Strange Ignorance

 

Imagine coming across a tribe with the following peculiar epistemic deficit: they are strangely ignorant of ordinary familiar things like animals, people, mountains, and other objects in the environment. They don’t know whether cats and dogs are both animals, they don’t know whether mountains are convex or concave, they don’t know the color of leaves, they don’t know the shape of the human body, they don’t know whether humans have minds, they don’t know that the sun is warm, etc. Their senses are normal and they know about many things (perhaps they know a lot of mathematics and history), but they draw a blank on questions that concern things they interact with every day. We find this very strange, a peculiar kind of selective ignorance. Perhaps we start to suffer from a similar pathology after a time and eventually trace it back to drinking from a certain river; we therefore assume an underlying physical cause. In any case, it is an ignorance quite unlike the kinds with which we are already familiar—such as things being too far away or too small to see or hidden in some way. We dub it “strange ignorance syndrome”.

            I want to compare this with our situation in regard to philosophy. The things that trouble us are ordinary familiar things not remote or inaccessible things: perceptual objects, consciousness, the will, the self, numbers, causality, values, universals, space, time, necessity, and so on. And we are ignorant of fundamental properties of these things: we don’t know their basic nature. Consider ordinary physical objects: we know they have color, shape, location, etc., but we don’t know whether they are mere bundles of qualities, or whether they exist in the mind or in a mind-independent way, or whether they really persist through time. You can stare at such objects from dawn till dusk and examine them from every angle but you will not thereby be able to answer these questions. As we like to put it, you can tell the shape and color of an object but you can’t tell its ontological status. Similarly, we know many properties of consciousness but we don’t know whether it is identical to the brain: you can tell you are in pain but you can’t tell whether pain is a brain state. That’s why we resort to arguments in philosophy—because we can’t simply tell whether pains are as one or another theory claims. I can tell by introspection that my pain is throbbing but I can’t tell that it is a brain state (or a state of an immaterial substance). Likewise, I can’t tell whether universals are mental, abstract or physical just by experiencing them; I can’t just inspect them and find the answer to this question. I can inspect an object to find out whether it exemplifies the universal whiteness, but I can’t inspect the universal to find out if it exists in Plato’s heaven. Philosophy does not proceed by inspecting ordinary objects and reporting on their properties: we can’t tell whether they have this or that nature by examining them. We can’t just have a look and see. But these are objects that can be looked at and seen (or known about in some other way such as introspection or intellectual intuition). Nor can we take a closer look at them or take them apart or weigh them in order to answer philosophical questions.  [1] We have to approach the matter indirectly (as we feel like saying) by constructing elaborate and contestable arguments. Maybe these arguments will reveal the truth, and maybe they won’t, but it is clear that we can’t bypass them and just do some ordinary inspecting and telling. We don’t have the faculties for that.

Thus our situation resembles that of the strangely ignorant tribe: they can’t tell what is true either when it comes to ordinary familiar things. They can’t examine or inspect dogs and cats to determine whether they are both animals, or have a look at mountains to see whether they are convex or concave, or check out the human body to see what shape it has. And these are not stupid people, ignorant of everything, understanding nothing; they know many things perfectly well. They just have a strange selective ignorance about quite ordinary things (it isn’t at all like the ignorance of the microscopic world that once afflicted humans). Evidently something about their brains (in concert with that river) explains this odd epistemic deficit; and evidently much the same must be true of us—our brains also prevent us from directly grasping the “philosophical” nature of ordinary things. We don’t know what this something is—it could even be the fact that our brains are made of carbon or are spatial objects—but presumably our philosophical ignorance reflects some truth about our organ of cognition. It may or may not be remediable, but in any case epistemic limits have neurological foundations (even if that just means being very far from the object of interest, as with remote galaxies). But the main point I want to make is that we, like the tribe, suffer from a type of strange ignorance syndrome: we are ignorant of fundamental properties of objects that we interact with daily.  [2]

