[3] It may be that the organism-centered view of evolution is a holdover from religious views of the origin of life. If we think of God as our creator, we naturally picture him as especially concerned with our welfare, particularly our life and death. By extension, then, we imagine him concerned with the individual lives of the organisms he has created: he has created them in order that they should live and die. Creation thus centers round the individual organism, construed as a quasi-self. When we switch to secular Darwinism we naturally cleave to the organism-centered perspective, only now with Nature in the place of God. But nature does not have the concerns of God and is quite indifferent to the welfare of animals and humans. We need to take the final step away from Creationism and recognize that nature (i.e. natural processes) is not responsive to questions of individual survival but only to the prevalence of traits: traits are not morally significant but they are the materials through which evolution operates. Nature selects traits, often very basic ones, and these are not equivalent to selves or even insentient life forms. The idea that God would choose to create traits for their own sake is bizarre, but it is very much the modus operandi of impersonal nature. Individual organisms just happen to be where traits cluster. From the point of view of nature, I am just a trait location.

 

 

Ontological Inconvenience

 

The order of ontology is not the same as the order of epistemology. In fact they are inversions of each other. What is ontologically basic is not epistemologically basic and vice versa. Let’s divide reality into three levels: elementary objects, middle sized objects, and sentient objects: the first level constitutes the second, which constitutes the third. There are many names for this relation of ontological derivation: grounding, supervenience, dependence, composition, emergence, etc. Some things are more basic than others, ontologically speaking: you can’t have the non-basic things without the basic things, but the basic things don’t presuppose the non-basic things. The epistemological order is the reverse of this: knowledge of mental states is the most basic, followed by knowledge of middle sized objects, followed by knowledge of elementary objects. We know our own states of mind best, perceptible objects second best, and atoms third best (or whatever atoms are made of). This fact gives rise to a lot of philosophy, because we are least certain about the things that are most basic. Descartes’s entire philosophy is motivated by this. We have to start with the topmost layer of reality and then work our way down. Not all philosophy sees things this way: some philosophy tries to align the two orderings. Thus we are instructed to regard sense data as ontologically basic as well as epistemologically basic: everything is made of mind, including atoms. The mind constructs reality; reality does not construct the mind. In effect, the mind furnishes the atoms of reality. But this position is not common these days; now we tend to suppose that the ontological order is the reverse of the epistemological order.

            Is this a necessary truth? The question is seldom (if ever) asked. Must all knowing beings start with sense data and work out to ordinary objects and elementary objects? Must every conceivable epistemology invert ontology? Apparently not: we can imagine beings that start with knowledge of atoms and work out to middle sized objects and minds. Think of Leibniz’s analogy of the mill: nano-beings that know the interior of the atom like the back of their hand but have to infer the rest from that basis. These beings have no direct acquaintance with tables and chairs and don’t introspect their own minds, but they aspire to know about these things by inference from what they are directly acquainted with. For them ordinary objects are conjectural and the existence of minds is a subject of heated debate—sense data and the like are mere posits so far as they are concerned. If you think this isn’t possible because they have minds themselves and hence must know of their existence introspectively, then imagine that our nano-beings don’t have minds: they are non-conscious epistemic agents.  [1] Or we can suppose that they have minds very different from the minds we are familiar with, which they know about directly, but that they also posit other minds of the kind we know about directly: that is, they postulate minds like ours based on evidence drawn from their knowledge of matter. In other words, their epistemology recapitulates ontology, while ours does not. In their community there is no Descartes convinced of the existence of mind but uncertain about matter; rather, the atom is the most certain of things while everything else is shrouded in doubt. Their equivalent of the evil demon is misleading them about everything except the nature of atoms. They may not enjoy absolute certainty about the existence of atoms, but they regard this area of knowledge as more secure than all other areas—justifiably given their epistemic make-up.

