Mental and Physical

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Mental and Physical

 

The way philosophers use the terms “mental” and “physical” presupposes a conceptual dichotomy with no overlap: what is mental is not physical and what is physical is not mental (except by dint of some speculative metaphysical doctrine such as idealism or materialism). But is that the way we normally think about the things in question? Is there such a rigid separation? Isn’t the mental also physical and the physical also mental? I mean nothing remarkable by saying this—nothing that deserves to be called “metaphysical”. In saying that the mind is physical we can mean simply that it is an attribute of the body with bodily causes and correlates (see my “Truly Physical”): mental illness, say, is physical in the sense that it arises from conditions of the body and brain (it isn’t a matter of demons or immaterial perturbations). Many of our so-called mental concepts reflect this conception: people are said to have backaches, stomachaches and headaches, and suffer from fevers, or fall asleep and wake up. These all involve what the philosopher would call a “psychophysical” fact in which body and mind are brought conceptually together. No normal speaker thinks of headaches without heads or fevers without bodily temperature. The mind involves the body, and the body is a physical thing. Likewise, the physical is bound up with the mental; we don’t conceive of the objects of perception as wholly devoid of mental involvement (though that might be a philosophical doctrine). I don’t mean fancy metaphysics like idealism and neutral monism; I mean such things as secondary qualities and pragmatic classification. We ascribe colors to things and group them according to our interests and innate categories: objects are not conceived as completely mind-independent (which is not to say that none of their properties are mind-independent). When an animal is classified as a “blue-faced monkey”, say, it is tacitly brought under a mind-involving category. Nowhere does common sense stipulate that its objects of interest are completely mind-independent—again, that is a philosopher’s contention. These are described as “physical objects” but that is not taken to imply that they are not mentally tinged. Our ordinary ontology allows for physical objects that have mind-involving attributes, just as it allows for mental phenomena that have body-involving attributes.

            In fact, at the ground-floor level we don’t even operate with these abstract concepts of the mental and physical: we just talk about monkeys, tables, rainbows, pains, emotions, thoughts, and so on. The philosopher then comes along and tries to find overarching categories: he or she has a “craving for abstraction” (compare Wittgenstein’s “craving for generality”). We come up with these two words and then we reify them into broad natural categories that are only accidentally joined or not joined at all. Our ordinary ways of talking and thinking don’t respect such abstract distinctions; it is only on reflection that we are taken in by them. Tables have colors and human uses; pains have bodily locations: that’s what tables and pains are. Colors are related to sense perception, and human uses reflect human desires; pains are caused by and felt in specific parts of the body: thus we can apply the terms “mental” and “physical”, respectively, to them. Ordinary ontology is unconcerned with the dichotomy suggested by the philosopher’s exclusive use of “mental” and “physical”. Talk of a mental world and a physical worldis alien to it—a philosophical theory not a piece of cultural anthropology. What is odd is that common sense doesn’t provide any substitute for these terms—no way to describe in general what kind of thing we are dealing with. We want to ask what pains, emotions and thoughts have in common, and we come up with the word “mental”; similarly for tables, rocks and monkeys, and the word “physical”. Shouldn’t there be a way of describing these things that recognizes their double nature as mental-cum-physical? That would be less misleading than “mental” and “physical”—and it isn’t as if these terms have clear meanings. They are too dualistic and their extension is quite unclear. In the “lived world” there is no such dichotomy as these words insinuate. Whether there is one in the theoretical world is another question; but if there is, it is not founded in common sense. We experience external objects as possessing properties reflecting our minds, and we experience our minds as bound up with our bodies; only in theory do we force a wedge between the two. It is odd that our language lacks the means to express the mental-and-physical nature of things in general terms.  [1]

 

Colin McGinn

  [1] We talk about “mental illness” while acknowledging that it is also bodily (an illness of the brain)—shouldn’t we talk of “mental-physical illness”? We call a flower “physical” while accepting that its color, smell and taste are all mind-dependent—shouldn’t we call it a “physical-mental” object? Our language is ontologically misleading. The mischief caused by the words “mental” and “physical” is incalculable. Yet we seem to have nothing better. Strange.

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American Psyche

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American Psyche

 

Suppose you wanted to explain why it is that people in America speak English. America is far from England and its native people were not English speakers. The obvious answer is that Americans speak the language of the British immigrants who founded the country. They spoke English and their descendants learned language from them by imitative learning or some such. It isn’t some kind of strange coincidence or the result of a general law (English isn’t a human universal). The propensity to speak English is the result of historical facts that could have been otherwise—if the original colonizers were Spanish speakers, Americans would speak Spanish today. I want to suggest that much the same is true of other aspects of American culture: Americans are as they are mentally and behavorially because of the original British settlers.  [1] There is an unbroken (though modified) imitative chain leading from those settlers to contemporary Americans, and not always to the credit of either party. If you want to explain why people living in Great Britain are as they are, you do well to look to history; and the same is true of people living in America biologically descended from the original British settlers. Since British culture was the dominant force in America, despite other incursions, we find that American culture reflects British culture. Albion begot America, warts and all. This is not at all surprising, but the traits that originated in Britain, particularly England, may not be so obvious, or welcome.

