Impersonal Identity

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Impersonal Identity

We normally think that bodily survival depends upon identity through time. The body of an animal may change over time, but the body remains one and the same through these changes; the animal doesn’t acquire a numerically distinct body as it goes through life. Even in death the body remains one and the same object (though the organism may be no more). The body of the animal survives death by being identical to an earlier body, going back to the womb. Only when nothing identical to the earlier body exists does the body cease to exist. But what should we say about fission cases? Suppose the body divides into two, either naturally or by artificial intervention: then we have a problem with identity as a criterion of survival. For we cannot say that the later bodies are each identical with the earlier body, since they are not identical with each other; and it seems funny to say that one body could be identical to two bodies taken together. Yet it would surely be an exaggeration to claim that in such a case we have no survival—as if fission cases are just like incineration cases. It seems right on balance to say that the fission of a body allows for survival without identity. That position is reinforced by noting that fission might be succeeded by fusion: the pieces might be put back together again just as they were in the pre-fission body. Surely that would be the very same body that had recently divided into two. The original body had survived even though for a while nothing was identical to it. Bodily survival does not logically require bodily identity over time.

            This conclusion applies to more than just animal bodies. You can divide a statue into two for purposes of ease of transportation, later to be reassembled, and the case is clearly one of survival without identity (the statue survives as two pieces). Likewise for a rock or a plant. Similarly for a club or nation: such social entities can divide and remain in existence. Secession is not cessation. If a club decides to operate henceforward as two clubs, this is not like disbanding the club altogether; it might just be a convenience so to divide, as when a tennis club decides to split into a doubles club and a singles club. The reason for this is that fission involves continuity: the parts of the original entity survive as separate entities. Wherever there is fission there will be survival without identity, because identity is a very demanding relation; there are relations that fall short of it where we still have continued existence. Identity obeys Leibniz’s law, but mere survival does not. If you take apart your bicycle, you don’t destroy it utterly; it may be expressly designed to be taken apart. Nor do you destroy a cake by cutting it into pieces, even though the original cake is not identical to any of its pieces (they are not identical to each other). There is nothing strange or paradoxical here: given fission, survival without identity is what we should expect.

            The survival of persons follows the same pattern. Generally survival coincides with identity through time, but in fission cases (split brain) these come apart. Then we have survival in the shape of erstwhile parts that persist, as when the two halves of the brain are implanted into different bodies. The original brain is not identical with either hemisphere, and it is odd to say that it is identical with both together.[1] But nothing here is surprising once personal fission has been mooted: brains can be divided, and when they are we have survival without identity. Suppose Jekyll resides in one half of a person’s brain and Hyde in the other. When the brain is split and the halves placed in different bodies two persons are formed, but the original person survives the procedure (unlike the case in which the original brain is simply burned to ashes). Nothing here shows anything distinctive or remarkable about persons as such; certainly they are not the onlythings that can survive without benefit of identity. If persons were simple indivisible entities, then fission would not be possible for them; but evidently this is not the case. In fact, the idea of split personality already provides space for such a possibility, given that the two (or more) personalities might come to inhabit distinct bodies. The potential for fission is present in cases of split personality, and it provides an example of survival without identity if the personalities come to occupy distinct bodies. I think this is implicit in our ordinary concept of a person, because we recognize that conflicting psychological traits can coexist inside the same human organism (as with selfish and unselfish traits). All is not harmony within, as many a human story illustrates. Once we envisage dividing an individual into separate unified psychological wholes we are preparing the ground for survival without identity. This is not some startling piece of anti-commonsense philosophy but part of our ordinary folk psychology—which is the story of Jekyll and Hyde makes sense to us. It is true of each of us that if we had our brains suitably rejigged and placed in different bodies, then we would survive without any future person being identical with the person we now are. In this respect we are like the rest of nature.

[1] Even if it were, we could still destroy one and have a case of survival without identity.

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Subjects and Persons

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Subjects and Persons

 

Are persons and subjects identical? Both these concepts are hard to define, but we can fix ideas by saying that subjects are centers of consciousness and persons are constituted by memories, personality traits, and mental and physical capacities. Elsewhere I have given an argument showing that they are not identical, because we can conceive of cases in which the same subject persists while the associated person changes.[1] An implication of this is that subjects and persons, though non-identical, exist in the same place (at the same time). In fact, we are already committed to the spatial coincidence of several distinct entities associated with persons: a particular aggregate of material stuff; a collection of biological cells; a body; a living organism—and in addition subjects and persons. All these have differing identity conditions, so that each can perish while the others survive. The aggregate of matter can go out of existence while the collection of cells persists, and the organism can survive the total replacement of its cells; arguably, too, the person can outlive the organism it was once attached to (say by being uploaded into another organism). All this is very familiar. The question I want to consider here is whether subjects and persons have different conditions of survival: are there cases in which one can survive without the other? I will be particularly interested in fission cases.

