Personal Pronouns

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Personal Pronouns

 

It has often been observed that there is something funny about “I” referentially speaking yet we use it all the time. I would say that we don’t know what we are referring to: we don’t know what the self is. This is an old story: philosophers have had a difficult time saying what the self is, even to the point of having no satisfactory word for it. People used to speak of the “spirit” and the “soul”, but this is now deemed suspect and spooky; today we prefer “person”, “subject”, or just “self”. None of this verbiage provides any clue as to what we are talking about, however. Is the referent of “I” a body, a brain, a part of a brain, a center of consciousness, a sequence of connected mental states, a primitive person, or nothing at all? The self is a mystery: we don’t know what it is. Yet we talk about it all the time (and think about it too)—the word “I” is always on our lips. You might think that we could define the self as “the bearer of conscious states”, but what is this bearer—is it a body or a brain or a center of consciousness, etc.? Given our ignorance of what it is, shouldn’t it be difficult to refer to it successfully? Some have said that we are acquainted with the self, as we are acquainted with pain or the color red; but if so, it is an acquaintance that provides no illumination as to what we are referring to. Do we introspect the self? Apparently not, as Hume famously observed. True, we know that it exists (at a given moment anyway): the Cogito supplies us with grounds for a bare existential claim. But this is cold comfort given that we don’t know what it is that so indubitably exists. Descartes thought he knew that the self is a thinking thing at least, but again that doesn’t settle what kind of thinking thing—it could be a brain or an immaterial substance or just a loose conglomeration of ideas. Still we happily bandy the word “I” about, as if we grasp clearly what it is that we are designating. We even have a semantics for it (content and character and all that); we just don’t know what kind of entity “I” refers to. The self is just whatever it is that “I” refers to. By contrast, we don’t think that pain is just whatever it is that “pain” refers to: we know quite well what pain is. The self is a stark enigma.  [1]

            It is often supposed that this is a peculiarity of the first-person pronoun, but that is not true. The same point applies to the other personal pronouns: “you”, “he”, “she”, “they” etc.: in each case we are referring to entities whose nature eludes us—the very entities that use ”I” to refer to themselves. I don’t know what I am and I don’t know what you are, or her over there. I don’t even know what it is when I refer to my pet lizard’s self with that demeaning pronoun. All these are words we use to talk about things whose nature we don’t grasp; and I don’t mean we don’t grasp this nature deeply—I mean we really don’t know what kind of thing we mean when we use these words. In a clear sense, we don’t know what it means to say “I am hot” or “She is smart” or “You are funny”. Do we really understand these sentences? True, they have a use, but that is all they have–they have no clear ontological content. No proposition is intelligibly conveyed by them, since we don’t know what the subject of the proposition is. Whatever meaning they have, it doesn’t convey the nature of the thing denoted. The sense is not a mode of presentation of the reference, if that means it enables the speaker or hearer to grasp what kind of thing is denoted. Since these expressions are at the heart of ordinary language use, we can say that our grasp of meaning falls far short of knowledge of the reference of some of our most common expressions. The mystery of the self thus infects linguistic understanding, rendering it at best partial. We are like people referring to colors but who have never seen any: such people would refer to things whose nature they don’t grasp. We know about things that are closely associated with selves, namely mental states, but the self itself is an unknown quantity—an I-know-not-what. Reference to the self thus proceeds in the absence of knowledge of the referent (though of course we know many things about selves).

            Why don’t we know the nature of the self? What is it about the self that precludes knowledge of its nature? I don’t think we know the answer to that question either; indeed, our ignorance seems distinctly odd considering how close we are to our own self (it isn’t as if selves exist on the far side of the moon). We ought to know the self much more intimately, but in fact we have to admit epistemic defeat in the face of the self: nothing in our self-knowledge reveals the kind of thing that the self is. The personal pronouns seem merely to point without specifying what kind of target they are pointing at. They operate in such a way as to compensate for our natural ignorance of the self rather than to express our knowledge of the self (as many acts of reference do). I think their peculiar semantic character should receive more attention.  [2]

