Action As Externalization

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Action As Externalization

 

The causal theory of action says that actions consist of a causal link between an inner mental state (a reason, an intention, a willing) and a piece of behavior (an arm rising, flicking the switch). The mental state causes the behavior in the same way a tap on the knee can cause the lower leg to rise quickly (patellar reflex). Acts of speech, say, are composed of an internal state of intending or trying or simply desiring and the distinct event of vocal utterance, where the former causes the latter. But this omits an important aspect of action: the fact that behavior often externalizes states of mind—expresses them, manifests them, embodies them. Dance and song can externalize inner mental states, and speech behavior can externalize states of mind. Language can and does externalize thought (as well as desire and emotion). The body puts the mind into the public realm. It isn’t just that the mind operates to cause behavior, as measles causes a rash; behavior can be the outward expression of mind. This expression relation is not merely a causal relation; it is more intimate than that. The psychophysical system has the capacity to generate externalizations—bodying forth, as it were. No doubt this idea is difficult to articulate, but it appears to be a real phenomenon—which is why we often express ourselves in these terms. As perception internalizes its object, so action externalizes the inner states that lead to it. Ordinary human behavior is not a mental blank; it has mind inscribed on it. We may not understand how this can be but we readily talk this way. A theory of action needs to find room for it—and the usual causal theory falls short of achieving this.

            Spoken language externalizes internal language, the kind that deals with thought.[1] So it is natural to suppose that we possess two languages—a language of thought and a language of communication. Generalizing this point, we can say that non-linguistic action constitutes a kind of second mind—externalized mind. This mind is derivative on internal mind, as communicative language is derivative on cognitive language; but both can be described as mind made external. What we think of as external behavior is mentally imbued: for it is expressive of the inner, not merely causally connected to it. Thus the mind has the power to externalize itself in overt action, extending its reach beyond the private sphere (“the externalized mind”). Just as spoken words have meaning, in addition to words in inner speech, so actions in general are mentally endowed in virtue of the externalization exerted by the mind. Among the mind’s powers is its ability to transfer itself to the body. It isn’t that action is just mindless movement caused by a mental substratum; rather, it is the mind in action, so to speak. So the idea of a double mind, like the idea of a double language, comes to seem natural and attractive. This is another way of expressing the familiar point that the right conception of behavior is mentally defined. It is the process or act of externalization that enables the mind to spread itself to the body, which now becomes a site of mentality. The gap between mind and body is not as rigid as tradition has supposed. This is because behavior is not just caused by the mind but also the externalization of the mind—a much closer relation. Our paradigm of action should be singing and dancing not arms rising because of sudden urges (as if the movement is merely triggered). Behavior is not the non-mental effect of mind but a species of mindedness in its own right.

            As the mind externalizes itself in the body, so in turn it internalizes the result: we are aware of our own body in acts of perception (including proprioception). A singer is aware of herself singing and a dancer is aware of her own movement. Given that perception is a type of internalization, we can say that the mind internalizes its own externalizations. This may lead to further externalizations as the agent modulates her behavior according to what she perceives: for example, the singer might adjust her volume and pitch according to what she hears. So controlled action is rightly seen as a process of externalization and internalization: first the mind pushes itself outward, then it internalizes the result of this act, leading to further externalizations. It’s a feedback loop, to use cybernetic jargon; but the language of externalization and internalization better captures the nature of the process in question. There is no comparable process in non-mental cybernetic systems such as thermostats: these are devoid of the operations we are calling internalization and externalization. A psychology based on the latter concepts is more appropriate for systems that genuinely perceive and act. So we should drop talk of stimulus and response and replace it with talk of internalization and externalization; and the same for the terminology of cybernetics. Perception allows the organism to take in the world, and action allows the organism to project the mind into the body: this is the conceptual framework within which to view psychology, animal and human. It isn’t old-fashioned behaviorism, and it isn’t modern cognitive science; it’s a view of the behaving organism that emphasizes the twin powers of the mind to take in and give out. The mind is forever internalizing and externalizing, not being stimulated and responding.

