, I shall introduce the notion of extended extension: a given term extendedly refers not just to its normal referent but to a wider range of referents, e.g., any twin of the normal referent. This will allow a wide range of substitutions to retain truth-value, since most of what is true of an individual will also be true of its twin. In a universe consisting of Leibnizian pairs (indiscernible but numerally distinct individuals) everything true of one twin will be true of the other, so we can substitute one twin’s name for the other and not disrupt truth-value. The names will be transparent with respect to duplicates. This seems like a definable idea and it substantially expands the range of possible substitutions. Transparent contexts will be doubly transparent in this universe—hyper-transparent. We could also employ the distinction between objects and the matter that composes them, as in the statue and the piece of bronze that composes it. Again, nearly everything true of one will be true of the other, so substitution will be well-nigh universal. Thus, the simple dichotomy between transparent and opaque contexts yields to a more generous understanding of the semantic phenomena. This opens up new possibilities concerning formal models and interpretations, i.e., assignments of elements from a chosen domain. I rather warm to the idea of fourfold functions from domains onto the formalized language: objects, aspects, senses, and words themselves. Full substitutivity will hold with respect to each subdomain.[1]

[1] Informed readers will discern elements of Frege, Wittgenstein, Russell, Carnap, Quine, and others in this paper. In general, I am promoting greater inclusiveness in formal semantics. Many types of entity are relevant to semantic functioning. Jungle, not desert, landscapes.

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Annoying Morality

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Annoying Morality

Given its importance, there is something deeply unsatisfactory about morality. I don’t mean its alleged subjectivity or relativity, which is more puerile than profound, still less the existence of metaethical controversy; I mean its fragmentary and unsystematic character. It appears as a list of injunctions with no unifying principle underlying them. This is a well-known complaint, so I don’t need to expatiate on it: the miscellaneous list of deontological rules, the consequentialist additions and amendments, the need for separate principles of justice. There are 10 commandments, but why 10 and not 14 or 2 or 23? The usual list concerning lying, stealing, killing, promise-breaking, committing adultery, betraying friends, ingratitude, contract-breaking, et cetera, seems woefully heterogeneous, and refuses to submit to unification or even simplification, despite some valiant efforts. Even utilitarianism consists of two non-equivalent principles, concerning harm and benefit, where one (the no-harm principle) doesn‘t entail the other (the maximize well-being principle). Considerations of justice complicate the picture still further, not being reducible to anything more primitive. There are many things we must not do, and likewise for what we must do. Some say it all comes down to one rule—treating people (and animals?) as ends in themselves, not violating the social contract, maximizing utility, obeying God, conforming to societal norms—but none of these stands up to scrutiny. Moral pluralism seems to be the inescapable predicament—a lamentable lack of system, order, and organization (where is the moral analogue of Peano’s axioms?). What is worse, this lack of unity breeds moral conflicts, dilemmas, and quandaries: one department of morality suggests one thing, another suggests another, with no resolving principle in sight. The poor moral agent is left struggling with a heap of different commands, cognitively overburdened, unable to think straight, confused and bewildered. It’s all so complicated, so messy, so all-over-the-place![1]

Prudence is different. Here things are pretty straightforward: there isn’t a lot to learn, to remember, to take into consideration. It’s mainly a matter of consequences: don’t harm yourself in the future; act so as to make your future self happy. You don’t need to worry about not treating yourself justly, not lying to yourself, not stealing from yourself, not betraying yourself, not committing adultery with yourself, and so on. Just don’t ignore your future self’s welfare—who could forget that? You may not always act prudently, but at least you know clearly and simply what you should do. But morality is not like that—not by a long chalk. Prudence is part of morality, to be sure, but morality contains a whole lot more, and it is thorny stuff—taxing, sometimes confounding. How can we teach all this to children? How do we navigate it in the heat of the moment? How can we keep our conscience clear with all this junk to think about? Some religions preach love as the unifying formula, but that is hopelessly limited, unrealistic, and prone to lapses from strict ethical correctness. It is appealing in its simplicity and sentimentality, but it fails to measure up to the complexities of the moral life. The fact is that morality is intolerably many-sided, splintered, and polymorphous. It seems cobbled together. This has consequences. Wouldn’t the world be a better place if morality had a sleek and simple nature—where one rule encompassed everything moral? Then everyone would be clear about what they ought to do—what morality requires of them. Wouldn’t this reduce moral laxity and moral skepticism? Because, frankly, the complexity is annoying, irritating, maddening—it makes you want to scream sometimes. It’s just so hard. It’s a pain to have to think about, a drag on the spirit. Even the smartest people get tripped up by it. You always feel that you might have missed something, and you frequently have. Why did God have to make it so bloody complicated, given that he wanted us to obey it? And it fuels the moral nihilists among us, who would be happy to get rid of morality entirely—who needs the hassle? Human life would be a great deal easier if morality were more straightforward.

Why do we even speak as if morality were a single unitary thing? Doesn’t this encourage simple-minded moral monism? Why not admit that so-called morality consists of heterogeneous subdepartments—moral maxims, future consequences, justice and injustice? At least let’s acknowledge that it isn’t a clean-limbed monolith but a museum of monuments of varying ages and pedigrees—a type of zoo. Also, teach it in schools like any other difficult subject of study; don’t expect everyone to get the hang of it by trial and error with no explicit instruction. It’s too academically demanding for that. Bit of history, bit of anthropology, some literature, lots of philosophy, examinations, the works. There could be an A-level in it. As things stand, morality is a haphazard collection of disparate ideas bundled together into a kind of disorganized heap. The ordinary mortal needs help finding his or her way through it.[2]

[1] W.D. Ross’s moral system (if that is the word) is agreeably realistic in its avowed pluralism, but it is complicated and far from algorithmic (“prima facie duties”). It represents the actual nature of moral thought, not some philosopher’s idealization. But it is intellectually far from readily graspable; and it doesn’t translate smoothly into right action. Still, I think it is the best moral philosophy we have. See The Right and the Good (1930).

[2] In my experience people’s moral expertise differs dramatically, and their level of moral complacency. Mostly people are just too simple-minded, too morally lazy. Professors are no exception. Moral thoughtfulness is a rare commodity. It takes work, patience, and dedication.

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