Let’s grant that in fission cases (brain bisection and subsequent relocation of the hemispheres) we have survival without identity. My question then is whether in such cases we also have survival of the subject sans identity: does the conscious subject survive in the form of two subjects of consciousness, as the person survives in the form of two persons? Our intuitions are clear about survival of the person, but are they equally clear about survival of the subject? The basis of these intuitions in the case of persons concerns the relationship between the brain and the person: the person as a psychological entity is distributed between the two hemispheres, so we can understand how each hemisphere can form the basis of a person (memories, personality traits, etc.). Thus we have no trouble accepting that brain bisection is not the end of the person. We can survive this operation, as we can survive losing part of our brain but retaining enough to constitute our (partial?) survival. We see what can survive and we understand the mechanism whereby survival occurs (it isn’t like incineration). But the same is not true of the conscious subject; here things are not so clear. What is it in the brain that gets bisected in such a way as to lead to two complete subjects? And what exactly is it that survives? What kind of parts does the subject have that allows for it to be divided into these parts? Do we even have a clear idea of what such division would amount to? Thus we have no articulable intuition comparable to that in the case of the survival of persons under fission. Maybe two brand new subjects emerge from the operation—we have way of telling. We can’t point to a brain structure and observe that it is plainly divisible into two, since the subject and the person are not the same. What if the conscious subject corresponds to a brain structure that cannot be divided into two to yield the survival of the original? It doesn’t have the analogue of two hemispheres, i.e. something capable of preserving a person-like entity in two bodies. What if the subject is simply not a divisible entity at all? We really have no idea, so we don’t have the conviction that it could allow for survival under fission. It might simply die when bisection of its neural correlate occurs. Thus we can be gratified that qua person we could survive fission but not convinced that qua conscious subject we could also survive fission. The subject is a different entity and it doesn’t automatically inherit the survival capabilities of persons; at any rate, we have no solid intuition that it does. The metaphysics of the subject might well preclude what the metaphysics of the person permits. What if the subject is based in a single (remarkable!) neuron that cannot be divided into two to yield two functionally equivalent neurons? Then we don’t have the possibility of survival under division of the physical basis in question—as we do for the person.

Someone might retort that it doesn’t matter; only the person matters. Why should I care if the conscious subject can’t survive under fission? If I must have the operation done I will be comforted to know that the person I am will survive, but I might not care whether the conscious subject I also am will survive. But this is too sanguine: for I will surely care that my own consciousness will survive the operation; it is what I centrally am. My personality may change and my memories fade without losing my identity, but if a numerically distinct center of consciousness comes to occupy my body then in a very real sense I no longer exist. If your conscious self replaces mine (while leaving my personhood intact) I shall feel that I have lost my essence; it’s not like having some else’s kidney put into my body. I care whether I survive! Perhaps we should say that both subject and person matter and not try to decide which matters more, since we may want to preserve our personhood as well as our subject-hood. The difference is that in the one case fission is clearly compatible with survival, while in the other case this claim is far more problematic; we don’t really have any clear idea of what the latter kind of fission might consist in. We only have a very schematic idea of what the conscious subject is (vide Hume) while the concept of a person has more structure (memories, projects, personality, etc.). It is even epistemically possible that our lives are populated by many successive conscious subjects that merge imperceptibly together. The concept of the pinpoint unstructured self has its intuitive appeal, with nothing to distinguish one self from another. In any case, survival without identity is harder to make sense of in the case of the conscious subject as such. The person is marked as to gender, for example, yet the conscious subject does not appear to be; so we know what must survive for fission to be a case of personal survival. But what has to survive in order that the conscious subject survives? One wants to say: merely the thing itself. Attributes matter in the one case but not in the other.

Thus if we are interested in the question of what it takes for us to survive, we need to consider two entities (not counting the living organism)—the person and the subject of consciousness—and different answers may be indicated in the two cases. Certainly we should not assume that what matters is preserved under fission just because this is true for persons; it may not be true for subjects (or organisms/animals). I am myself inclined to say that the preservation of the person matters less, simply because one’s personal profile changes considerably over a single life, from childhood to old age: but one remains the same animal and the same subject of consciousness throughout one’s life. So fission cases have less significance for the survival of what we are than has been recognized. We are animals and subjects of consciousness as well as persons, but only persons allow for clear cases of survival without identity.

[1] See my “I Am Not a Person”.

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Does Arithmetic Rest on a Mistake?

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Does Arithmetic Rest on a Mistake?