            I am going to paint with a broad brush and from first-hand experience (I’m not a sociologist or historian). The traits I identify are four: puritanism, violence, social supremacy, and insularity. Different labels could be given and the psychological formations labeled are complex and multi-faceted. What is called puritanism might also be described as inhibition, repression, buttoned-up-ness, austerity, conformism, primness, prudishness, stuffiness, and straight-out sexual shame. I take it this is an old story and needs no defending. Violence is an aspect of British culture that is all too familiar to the inhabitants of the British Isles, particularly alcohol-driven street violence from predominantly working-class youths (I recall an American female graduate student in Oxford who was beaten up twice on the streets of that city by British thugs). My own school days were full of it. But let’s not forget the state-sponsored violence of the British Empire, which again is an oft-told story. The British are a violent people and proud of it (“Bring back the birch!”). By social supremacy I mean the burning desire to be better than your fellow man, or to be thought better: snobbery, class division, acting posh, looking down your nose, being well-bred, associating with the better sort of person, etc. etc. This desire to outclass others has racial and nationalist forms, but it should be remembered that it applies within the class of white British nationals. It is a desire for supremacy over others—foreigners, northerners (or southerners), the differently accented, the improperly educated, or the dubiously mannered. By insularity I mean a concern only with local affairs, a “little England” mentality, narrow-mindedness, a suspicion of “abroad”, a conviction that your way is always the best way, a lack of interest in anything beyond your own daily life. Much more could be said about these four traits and their connection to national peculiarities, like excessive drinking and football violence, or a rigid class system, or a tendency to get sunburned while holidaying in hot places; but I think I have said enough to convey the general picture. It is not an edifying spectacle, and many have been the souls that have fled it in search of other climes.

            Now we move to America: don’t we see the same basic pattern playing out, though in gaudier colors? Do I even need to spell out the American national character? The chief difference is the influx of other immigrants to the American continent (voluntary and involuntary): this has given a peculiar twist to the underlying personality type. A fanatically puritanical frame of mind, extreme violence, appalling racism and bigotry, and a magnificent indifference to anything beyond these American shores: the basic components are all there. Above all, there is a sublime lack of awareness of the American psychopathology. England is an island nation and so is America, and people like it that way: they don’t want anyone interfering in their traditional ways. And it isn’t as if both countries are models of internal harmony: the internal conflicts of the British Isles, many within England itself, are notorious; and the United States is a country with deep divisions, not to mention hatreds. In both countries we have a combustible mix of contempt, insecurity, supremacist thinking, and a refusal to heed the interests of others. At its crudest we have raging hatred and simmering (as well as overt) violence. The American psyche has adopted the characteristic traits of the British (mainly English) psyche and amplified them to screeching levels—bigger, nastier, and stupider. Combine this with unrestrained capitalism and simple greed and you get a version of Albion that is quite recognizable but also grotesque. The love of personal destruction is one of the manifestations of this pathology: lynching, legal execution, imprisonment, financial ruin, Internet defamation, and a callous disregard for human suffering (not to mention animal suffering). That is America and always has been, but it derives from the culture that created it—the culture of Great Britain. Look at Monty Python and the Holy Grail and you will see the bare bones of England satirized; now transpose this to a continent three thousand miles away. Of course, there are differences, born of climate and geography, of indigenous and neighboring peoples, but the toxic mixture of puritanism, violence, social supremacy, and insularity is present in full force. How could it not be, given that the architects of the country as it now exists were themselves steeped in this kind of culture? It didn’t disappear when British feet touched American soil; it was simply transplanted to a new place. Indeed, it might be argued that America allowed the pathology greater freedom to express itself, thus assuming more virulent forms.

            American English is recognizably the same language as British English (which itself has multiple forms) but with certain accretions and deformations: some would say it is harsher-sounding than its British progenitor (it is certainly spoken more loudly and confidently). American culture is the same: it is recognizably a version of British culture, but harsher, more extreme, and less modulated. Or to put it in more old-fashioned language, the American soul is really the English soul unleashed.  [2]            

 

  [1] This basic thesis was defended at length by David Hackett Fischer in Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989). I have given my own version of the general idea but without following his precise division of traits and without tying those traits down to geographical locations in England. For example, he traces the origins of American violence to the Scottish and Irish borderlands with their distinctive history, while I see British violence as a far more distributed characteristic of British society. His perspective is based on the American experience; I am drawing on my experience growing up in England (I moved to the USA when I was forty). Neither Fischer nor I wish to condemn both countries without qualification—there are good things about both places and other countries can be terrible too—but we want to present a clear-eyed picture of the realities of the countries in question. In many ways American history is just a continuation of British history, though occurring in another land: a “special relationship”—no doubt about it. What about the relationship of identity? 