            Isn’t this fact the basis of the philosophical impulse in humans? You find yourself gazing at an object, say a table, noting its various features, and then you start to wonder whether the table is just the sum of its properties, or whether it is really just in your mind, or whether it exists through time (but what is time?). You realize that no amount of gazing is going to answer these questions and you think, “Strange—how come I can’t tell whether the table is one kind of thing rather than another when I can tell its color and shape?”  [3] Then you have a further philosophical thought: Is it even possible for anyone to tell whether the table is one thing or the other? Isn’t it a necessary truth that no one could answer these questions by direct inspection? But what kind of truth is that, and why is the world like that? You have discovered philosophical questions—just by realizing that ordinary things don’t yield up their full nature to your ordinary powers of detection. You have discovered a strange area of ignorance in your view of the world. Members of our tribe might also be aware of their epistemic strangeness: they note that some subject matters yield their truths by ordinary inspection but others don’t—arguments have to be given for why mountains are convex or people tetrapod. It isn’t that they think these questions are philosophy (they may have a sophisticated understanding of philosophical questions possibly superior to ours); they just recognize that they have peculiar pockets of ignorance that they struggle to fill. We too are dimly aware that the familiar world presents us with questions that can’t be answered simply by exercising our powers of direct inspection and ascertaining what is the case. We can’t use the same epistemic powers to answer these questions that we use to answer other questions about the very same objects—such as perception, memory, introspection, and intellectual intuition. It would be nice if we could—if we could just tell by looking whether the will is free, or consciousness is material, or universals are mind-independent abstract entities—but we are not built that way. Empiricism is in effect the wish that this were so (as is rationalism in its fashion), but in reality philosophy must consist in arguing not detecting, persuading not ascertaining. We can’t go on an expedition to find out whether objects are bundles of qualities or whether numbers exist, hoping thereby to detect what is in fact the case. The objects are right under our noses, but our ordinary powers of inspection fail to give us the knowledge we seek: our ignorance is anomalous, singular, peculiar. It is really very strange that we don’t know these things (itself a philosophical thought)—one might even say, astonishing and marvelous. How amazing that we don’t know these basic facts about the things of the world! How, for example, can we be so ignorant of the nature of time, given that we are obsessed with it, experience it daily, and use it to govern our lives? You would think we should know allabout time! Why is there even such a subject as the philosophy of time—there is no subject of the philosophy of water or air or blood? Isn’t it curious that we exhibit this kind of selective ignorance—just as it is curious that our tribe has its areas of selective ignorance? Shouldn’t all knowledge be homogeneous, given that reality is homogeneous (a totality of facts)? Why this odd epistemic partition when there is no ontological partition? Can it be that the world consists of two types of fact—the philosophical facts and non-philosophical facts? But what would that even mean? It is really very peculiar that philosophy exists at all. Yet it does, indisputably so: not all questions about reality can be resolved using our faculties of inspection, detection, and telling. Isn’t it actually quite remarkable that we can’t tell what consciousness is—or causality, moral value, meaning, necessity, the will, generality, etc.? The very existence of philosophy is a puzzling and peculiar thing, by no means predictable from the objective world or our basic epistemic faculties. It really ought not to exist—yet here it is right in front of us. Other terrestrial creatures go about their business inspecting and detecting, never suspecting the existence of philosophical questions; we alone ask questions that transcend our creaturely epistemic faculties—real difficult questions about real things with real natures. We alone know that there is more to reality than our powers of inspection and detection can reveal, and that “philosophy” is the name of this area of study. Strange, surpassing strange.  [4]

 

  [1] We can inspect the whole physical universe and ascertain facts about it that remove deep ignorance, such as the existence of background radiation. But there is nothing comparable for philosophy: there is no analogue of background radiation that might be detected and provide a demonstration of a particular philosophical position. It couldn’t be that the existence of platonic universals, say, can be established by observing a telltale remnant of their earliest existence in the shape of traces of Form-like activity in space. So even cosmology provides no model for the epistemology of philosophy, despite its speculative character.  