 

How can the statement “1 + 1 = 2” be true? How can the operation of adding 1 to itself produce the number 2? There is only one number 1, so how could it by itself give rise to the distinct number 2? If you add the number 1 to itself, all you get is the number 1. It’s like adding Socrates to Socrates and hoping to get Plato (or “double Socrates”, whatever that may be). If anything we have the oddity “Socrates + Socrates = Socrates”. The Concise OED has an instructive definition of “add”: “to join to or put with something else”; the Shorter OED gives “join to or unite (one thing to another) as an increase or supplement”. Both stipulate that the added things must be distinct (“something else”, “another”): but 1 is not distinct from itself, so it can’t properly be added to itself. And how would doing that “increase” anything? In our initial statement we have two occurrences of the numeral “1” denoting the self-same number, asserting that this number added to itself gives 2 as sum. What is this strange kind of addition, and if it were to exist how could it yield the number 2? If “+” expresses a function, it would appear to have the same number occur in both argument places—yet we are told that this single number yields 2 as value of the function from 1 as argument. Notice that no one ever utters the sentence “1 added to itself equals 2”, because that makes the incoherence obvious—as with “Socrates added to himself equals Plato (or some other entity distinct from Socrates)”. On the face of it, then, arithmetic contains an absurdity—but one that escapes notice and goes unchallenged. What is going on?

            We must first observe that ordinary language contains two sorts of number word: adjectival and nominal. The arithmetical language we have been considering is nominal: nouns, singular terms and proper names that denote numbers conceived as objects. These terms form the subject of sentences to which predications are directed. But in much ordinary speech the adjectival use dominates: “five dogs”, “three cats”, “one car”. Here we are not using number words to denote objects but as components of predicates; they modify count nouns or sortals. In the adjectival use we can say things like, “One cat and one dog together add up to two animals”; or more formally, “One dog + one cat = two animals”. There is nothing puzzling here: there are many dogs and cats subject to counting and they can feature in equations (one dog and one cat are clearly distinct things). We are not trying to get two things out of one or engaging in peculiar acts of addition. We said nothing here about the object 1 and adding it to itself; we spoke only of the number of cats and dogs. I conjecture that people tend to hear the pure mathematical nominal statement as short for, or closely related to, the applied adjectival statement; and this leads them to overlook the peculiarities of the former kind of statement, logically speaking. Probably when we are drilled in early school years in academic arithmetic we are introduced to its formulas by means of adjectival paraphrases that lull the mind into a sense of familiarity, while actually changing the thought in fundamental ways. An ontology of cats and dogs is covertly replaced by an ontology of numbers denoted by proper names. Thus children don’t protest, “But you can’t produce 2 just by combining 1 with itself!”

            Abetting these adjectival uses in overlooking the logical problems inherent in “1 + 1 = 2”, we have sign-object confusion: we see two signs for 1 and conjure two number 1’s to go with them. This gives us the illusion that 1 can be converted into 2 by being added to itself. That clearly won’t work for “4 + 4 = 8” and infinitely many sentences like it, since there are not eight occurrences of “4” here; but anyway the fallacy is too blatant to bamboozle the mind for long. There is just the number 4 here, denoted twice, and it can’t be converted into 8 by being added to itself: 4 put together with itself gives just the same old number 4. In addition to this there is vagueness and uncertainty about what precisely these mathematical objects are, which allows the mind to imagine that they can increase in magnitude simply by self-adding. One has to focus on the logical character of the statements in question to see how peculiar they are, as standardly understood. In any case there are several factors that induce us to overlook the actual intended content of these sentences, the main one being the availability of adjectival counterparts to them, which are perfectly kosher.

            The problem I have indicated infects certain attempts to define the natural numbers. Leibniz’s approach, endorsed by Frege, has it that each number is composed of a series of 1’s (apart from zero). Thus “1 + 1 + 1 = 3”: we can define 3 in this manner, and so on for all numbers. But adding 1 to 1 is not a method for generating a new number; it is simply a way to remain stuck at the number 1. We can add 2 to 1 to get 3 because these are different numbers, but adding a number to itself can’t produce a new number. Non-identity is the essence of counting. It might be thought that there is a way out by exploiting the adjectival paraphrase as follows: the statement “one collection + another collection + one more collection = three collections” is perfectly meaningful, allowing us to identify these three entities with the number 3. That is not adding one thing to itself, but rather adding three distinct things together (as it might be, collections of dogs, cats, and mice). But really this says nothing like the original statement containing tokens of “1” that all denote the same number; it merely gives the false impression that such a statement makes sense by sounding similar to it.

            It might be said that we could save arithmetic by reformulating it adjectivally, ridding ourselves of nominal expressions and an ontology of numbers as objects. That sounds like a solid move in principle, but it won’t be able to save all of arithmetic as it now exists, because that subject has now taken on a life of its own. We would need to be able to restate all propositions about numbers in adjectival terms—for example, propositions affirming primes, cubes, successors, etc. How can theorems about numbers as such be represented in a language that declines to refer to them? What is called “number theory” will find it difficult to reformulate itself using only numerical adjectives and count nouns—how can we even say that a certain number is even? Adjectival arithmetic is fine in the market place, but it won’t do to encompass nominalized academic arithmetic.