  [2] What I have offered here is a general framework for thinking about American culture and Anglo-American relations, obviously in need of fleshing out. I doubt that I have said anything remotely original. If we want an acronym we could use “SPIV”: Supremacy, Puritanism, Insularity, Violence. There have always been critics of SPIV culture, internal and external, and some progress has been made in overcoming its direst forms, but it has proved remarkably resilient. Everyone should ask himself or herself to what degree he or she is a walking embodiment of it. We are all creatures of history.

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Cosmic Compression

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Cosmic Compression

 

Many a student of cosmology reels at the idea of the universe squeezed into a tiny dense point. How could all the matter (and space!) of the known universe be condensed into such a point? There is just too much of it! Our student is not bemused by another feat of condensation: placing all the particles of an object into close proximity and witnessing drastic downsizing. We are told that most of the atom is empty space with electrons and protons set widely apart, so if you eliminate the space the object shrinks dramatically (I remember reading that if you did this to the earth it would be the size of an orange). But this doesn’t help with the kind of cosmic compression envisaged in the big bang theory (or what I prefer to call the hot speck theory): for placing all the elementary particles of the universe next to each other would still produce a very large object (the size of the Sun, say). So how are we to understand the physics of that original tiny dot? How is such a thing possible? How can you cram that much matter into so small a space?

            As I understand it (I am no expert), we are to drop the idea of matter altogether and replace it with energy: that is, we are not postulating a cramming together of material particles such as electrons and protons. Such entities did not exist at the time the universe was so compressed; they came into existence only as the original stuff cooled down (like space itself). Instead we are to envisage a point of extremely high energy sans matter. From this concentrated energy matter is thought to have emerged, by the equivalence of matter and energy in physics. Energy converted to matter in the big bang; it isn’t that the matter already existed then in a highly compressed form with all the particles jammed tightly together. And energy is not something that needs to take up space according to its intensity: you can increase the energy of an object without increasing the volume it occupies. A hotter thing is not necessarily a bigger thing. Suppose we think of energy as oscillatory motion: the more rapid the oscillations the greater the energy. Then energy (motion) can increase indefinitely while not taking up more space. Suppose we say that all the energy of the universe can be condensed into a tiny spot: that occasions no conceptual recoil in our keen student, because it just means that we can envisage a very high degree of energy contained in a small area. Energy has no spatial dimensions; it is, as physicists say, just “work done” (or the potential for such work). So there should be no conceptual difficulty in the idea of a speck with the energy levels of the whole universe; we are not being asked to cram particles into a tiny space. The theory is that this concentrated energy can be converted into particulate matter; it isn’t that all the particulate matter of the universe can be crammed into a tiny spot. That conversion may be conceptually troublesome (though a truism of current physics), but the idea of near-infinite levels of energy in a tiny area is not. The universe as it now exists doesn’t contain such high-energy spots (except perhaps in back holes, and hence not observable by us), but theoretically energy can be raised to arbitrarily high levels without violating any basic principles of matter and space. That is, the hot speck could be incredibly hot without ceasing to be tiny.

            So we needn’t be fazed by the idea of a tiny speck containing (potentially!) all the matter of the universe in virtue of its extremely high energy level. This is good to know because we don’t want the universe beginning in a paradox.    [1]

 

    [1] This is my attempt to make sense of what has long troubled me and troubles many people. I don’t believe I have ever read an exposition of big bang theory that puts things quite this way, but it seems to correspond to the underlying idea (I may be wrong, though).

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Big Bang Metaphysics

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Big Bang Metaphysics

 

Metaphysics typically deals with the universe as it now exists: material objects, space, time, mind, moral values, and so on. But it wasn’t always like that: at the time of the big bang it was very different and didn’t include any of those things. Shouldn’t there also be a metaphysics that deals with the universe as it was then—a truly cosmological metaphysics? And shouldn’t it relate that old universe with the one that confronts us now? We are told that the big bang led to the creation of many things: matter and its constituent particles, space, time itself, and eventually life and mind. Are there metaphysical questions about how this is possible? I am going to raise one such question, but first I need to attend to some terminological matters that have impeded comprehension and muddied the waters. The whole subject is a linguistic morass, sorely in need of revision.

            First the phrase “big bang”, used in contrast to “steady state”. As has been pointed out, there was no bang, since there was no sound medium to transmit waves; nor was there any one to register such waves in a form of a banging sound. The event was also not “big”: there was no space within which to make such judgments, and anyway the universe was tiny at this point. So the phrase is multiply misleading. We need a phrase to contrast with “steady state” that is more literally correct: I suggest “sudden surge” (we could also say “abrupt inflation” but that is a bit of a mouthful). What happened at this seminal moment was certainly sudden—an extremely rapid eruption (nothing like the stately steadiness envisaged by the rival theory). I choose the word “surge” to suggest a swelling, an outpouring, a leap forward and outward. I could have used “eruption”, but it lacks the alliteration and suggests volcanoes. So let us say that the universe exists by virtue of a sudden surge not a continuous steady state; that captures the theoretical difference nicely (and is euphonious). The universe ballooned spectacularly into being.