            This means that our human epistemology is contingent: not every epistemology inverts ontology. The epistemological problems that face us don’t face every knowing being, and other beings may have problems we don’t have. For example, some beings may have trouble formulating the Cogito, because they don’t have introspective access to their own thoughts and may never have formed the idea of the self. We know that we think because we have the faculty of introspection, but not every possible thinking being is like this; indeed many animals appear to be in this case. One can only formulate the Cogito if one possesses the requisite concepts, but that is not a logical necessity. My nano-beings have a specific set of epistemic faculties unlike our own, so they must contrive an epistemology suitable to their situation. There is no universal epistemology, no one-size-fits-all; it all depends on contingent psychological make-up. In our case evolution has given us a capacity to know our own mental states and an ability to make inferences from them, but this is not universally shared even among knowing terrestrial animals. We know the most high-level things most easily, while low-level things are known only with time and effort. Other epistemic beings might have a more natural way of knowing reality, starting from the bottom up. Their philosophers will shape their epistemology accordingly.

            One of the curiosities of human epistemology is that we know our own minds very well but not the minds of others. We therefore have a problem about our knowledge of other minds. This is a case in which a high level phenomenon is known poorly, because we are not hooked up to other minds as we are hooked up to our own. But this too is contingent, since we can imagine ways in which minds could merge so as to allow surer knowledge of other minds: for example, bits of our brain might be inserted into other people’s brains in such a way that their mental states are directly known to us. It is only a contingent fact that we have a problem of other minds, though no doubt a deeply entrenched one, biologically speaking (our brains are isolated from other brains). I think this helps in easing the pressures caused by epistemological problems: they are not problems about knowledge as such, or about knowledge of this or that subject matter as such, but problems arising from contingent human faculties. We are only one small part of reality and how things are for us is not the measure of how things must be for everybody. We just happen to have this particular epistemology.  [2]

 

  [1] They might only have unconscious minds, so that their existence is conjectural. The epistemic system might not be accessible to consciousness. There is no necessity that knowing beings have conscious minds like ours.

  [2] If we had been raised in an atomic environment like the nano-beings, no doubt we would have had a different epistemological profile—rather as microorganisms have a different epistemological profile from ours. Bacteria are well acquainted with other bacteria, though we know about them only indirectly. At the far end of the spectrum we have possible beings with only unconscious minds but intimate knowledge of other minds and even acquaintance with quarks. The logical possibilities are endless. 

 

The Concept of Language

 

What is language? What does the word “language” mean? What does it refer to? We can distinguish two sorts of answer: performance-centered and competence-centered. Alternatively, utterance-centered and cognition-centered: answers that stress the actual use of language in speech and answers that focus on the internal mechanisms and structures that underlie such use. The later Wittgenstein provides an example of the former type; Chomsky provides an example of the latter type (as does the early Wittgenstein). Here is Chomsky: “The Basic Property [of language] is generation of an unbounded array of hierarchically structured expressions mapping to the conceptual-intentional interface, providing a kind of ‘language of thought’”.  [1] For Chomsky actual speech is merely the externalization of this internal structure not part of its essence (for him language is primarily a tool for thought and much of it is entirely in the head). Chomsky distinguishes sharply between language as a cognitive system—a property of the brain—and language as overt speech involving the sensorimotor systems. Wittgenstein never makes any such distinction, and the same is true of many other philosophers of language. The OED clearly sides with these philosophers: for “language” we read “the method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured and conventional way”. We could read this as referring to an internal “method” for performing external acts that strictly go beyond the method, and so as not incompatible with Chomsky’s characterization, but the intent of the definition is clearly to identify language with a set of behaviors, specifically communicative acts. For Chomsky this is confusing language itself—a cognitive structure–with its various expressions in acts of performance. We might compare the question with the question, “What is memory?” Does the word “memory” refer to a cognitive system realized in the brain or does it refer to acts of remembering—competence or performance? Are we speaking of mental faculties or sensorimotor manifestations of such faculties (if faculties are admitted at all)? This is a question about the semantics of the word “language” (or “memory”), or equivalently the concept language. Is the word perhaps ambiguous between these two interpretations, or is it that we should replace one definition with another, or is the meaning a mish-mash of both? Is one definition a folk definition and the other a scientific one, both perhaps useful but serving different purposes? We certainly seem tugged in two directions with much scope for irresoluble disagreement.