            Could we ban all equations of the form “n + n = m” but keep the rest of pure arithmetic? There will still be infinitely many true equations to play with, such “5 + 3 = 8”. This doesn’t add any number to itself. But unfortunately the problem persists under the surface: for implicit in such a statement is an addition of one number to itself, viz. 3 added to 3, since 3 is part of 5 and so gets added to 3 (with 2 added to the result to give 8). Hidden in “5 + 3” is the addition “3 + 3”—as also is “4 + 1”. So we can’t avoid commitment to such equations even when they don’t appear on the surface; they lurk beneath because they are built into the whole conception. Numbers can always be broken down so as to generate them. You can’t have arithmetic, as it now exists, without these kinds of equations, despite their manifest weirdness (they don’t even fit the dictionary definition of “add”). One might even say that they claim a metaphysical impossibility: adding an object to itself (itself an impossible operation) to produce a quite distinct object (impossible ontologically). This is what you get if you nominalize adjectives illicitly. Here is an analogy: talk of large and small objects is common, as in “Jumbo is a small elephant” and “Mickey is a large mouse” (attributive adjectives). There is no logical problem about such sortal-relative adjectives in their proper grammatical position, but if we try to abstract them away from this position in order to form nominal expressions we get ourselves into trouble. Thus we might elect to speak of an entity called “largeness” and regard it as self-subsistent, as if “large” had a meaning independently of the nouns to which it is usually linked. Then we would wonder how a single animal could have both largeness and smallness at the same time, given that Jumbo is a large mammal but a small elephant (small for an elephant). Similarly, number words originally belong with count nouns, in which position they are unproblematic; but if you abstract them from that context and nominalize them, you find that the ontology thus created produces monsters like “1 + 1”. You can certainly add one cat to one dog and get two animals, but if you try to add the object 1 to itself to get the object 2 you run into incoherencies. In effect, there has been an illicit reification—of attributive adjectives or of numerical adjectives. Singular terms have been introduced and objects assigned to them, along with certain operations (like addition): but the coherence of the whole structure has not been demonstrated. In fact, the structure is built on equations that have no clear sense—or else are demonstrably nonsensical.

            So what is the status of arithmetic as it is commonly understood? Is it simply nonsense? Are its propositions analogous to “Largeness is larger than smallness” or “Largeness added to largeness equals even larger largeness”? That is, does it consist of mangled adjectives forced to dress up as pseudo proper names? Should it therefore be dropped, eschewed, and ridiculed? That seems harsh. Perhaps a form of fictionalism will serve to save it: arithmetical facts in the shape of adjectival constructions have been converted into propositions about fictional entities, obeying fictional laws. Names have been introduced and formulas manufactured, so that we end up with the likes of “1 + 1 = 2”. We drill kids in this discourse, as we drill them in other fictional discourse masquerading as fact (e.g. religion) and they are forced to accept it at face value. People end up believing in the Holy Trinity, a piece of transparent nonsense; and they end up believing that there are objects that when added to themselves produce other greater objects, which is scarcely more credible than the Holy Trinity nonsense. So maybe the whole shebang is carefully curated fiction presented as sober truth. And there is no denying that the edifice rests on perfectly sensible foundations in the use of number words in adjectival form; it is not pure nonsense. Nor is nonsense always and necessarily pernicious; it may even be useful (“useful fictions”, e.g. the average man). Is it an accident that Charles Dodgson was both a mathematician and a creator of delightful nonsense? Arithmetic, as we have it, is a human construction, according to fictionalism, like the creatures of the Jaberwocky, and it does not need literal truth in order to captivate the human mind. And it’s sort of true, given its sterling adjectival origins. We can carry on cheerfully intoning such nonsense as “1 + 1 = 2” while accepting that we are engaging in metaphysical quackery. The whole history of mathematics is littered with controversy about the reality of this or that newly created mathematical entity (zero, the infinitesimal, the irrational, the negative, etc.): is it inconceivable that the arithmetic of positive whole numbers is also steeped in ontological mud?

 

Colin McGinn                

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Intuitive Knowledge

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Intuitive Knowledge

 

The OED defines “intuition” as “immediate apprehension by the intellect alone” (among other meanings). Intuitive knowledge, then, is knowledge by the intellect alone—knowledge by pure intellection. The senses play no part in it. Empirical knowledge, by contrast, is defined as knowledge by means of the senses, perhaps allowing a contribution by the intellect in addition to sense experience. Intuitive knowledge is often regarded as problematic, even unintelligible, while empirical knowledge is thought to be pellucid and paradigmatic. Thus empiricism has enjoyed ascendancy over rationalism since its inception in the seventeenth century. I will argue that this assessment is mistaken. The subject is large, but I will keep it brief.

