“Inner” and “Outer”

It is with some reluctance that I undertake a discussion of an obscure and elusive topic: what philosophers mean by “inner” and “outer”, if anything. There is a cluster of putative distinctions surrounding the mental: internal and external, private and public, subjective and objective, mental and physical, spiritual and corporeal, inner and outer. I shall only be discussing the last of these; I mean to cast no aspersions on the others. These are distinct distinctions, as the words used indicate, some more viable than others. I am concerned with the alleged distinction between the property of being inner and the property of being outer, construed as both ontological and phenomenological (so distinct from the property of intersubjective knowability or observability). What does it mean to say that the mind is something inner while the material world is something outer? It clearly doesn’t mean the same as the distinction between being internal and external in the spatial sense: that distinction applies to facts about the body—what is spatially within it and spatially outside of it. The heart and brain are within it (“internal”) while clothes and houses are outside it (“external”). But the heart and brain are not “inner”—they are “outer”. Only the mind is inner, not the internal organs of the body.

What does the dictionary have to say about “inner”? The OED (Shorter) gives: “situated (more) within or inside; (more or further) inward; internal”. This is intended to capture such uses as “inner sanctum”, “inner recesses”, “innertube”, “inner regions”, “innermost”, “inner circle”, “inner workings”—not the nature of the mind as an “inner” reality. We also are given “close to the center” by the OED (Concise), also intended in the spatial sense—central as opposed to peripheral. This distinction makes perfect sense, but it is not the distinction as intended by psychologists and philosophers of mind. The mind is not being conceived as closer to some center than the body or the material world outside the body (literally, spatially). Nor do philosophers want to allow for gradations of innerness, as in “more inner”—the mind is not “more inner” than the body. And what exactly is it inside of—the body, the self? No, the idea is that the mind is inner intrinsically, as a matter of its very nature, as material objects are intrinsically extended, or numbers are intrinsically abstract—it isn’t more or less inner relative to some containing entity. If so, shouldn’t the property be phenomenologically detectable—part of everyday consciousness? But do I experience my mind as inner? Does it strike me as something inner? It is hard to know what this might mean, but in so far as it means anything the answer would appear to be no. It strikes me neither as inner nor as outer; it just strikes me as there. For relative to what would it be inner? What center is it closer to? In what sense of “closer”? Granted, material objects strike me as outer relative to my body—both are objects situated in space—but what does it mean to say they each strike me as outer relative to my mind? It isn’t an object in space that other objects could stand in spatial relations to. By the same token, my mind doesn’t strike me as inner relative to objects of perception, because it stands in no spatial relation to those objects (phenomenologically). It doesn’t feel somehow inner. My heart feels inner in relation to my arms or the chair I am sitting in, but my mind doesn’t feel inner in these ways—I don’t perceive it that way, or otherwise so apprehend it. Thus, this alleged innerness is not a phenomenological datum, not a part of one’s normal self-awareness. How then could its ascription be ontologically true—how could the mind be ontologically inner and yet not phenomenologically inner? How could it be inner without my knowing it? Why would we even talk this way if there was no phenomenological basis to the distinction? The natural conclusion, then, is that there is no such property as innerness (and none of outerness either, except in the innocuous “outside my body” sense).