[1] Here I am assuming, not defending, the perspective on language favored by Chomsky and Fodor.

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Perception As Internalization

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Perception As Internalization

 

We have become accustomed to thinking of perception as a type of causal relation, sharing its logical (metaphysical) features. As earthquakes cause buildings to collapse, so external objects cause experiences to occur. Cause and effect are external to each other; neither is contained in the other. But this picture fails to accommodate the fact that perception internalizes its object in roughly the sense in which the mind internalizes a surrounding language or culture or moral system.  When you see an object that object is external to you but it comes to play the role of an internal object in your mind: it comes to “live” in your mind, to be part of the mind’s landscape, to operate as a mental constituent. For example, your perception of your mother produces an inner object that has a particular significance for you, a particular potency. The external object becomes an intentional object, an object for you. Thus it is natural to speak of a process of internalization, as psychologists often do. In general when you sense an external object an act of internalization occurs, the upshot of which is that something is added to your mental resources. Perception, then, is not just a cause-effect relation, but something more intimate. The external object becomes part of the perceiver’s mental world, not merely the trigger of the experience it leads to. We should therefore not model the perceptual process on typical causal sequences; rather, there is an act of internalization that transcends the usual causal relation (this is not to deny that causation is part of the picture).

            In any process of internalization some sort of boundary must be crossed, as in the membrane of a cell through which nutrients may be absorbed. So the mind must have a boundary that is crossed when an object is internalized. Presumably it is not a spatial boundary, under any conception of space that we can understand. There is a point at which an object passes into the mind (though this passing is not a form of travelling through space). We have no clear idea of what such a boundary consists in (or of), but it must exist if it is correct to speak of perceptual internalization. At one time the object existed outside of the boundary; at a later time the object has become part of a mental landscape. The mind has the capacity to include things within its boundaries. Perception is the most basic way this happens. It doesn’t happen in the case of innate or pre-existing mental contents: here there is no transition from outer to inner, since there was no act of internalization. The word “perception” should be taken in a broad sense: the mind can perceive and internalize music, one’s own body (proprioception), moral codes, universals, and works of art, among other things. How this happens, and how the brain underpins it, is not easy to understand (it might even be a deep mystery), but it evidently occurs, and it is essential to the nature of perception. One might think of it as a process of de-alienation: the alien other becomes one’s own. This is a richer operation than any envisaged by a purely causal account of perception.

            Brentano had the idea, not merely that mental states have objects, but that these objects are internal to their identity (“intentional inexistence”). We can add to that insight the thought that perceptual intentionality arises by a process of internalization. The external object is internalized in perception thereby becoming an inner intentional object. What that external object is exactly is a matter for further decision: is it the material thing itself, much of which is imperceptible to the perceiver, or is it limited to aspects of the object that can be perceived (or are being perceived)? Perhaps the internalized object should be identified with certain of the properties of the external physical thing—aspects of objects not whole objects. When you are perceptually acquainted with a table, say, the internalized entity is really an aspect of the table, i.e. a subset of its properties. Strictly speaking, then, internalization acts on universals (or whatever you think is immediately presented when an object is perceived). In any case, we have this rather mystifying act of internalization that converts a non-mental entity into something native to the mind. Perceiving is thus more than merely an external object causing an experience; it essentially involves internalizing the object in experience.[1]

 

Col

[1] It is strange that the philosophy of perception, from the sense datum theory to the causal theory, has not recognized the centrality of the notion of internalization, given that it is such a natural intuitive way to think of perception. Isn’t it obvious that when you see something that thing comes to be an item in your inner world—part of your Dasein? It enters your memory and imagination, forming a constituent of your world-view. Such “object relations” (to use Melanie Klein’s phrase) are the stuff of psychology. Learning itself is really a matter of internalization (empiricism says that all knowledge arises by internalization).