            The first point to note is that intuitive knowledge employs a single mental faculty in producing knowledge—the faculty of intellect. Its inputs are intellectual and so are its outputs; it doesn’t go outside itself. However, empirical knowledge employs a pair of faculties of very different nature: intellect in which the knowledge is stored, and the senses that yield sensations. Somehow sensations are supposed to produce states of knowledge. But how can sensations, which are non-propositional, give rise to knowledge, which is propositional? How could sensations constitute knowledge? The two are like chalk and cheese.  Only by attempting to reduce intellect to sensation, which is hopeless. Call this the problem of epistemic mismatch. Second, skepticism stands in the way of basing knowledge of the world on experience, since the two are not logically connected—as with dreams, evil demons, and brains in a vat. Sense experience cannot justify such knowledge claims, so it can hardly be a sound basis for knowledge. Intuitive knowledge has no such problem and is generally regarded as certain (e.g. knowledge of logical laws). There is thus no such thing as empirical knowledge (true justified belief). Third, it is completely unclear what sense experience is such that it can produce knowledge. If we take it to be concept-infused, we impose intellect on sense from outside; if we rigorously exclude concepts from it, the residue will be incapable of creating knowledge (the bare “given”). More basically, it is impossible to say, or discern, what sense experience actually contains: the more you stare at it the more it looks impotent to justify our typical claims about the world. Blooming buzzing confusion can’t yield propositional knowledge of reality. The only way to save empiricism is to inject it with rationalism by invoking intellect. Maybe sensations can somehow trigger knowledge but they can’t act as justifiers of knowledge (“only knowledge can justify knowledge”).

            Here is another way to look at the matter. The senses evolved in collaboration with the motor system to form the sensorimotor system. This system operates to regulate the organism’s relation to its environment and exists independently of cognition. It is not designed to produce knowledge or to interact with the intellect (all animals have it). The empiricist in effect believes that this primitive system can also give rise to propositional knowledge and is indeed its only legitimate basis. But seen from the proper biological perspective, this claim is vastly implausible; the intellectual system might never have evolved while the sensorimotor system would still be doing its job. It would be completely accidental if the senses could perform both functions. Perhaps there is some sort of epistemic hookup between the senses and the intellect, but the idea that knowledge of the world can be exhaustively explained by sensory inputs is quixotic at best. One can certainly imagine a rationalist philosopher (Plato?) holding that no knowledge can be derived from sensation, i.e. sensations can play no justificatory role. This isn’t to say that states of sensory seeming can’t function as justifications, as in “It seems to me that there’s a book on my desk”, but the states so reported are heavily imbued with concepts and capacities drawn from the intellectual faculty; they aren’t simply raw data existing antecedently to the operations of intellect. We really have no clear idea of what empirical knowledge could be construed in the traditional way (“impressions”, “ideas”, “sense-data”, etc.). So as a theory of knowledge, supposedly superior to rationalist theories, empiricist theories are woefully under-described, if not demonstrably incoherent. It is simply not true that knowledge is “based on experience”.

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Ears

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Ears

 

It began over a year ago when a small red patch appeared on the top of my right ear. At first it was diagnosed as inflammation of the cartilage probably brought on by wearing too tight headphones. The cure was not to put any pressure on it and wait for the inflammation to die down. After several months it had increased in size and painfulness, so I returned to the dermatologist. This time a biopsy revealed skin cancer (squamous cell). Now it was necessary to perform surgery. This was duly done: a five-hour MOHs procedure followed by a three-hour reconstruction (local anesthetic). I won’t specify the details but it was all pretty brutal (twenty odd stitches, serious pain). I lost half my ear. The cause: sun damage, possibly a result of playing tennis in the Florida sun.

            At the same time the ear was declared healed a lump appeared in my neck. This was duly scanned and biopsied: it was more cancer. The cancer in my ear had evidently spread to my neck and was now growing apace. A full-scale operation was quickly scheduled. This was performed two weeks ago. Again, I will spare you the gory details except to say that it was an eleven-hour operation requiring a hospital stay and subsequent daily home visits from a nurse. Full recovery is not guaranteed. It is presently difficult to eat and my right shoulder is compromised.

            I relay all this in order to encourage readers to protect their ears from the sun, especially if they live in a place with a lot of it. It is easy to neglect the ears while protecting the face. Sunscreen is not enough, especially if you spend time doing water sports (as I do). Wear a broad-brimmed hat (not a baseball cap). Ideally use a fabric covering such as a skullcap or full-face sun protection balaclava (as I have done for some years). Apparently my experiences are not uncommon and you don’t want to share them.