Why do we talk this way if it has no basis in fact? Well, there is a use of “inner” and “inside” that does apply to the mind, as when I say that my beliefs and desires are inside my mind (not outside it)—that they are inner constituents of my mind. In this sense my mental states are “internal” to my mind not “external” to it. And surely, I do experience my mental states as inner parts of my mind, constituents of it, elements within it. Is thatwhat we mean by calling the mind inner? There are two points about this. The first is that there is no entailment from “beliefs are inner parts of the mind” to “the mind is inner”. That is a simple non sequitur: parts can be inner to the thing they are parts of without the whole thing itself being inner to anything, or nothing. Second, the same locution applies to material objects and their parts: the parts of an engine are internal to it (“inner” relative to the engine), but neither they nor the engine are themselves inner—unless parts of something larger. So, there is no basis here for grounding the concept of the inner, construed as a property of the mind considered in itself. This is just another way of talking about the part-whole relation and has no bearing on the supposed inner nature of the mind. The mind is neither inner nor outer; it simply is. The distinction between what is internal to the person and external to the person, where this coincides with the boundaries of the body, is perfectly intelligible and real; but the philosophical inner-outer distinction looks like a myth, a conceptual snarl-up. It is also true that we have a private-public distinction in good standing, but this epistemological distinction is not identical to the inner-outer distinction—neither entails the other. I don’t even experience my mind as analogous to the inner chambers of a building, because there is no contrast analogous to the spatial relation between periphery and center. I do have what I am pleased to call an “inner life”, but this means nothing more than that I have a mental life in addition to an organic physical life. The word “inner” just means “mental” or “psychological” or “spiritual”; it does not connote anything beyond these terms. Interestingly, the OED gives as its second definition of “inner”, “designating the mind or soul; mental; spiritual”, thus regarding the word as simply synonymous with those terms—in which case “the mind is inner” means “the mind is the mind”. It is obvious that philosophers intend more than a tautology when characterizing the mind as “inner”, but it is unclear whether there is anything more they can mean. It looks as if language has been playing tricks on them, mixing up one “language game” with another (architecture and psychology). Yet it is a trick that has proved remarkably tenacious. It is hard to think of the mind as not inner (in some nontrivial sense of the term).[1]

[1] One might think that since the mind is not conceived as in space (whether or not it really is) it is impossible for it to be outer, so it is “inner” by default.  But this is obviously wrong, because not being in space does not entail being inner in any sense (if anything, being inner implies some sort of spatiality); numbers are not in space but not intuitively inner in any way. It is really tremendously obscure what this talk of the inner amounts to. The plain fact is that I experience my mind as neutral with respect to the inner-outer axis; it is simply present. It is not experienced as within anything—the body, the soul, the cosmos. That is why idealism is thought possible.

I hereby perform the following performative: :”I hereby name this blog “The Journal of Philosophical Philosophy”. There, done. I am the editor and sole contributor (aside from such comments as I deem worthy of inclusion). That wasn’t so difficult.

Metaphysical Meaning

The positivists declared metaphysical sentences meaningless. This required them to be able to identify a metaphysical sentence. But how could they do that if such sentences literally have no meaning? It could not be by recognizing them as meaningless, though that is certainly an intelligible mental act, because many sentences are meaningless without being metaphysical—not all gibberish is metaphysical gibberish. Being gibberish is not sufficient for being metaphysical, though it may be necessary (according to the positivists). The answer, of course, is that metaphysical sentences are perfectly meaningful and are recognizable as metaphysical by being meaningful: we can see that they are both meaningful and not empirically verifiable. But the positivists are not permitted to say that by their own doctrine, so their position is self-refuting. It would be different if such sentences had a different kind of meaning altogether, as ethical sentences are alleged to; then the positivist could claim them to be meaningless only as construed as fact-stating (assertoric, cognitive). But that is highly implausible—they aren’t merely expressive or imperative. They are straightforward indicative sentences. So, there is really no alternative to the commonsense view that metaphysical sentences are meaningful, though not empirically verifiable (we can all agree that they are not mere tautologies). The simple truth is that the positivists could pick them out as metaphysical only by knowing what they mean, which is surely what they did; but then they can’t turn around and declare them meaningless. How could a meaningless sentence count as metaphysical in meaning?[1]

[1] You might question whether there is any point in flogging the dead mackerel of positivism, since it perished decades ago, but actually the ghost of positivism still lingers, ready to leap from the shadows. It is therefore worthwhile to point out its flaws (many scientists still believe it, if only implicitly).