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Ed Erwin Again

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Ed Erwin Again

 

It’s nice to receive two laudatory messages about Ed Erwin from Michael Tooley and Alan Goldman, both old colleagues of Ed’s at Miami (now posted under my brief notice of his death in May 2022). I observe, however, that neither the Brian Leiter blog nor Daily Nous has posted any notice of his death. I wonder why. Has no one informed them of it or have they decided not to mention it? Is the Miami philosophy department responsible or have they simply chosen to omit it? It seems very strange to me, though depressingly predictable.

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Concepts and Philosophical Puzzlement

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Concepts and Philosophical Puzzlement

 

Michael Dummett has suggested that philosophical puzzlement is caused by our “imperfect mastery” of our concepts (he is by no means the only person to think this way).[1] He gives the example of the concepts past and future: we understand these concepts well enough to make judgments about the past and future of an ordinary kind, but if we ask ourselves why cannot affect the past as we can affect the future we find ourselves puzzled. The reason for this, he says, echoing Wittgenstein, is that we don’t “command a clear view” of the concepts past and future. That is, we have only an “imperfect mastery” of these concepts—a partial mastery, a tenuous grasp, a limited understanding. There is something about them we fail to grasp, and this failure generates perplexity. Such a view contrasts with the idea that we have a limited understanding of the world beyond concepts: we fail to grasp important aspects of reality not our conceptual representation of it; and this is what generates philosophical perplexity. Dummett gives the example of quantum theory: here we have an effective theory for making predictions but we have no satisfactory interpretation of the theory. Some may say this is because we lack knowledge of quantum reality itself; others may say we lack an adequate grasp of the concepts of quantum theory (analytical knowledge not empirical knowledge). Dummett is proposing that philosophical perplexity arises from a deficit in our knowledge of our own concepts not from a deficit in our knowledge of what these concepts are about (sense not reference, in effect).

            This thesis raises some interesting questions. Is the thesis true of all concepts or only some? Do we have perfect mastery of some of our concepts, so that no philosophical puzzlement is occasioned by them? Which are they? Are there degrees of imperfection in our mastery of concepts—are some very imperfectly grasped while others are only mildly so? Are there concepts we possess that we have no understanding of—concepts we can’t use at all? If that is impossible, what about concepts that are almost completely opaque to us? How deep can the imperfection in our mastery go? And why should this be so—why should our concepts lack in transparency? After all, they exist in our minds and we use them in our conscious thought, so why should our grasp of them be so imperfect? Why would nature (or God: Dummett was a Catholic) design us this way? Bear in mind that concepts constitute the meaning of words, so that Dummett’s thesis applies to them too—we have imperfect mastery of the meaning of our own words. We lack knowledge of these meanings; we are ignorant of what we mean by our own words. By contrast there is no paradox in the idea that we are ignorant of the world beyond our conceiving minds—time itself in the case Dummett cites. But it is surely strange to think that our own concepts and meanings are routinely closed off from our knowledge of them. If some philosophical problems are insoluble that would imply that we can never gain access to the content of our own concepts; maybe so, but the idea requires careful consideration. It seems to imply the existence of a vast conceptual unconscious—all the stuff that we fail to know consciously when we employ concepts. Why does this unconscious exist? How inaccessible is it? How is it connected to our conscious thought? Our concepts allow us to make intelligent judgments, both practical and theoretical, but they refuse to allow us to make philosophical judgments (or judgments that command general assent). This is curious to say the least.

            I don’t say the whole idea is preposterous; indeed I think it raises interesting questions about the nature of conscious thought and the concepts it invokes. But it is not an idea to be thrown out without due consideration. No one would think a comparable thesis holds for the case of other subjects: physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, geography, etc. Here the difficulties stem not from our imperfect mastery of the relevant concepts but from our ignorance of the extra-conceptual world.[2]

 

[1] My source for this is a lecture on philosophy of mathematics given by Dummett many years ago (and now available on YouTube).

[2] Once you make the linguistic turn you are bound to find the difficulty of philosophy to arise from the inscrutability of language, i.e. the elusiveness of our concepts.   

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What is Mathematics About?

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What is Mathematics About?