Now for “singularity”: the OED gives “a point at which a function takes an infinite value, especially a point of infinite density at the center of a black hole”. Note that the dictionary makes no reference to the origin of the universe according to the big bang (sic) theory, perhaps because this was not a mathematical point of infinitedensity and heat (just extremely high). The word sounds very grand and no doubt mystifies earnest seekers after cosmological knowledge. George Lemaitre in 1927 called the entity in question a “primeval atom”—and he invented the theory: I think this is a better term than “singularity”. It conveys the idea of an extremely small indivisible entity, along with the suggestion that the whole universe once existed inside a mere atom. We might modify it slightly to form “seminal atom” so as to stress the idea that this atom was not only primeval but also creative—seed-like, full of potential. Then we can say that the seminal atom underwent a sudden surge—and lo, the universe came into existence. If we want something a bit more colloquial I suggest “hot speck”: the universe at this stage was certainly extremely hot (also extremely dense) and it was a mere speck. For brevity we might just talk of the Speck (“the Speck rapidly surged to create space and time” etc.)

There is also a question about using the verb “explode” in this connection. It is sometimes pointed out that this was no ordinary explosion: there was no surrounding space to start with, and no destruction of objects in the vicinity, and no mushroom cloud (also it was completely silent). All true, but there is a definition of “explode” that lacks these connotations: “increase suddenly in number or extent” (definition 3 in the OED). That seems perfectly correct as a way of describing the results of the sudden surge, and it corresponds to the definition of “expand” in the OED: “make or become larger or more extensive”, which some cosmologists prefer to “explode”. What we want is the idea of growth, increase, enlargement; then we can say, “the hot speck grew extremely rapidly during the first second of the sudden surge” and not be accused of misleading metaphors and inaccurate description. Also, this is a lot more comprehensible to the layman than, “the singularity made a big bang” and the like (the what made what?). As a seed grows into a tree, so the hot speck grew into a massive universe (but see below). It wasn’t always fully grown trees existing in a steady state: there was transformation, expansion, and novelty. These ways of talking and imagining help with grasping what the so-called “big bang theory” is really saying. The usual terminology has produced obfuscation not clarification.

Now let’s talk metaphysics. According to the hot speck theory, the universe at this stage was devoid of particulate matter, space, and even time—so not subsumable under Kantian categories. There were no spatial objects existing over time. These concepts are geared to our current universe, but that was just a glint in the eye of the hot speck (if that). But does that mean our entire conceptual scheme fails to apply to the universe as it then was? I think not (as our discourse about it would seem to suggest): I think we can perfectly well apply the concepts of object, event, and process to the early universe. The hot speck is an object, the sudden surge is an event, and the subsequent expansion and cooling is a process (still going on today as the galaxies continue their recession). These basic categories have application even in those remote days to that peculiar entity. Can we be materialists or idealists about the universe as it was then? Not in the sense of claiming that the hot speck was made of atoms and occupied space; and Berkeley’s God had precious few ideas on his mind (just the idea of that tiny volatile speck).  [1]Did causality exist at this juncture? Well, there was no propinquity or constant conjunction (because no space and time), so if causation did exist it wasn’t as it is now. Were there any primary qualities (clearly there were no secondary qualities)? Were there shape and number, solidity and volume? Apparently not: these emerged in the aftermath of the Surge. The composition of the Speck is hard to conceive and it is certainly alien to human perception. Perhaps it needs a new metaphysics—a new type of “substance”, a new conception of “body”. People say the laws of physics break down for such “singularities”; maybe the laws of metaphysics do too (except for the very general categories of object, event, and process). The Speck might need its own special brand of ontology.

But I want to discuss a different question, one that I have not seen discussed; it concerns what might be called “the puzzle of plurality”. The puzzle can be stated simply: how did the hot speck produce the multiplicity of objects we see today? It was one object, minute and homogeneous, not even articulated into component parts, and yet it created a huge number of separate objects—galaxies, stars, planets, molecules, atoms, protons, electrons, animals, plants, and people. It went from unity to plurality, from One to Many, from undifferentiated stuff to articulated objects. What made this possible? High density and heat would not by themselves allow this to happen, so what did? The problem arises already at the level of elementary particles: we are told they arose when the hot stuff of the Speck cooled sufficiently, but how could a mere cooling lead to the plurality of entities that resulted? We have an explanatory problem here: how can we explain the emergence of plurality on this scale from a complete absence of plurality? The problem is analogous to the mind-body problem: how does consciousness emerge from the brain given that neurons carry no trace of it? We have a yawning explanatory gap. We don’t know how to get from the One to the Many. It is a mystery how the undivided Speck produced the vast array of discrete objects that populate our universe. Why didn’t the Surge leave the Speck in its undivided form, just a lot more spread out? Are there other universes in which precisely this happened—ballooning undifferentiated specks, distended primeval atoms? They would be a lot easier to understand. Our universe seems like something from nothing, a miraculous ontological proliferation. If the process were reversed, wouldn’t it seem totally unaccountable? Suppose all of matter started to retrace its steps, speeding towards a singular spot, eventually vanishing into a tiny homogenous speck. Where has it all disappeared? How could that vast plurality turn into a speck of compressed homogeneity? How do we get One from Many?