 

  [1] It would be wrong to suppose that our ignorance of the self is like other sorts of philosophical ignorance such as not knowing the correct analysis of knowledge, or the metaphysical status of color, or whether “good” expresses a primitive property. Our ignorance of the self is far more radical than that: we really don’t know what order of thing we are dealing with. Hume was right: we have no concept of the self such that its general nature is revealed by that concept. This is why a person unlettered in philosophy can be made quickly to accept that he or she is ignorant about what a self is. This is ground-floor ignorance, not ignorance of high-flown philosophy. Compare color: a blind person is far more ignorant of color than a sighted theorist trying to come up with the right analysis of color. Similarly, our access to the self reveals almost nothing about what kind of thing it is: we are effectively self-blind (though self-obsessed).

  [2] The connection between meaning and knowledge has been explored but not the connection between meaning and ignorance—ignorance of a very basic sort. Somehow language had to cope with the deep-seated ignorance we labor under in the case of the self, and it came up with the apparatus of personal pronouns (and associated expressions). It converted deep ignorance into a viable system of reference. How did that happen? How did language manage to latch onto selves in an epistemic vacuum? 

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Tennis Sublime

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Tennis Sublime

 

I can’t let what happened at the US Open this year pass without comment. First we had the transcendent victory of Emma Racunadu over her equally transcendent rival Leyla Fernandez. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite so sublime in sports: the skill, the style, and the determination. Just look at Emma’s return of serve! She didn’t drop a set in ten matches. Leyla was equally phenomenal and the match was closer than the score indicated. Together they have transformed the tennis world, and perhaps more than that. Pure joy! As for the men’s final, that was sublime in a different way: to see Novak Djokovic lose like that was itself a sublime moment in tennis history (despite robbing him and us of the calendar Grand Slam). Medvedev simply outplayed him with a remarkable display of defense and attack. Note the way Novak congratulated him at the end of the match and in his acceptance speech: true sportsmanship. It was two days of quality and purity such as we seldom see these days (no Americans were among the players). I return to the court with a new spring in my step.

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9/11

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I do sometimes wonder whether the appalling degradation in American culture, morality, and intelligence that we have winessed in the last twenty years (including in universities) was caused by the horrific events of 9/11. At the time I feared that the American reaction to these events might exceed in harmfulness the events in question. Can there be any doubt that American paranoia has increased markedly because of that day?  

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Is Shape Physical?

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Is Shape Physical?

 

Shape is included on the traditional list of primary qualities, but that doesn’t settle the question of whether it is physical. Indeed the question is seldom raised: is the shape of an object a physical property of it? Nor is it an easy question to answer—largely because of vagueness in the word “physical”. Is geometry a physical science? It is not usually so described, since it deals in abstract objects. Such objects are ideal: perfect circles, perfect rectangles, etc. No physical object (so called) exhibits these properties, so it seems reasonable to say that perfect shapes are not physical. Shapes are mathematical abstractions imperfectly exemplified by physical objects. We apply geometry in physics, but the objects of geometry are not themselves physical entities (in so far as we know that means). Moreover, there are no laws of shape recognized in physics, as there are laws of gravity and electromagnetism: shape doesn’t act as a force producing motion. A physics textbook doesn’t have a chapter on the laws governing shape. Shape is irrelevant to gravity and electromagnetism: the mass of an object is relevant to its gravitational force but the shape is not. Physics would be essentially the same if every object had the same shape. So there seems every reason to deny that shape is physical. But does that imply that it is mental? Not at all, and the idea seems obviously wrong (short of generalized idealism). Shape is neither mental nor physical. It may be causally consequential but it is not thereby a physical property. Someone who believed that the world is fundamentally geometrical would not ipso facto be a physicalist (or materialist). Nor would it be correct to say that size, number, motion, and dimensionality are physical properties: they too belong on the mathematical side of things. Maybe it is necessary truth that anything that has such properties is a physical thing, but that by itself doesn’t entail that they themselves are physical properties (the same might be said of colors). One is then left wondering what indisputably is a physical property, if shape isn’t one. Is mass a physical property? But mass is defined in terms of inertia, which is a dispositional mathematical property (measured by how much force is needed to initiate motion). What about electric charge? But that too is dispositional and mathematical, and has historically been regarded as clearly non-physical (like gravity). Is it perhaps that no property is physical but that objects are what fall under that (alleged) concept? But in virtue of what—don’t we need some viable notion of a physical property? The very idea of the “physical” starts to slip through our fingers once we focus hard on these questions. It is entirely conceivable that the whole subject called “physics” has no intelligible notion of the physical—and that this is no objection to the science known by that name. Here we reach a conclusion that has persistently threatened the would-be philosophical physicalist: we simply have no workable general notion of the physical. Shape might have seemed to provide at least a paradigm of the physical, but that has turned out to be a frail reed. All we are left with is the idea that a physical property is what the subject called “physics” talks about, but that is a variable and pragmatic matter. We have no clear idea of what a physical property is intrinsically—unless we decide to stipulate that everything is to be counted as physical, the term being equivalent to “real”.