 

Various suggestions have been made about this question: mathematics is about symbols, or mental constructions, or abstract Platonic entities. We can also ask what physics is about and expect a variety of answers: the sensations of the physicist, mind-independent material bodies, an all-pervading consciousness, abstract structure. In the physics case another answer has sometimes been contemplated: physics is about something whose nature we do not know and perhaps cannot know. This usually gets expressed as the thought that matter is an I-know-not-what, a mysterious substratum, a noumenal thingummy. We may know something of its structure and its mode of operation but we don’t know its inner nature. But I don’t know of any analogous view of the subject matter of mathematics: the view that mathematics is about something unknown to us yet partially described by our mathematical theories. Arithmetic, say, aptly represents the structure of mathematical reality, but nothing in it provides a clue about what numbers really are; nor do we have access to anything else that informs us of the nature of number. Thus we have agnostic realism about the mathematical world: numbers are real but we must be agnostic about the intrinsic character of numbers—as we must be agnostic about the true nature of what we call “matter”. Maybe physics and mathematics are ultimately about the same thing, but if so we are ignorant of what that thing is. The advantage of this way of thinking, in both areas, is that it allows us to avoid being forced into unpalatable positions: none of the standard positions is free of difficulty, and at least the agnostic realist position avoids these difficulties. Certainly the long history of mathematics gives the impression of people stabbing in the dark unaware of the vast mathematical world that would later be revealed; the very idea that mathematics has a subject matter would be alien to these early thinkers.[1] The reason is simply that we are not faced with any such subject matter by our senses or by anything else. There is a subject matter to mathematics, objectively real and determinate, but we have next to no knowledge of its ultimate nature; we don’t grasp the underlying mathematical reality (that very concept may be inadequate to its intended referent). The numerals we use are just symbols for we-know-not-what, mere placeholders. That, at any rate, sounds like an option to be added to the usual options. Call it mathematical agnosticism.           

[1] See for example Dirk. J. Struik, A Concise History of Mathematics (1987), which begins 10,000 years ago. Perhaps the earliest mathematicians would say that its subject matter consists of cows and corn, friends and foes.

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Extended Ban

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Extended Ban

 

A thought occurs to me: would other university administrators take a similar line? I have to admit that the idea that I would ever be forbidden to attend an academic gathering never entered my head, but that is the reality I now face. So far as I know it is unprecedented. But what about other institutions—would they also ban me? I haven’t been to a philosophy talk in the USA in nine years, so I don’t know. If I proposed to attend a colloquium at some other American university, would I be forbidden from attending? The question divides into three parts: would university administrators ban me, would faculty ban me, and would students ban me? Certainly I have not been invited to give a talk at an American university since 2013, but what about my attending someone else’s talk? What precise grounds could be given for such a ban? None that I can think of, but that doesn’t seem to matter. One would think that the position of the University of Miami would generalize, so that other places would have equal grounds for keeping me out—for example, if I was a deemed dangerous. Or would the mere possibility of protest be sufficient to have me banned? I really don’t know—and that says a lot. Perhaps I should do an experiment and mention to (say) NYU that I plan to attend a colloquium of theirs: what would happen? Would administrators step in to threaten me with expulsion? Would the faculty advise me that I am not welcome? Would the students rise up in protest? The terrible truth is that all these things strike me now as eminently possible. What a world we live in. I expect no improvement in 2023.

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Banned

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Banned

 

I recently expressed an interest in attending colloquia at the University of Miami, where I used to teach (I live nearby). I was told by the chairman, Professor Mark Rowlands, that I was banned from campus at the direction of university administrators. No reason was given. There was no protest from members of the department, including the chairman. Apparently the ban is in effect until the day I die. So much for academic freedom, etc. Happy New Year everybody!