A Taxonomy of Reference

Wittgenstein would say that reference comes in many varieties, like sentences; the concept of reference is a family resemblance concept. We should be wary of the urge to assimilate, unify; we should respect the multiplicity (his word) of reference, like the multiplicity of language games. Gareth Evans called his book The Varieties of Reference (though without acknowledgment to Wittgenstein—why, I wonder), and he explored these varieties in detail, resisting efforts to reduce one variety to another. At the level of thought, we could say that intentionality comes in varieties: there are irreducibly different ways of mentally representing things—being intentionally “directed” to them. Russell didn’t subscribe to this strong multiplicity thesis, but he firmly distinguished two basic types of reference, which he famously labeled “knowledge by acquaintance” and “knowledge by description”; these are held to underlie different types of linguistic reference (proper names and definite descriptions). He was a two-variety theorist about reference—a referential dualist—as opposed to a radical plurality theorist. What about Frege? He, I think, was a single-variety theorist, at least if we limit ourselves to reference to objects as opposed to concepts (in his sense). Frege took all reference to objects to proceed by way of what he called “sense”, glossed as “mode of presentation”—which includes sentences as referring to truth-values, conceived as objects. He made no principled distinction between different types of referential device; all involve the all-purpose notion of a mode of presentation (whatever quite that amounts to). In Russell’s terminology, he might be said to hold that all reference depends on knowledge by description, i.e., knowledge of truths, or conceptual knowledge. That is certainly the way he has traditionally been understood, though there have been dissenters from this interpretation. Anyway, for Frege, reference is homogeneous, uniform, essentially identical (identical in essence). So, classically, we have a one-variety theory, a two-variety theory, and a multiple-variety theory—monism, dualism, and pluralism (a familiar philosophical division of viewpoint).

I am going to propose a three-variety theory, based on ideas that have been floating around for a while. I want to make explicit and systematize these ideas. Since labels matter, I will fuss a little over how these three varieties are to be characterized. The first variety I shall call (in deference to Russell) “reference by acquaintance”, though the terminology is by no means perfect. We might better call it “reference by perception” using a suitably wide notion of perception, because we want to include not only perception by the five senses but also introspective perception and “intuitive” perception (as in perception of mathematical objects and perception of universals—Russell’s “acquaintance with universals”). The idea is that of direct unmediated awareness of some entity not based on concepts or what Russell calls “knowledge of truths”. It is not inferential or derivative or indirect, but immediate and in-your-face. Sense data are Russell’s favored objects of such acquaintance. This kind of reference could be possessed by a being devoid of concepts or propositional knowledge; we might think of it as primitive animal intentionality. The human mind is capable of such basic apprehension of things—a result of primitive mechanisms of mental representation shared by other creatures. Baby reference, we might call it—reference without thought, reflection, or reasoning. Simple vision is the paradigm, though not the sole instance. It can be, and has been, studied by perceptual psychologists. We know quite a bit about how it works.

The second variety I will call (again in deference to Russell and tradition) “reference by description”, which again is not perfect, because we mean to include non-linguistic concept-mediated reference. It is thought-involving, truth-invoking, inference-implicating, and inherently complex. It works by the mechanism of satisfaction—predication, attribution. It essentially employs the word “the” or its psychological counterpart. It conforms to Russell’s theory of descriptions, so it involves quantification and identity. It is sophisticated compared to reference by acquaintance, requiring ascent to propositional thinking not just brute object awareness. Such reference is typically accomplished by employing causal, spatial, and temporal concepts—”the cause of X”, “the object to the right of Y”, “the event following Z”. Relational concepts are its bread and butter. Inference is its natural home. It belongs to the “higher” animals. It occurs when we say and think things like, “The next in line to the throne had better not be bald”. Cognitively, it goes well beyond reference by acquaintance. Its brain physiology is mysterious.