  [2] The case of meaning is instructive: we know a lot about meaning and about language in general—what words and sentences mean, that one meaning is different from another, the various categories of meaning—but we don’t know what meaning is. That is, there is no consensus about what is the correct theory of meaning (even within an individual: compare Wittgenstein’s earlier and later theories). We mean things all the time but we can’t tell what constitutes meaning—we can’t inspect it and report our findings. We are strangely ignorant about the nature of meaning. Yet we are not similarly ignorant of phonetics and grammar; our ignorance is curiously localized.

  [3] Note that the same distinction applies to our knowledge of numbers: we can tell by inspection that 4 is even and precedes 5 but we can’t tell by inspection whether it is a platonic entity or exists in the mind or is reducible to marks on paper. Similarly for moral value: we can tell that someone did something wrong by finding out the facts but we can’t tell whether moral values are objective or subjective in this way. The concepts of inspection, detection, and telling apply to the non-perceptual world as well as the perceptual world—and they likewise fail to extend to questions of a philosophical nature. (The point has nothing to do with the question of whether philosophy is an a priori discipline.)

  [4] How did philosophy evolve? What kind of mutation led to it? Would Neanderthals have indulged in it if they had survived? What if dogs underwent a mutation that led to possessing a philosophical brain (and accompanying language)? It seems like an odd adaptation, and quite an abrupt one (a notable saltation). It doesn’t seem to be an inevitable accompaniment of science, since science works by powers of inspection and detection (suitable extended). Nor does it look like an inevitable by-product of the human capacity to argue. Philosophy is a sui generistrait, unique to Homo sapiens, and having no apparent function (even as an offshoot)—its biology is obscure. Somehow we came to be philosophical animals, but we were not vouchsafed any method for detecting the answer to philosophical questions. 

 

Can We Solve the Problems of Philosophy?

 

Philosophy consists of a set of problems that are particularly difficult to resolve. There are two aspects to this difficulty: first, we can’t find solutions that every reasonable person should be able to accept; second, the solutions offered always seem quite inadequate, i.e. we seem forced to consider purported solutions that stretch credulity. How do we avoid being forced into unpalatable positions? This meta-problem takes a characteristic form: either we accept a reductive deflationary position or we accept a kind of inflationary anti-naturalist position. Take the problem of universals: either we accept nominalism or we accept platonic realism—the former being implausibly reductive, the latter startlingly reifying. At the most extreme we are forced to choose between an eliminative position and a supernatural position: there are no such things as universals or they are occupants of a quasi-divine abstract eternal heaven. So not only can we not decide between the various options, but the options themselves are distinctly unappealing. We would like to find something both inarguably correct and not intrinsically absurd (or at least hard to believe), but the field of options is difficult to narrow down and it is populated with non-starters. Why do we find ourselves in this predicament? Can we get out of it? In the case of cosmology, say, we have a choice between a steady state theory and an originating event theory: the choice between them may be difficult to make, but at least the options are perfectly feasible—each theory might be true. But in the case of the problem of universals both options seem inherently unsatisfactory, if not preposterous: how could the universal whiteness(say) be just a word, and how could it be an abstract entity floating in an otherworldly realm? In philosophy it often seems that we are condemned to be unable to choose between theories and that the theories available are none too appealing in themselves. It’s like wanting to buy a used car and being confronted by a bunch of lemons between which we can only dither.

            I would list the following as exhibiting this general character (in addition to the problem of universals): the problem of the nature of ordinary objects, the problem of what constitutes matter, the problems of causality, space, time, necessity, natural law, consciousness, the will, perception, knowledge, the a priori, the self, meaning, moral values, and numbers. The list is not exhaustive, though it is representative: each of these raises profoundly difficult questions, and there is a feeling that nothing we know of adequately answers these questions; indeed, the proposed answers strike us as conspicuously wide of the mark (though fervently defended by their adherents). I could go through each topic in turn and explain how the dialectic plays out, but I won’t; I will merely note that the usual theories typically fail to measure up to the problem they are designed to solve. They tend to alternate between the overly reductive and the vaguely mystical. For example, we have linguistic theories of necessity and possible world realism; we have constant conjunction theories of causation and magical power theories; we have materialism and dualism about the mind; and so on. The arguments between these eternally rage, and what is contended for seems hopeless from the start (prima facie ridiculous or at least pretty far fetched). So the problems of philosophy appear to exist in an uncomfortable intellectual space—recalcitrant to the mind and inherently maddening. Yet we can’t just let them go: for the questions strike us as real, reasons can be given for favoring certain positions, and there must be some truth of the matter. It is just that we don’t seem to be able to get where we would like to be: with a solid understanding of what we are talking about and a set of considerations that decisively settle the matter. We seem stuck, permanently lost.