            I say all this to make a metaphysical point, viz. that we should stop trying to divide the world up into the physical and the non-physical. We can talk about what is mind-dependent and what is mind-independent, but we should drop the assumption that anything can be usefully described as “physical”. This means that falling under that term is no measure of ontological primacy or clarity: we can’t contrast other types of putative property with physical properties and hope to formulate a useful distinction. We can’t characterize mental or moral or mathematical properties as “non-physical” and hope to join a genuine metaphysical debate: for there is simply no such thing as the category of “the physical”. We might have supposed that shape would give us a firm foothold, but shape turns out not to be a good candidate for fixing the notion of the physical. The word “physical” has an everyday use (or several such uses) but as a theoretical term it lacks any clear definition, as has frequently been pointed out. That is why we hesitate when asked if shape is physical—as we do when asked if color is physical (or beauty or moral rightness). Let me put it more forcibly: if we can’t say whether shape is physical, we may as well retire the term from serious theoretical employment. It’s like asking whether shapes are holy: the term belongs to an outmoded theoretical framework and survives mainly as a term of approbation. Are circles more holy than rectangles? Are circles less physical than irregular figures? Such questions have no meaning, because “holy” and “physical” lack determinate content. I would say that shapes are clearly not physical if we mean by “physical” something like “tangible and concrete” or “relating to the body” (as the OED has it): for shapes are abstract, and they are not peculiar to the body. Nor are they physical in the sense that they are perceived by the senses: they may sometimes be imperceptible to the senses, and they may never be perceived as they really are. Shapes are just not intuitively physical (though intuitions about the concept of the physical are notoriously slippery). So the world contains properties that are not mental and not physical, and these properties are among the most salient in our experience. We can intelligibly ask whether everything real reduces to the standard list of primary qualities, but that is not the same question as whether everything real reduces to the physical—which is pretty much vacuous. I can imagine a “shape-ist” metaphysics in which geometrical form is taken to be the most basic property in the universe, but it would be misguided to describe this as a form of physicalism. Maybe everything comes down to the motion of shaped objects, but it is not helpful to describe this as a type of physicalism. The doctrine known as “physicalism” survives largely on the lack of clarity in the term: we should abolish it and speak directly of specific kinds of properties such as shape and color. Whether these properties count as physical is an empty question best ignored.  [1]

 

  [1] The familiar (and good) point that gravity is not physical according to traditional notions of the physical (deriving from mechanism) is the usual way of questioning the utility of the term “physical”; my point here is that even shape poses problems for that term. In what sense precisely is shape to be deemed physical? Would Plato and Pythagoras so characterize it? It is hugely tendentious to count circularity as a physical property and is not remotely warranted by tradition—you may as well declare that beauty is a physical property because physical things (whatever that may mean) have it.   