You might think I am exaggerating the problem: don’t new objects come into existence all the time? Mountains divide, cells split, animals are born. Yes, but notice that these examples of increased multiplicity all involve intelligible production: fission produces new objects and genetic reproduction is the basis of animal proliferation. You can cut things in two and progeny arise from differentiated chunks of DNA. But the Speck has no such internal differentiation; even the idea of parts seems inapplicable. During the Surge there was no fission into distinct objects and there was nothing corresponding to genetic copying—there was just a miraculous coalescence into particles (and later big clumps of them). So the usual models of plurality production break down (compare panpsychism).  [2] Imagine if someone told you that the whole universe came from a single electron with no internal structure—wouldn’t you wonder how so many things came from just one? And being assured that the electron was extremely dense and incredibly hot would not assuage your puzzlement. So we have a puzzle, a mystery, an explanatory gap. That should not be so surprising given how little we know about the early stages of the universe: what triggered the Speck into its sudden surge, how did the Speck come into existence, what was the universe like before the Speck took over? We have some idea, sketchy though it be, of how clouds of gas formed into solid objects, how galaxies were created, how animals came to exist, how minds evolved: but we have no idea how the stuff of the Speck managed to create a multiplicity of objects from its non-object-like interior. More abstractly, how did the Many come from the One? Something from nothing is bad, but so is many from one, plurality from unity. No doubt the theory known as the big bang theory (ineptly so called) is broadly speaking true, but that doesn’t prevent it from harboring serious mysteries that boggle the mind (if I may reach for this cliché). The mystery I have focused on is the metaphysical mystery of the Many-from-the-One, which the theory raises in a sharp form. Let us not malign the hot speck as a hot mess, but we can acknowledge that it raises profound problems for which no obvious solution lies to hand (it’s a hotbed of mystery).  [3]

 

  [1] A monist might retreat to the idea that the universe was once an indivisible unity even if it is an irreducible plurality now. Hegel would have been right then. The universe shattered into innumerable parts, destroying that beautiful unity. We live among the debris of that ugly shattering.

  [2] Panpsychism postulates hidden mentality in microscopic matter in order to explain its emergence at macro levels. An analogous move would postulate plurality in the initial state of the universe—the hot speck is really a humming hive of discrete objects. That seems distinctly unappealing.

  [3] One can understand the temptation to credit the Speck with all sorts of supernatural powers, as if it is vaguely spiritual and tinged with the divine. But we should resist all such mystical meanderings; they are sure signs of deep natural mystery, i.e. lack of comprehension on our part. In fact, the Speck is as objectively ordinary as a mote of dust, nature not being inclined to intrinsic mystery. But what a work of nature that Speck was! 

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Reply to Michael Huemer

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Reply to Michael Huemer

 

I had hoped to send this reply to Huemer by email but the department website apparently blocks email sent to faculty (I have no idea why). So with some reluctance I am posting it here in the hope that it comes to his attention.

 

Dear Professor Huemer,

 

I have read your comments in the interview about a seminar you attended with me many years ago at Rutgers (probably in the early 1990s). I wish to point out to you that your statements are quite untrue. First, my recollection is that the topic was the mind-body problem not the free will problem, but I may be wrong about this and it is immaterial. On the substance of the issue I was then and still am a compatibilist, so I don’t know what I could have been objecting to in your describing me as a compatibilist: that would be perfectly true and not at all stupid. You then suggest that I was reluctant to  engage in philosophical argument, which would be deplorable. Nothing could be further from the truth, as my entire teaching history (and publishing history) amply confirms. You are quite correct in your quotation of my words to you—I did indeed say that your comment at the time was stupid (I don’t recall now what it was). Why did I do that? Because I thought it was stupid and just one instance of a train of stupid comments you had made. The question then is whether it was indeed stupid. Why did I think it appropriate to say it to you? Because you had proven yourself completely oblivious to earlier hints that you were not making helpful comments, and it seemed to me that you needed to hear some stern words if you were to be prevented from continuing in this way. I have never before or since felt the need to speak so harshly to a student and certainly weighed my words carefully on that occasion. Wouldn’t it be odd if my alleged tendency to refuse to engage in argument had led to a single instance of calling a student stupid (or rather their words) if that were the reason for my comment? Surely you yourself have taught classes in which some young guy (it’s always a guy) lowers the tone by repeatedly making stupid comments and you are faced with the question of what to do about it. Is it inconceivable to you that you might at one time have been that guy? Is that the true explanation or is it that I call anyone stupid who raises a reasonable objection to me in a class or elsewhere (where would that get me)? I think you should after all these years have thought a bit harder about your version of events, even going so far as to make your grievances public, thus compelling me to reply.        