            I would like to venture a hypothesis (and I choose these words carefully): a hypothesis about why the problems are so resistant to solution and about why the normal range of proposed solutions is so jejune. I will first note a certain tendency of thought: we are apt to dwell on two aspects of the phenomenon or concept in which we are interested, viz. its appearance and its correlates. So consider causation: we examine how it strikes the senses and what it is correlated with; and it does not appear as a mode of necessitation and is correlated with constant conjunctions. Or consciousness: it appears in a certain way to our introspective sense and is correlated with brain states. And so on through the list. These two aspects form the shape of the solutions we come up with, either separately or together. We strive for a theory that explains the nature of what we are interested in in terms confined to appearances and correlates—how it affects our sensibility and how it relates to other associated things. Thus we try to develop a theory of consciousness that draws upon its subjective character and its neural correlates; or we approach moral value with how it is represented in the mind and how it is correlated with actions and language; or we consider the perceptual appearance of objects and their causal and functional properties. Certainly the things in question have a phenomenology (a presence in the human mind) and they also have correlates of various kinds (relations to other things); but it is a question whether this is all they have. Might not these two aspects fail to include some essential fact about the thing being studied? Might this ignored aspect be vital to understanding that thing? Might it be the key to uncovering the solution to the problems that so trouble us? To be concrete, might not pain (say) have a nature that goes beyond its subjective appearance and its observed bodily correlates? This suggests the hypothesis I have in mind, which I will call elusivism. The hypothesis is akin to mysterianism but it stresses the idea that the problematic thing actively eludes our powers of comprehension. It isn’t just that we are cognitively limited; rather, some things have a nature that defies the specific type of intelligence that we contingently possess. For example, universals have a nature that refuses to be represented as a type of perceptual object—either of the five senses or of the faculty of intellectual intuition. Recoiling from the idea that universals can be sensed like particulars, we picture them as subsisting in a type of space in which they might be glimpsed by our mind’s eye; but in fact they are not of a nature that permits any such apprehension. They are radically non-perceptual; it is not that they require a specific type of sense that might be supplied by the human mind. The way they enter our consciousness, then, is inadequate to capture their elusive nature—which is why we have so much trouble understanding them. Their essence precludes them from locking with our given mental faculties, save in a glancing and indirect way. They slip between our mental fingers (some objects are manually elusive).