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Social Interactions

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Social Interactions

 

What is the nature of a social interaction? The subjects interacting have their own nature, but what about the interaction itself? It will no doubt reflect the nature of the interacting subjects, but it may be expected to have a nature of its own. There have been varying views of this, more or less explicit, in social psychology and elsewhere, which I will list. The simplest view might be called causal: the idea would be that individual subjects causally interact in the manner of physical bodies, so that there is nothing distinctive about human social interaction—it’s all just pushes and pulls. A second view brings in the concept of information: in a social interaction information is exchanged, linguistically and otherwise, so that the informational state of each subject is altered. A third view might be called epistemic: each subject has a certain kind of knowledge of the other, typically mutual knowledge, as in “x knows that y knows that x knows etc.”. Fourth, there is the interpretative view: each subject is engaged in interpreting the other’s behavior, linguistic and non-linguistic, either radically or domestically, using psychological and semantic concepts. Fifth, the relation is one of influence: one subject influences another in certain ways, say by inducing conformity. Sixth, the idea of power is invoked: subjects exercise power over other subjects, sometimes detrimentally, this being the essence of social interaction. Seventh, the notion of competition is added: individuals compete with each other, biologically or economically or in some other way, the result varying from death to status superiority. Eighth, cooperation is taken to be the essence of social interaction: people bond and band together to achieve a joint goal, as in hunting parties, political parties, and party parties. Ninth, we have the existentialist view of social interaction: individual subjects of consciousness confront each other in their radical freedom, sometimes in bad faith, possibly in a condition of authenticity. Tenth, there is the theatrical conception: the nature of social interaction is inherently dramatic or histrionic, as each party plays a part on the social stage. Eleventh, we have what might be called the spiritual theory: social interaction is a meeting of souls, an escape from spiritual solitude, and a glimpse into the inner spirit of the other. Finally, there is the moral conception: social interaction is the exercise of moral duties, an expression of virtues and vices, the place where our moral nature shows itself.

            I take it these positions will seem familiar, with familiar names attaching: Shakespeare, Goffman, Rousseau, Marx, Sartre, Foucault, Quine, Davidson, Darwin, Kant, Hume, and many more. Clearly, not all of these views are in competition with each other, except perhaps as declarations of emphasis; but we can see that different concerns, practical and theoretical, lead to different conceptions of the nature of the social. One might adopt an eclectic position: all the views mentioned have an element of truth to them, social interaction being a multi-dimensional affair. But one might hope for something a bit more organized and systematic; one might seek to identify the kernel of social interaction, from which other features flow. So I will suggest a conception that seems to me to capture the basic character of the social: it combines the epistemic, the existential, and the theatrical conceptions. In a social interaction we possess a certain kind of mutual knowledge, as we recognize the way the other is forming a view of our views of him or her; and so on indefinitely. I know that you know that I know that you can’t be trusted, say. This doesn’t apply to social interactions involving animals or small children, but it is the bane of adult human social interactions: we are always wondering what the other thinks of us, especially with regard to what we think of them. The existentialist component comes in via free action: we see the other as a free agent who may or may not act as we would wish. We are aware that the person we are interacting with may not act as we desire—that she might, say, suddenly decide to leave, or to end the relationship. This awareness of freedom hovers over all our social interactions: they are nothing like our interactions with inanimate objects. Anxiety is the natural outcome, so the social encounter is always fraught, always tenuous. The theatrical component concerns our methods for handling social interactions: we have to construct a social self (or selves) that we present to others for their consideration and treatment. We must play a part that will oil the encounter, produce the requisite attitudes in others, and manage the freedom that we know hovers ominously in the background. Thus our social interactions combine a special type of mutual knowledge, an understanding of freedom, and theatrical skill. That is their basic structure, from which other features emanate. And it is what might be lacking in abnormal cases—a certain package of cognitive competences. This could come about by way of upbringing or innate endowment, resulting in social incompetence or worse. And it is not as if this stuff is easy, some people being much better at it than others. It is a developed skill, a specific mental module, with a rich internal structure. It grows in the child and can atrophy in the adult. Disease can disrupt it. Practice helps. It needs nurturing.