 

Co

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Blindsight and Empiricism

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Blindsight and Empiricism

 

Imagine a person with blindsight in every sense: no conscious perceptual experience at all but able to receive information subconsciously from the external world. This person nevertheless has ordinary fully conscious reason: she is capable of forming beliefs that count as knowledge in virtue of the informational input. It would not occur to her to suppose that all her knowledge rests on conscious experience; she would not be a traditional empiricist. She might indeed be a rationalist about her powers of knowing, supposing the intellect to be the sole mental faculty implicated in the generation of knowledge (she could still allow that causal relations to the environment are involved). So there is nothing necessary about conscious sensory experience in the production of knowledge of the external world (subliminal perception makes the same point). Sensory qualia are not essential to knowledge of the physical world. On the other hand, the apparatus of reason is essential: concepts, judgment, reasoning, and propositions. You can’t be blind about these things and still know in the ordinary sense. If someone were to claim that sensations of pain and pleasure were the essence of knowledge of physical things, we could quickly refute them by pointing out that a knower could very well lack such sensations and still know, so long as other faculties remained intact—in no way is knowledge based on sensations of pain and pleasure. The same could be said of emotion: it is not essential to the enterprise of knowledge despite its presence in the mind of the typical human knower. Pain, pleasure, and emotion no doubt have a function, but it is clearly not to serve as a foundation for human knowledge. The case of the blindsighted knower shows that the same is true of sensory experience: this too is not the indispensable foundation of human knowledge.[1]

            This suggests that all knowledge conforms to the basic tenets of rationalism: the mental faculty involved in producing knowledge is uniformly reason. It isn’t that some knowledge arises purely from reason and some knowledge consists in a kind of refinement or distillation of sense experience—a different kind of cognitive state—but rather that all knowledge is composed of the same basic materials, though no doubt about different things. Thus mathematical knowledge is essentially the same as knowledge of physical things in its intrinsic nature—viz. an activity of intellect—though the subject matter of the two is different. There is not intellectual knowledge and sensory knowledge, as if the latter is infused with sense experience while the former is not; rather, all knowledge is an affair of the intellect in its inner composition (however differently caused). Moreover, there is no sense in which one type of knowledge mimics or copies sensation; sensation is not internal to any kind of knowledge. There are not two types of knowledge as there are two types of swans (black or white): all knowledge is as the rationalist supposes. Empiricism only seems plausible because we tacitly imbue sensation with the products of the intellect, but this is to presuppose rationalism not find an alternative to it.

            It is quite true that some of our knowledge is about sensation, but that does not imply that this knowledge is itself a form of sensation; it is as intellectual as any knowledge we have. We must not transfer to the medium what belongs to the message, i.e. the subject matter. Our knowledge of sensation (Hume’s “impressions”) is not a version of sensation; it is the application of reason to a certain type of subject matter. Human reason is essentially homogeneous not an amalgam of a sense-based faculty and an intellect-based faculty; and the nature of this faculty corresponds closely to traditional rationalist conceptions from Plato onwards. Simply put, and without any attempt at argumentation, it consists of a set of innate ideas organized by a logical faculty into propositional structures of arbitrary complexity. The rational faculty receives inputs of various kinds, to be sure, but it operates in much the same way across the board. Empiricism is an inadequate theory of the nature of this faculty, and it mistakes the inessential for the essential in the production of knowledge.[2]       

 

[1] See my “Intuitive Knowledge”.

[2] Plato regarded sense experience as incapable of producing genuine knowledge, relegating it to the realm of mere “opinion”; but he could have gone further and rejected it as any kind of justifying basis for our knowledge claims. Experience is just the wrong kind of thing to provide a basis for reason to work on (as I argue in “Intuitive Knowledge”).

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Saying and Showing

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Saying and Showing

 

Wittgenstein famously introduced the distinction between saying and showing in the Tractatus. I won’t be concerned with his treatment of the distinction, either by way of interpretation or evaluation; but I will be using the terminology. I want to say that every speech act includes an act of showing, as well as an act of saying, and also that showing is not a type of saying. It is not (pace Wittgenstein) that what is shown cannot be said, but only that the showing that occurs in speech acts is not a type of saying in that very speech act. The kind of showing I have in mind is perfectly familiar and non-mystifying: it is the mere utterance of a sentence with its characteristic form. The speaker displays or exhibits or presents a sentence to the hearer’s senses (generally vision and hearing), thus showing him that sentence. The speaker doesn’t say he is showing the hearer a sentence; he simply does it—as he might show the audience a coin in his hand. But the hearer is then in a position to know what the speaker is saying: the speaker says something to the hearer by showing him a sentence. He might, for example, produce a written sentence from behind his back that the hearer is now in a position to interpret and make an ascription of saying. Showing in this sense is an act of proffering an item to the senses, and this is what enables the speaker to communicate by acts of speech. So two acts are performed in a given speech act: an act of showing and an act of saying, where the former enables the latter. In other words, the act of uttering (saying in the oratio recta sense) is an act of showing (displaying, exhibiting, etc.) in the performance of which something is said in the oratio obliquasense. Utterance is not merely sounds issuing from the speaker’s mouth—that might be just involuntary babble—but an intentional presentation to someone’s senses of a sentence (conceived as such) for a specific purpose, viz. to say something to that person. The speaker is showing something to the hearer in roughly the sense in which a tour guide might show you the way to a cathedral. The purpose of the showing is to perform an act of saying and it is a sine qua non of that.