 

Best wishes,

Colin McGinn

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Is the World Vague?

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Is the World Vague?

 

Either the world is intrinsically vague or our words and concepts are but the world is not. We say that “bald” is a vague predicate and bald is a vague concept. We don’t mean they are vague as such—that the predicate is a vague linguistic entity and the concept a vague psychological entity. We mean that they denote or express something vague: they themselves are determinate entities that determinately express something vague. What is this? A property of course: the property of being bald is a vague property (borderline cases etc.). So the question becomes whether this property is part of the world or is confined to language and the mind. Is it that the world is perfectly precise and our modes of representing it are not? Suppose we say that baldness lies in our representations (the properties we bring to the world) and not on the top of people’s heads. Then nothing we say or think involving this property will be true, since there is no vague property in the world corresponding to the property we mentally represent when we say “bald” or think bald. For we are attributing a property to things that they objectively lack—nothing is objectively bald. Similarly for other vague predicates or concepts. This means that there is an enormous amount of falsehood in our statements and beliefs. But that is surely absurd: surely some people are bald and some objects are red (etc.)! So we had better say that objects do have the properties they are said to have when we use such predicates, which is to say they objectively have the properties in question. Ergo the world is vague.

            But are these vague properties mind-independent? It might be maintained that they are all in some way dependent on the mind for their instantiation: experience-dependent, interest-relative, or pragmatically defined. In addition the world has properties that are not mind-dependent and these properties are never vague—say, the properties spoken of in fundamental physics (mass, spin, charge, etc.). Maybe so, but the point makes no difference to the argument, though it raises the interesting question of why there should be such a partition (is the mind inherently vague but the physical world inherently precise?). For we still have the result that a great many properties of things are vague: reality is still vaguely constituted, not a determinate realm, not a totality of precise facts. When God made the world he made it blurry at the edges, inherently fuzzy, not a mathematician’s paradise.  [1]

 

  [1] If you think that precision in a property is a necessary condition of its objective instantiation, you will end up denying the reality of many facts, leaving a skeletal world or no world at all. Anti-realism about vagueness leads to anti-realism tout court. On the upside, bald men will be able to proudly announce their non-baldness (philosophy as the cure for baldness).

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Skeptical Certainty

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Skeptical Certainty

 

There is something of a paradox at the heart of skepticism. On the one hand, we are told that we can have no certainty with respect to a certain subject matter (the external world, other minds, etc.), no adequate justification, and no knowledge—that all such epistemic claims are false. On the other hand, we are assured that with respect to some things we can be certain, justified, and knowledgeable, even when skepticism has been extended to beliefs about one’s own mind. For we can be certain, justified, and knowledgeable about skepticism itself: that is, skepticism is skepticism-proof. I can be certain that I don’t know there is an external world, say. There is no room for doubt that I am deficient in this respect. I can know of a certain object that it has a certain property, i.e. the property of not knowing there is an external world. I can’t know of other objects that they have properties of the kind normally attributed to them, but I can know that I have this property—the ignorance property. I can also know with certainty that you have this property, since for everyone the external world is dubitable. So the skeptic actually makes a strong epistemic claim: he has cast-iron certainty that skepticism is true, based on the classic skeptical argument. He knows that we can’t know certain things.

You might wonder whether he can weaken his position: but by his own arguments that is not possible, because any weakening makes the position incapable of assertion. He can’t claim that skepticism is probably true without opening up this possibility for beliefs about the external world; nor do skeptics ever attempt any such maneuver. They tacitly assume that their position is unassailable, not susceptible to rational doubt. Whether that is so is questionable: maybe there has been a mistake in the reasoning; maybe our memory of the argument from day to day is fallible; maybe we are all insane. There are forms of skepticism that can be made to apply to skepticism itself. But the position of the skeptic is that there is a radical asymmetry between his epistemic claims and ours: his are indubitably true and ours are demonstrably false. He is not a skeptic about his own skeptical beliefs; in fact, he is a diehard believer. We might wonder whether his arguments are as impregnable as he supposes, but he has no doubts—or else he would allow that our epistemic claims might be true. His position is not that we should be agnostic about our epistemic claims; his claim is that we should outright reject them. Nor is he agnostic about the truth of his own epistemic claims: he is fully committed to their truth. He is not a skeptic at all when it comes to his own epistemic credentials. He regards skepticism as an established certainty.