            There should really be a philosophy of social interaction—a systematic attempt to delineate its structure. It would identify the basic components and seek to derive the social phenomena we observe in various contexts—economic, marital, athletic, musical, familial, pedagogical, etc. Philosophers have analyzed the human subject and human society, but they have not developed a branch of study dedicated to the nature of social interaction as such, except as this might serve some other agenda. Social psychology, too, might benefit from this kind of philosophical attention. It never hurts to be clear about what you are talking about.  [1]

 

  [1] When I studied social psychology in the late 1960s there was much concern with issues of obedience and conformity, possibly as a consequence of prevailing social conditions. But I don’t recall any preliminary discussion of the general nature of a social interaction, so the subject matter was left vague and indeterminate. If I were teaching social psychology today, I would spend some time exploring different conceptions of social interaction: what is it to interact socially with another person? And I would frame the issue as concerning a certain mental competence, Chomsky-style. What is this competence, how is it acquired, how is it expressed, what are its pathologies, how might it be improved? The philosopher might be useful here.  

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SNL Skit

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I happened to be watching a repeat of SNL last night and was struck again by a sketch about cancel culture. A preening pair, woman and man, were congratulating themselves on their activities in canceling young children. The kids were aged from 3 to 5 and the pair were relishing their destruction of the future lives of these miscreant infants for saying things deemed “problematic”. It really wasn’t funny except in the darkest way. It nailed the psychology of this recent exercise in violence perfectly.

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Knowledge of Color

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Knowledge of Color

 

As colors have a metaphysics, so they have an epistemology. In addition to ordinary empirical truths about what colors objects have, there are also general truths stating a priori necessities: for example, “Orange is closer to red than to blue”, “There cannot be reddish green”, “Nothing can be white and transparent”, and “Nothing can be red and green all over”.  [1] There is also knowledge of what colors in themselves are (“knowledge of things”): we know what red is, for example. We know quite a lot about colors before we even get to questions about the empirical distribution of colors among objects. Compare shapes: we also know a lot about shapes, both what they are and general truths about them, in addition to propositions about the shape of particular objects. This knowledge is also of a priori necessities. But there is a difference between shape and color: there is no analogue of geometry for color. There is no mathematical science of color comparable to the mathematical science of shape. There are no color theorems analogous to the theorems of Euclid’s Elements. There is barely a mathematics of color at all, though colors do form an abstract structure. Nor can we conceive of colors as derived from anything analogous to lines, as geometrical figures are so derived: you can form circles and rectangles with simple lines, but you can’t form red and green from a single basic chromatic primitive. Colors just don’t have the requisite degree of structure or quantitative character to allow a color geometry. Sounds are closer to shapes in this respect, as evidenced by musical theory: scales and keys are derived from mathematical relations of pitch (pitch being like line, constructively). But colors aren’t structured like closed many-sided figures, and there is nothing like angle in color space. So our knowledge of color doesn’t include anything comparable to geometrical knowledge, despite being a priori and necessary. Colors are not mathematizable in the way shapes are.

            One might speculate that this is because colors are less objective than shapes. If colors are really experiential properties in disguise, then maybe it is the non-mathematical nature of experience that underlies the absence of a geometry of color. The same would not be true of shape, since we can separate objective shape from subjective shape: geometry is about objective shape not experienced shape; and maybe experience of shape is not susceptible to mathematical treatment either. But that kind of subjectivism doesn’t seem correct in the case of knowledge of color: such knowledge is not knowledge of experience as such—we are not thinking about experiences of color when we recognize general truths about color. Perhaps there are deep a priori connections between facts about color and facts about experiences of color, but it seems wrong to suppose that truths concerning color are simply analyzable as truths about experience—a color isn’t an experience! We have experiences of color, but the color of an object is not an experience in the perceiving subject. So the character of our knowledge of color is not immediately explicable in terms of our knowledge of color experience. Further, if we ask why experience of color is not mathematizable, the answer must surely advert to what such experiences are of, viz. colors: but this returns us to the non-mathematical character of colors themselves. There is much more hope of a mathematics of shape experience, given that such experiences are of shapes, which have a developed geometry to call their own. It appears, then, that it is colors as such that resist mathematical treatment: being red is not like being an equilateral triangle—the property itself lacks internal mathematical structure. This is just a basic ontological fact.