            This is hard to get one’s mind round for obvious reasons. The elusiveness hypothesis asks us to accept that we literally don’t know what we are talking about, though we do have knowledge of appearances and correlates.  [1]But of course we can’t conceive what we can’t conceive, so it’s hard to accept the truth of the hypothesis; still it may be true. If we could grasp what these things really are, we would not be prone to taking absurd theories seriously; but we are confined to phenomenology and correlates. It may of course be that one of the standard theories is closer to the truth than the others, and may indeed be essentially correct, but that we don’t have the conceptual resources with which to understand this theory properly. Realism about universals may be perfectly true, but our mode of conceiving of them leaves us baffled and troubled by the theory (rather as consciousness might actually be a brain state but we are unable to make this idea intelligible to ourselves). Things can be true without being comprehensibly true. The problem is that our ideas of things might not be adequate to those things (as seventeenth century theorists put it). So we are prone to manufacture bad theories of the things in question and unable to find the right theory. Reality is elusive, so philosophy has the shape it has. It isn’t because of intellectual laziness, or the primitive state of science, or misleading ordinary language, or a lack of imagination, or religious holdovers; it’s because reality is elusive relative to our epistemic faculties. We tend to substitute what we do know for what we don’t know (and need to know)—hence the reliance on appearance and correlates—but this strategy doesn’t solve the problems. Ideally we would immediately grasp what all these problematic things essentially are, and then we would know the truth about philosophical questions; but that is a fantasy exemplified only by God. Isn’t it amazing that we don’t even know whether universals are abstract, mental or linguistic? How inadequate can our supposed knowledge of them be! Our grasp of their nature must be weak to non-existent. We can’t even decide whether ordinary objects are in the mind or outside it—that’s how inadequate our knowledge of them is. It is as if we don’t know the first thing about a lot of things. Of course, there is no reason why we should from a biological point of view: our knowledge is originally practical and species-specific, not designed to answer deep questions about reality. Nor are our concepts open repositories of complete information about their referents, but are more like pragmatic pointers with a practical purpose: hence the existence of philosophical problems, according to the elusivist hypothesis. Still, we can least solve the problem of how to avoid unpalatable theories: we can relax in the knowledge that this is an artifact of our contingent ignorance. We don’t have to believe any of them, or if we do we don’t have to accept that they meet certain conditions of intelligibility. We can be complete agnostics or tentative believers—not bad faith dogmatists for one position or another. We can thus solve the problem of forced philosophical belief, which is not nothing. We are not compelled to believe what we can’t in good conscience believe. We can believe that the solution lies outside of the range of options our minds are capable of generating. We are spared the thought that the world is inherently absurd. That is progress of a kind.  [2]  

 

  [1] The elusiveness hypothesis comes in various strengths: from the weak variant that claims only present lack of knowledge to the strong variant that insists on terminal ignorance, with positions in between. I won’t discuss which to prefer except to note that philosophical problems seem extremely resistant to solution, thus favoring the strong version.

  [2] This paper continues the theme of my Problems in Philosophy: The Limits of Enquiry (1993) with some terminological innovations and an extension of scope.

 

 

Mind Maps

 

Animals have bodies but they also have maps of bodies in their brains. They know the layout of their own body—topographic somatic representations. This is the basis of what is called proprioception. These representations are not discursive but model-like. They provide the animal with an innate awareness of its body type, a primitive knowledge of its corporeal nature. In our case such knowledge interlocks with scientific knowledge of anatomy and physiology; we don’t come to these subjects with a blank slate—we already know a lot about our body’s architecture and functioning. This makes the subjects of anatomy and physiology easier to grasp, at least in broad outline (we don’t know everything about our body spontaneously). But nothing like this holds in the case of the mind: we don’t have a primitive knowledge of its basic architecture. We do have knowledge of scattered psychological facts, but we don’t have a mental model of the overall structure of the mind—how it all fits together. Some theorists have tried to develop maps of the mind, analogous to maps of the brain, but we don’t possess such maps as part of our innate human endowment. This makes psychology a lot harder than anatomy for us: for we don’t have a natural jumping-off point. We have to discover it from the outside—hence all those flow diagrams that psychologists manufacture. Just imagine if we had a natural awareness of the links between perception and memory with all the senses and types of memory perspicuously laid out in diagrammatic form. Imagine if we felt our mental architecture the way we feel the architecture of our body. Wouldn’t it all be so much easier? We wouldn’t be staring into a void but already well on the way to psychological omniscience. Or imagine if the links between language and the rest of the mind were as perspicuous as the links between your limbs: not a black box but an open cabinet. It’s a tantalizing thought—psychology on the cheap. We do have first-person knowledge of the outputs of mental faculties, but we are denied knowledge of the overall structure—we have no map to guide us. So we have both knowledge and ignorance of the mind—isolated spots of knowledge but no general picture. It’s a pity nature didn’t provide us with a leg up in this department. It would be nice to survey the mind as a functional whole from the comfort of one’s own inner awareness.  [1]

 

  [1] We experience the body as unified whole, but we don’t experience the mind as a unified whole; its various elements are felt as fragmentary, if somehow connected. Wouldn’t it be interesting to sense all the parts of your mind linked together as you sense the parts of your body linked together?