The third type of reference I will call “reference by location”, which again is not ideal but better than some other labels. I have in mind reference effected by means of context, causality, community, history, environmental embedding, spatiotemporal location, and overt pointing: that is, factors external to the referrer, often unknown by him, and entirely objective. We are now very familiar with this third source of reference through work on indexical terms, causal theories of names, externalist thought experiments, division of linguistic labor, and the role of the community in fixing reference. I won’t defend this body of work here; the point is just that this viewpoint has introduced us to a type of reference distinct from the other two—reference by means of location. Reference can depend not just on what you are currently conscious of, or what descriptions you have in mind, but also on context, causal relations, spatiotemporal location, and community membership. Not on knowledgeof these things, mark, but the objective existence of them—what the external facts actually are. In respect of primitiveness, we might think of reference by location as lying somewhere between reference by acquaintance and reference by description—“adolescent” reference perhaps, or “canine” reference (dogs are not big on reference by means of individuating descriptions, but they are not limited to simple perception). The animal doesn’t need direct perception of the referent, nor the resources of conceptual individuation; the context can provide the necessary grounds for effecting an act of referring. This is reference by means of objective relations.[1]

Once we have this tripartite taxonomy to hand, we can discern further subdivisions: we have the genus Reference, the species Acquaintance, Description, and Location, and now the subspecies corresponding to the different types of perception, description, and location. For example, we might have visual perception of objects, descriptions employing spatial concepts, and actual temporal location. We can also contemplate extending the taxonomy beyond reference to objects to take in reference to properties or even states of affairs and truth-values. Thus, we could distinguish perceiving a state of affairs, describing a state of affairs, and demonstrating a state of affairs (“that fact”, “the actual world”). The same three-part taxonomy carries over to higher-order types of reference. It may also occur to us (as it has to many theorists in the past) that one type of reference might conceivably be reducible to another type. Thus, might all three types be reducible to the perceptual type? Russell clearly thought that reference to universals was a special case of acquaintance, so that reference by description reduces to reference by acquaintance. Some have thought that all reference might turn out to be locational—all reference reduces to causal relations to the environment (nothing referential is “in the head”). Yet others have maintained that it all comes down to concepts—description theories of everything, even perception. I think myself that we have learned enough to be confident that such reductionist projects stand little chance of success: we really do have three distinct varieties of reference (and not any more). It isn’t an open-ended plurality a la Wittgenstein, nor is it monolithic a la Frege, nor dualistic a la Russell, but rather a threefold division—a referential trinity. Nor is any one variety more basic than the others in the sense that the others depend upon it, or grow from it; they aren’t versions or variants of it. To be sure, perceptual reference is basic phylogenetically and ontogenetically, but it doesn’t follow that the other two are simply versions of it, as petals are versions of leaves. They may incorporate perceptual reference in some way, but they add to it substantially; new processes and principles are involved. The psychology of the three varieties is therefore markedly different; the mind is doing different things in each case. Intentionality works differently in the three cases, implicating quite distinct modes of reference determination—direct perception, conceptual individuation, and contextual fixation. The underlying machinery is different in each case. Concepts dominate in one (description), are absent from another (perception), and operate only partially in the third (location). Causation is central to perception, but not the other two. Location is inessential to description and incidental to perception. Elephants, whales, and humans are all mammals, but they are very different from each other; similarly, the three forms of reference are all instances of reference, but they are markedly different from each other. In fact, on my way of looking at things, reference is a biological phenomenon, so the threefold distinction is a biological distinction. Hearts, kidneys, and brains are all internal organs of the body, but they are as different as chalk and cheese. I can even see how Wittgenstein might insist that it is misleading to call each type of reference “reference”, as if they each share a common essence–though I don’t myself believe it is necessary to go that far. Reference is the genus; its varieties are the species. The variety matters, though it is not unlimited.[2]

[1] There is, of course, a huge literature on the topic of reference, to which I make no direct reference; readers can supply appropriate references. What kind of reference does the word “refer” make?

[2] If I were to write a book on the subject, it would be entitled The Three Varieties of Reference. I take the same view of speech acts: there are a small number of basic types (each belonging to the genus Speech Act) with many subspecies, not an indefinite number of basic types (pace Wittgenstein).