            Here is another difference between color and shape: there is nothing analogous to space in the color case. What I mean by this has to be carefully stated: shape can be viewed as a mode of space, but color can’t be viewed as a mode anything analogous to space. Space, like matter, has extension (at least in commonsense physics), and shapes are modes of extension; but there is nothing analogous that has some chromatic property of which the several colors can be viewed as modes. A red object (isolated from other colored objects) is not surrounded by a sea of color, in the way a square object is surrounded by a sea of space. Shaped objects exist in a medium that shares their geometrical nature, but colored objects don’t exist in a chromatic medium: space isn’t colored! The color is simply in the object not borrowed from the medium in which it exists. Space and shape are natural partners, but space is not a progenitor (or twin) of color—and neither is there anything else that plays the role of space in relation to color. There is not some milky stuff, say, that houses the colors we observe in objects. Given space, shape is not a surprise; but space doesn’t prepare us for color, which appears as a radical addition. Color just seems plonked down in space with nothing comparable to support it. There is no chromatic ether.

            Knowledge of color might be cited as a basic type of knowledge that could illuminate other types of knowledge. Puzzles raised by other types of knowledge might have precursors in our knowledge of color, in particular knowledge of what is necessary and a priori. Wittgenstein compares mathematical knowledge to color knowledge, hoping thereby to demystify it.  [2] The comparison might help resist platonic conceptions of mathematical knowledge, given that colors are relatively “concrete”. Certainly we can use color knowledge to argue for the non-uniqueness of mathematical knowledge in its synthetic a priori character: mathematical knowledge doesn’t stand apart from all other types of knowledge in having that kind of status. Even perceived colors can give rise to synthetic a priori truths—not just abstract platonic universals. But the other area that might be compared to color knowledge is knowledge in ethics, which is often compared to mathematical knowledge. It is felt that ethical knowledge needs all the help it can get in securing its epistemic credentials, and mathematical knowledge is then wheeled in as a precursor or partner in crime. The idea certainly has strong appeal for a moral realist convinced that moral knowledge is a species of a priori knowledge. But the color case might be an even better model for ethics, because it is less rigorous than mathematical knowledge and, well, less mathematical. The critic will point to the asymmetry in respect of proofs and general formal sophistication, thus pooh-poohing the comparison to mathematics; but the color case mirrors ethics more closely in these respects. Ethical knowledge resembles our knowledge of color in being synthetic and a priori, and neither is at the level of mathematical science. This is not to downgrade them: it is merely the way they are given the properties and facts concerned. Colors are just not intrinsically susceptible to mathematical treatment (save very superficially), and there is no reason they should be; analogously, moral values are not susceptible to mathematical treatment, and there is no reason they should be. So color and morality belong together epistemologically (we could also bring in sounds and even tastes and smells). In both cases we have a faculty of knowledge that delivers insight into the subject matter in question, thus delivering types of knowledge traditionally described as synthetic a priori (i.e. not analytic and not derived for experience). Anyone seeking to question the status of moral propositions in these respects must explain why they decline to take the same line for propositions about color. It turns out that synthetic a priori knowledge is quite common (and indeed commonplace) and not confined to the supposedly elevated areas of mathematics and morality. Even the humble colors, perceived by human and beast alike, can give rise to such knowledge. Being right is not so far from being red, epistemologically speaking.  [3]                          

Colin McGinn
 

  [1] Wittgenstein discusses these kinds of propositions in Remarks on Colour (1977).

  [2] See Zettel (1967): “’There is no such thing as reddish green’ is akin to the sentences we use as axioms in mathematics” (section 346).

  [3] Readers of my 1983 book The Subjective View may notice some departures in what I write here, though I think they are largely a matter of emphasis.

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