That is why I say there is a kind of paradox at the heart of skepticism: the skeptic is curiously prone to denying some epistemic claims but asserting others. He might even reject the Cogito as unjustified but still insist that he is certain that we lack the epistemic attributes that we commonly assume we possess. Oughtn’t a principled skeptic to concede that he has no certainty about whether we lack knowledge of the external world, but then he wouldn’t be a skeptic in the sense that he denies that we have such knowledge. The committed skeptic can’t be a consistent skeptic. He must always make an exception for himself, as part of the logic of the position. It isn’t that he denies knowledge tout court; rather, he limits it to his own beliefs (rightly or wrongly). He thinks human beings are perfectly capable of knowledge, but it is confined to the attribution (or non-attribution) of epistemic properties: he knows perfectly well that other people don’t know what they think they know, and he is certain that he knows what he thinks he knows. Even Socrates was quite certain that his interlocutors lacked knowledge. The skeptic isn’t someone who discourages attitudes of certainty; he indulges such attitudes freely—but selectively. He is not remotely skeptical about his own beliefs, just yours. He is, in fact, a complete dogmatist—just by being a convinced skeptic. He is absolutely certain that no one has knowledge of the external world, other minds, etc. If he were not, he would keep his mouth shut, or simply say that he doesn’t know whether people have knowledge. But in fact the skeptic is the most opinionated of men: he is sure beyond any possibility of doubt that other men are ignorant and misguided, while he is in possession of the incontrovertible truth. So let’s not give him credit for humility or self-criticism: the skeptic isn’t skeptical about himself—he doesn’t think he might be wrong. And it isn’t as if his beliefs are widely shared, natural to mankind, or conducive to happiness; his beliefs are eccentric and disturbing. Yet he persists in holding them with complete confidence (rightly or wrongly). To be a skeptic is to be a true believer.  [1]  

 

  [1] To be a true doubter, by contrast, one would need to have a questioning attitude towards the standard skeptical arguments—but that is not the position of the skeptic. A true doubter would point out that skeptical arguments are like other philosophical arguments, i.e. endlessly debatable and fallible. Are those arguments any better than philosophical arguments against free will, or in favor of dualism, or for moral relativism? Skepticism is philosophy and as open to question as all philosophy.  

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Is Gravity a Mystery?

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Is Gravity a Mystery?

 

Gravity was certainly viewed as a mystery upon its introduction into the learned world, on account of its action-at-a-distance powers. How can one body affect another across great distances without any connecting medium? But that is not the aspect of gravity I want to focus on; my concern is with the idea that gravity is an attractive force. It is commonly said that bodies exercise a gravitational pull on other bodies: they draw other bodies towards them by means of an emanating force. An object strays into the earth’s gravitational field and feels the gripping power of gravity pulling it downwards, and down it goes ever more rapidly. The earth actively attracts it while it is held in gravity’s grip. Gravity is thus an attractive not a repulsive force. But what is it we actually observe about such motion? We observe one object moving towards another; we observe no attractive force. This is an interpretation of what we observe. Similarly for tidal motion, the motions of the planets around the sun, and any other gravity-induced motion. Two or more objects are observed to be in relative motion and we hypothesize that there is an attractive force acting between them. But why don’t we interpret what we observe differently—why don’t we say that one object is surging towards another, actively moving in its direction under its own power? Why aren’t the waters of the world reaching out to the moon, surging in its direction? People can be irresistibly attracted to other people, powerless in their grip, but they can also just move towards them of their own volition: so why can’t we say that that’s what objects do when the force we call gravity is operating? It isn’t that the earth has pull; rather, meteors (and the like) have thrust. Isn’t this hypothesis equally compatible with the observed motions? The concept of attraction clearly derives from human psychological attraction, but inanimate bodies don’t attract in this sense; so what grounds the idea of gravitational attraction? Isn’t this gratuitous anthropomorphism with no objective basis? If we must have an invisible force, why can’t it be a propulsive force possessed by bodies in relation to each other? The sun isn’t pulling the planets in their orbits; the planets are propelling themselves around the sun—they have that active power. They propel themselves faster the closer they get to the more massive object, according to an inverse square law; but the object towards which they move exercises no pull on them—nothing like being yanked by a rope. Gravity is the power of objects to move towards other objects not the power to move other objects: the moving objects have the power, while the stationary object lacks any power to influence the movement of remote objects. Couldn’t there be a world in which this was the actual situation—no pull but all thrust? We have got into the habit of describing the motions we observe by using the concept of attraction, borrowed from human interactions, but aren’t the motions equally describable by using the concept of thrust? The sun isn’t coercing the planets to orbit it in the way they do; the planets do this of their own volition, so to speak—it is in their nature to move this way. They move according to Newton’s laws but not for Newton’s reasons: the explanation of their movements is quite different. Newton had no account of what confers the power of attraction—no physical basis for this power  [1]—but it is a question why we should talk this way to begin with, given that the observed motions are compatible with the rival hypothesis just sketched. The ability of an object to propel itself is admittedly puzzling, but on this score the two theories seem on a par. Why posit attraction?