            In fact there is a bit more complexity here. First, there is not just the speech act of saying but also of commanding and questioning (and any other type of speech act you may believe in). The speaker shows the sentence “Shut the door!” in order to command the addressee to shut the door, or shows the sentence “What time is it?” in order to ask what the time is. Notice that the variety of speech acts performed is accompanied by uniformity in the act of showing: all speech acts involve showing, though not all involve saying. So there is something in common to all speech acts—they all involve an act of showing. Moreover, they all involve something not specifically linguistic, because showing occurs in a wide range of activities: we show sentences to each other in much the way we show things in general to each other (maybe the one capacity derives from the other). Second, there are two parts to the kind of showing that occurs in acts of communication: one part is the act of the speaker in showing a sentence to the hearer; the other is the sentence itself showing its form to the hearer (this is closer to Wittgenstein’s use of the concept). I show you a sentence S and S shows you its grammatical and logical form—without saying anything about this form. A conjunctive sentence doesn’t say it is a conjunction—it just is one. So strictly there are two acts of showing in any speech act: speaker showing and sentence showing. The speaker shows you a sentence and the sentence shows you its form (as well as its vocabulary). The speaker doesn’t say, “I am showing you this sentence” but simply does it, and the sentence doesn’t say, “I am an existentially quantified sentence” though it manifestly is one. This double showing is integral to the success of the speech act and is not to be viewed as mere acoustic production: it is part of speech as a rational purposive activity.

            I am tempted to suggest that this way of talking comes naturally because we are a theatrical species. Our social interactions have a theatrical character (think Shakespeare and Erving Goffman). We are always “putting on a show”. Thus the idea that speech involves performance is a theatrical idea (we perform speech acts as actors perform their lines). Our speech comprises a display that is designed to be interpreted by an audience as an act of saying (etc.). If all the world’s a stage and we are merely players, then our speech will involve acts of theatrical showing—skilled presentations that reveal states of mind. We show other people things in order to get things across to them: we wave our hands, point our fingers, make urgent sounds when in extremis, and produce grammatical strings.  We proffer things to other people’s senses in the hope that we will be understood. This requires skills akin to those of an actor; and isn’t speech often a kind of acting? We have to put in a goodperformance, a convincing verbal display (e.g. Winston Churchill giving a mesmerizing speech). So we naturally think of our speech performances in theatrical terms—as a type of show we put on. The great speaker or writer is exceptionally good at showing people sentences that produce the best audience effect. In any case, speaking involves showing—displaying, exhibiting. In speaking I reveal my thoughts, parade my desires, and exhibit my intentions—I show you sentences from which you make suitable inferences. Sign language is exemplary in this respect: here the speaker uses her hands to show the audience signs that communicate states of mind—and it lookstheatrical. The poet, too, shows you words and sentences that convey ideas and emotions (the love letter is similar). The language teacher may proceed by exhibiting sentences for the student to learn—while simultaneously saying something.

            The point of my saying all this is to supplement the usual conceptual apparatus of speech act theory with another layer of concepts: it is not just about saying, commanding, etc. but also a sophisticated type of action aptly captured by the showing terminology. Nothing like this exists in the work of the later Wittgenstein or Austin or Searle or Strawson or Grice: we just have an etiolated notion of “utterance”. But the speech act as it exists in humans is a more complex and subtle phenomenon than this terminology suggests, possibly because of lingering behaviorist assumptions. The general form of a speech act consists of a double act of showing combined with an illocutionary act of saying (commanding, questioning, etc.). It isn’t just people making noises that other people interpret this way and that but an act of putting words on display with all that that implies.[1]   

 

Colin McGinn

[1] Showing is not opposed to saying but the two form an indissoluble whole: in saying we show and in showing we say. I will also note that showing is a type of externalization: an inner process is externalized as we show sentences to interlocutors—thought is revealed in spoken words.