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My Mind

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My Mind

 

How do I get the idea of my own mind? Do I get it simply by having my mind, or possibly by experiencing the mind I have? Do I perhaps have an “impression” of my mind from which I extract the idea? Here is a problem with this theory: based on my mind alone, I cannot distinguish between it and the world. My mind is my world. The world I know is the world presented to me by my mind, so my world and my mind are coeval and coterminous. The limits of my mind coincide with the limits of my world.[1]  When I gaze at my mind all I see is a world. I don’t have an idea of my mind as something in the world. Merely having a mind does not give me a perspective from which I can grasp my mind as an object: I don’t apprehend it as I apprehend the Sun setting on the horizon.

            How then do I get the idea? First let us ask how I get the idea of other minds. This idea is useful in social contexts: it enables me to think effectively about the behavior of other people. We probably have this idea innately, as do other mammals. It enables us to think of minds as things existing in the world. But my mind is not included in this general conception; it stands apart from other minds. How do I bring my mind under the conception that includes other minds? Not by thinking of my mind as other! But one thing I can know about other minds is that I am other to them: they think of me as an other mind. So we can imagine the child coming to realize that he or she is an object of thought for other minds: “Oh, so they think of me as I think of them”. Now she is thinking of her mind as something in the world: it is her world but it is also an object in other people’s worlds. She thinks of her mind as being an object for the minds of others. This is the exact opposite of her own perspective on her mind, in which world and mind are merged. She sees herself reflected in the minds of others, and this gives her the idea of her mind as one thing among other things. So we grasp our own mind via our grasp of the minds of others, by understanding that we are objects for them. Our mind cannot give us an idea of itself as existing in a world containing other minds, but our grasp of other minds can give us this idea once we grasp that those minds take us as objects. This is a very sophisticated idea and it is doubtful that other mammals and small children have it. They may have the concept of other minds, but they don’t really have the concept of their own mind. Only by recognizing that other people think about them can they manage to think about themselves, i.e. grasp that they are entities of the same kind as other people. The thought “I have a mind” is really the thought “This world is an object of thought for people with other worlds”—that is, “I exist in other people’s worlds”. My mind and their minds form a totality for me because I think this way: I think of myself from their point of view, because I think of other minds and realize that I am considered by them. No doubt my first thoughts along these lines centered on my mother: “I am an object in my mother’s world, so I must be something in the world as well as a world unto myself”. Then I realize I am an object among others, and am nothing unique (a sobering thought in my childish egotism).

            These two thoughts always coexist uneasily: the “I” as object in the world and the “I” as constituting the world for me. Can all this really be just one pinpoint thing in a much larger reality? Thus we oscillate between solipsistic egotism (there is only my world) and vertiginous humility (I am just a tiny speck in a huge wide world). The astonishing thought that I am merely one mind among innumerable others brings together two ways of thinking about the self: the idealist conceit that the world is my world, and the realist concession that the world is much greater than I am. In particular, it locates the self in a world occupied by other equally real selves—as an object of their apprehension. In coming to have the idea of my mind I come to realize that I am much smaller than I thought, even though I know no world larger than the one presented by my mind. The concept of my mind is thus the consummate philosophical concept, because it contains an entire metaphysical outlook on reality, one that generates perplexity and intellectual disharmony. It isn’t just a “faint copy” of a perceptual datum, a “simple idea”. It might even be said that putative possessors of this concept don’t really have it themselves, not fully, because it is just too hard to grasp: I never really understand the idea that I am just one mind among others; my own mind asserts itself too strongly to accept that. I am the world; I am not a minute part of it! Certainly some people never seem to get over the idea that everything centers on them—that nothing else is real (not really real).  The idea of one’s own mind as one thing among others is just too lowering, too ontologically disquieting.

            In any case, our concept of our own mind is a concept originally derived from our concept of other minds, particularly from the idea that other minds regard my mind as an object in their world. It doesn’t spring from a simple encounter between me and myself, as if my mind introduces itself to me one day and I recognize it for what it is (“Ah, I’ve heard a lot about you, good to meet you at last!”). It arises from complex reflection on the minds of others, an idea with roots in practical biological concerns. Not every being with a mind has a concept of that mind, even those with a concept of other minds.

[1] Cf. Wittgenstein: “What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that ‘the world is my world’. The philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world—not a part of it”. Tractatus 5.641

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