            My point here is not that the thrust theory is true, or preferable to the pull theory; it is that we don’t knowwhich is true. Of course, it can also be said that neither theory is true: maybe there are no such forces in the universe but just the motions we observe. Such a view has been held by some physicists, and the General Theory of Relativity can be interpreted as replacing forces with the structure of space. We know that gravity exists in the sense that there are universal laws of motion of the kind adumbrated by Newton and Einstein, but we don’t know what kinds of force govern it. This is a mystery, an area of deep ignorance: we don’t know whether the earth pulls or whether objects seek it out or neither. Or both: maybe the earth pulls a bit and falling objects thrust a bit. We don’t know what forces bodies intrinsically have, only how they are disposed to move. We don’t know how forces act over empty space, but we also don’t know how the forces are distributed. I notice that some physicists eschew talk of attraction and pull, no doubt sensing their empirical vacuity; but then they are left with no causal explanation of the movement of bodies. Either movement is a mystery or gravity is a mystery or both. Not only do we not know what grounds the (alleged) gravitational pull of the earth (Newton’s lacuna); we don’t even know that it has any such pull. The whole thing starts to seem pretty damn mysterious, not to say spooky. We don’t know how gravity operates over the void; we don’t know what confers it; and we don’t know whether the force is attractive or propulsive. It is as if we observe a group of people moving around each other, some moving towards some central person, and we assume a force of attraction emanating from that central person—while it could be that they are all moving of their own accord with nothing coercive emanating from the center. The truth is that we are simply ignorant of the underlying causal structure of things.

            Now consider those billiard balls that so fascinated Hume. Here the causal nexus is one of propinquity—no action-at-a-distance (allegedly). We tend to assume that the cue ball carries the power to move the target ball: its motion is “transferred” to that ball. It has a pushing power, while the target ball just passively receives this power and is propelled in a certain direction with a determinate velocity. Hume was very concerned about this nexus, but he assumed that the cue ball has the coercive power. But is this the only possibility—what about the idea that the target ball has the power to move off when touched by the cue ball? It is the occasion of the movement but not the cause of it (Occasionalism without God): that is, the target ball propels itself away when triggered to do so by the cue ball. The case is like a person being given permission to do something and thereupon acts in a certain way: all the causal power comes from within the person not from the permission. Why isn’t this the way causality works? So-called causes don’t have causal power; so-called effects do. The triggering object has no power by itself to bring about a change in the affected object; rather, the latter object has the power to change when impinged upon by the former object. Contact causation is not a matter of a transfer of power (“energy”) from impinging object to impinged-upon object; it is a matter of the latter object having the power to move itself when certain conditions obtain involving the former object. This is an ignition-and-thrust model of causation (like rockets) not a transfer-of-power model. Active power is located in the effect object not the cause object (so-called). Again, the point is not that this model is the true theory of causation; it is that we don’t know it’s not true. We don’t know how causation works, even in this fundamental respect. Causation is thus a mystery. We talk in certain ways, probably deriving from human experience, but we have no justification for this way of talking over other ways—none that is warranted by the observable facts. Hume was right about how little observation of causal sequences tells us about the nature of causation; and it turns out that it doesn’t even tell us in which objects causal power is located. We are deeply ignorant of causation, even of the contact kind, i.e. causation is a mystery. We don’t know what is going onwith causation even in the simplest cases (which is why Occasionalism is even a theoretical possibility). The cause-effect nexus is like the mind-body nexus—an area of profound ignorance.

            Electromagnetic causation is also deeply mysterious. Here we are said to have attractive and repulsive forces (related to so-called positive and negative charge). But why employ the concepts of attraction and repulsion (pull and push)? All we observe are movements of particles towards or away from other particles; it is a further claim that attractive and repulsive forces govern these movements. Maybe particles propel themselves in the direction of other particles instead of being attracted by them (similarly for repulsion): there is no active pulling force, but rather a spontaneous tendency to move towards other particles. Or maybe there are no such forces but just brute motions, or maybe a bit of both. We don’t know. We just talk in a certain way because it makes intuitive sense to us given our psychology; there is no objective evidential basis for this mode of talk. So again, electromagnetic causation is mysterious—far from transparent. We try to summarize the motions we have observed with concepts drawn from common sense and originating in human agency, but really we are flailing in a sea of ignorance. Even so-called mechanistic causation is full of mystery, as Hume pointed out in the case of those careening billiard balls.

  [1] Note that mass could equally be the variable with respect to which a repulsive force is proportional. In a possible world in which massive objects repel other such objects, instead of attracting them, we could equally find a lawlike correlation with mass. There is no intrinsic necessary connection between mass and attraction—or none that we can discern.

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