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Time and Truth

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Time and Truth

 

Truth relates to time in an interesting way: once a fact obtains a corresponding proposition is instantaneously true. On the one hand is a fact, say the fact that it just started raining at a certain place, while on the other is a proposition (a belief or assertion), say that it is raining at said location, and the second thing acquires the property of being true at the very moment the fact begins to obtain. Generally, when an object acquires a property a propositional entity comes to possess the attribute of being true at exactly that time—there is no time lag—even though the two things may be far apart (even at the other end of the universe). It is customary to speak of facts as truth-makers, so we can say that facts make propositions true instantly. Facts and true propositions are not identical, yet facts can confer truth on propositions. The truth of the proposition is a consequence of the fact, though it is a consequence that takes no time (rather like logical consequence and unlike causal consequence). This can seem puzzling—like the “non-locality” spoken of in connection with quantum theory. How can the fact manage to reach across space and make a proposition true without any temporal delay? For it is not just that the fact obtains and the proposition is simultaneously true but that the proposition’s being true is a result of the fact obtaining. It would be different if the fact were simply identical to a true proposition, but that is evidently not the case, since facts are not true propositions and true propositions are not facts (they involve different ontologies). No, these are entities of different types, yet one can influence the other at arbitrarily large removes. (One might indeed see the puzzle as a motivation for regarding an identity theory of facts and truths with more favor.) In any case, it appears to be a fact that facts and truths are connected in this way—by a kind of instantaneous action at a distance. Notice that objects and singular terms are not likewise connected: objects don’t make terms refer to them—they are not “reference-makers”. We are more inclined to speak of terms as determining the object referred to, not of objects as determining the reference of terms. In the case of truth, by contrast, the entity in the world contrives to bestow the semantic property of truth on the extraneous propositional entity, which may be an utterance at some remote location (a different galaxy, say). The reason the proposition is true is simply that the fact obtains (an object has a certain property): that is the explanation of its truth.

            I won’t say anything more about how to resolve this puzzle, or even whether it really is a puzzle; I will simply take it for granted that truth has the property in question, viz. that truth is conferred at the exact time that the reported fact comes to obtain. My purpose is to use this property of truth to undermine certain ideas about the nature of truth. The property is thus not a trivial property consistent with any theory of truth but rather has polemical teeth. Suppose we try to identify truth with verification: then truth will turn out not to be simultaneous with the fact stated. For verification takes time and is generally subsequent to the time of statement. Suppose that at time t I say that there are five oak trees in my garden; and suppose it takes five minutes to verify that this is true: then the statement will not be true until five minutes after t, according to the thesis that truth is verification. There were five oak trees in my garden at t and so my statement was true at t, but the statement was not verified to be true until five minutes later, which would make it true then according to the theory that truth consists in verification. The only way to avoid this is to claim that there were no oak trees in my garden at the time of utterance and that there only came to be five oak trees at t + 5 minutes. But surely we want to allow that facts can be verified after the time at which they actually obtain (now the fact, later the verification of the fact). Truth arrives at the time of facts not at the time of the verification of facts, so we can’t tie truth to verification by identifying the two. This is why it makes sense to ask how long it will take to verify a proposition, but it makes no sense to ask how long it takes for a proposition to be true. Verification takes time, but it takes no time for a proposition to be made true. Verification is an activity spread out in time, but making-true is not similarly spread out in time—it happens instantly. We can say that a proposition can be verified as true, but we can’t say that a proposition can be true bybeing verified; the two concepts are logically quite different, as is shown in their relation to time. Similarly, we can say that a procedure of verification is time-consuming or that it was executed slowly, but we can’t say anything like this about truth (“It took so long for his assertion to be true”). We might choose to replace the concept of truth with the concept of verification, but we can’t claim to analyze the former by the latter. Simply put, verification is a temporal concept but truth is not. Such ideas as that truth is an “epistemic concept” fail because of this obvious point: evidence gathering is essentially temporal but truth is essential atemporal (in the sense intended here).

            The same goes for pragmatist theories of truth that seek to identify truth with something like “convergence of inquirers’ beliefs in the long run” or “what leads to human satisfaction”. These things also take time, sometimes a lot of time, but truth takes no time. Any theory that identifies truth with the effects of belief will fall foul of this point, since effects occur subsequently and are spread out in time.  Statements are true or false at the time you make them, depending on the facts, not at some later time. Intuitively, the facts immediately stamp propositions as true or false at the time they obtain no matter what the future holds; so any theory of truth that ties it to future facts will fail. Of course, our judgments of truth are enmeshed in time, being dependent on verification procedures, but truth itself is not—truth itself depends entirely on the prevailing facts (and suitable truth bearers). Truth comes straight from the world in the blink of an eye (so to speak). It is a peculiar property in this respect, and maybe a puzzling one, but any theory of truth needs to accommodate it.[1]

 

[1] We could add to Tarski’s famous formula the following truth about truth: “snow is white” is true at the moment that snow is white. It would be different if snow had to send a signal to the sentence to inform it that snow is white, since that would take time. No, truth is conferred on the sentence at the very second the fact obtains.

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