            I want to suggest that the answer is to be found in recent discussions of natural kind terms, though with a twist. I will put this roughly by saying that Chomsky gives us the real essence of language while Wittgenstein gives us the nominal essence.  Consider the dictionary definition of “water”: “the liquid which forms the seas, lakes, rivers, and rain and is the basis of the fluids of living organisms”. Perhaps this gives (some of) the nominal essence of water, but it is a far cry from the real essence: it is neither necessary nor sufficient to be water that a liquid forms the seas, lakes, etc. Water might never have done that and some other liquid might have. It is an entirely contingent property of water. Similarly, Chomsky would urge that the externalization of the language faculty in vocal speech is entirely contingent: we could have spoken in gestural signs instead, or not spoken at all except in inner speech, or used the cognitive mechanism Chomsky describes only in thought. And overt communicative vocalization could arise from a different kind of internal competence, as is presumably the case for animal signaling systems. We might well associate the word “language” with these contingent manifestations, forming the nominal essence corresponding to the term, but they are not what language intrinsically and essentially is—its real essence. For that we must look to the scientific analysis of the underlying cognitive faculty, which turns out to be a tightly structured computational system obeying specific rules. Thus UG is the analogue of H2O. Syntactic structure is the analogue of chemical structure. We can talk about the superficial features associated with the words “language” and “water” but their real-world referents are captured in real essence descriptions of an underlying reality. The words contain a kind of hidden indexical that picks out this underlying essence, bypassing the nominal essence.

            So should we say that “language” is a kind of directly referential term that rigidly designates the Basic Property? Is it a name of a natural kind with this essence? Is it semantically just like “water” on the standard model? I think that would be going too far—or perhaps I should say not far enough. The term has both sorts of meaning, real and nominal: connotation as well as denotation. In other words, the concept of language contains a dual polarity: it both designates a hidden real essence and it expresses a nominal essence—just like “water”. Both ideas enter into our understanding of the word: the Basic Property and the contingent superficial appearances. Which idea is uppermost in our mind depends on context, scientific or everyday. The dictionary isn’t wrong, but it highlights only the superficial aspects; we need to supplement it with a specification of the actual structure of language as a cognitive system. Thus there could be a scientific dictionary that gives a Chomsky-style definition of language, as well as a chemist’s definition of “water”. Both dictionaries are correct and not in competition with each other; together they comprise the full meaning of the terms “language” and “water”. Like other natural kind terms, “language” has a kind of double meaning, and this is the source of the disagreement over the nature of language. Linguistics can occupy itself with both subject matters and claim to be talking about language, though strictly speaking the study of performance is the study of the externalization of the brain-based language faculty. But a follower of Chomsky might allow his colleagues to speak loosely of performance as “language”—after all, it is the internal language system in action. The word “memory” is similar: strictly speaking it refers to a mental storehouse (or some such), but we can allow ourselves to call acts of remembering “memories”. This is pleasantly irenic because now we don’t have to declare much of philosophy of language not about language at all, but only about its sensorimotor manifestation. We just need to be clear about how the semantics of “language” works: inclusively not exclusively (compare Kaplan’s content and character). The word “language” has dual component semantics, being partly indexical and partly descriptive: “language” means, “that underlying cognitive structure, which is typically expressed in acts of communication of speech and writing (and in other ways)”. Compare: “water” means, “thatliquid, which is found in seas, lakes, etc.”. We might then say that Wittgenstein was doing descriptive anthropology of language use, while Chomsky does scientific investigation of the language faculty itself. Wittgenstein makes sketches (his metaphor) of language use, as it presents itself, in an effort to capture nominal essence, while Chomsky puts language under a microscope in order to discover its real essence. Both ventures can claim support from the meaning of “language”, according to the dual component semantic model; and it would be wrong for the nominal essence theorist to exclude the real essence theorist from being a student of language as such. Likewise we don’t want to detach the concept of language too sharply from its actual expression, on pain of losing the concept altogether. If the mutation that led to the abstract computational system Chomsky describes had never resulted in the linguistic phenomena that it did, we would not describe that system as language. Suppose that the Merge operation constitutes the real nature of the language faculty as we actually have it, but in another possible world it never led to anything like inner and outer speech: would we then say that language exists in this possible world? I think not. We can’t divorce the concept of language completely from its normal expression, just as we can’t divorce the concept of water completely from its normal manifest properties. Both concepts incorporate the superficial as well as the deep.