 

 

Immaterial Substance

 

We already face a problem: what is meant by “immaterial” and what is meant by “substance”? I will bypass all this to raise a clearer question: is there a significant analogy between the structure of material objects (meaning middle-sized dry goods) and the structure of minds? By “structure” I mean primarily a distinction between primary and secondary qualities (but corpuscular structure can also be considered): does anything like that distinction apply to minds? On the face of it no, because minds don’t have shape and color (etc.), but maybe there is a subtler form of the distinction we can make. One fact about color is generally accepted: colors play no role in the causal powers of objects (though the underlying properties of light do). Let’s say they are epiphenomenal. Is anything like this true of properties of mind? What about color qualia? Aren’t they epiphenomenal? Isn’t the experience of seeming to see something red, construed as a phenomenal property, epiphenomenal? To be sure, the neural basis of it is not, but the phenomenal property itself plays no causal role; it is causally redundant. Just as the color is epiphenomenal, so the subjective impression of a color is epiphenomenal; the causality is carried by underlying primary qualities. Here we have a structural parallel.

            But aren’t these properties just brain properties and hence “material”? That is not a good question, given the vagaries of the word “material”, but we can rephrase it into something meaningful. We know that electricity is vital to mental functioning, so that all sensation has electrical correlates: let’s then agree that the causal powers of sensations are based in those electrical correlates. These are the equivalent of primary qualities in objects. Moreover, electricity (electromagnetism) is immaterial on some understandings of the term: it doesn’t fit the mechanistic Cartesian conception of matter. So we can say that mind divides into a phenomenal non-causal set of properties and a causal immaterial set of properties—just as material objects have both non-causal sensible qualities and causal material properties (in the sense of mechanism). It may be said that ordinary objects are not material either—and I have a lot of sympathy for that position—but still we have found a sense in which mind is immaterial (by the standards of mechanism): for mind is electrical, and electricity is not material in the old sense. Now if we extend the concept of substance to include stuff broadly considered (including electrical fields), then we can announce that the mind is an immaterial substance (a non-mechanistic stuff). Moreover, it is an immaterial substance that admits of something like a primary quality/secondary quality distinction.

            This electrical substance (stuff) might also have computational properties that play a causal role in mental functioning. That might be the best theory of its structure, analogous to the molecular theory of matter. It isn’t that the phenomenal properties are reducible to electrical and computational properties—as colors are not reducible to wavelengths of light—but we can truly say that the mind is in its nature partly constituted by such properties, because the mind is both causal and phenomenal. Would Descartes disagree with this? Not on the basis of his conception of matter, since electromagnetism counts as immaterial by his criterion of the material. This is a type of dualism we can live with, given that we already have to accept field-based physics before we get to the mind. Moreover, we can accept a corpuscular conception of the mind on the assumption that electricity has a quantum nature (is not a continuous magnitude). So the analogy between mind and matter is quite close except for the question of materiality, and even that might collapse if matter turns out to be less “material” than was imagined. First we discovered electricity, regarding it as spookily non-physical; then we discovered that mental activity depends on electrical activity: didn’t we thereby discover that mind is an immaterial substance (stuff)? The brain is an electrical generator and this electricity is what powers the mind: so the mind has a nature distinct from the world of matter as envisaged by mechanism– it is “immaterial” in one clear sense of the word (and is there any other clear sense?).  [1]

 

  [1] Prescientific Cartesian dualism conceives of immaterial substance by comparison with supernatural substance such as composes fairies and deities (whatever that may be), but scientific Cartesian dualism conceives of immaterial substance by comparison with electricity and magnetism—perfectly natural phenomena (if not totally devoid of mystery). It isn’t that phenomenal properties are electrical properties (at least under our current conception of electricity), but the causal powers of the mind are provided by brain-based electrical power. Thus we have what might be called “scientific immaterialism”.