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”. 

 

 

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.