            Could there be fool’s language as there can be fool’s gold? Suppose we come across a species that speaks a mile a minute and behaves a lot like us when they do so: do they necessarily share our underlying grammar? No, because they might have a grammar obeying different principles from ours but which doesn’t reveal itself under casual inspection. They might look like they speak a human language but in fact their grammar diverges substantially from ours—just like iron pyrites resembles gold superficially but has a different atomic structure. We can say that these speakers have a language, appealing to the nominal essence notion of language captured in the dictionary definition, but we should follow that up with the admission that their language isn’t really of the same natural kind as ours; we might choose to put the word “language” in scare quotes when speaking of the noises they emit. In any case, there are two questions here and they can receive different answers. The meaning of “language” points in two directions.  [2]

 

  [1] What Kind of Creatures Are We? (2016): p.13.

  [2] There has been a lot of dispute in linguistics and philosophy about what language is, but I don’t recall ever seeing a discussion about what “language” means, i.e. about its semantic analysis. It turns out to have a rather complex meaning.

 

Mysticism and Philosophy

 

 

The word “mysticism” has a variety of meanings, but the one of interest to us now is “vague or ill defined religious or spiritual belief, especially as associated with a belief in the occult” (OED). This definition itself contains some vague or ill-defined words, notably “religious”, “spiritual”, and “occult”. For “occult” we find “supernatural or magical powers, practices, or phenomena”. Mysticism is thus understood to include belief in things that are somehow outside the natural, normal, everyday, ordinary, commonsense, intelligible world—the uncanny, spooky, weird, queer, profound, awe inspiring. Is mysticism in this sense a natural part of philosophy? Do philosophers find themselves believing in the mystical as part of their professional occupation? Certainly some philosophers have attracted the label “mystical”: one thinks of Plato’s theory of forms, of Hegel’s metaphysical monism, of the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. But is the mystical a more entrenched part of the philosophical enterprise—is it woven into the very fabric of philosophy? If we survey the field do we detect signs of it in positions not avowedly mystical? What about panpsychism? What about David Lewis’s possible worlds realism? What about hardline Fregeanism? What about Godel’s mathematical platonism? These doctrines all traffic in entities that go beyond ordinary experience, and all require a leap of faith if they are to be taken seriously; there is a frisson of exhilaration in accepting them. And there is an aura of religious dedication in the attitudes of their firmest exponents. It isn’t as if the mysticism of philosophy past has completely withdrawn its tentacles from the subject; it still breaks out here and there. The philosopher, even the university-based analytical philosopher, is still in the mysticism business, still adjacent to the Department of Mysticism.

            Why is this? Why hasn’t philosophy outgrown its roots in primitive mysticism? The answer is that philosophical problems themselves involve us in the permanent possibility of the mystical. Mysticism is always hovering in the background waiting to pounce; we either embrace it or seek to ward it off. We might even call philosophy a battle against the bewitchments of the mystical, with some philosophers temperamentally on the side of the mystical and some against it. It can’t be ignored because it is what philosophy is so frequently about. Take the mind-body problem: the whole debate reeks of the mystical, notably in the threat of dualism. We are constantly trying to avoid going down a mystical path, embracing the occult and the spooky. Materialism might be defined as simply anti-mysticalism: it would have little appeal but for its promise to ward off its mystical-sounding rivals. No one ever claimed that materialism can be seen to be obviously true just by inspecting the nature of the mind! That is why the debate is so heated: mysticism looks to be a real threat when it comes to the nature of mind. But the same thing is true of other central problems: free will, the self, necessity, causation, mathematics, ethics, meaning, etc. In each area we find positions that introduce mystical elements, implicitly or explicitly—stuff that strikes us as occult, as suspiciously thrilling, as subversive of commonsense naturalism. Pure voluntarism, the transcendental ego, modal hyperrealism, inscrutable causal powers, abstract objects, objective values, mind-independent senses, etc. The world is threatened with realities not recognized in science and common sense—realities that excite devotion, enlarge our sense of what is, indicate a hidden reality akin to the divine. Some philosophers will fall in love with these mystical elements; others will bend over backwards to avoid accepting them. But they are part of the philosophical landscape: they define the subject. We may as well admit it and call it by its proper name. Isn’t this partly why philosophy has the appeal it has? The sciences don’t generally stray into mystical territory, except in their most philosophical moments, which is reassuring, if somewhat deflating (especially compared to earlier times); but philosophy is really up to its neck in mysticism, either welcoming it or resisting it. David Lewis was a modal mystic entranced with his super-ontology of existing but non-actual worlds. Quine was a desert landscapes mystic if you look deep: he campaigned for a world unified by physical science and radically contrary to common sense, and he was fond of the gnomic pronouncement (“To be is to be the value of a variable”, “Nothing is true but reality makes it so”). Davidson was a meaning mystic whose ruling deity was Alfred Tarski: the theory of truth as the key to all problems, if only we could see that there is nothing to meaning than those tantalizing snow-bound biconditionals. That is why these philosophers spawned cults whose members seemed hypnotized by certain phrases and postures (“Convention T”, “the museum myth”, “the indexical theory of actuality”). The later Wittgenstein was also a mystic, though of a peculiar variety: he was a kind of second-order mystic sternly opposed to the first-order mysticism of the Tractatus. His catchphrases resonate like cultish mantra: family resemblance, language game, form of life, grammar, use, criterion, custom, practice, rules, seeing-as, etc. He introduced a philosophical vocabulary that promoted a liberationist movement, a dream of a better philosophical life, a life of intellectual peace, and of smug superiority. The cult of the later Wittgenstein was itself a form of mysticism—possibly akin to nature mysticism, or the romantic worship of the everyday.

I don’t say that all forms of mysticism in philosophy are necessarily wrong (though I tend to find myself opposed to them); I am merely observing that mysticism is a real phenomenon within even the most recent iterations of Western philosophy (it’s clearly alive and well in Eastern philosophy). Perhaps we find it embarrassing to admit such retrograde intrusions in our enthusiasm to mimic the natural sciences, but it is clear on reflection that mysticism is built into the structure of the subject. Russell published a book called Mysticism and Logic, relishing the jarring juxtaposition, but a book called Mysticism and Philosophy would hardly be eyebrow-raising, simply because the two things are just not so far apart. Mysticism can come in many forms, often in disguise, sometimes clandestinely, and philosophy as we have it now is not immune to its charms, as well as its possible harms. Let’s start talking about it openly. We need, as they say, to have that conversation.  [1]

 

Colin McGinn

 

                

 

  [1] A word on mystery and mysticism: one of main motivations for postulating mystery is the avoidance of mysticism. Instead of declaring some subject matter inherently supernatural we attribute its recalcitrance to understanding to human intellectual limitation. The spooky is just ignorance reified. The mysterian is the least mystical of philosophers. Of course this is compatible with accepting some elements of the mystical viewpoint: some things might really be quite different from other things, and matter might be the most mystical thing of all. There is intellectual room for the mystical mysterian, though he is certainly a rare bird.